Bloggers to the Health Care Reform Rescue

Last night, I got my marching orders from the Obama White House. The liberal-blogger Bat Signal was sent across the internet in the form of a quote from an Obama conference call with bloggers -- health care reform is in peril and only the internets can save it.

"It is important just to keep the pressure on members of Congress because what happens is there is a default position of inertia here in Washington," Obama told prominent lefty bloggers in an invitation-only conference call. "And pushing against that, making sure that people feel that the desperation that ordinary families are feeling all across the country, every single day, when they are worrying about whether they can pay their premiums or not... People have to feel that in a visceral way. And you guys can help deliver that better than just about anybody."

Oui, mon capitan! Je get bloggin' right pronto!

Of course, there might have been a way to keep reform on track without calling on friendly new media to get the word out. President Obama, trying to avoid the mistakes that killed Clinton's attempt at health care reform, took a more hands-off approach to the issue by leaving the details up to congress. Imperial edicts handed down from the executive branch killed Clinton's plan, the thinking went, so letting congress take the reigns would make it easier to work out some sort of decent compromise.

But this strategy assumed the existence of something that wasn't actually there; Democratic congressional leadership that's worth a damn. This is especially true in the Senate, where Harry Reid seems in constant search of fences to sit on. Senate leadership would have to come from someplace else, because Reid's positively phobic of anything that doesn't have nearly unanimous support. And that leadership came from Sen. Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who may have almost literally been the absolute worst person in the world for the job.





It's become clear that Baucus has no interest in reforming health care in any meaningful way. His first step in moving reform forward was to rule out any Canadian-style single-payer plan. At initial hearings and meetings, advocates of a single-payer plan weren't invited to testify, to speak, or -- God forbid -- make their case in any way. At one point, 13 doctors, nurses and activists were arrested while trying to get some sort of attention from Baucus' Senate Finance Committee.

"Is Senator Baucus open to your ideas?," Sen. Bernie Sanders was asked on C-SPAN.

"To a single-payer idea?" Sanders answered. "No. Not in a million years."

It's tempting at this point to just call Max Baucus an idiot. His reasoning -- at least, it's the way he explained his position -- was that there was no hope of ever passing a single-payer plan, so why knock yourself out? We should just cut to the chase and push for the possible. Bothering the Senate with this harebrained scheme was just a waste of time.

That argument would have some merit, if Republicans were interested in anything other than the status quo. But, since the GOP's position is that the current insurance system provides "the best health care in the world," that's really not the case. If the item at the top of the left's wishlist is single-payer, the item at the top of the right's is no reform at all. Clearly, Democrats would wind up with some sort of compromise and Baucus had forced them into a position with no fall back. Had he signaled that single-payer was the preferred system, the public option would've been the fall back. Bonus, single-payer would've been a lot closer to a possibility. Not a realistic possibility, but one hell of a lot more possible than it is when you rule it out entirely.

For his part, Baucus concedes this was a mistake.

New York Times, via Matthew Yglesias:

He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a "single-payer plan," not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama's proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.

Feel free to shout, "Well duh!" as loud as you like.

"...Framing effects are important in politics," wrote Yglesias. "The public-private competition is supposed to be a compromise between the pristine vision of single-payer and the desire of private insurers not to be put out of business. It creates a situation in which insurers are challenged to prove that single-payer advocates are wrong, rather than simply assert it. But with no single-payer plan in the mix, this gets lost, and the compromise becomes the leftmost anchor of the debate. A single-payer plan couldn't possibly have passed, but I think having hearings on single-payer and having one committee draft a serious single-payer bill that gets a serious CBO score would have been a useful exercise. In particular, it would have focused the mind on the costs involved in rejecting this option."

All but the least realistic Republicans would've been left hugging the public option like a lifesaver. So, is this all the result of lousy leadership and incompetent political strategizing? Yes. But is this all the result of only lousy leadership and incompetent political strategizing?

Clearly not.

Washington Post:

As liberal protesters marched outside, Sen. Max Baucus sat down inside a San Francisco mansion for a dinner of chicken cordon bleu and a discussion of landmark health-care legislation under consideration by his Senate Finance Committee.

At the table on May 26 were about 20 donors willing to fork over $10,000 or more to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, including executives of major insurance companies, hospitals and other health-care firms.

"Most people there had an agenda; they wanted the ear of a senator, and they got it," said Aaron Roland, a San Francisco health-care activist who paid half price to attend the gathering. "Money gets you in the door. The only thing the other side can do is march around and protest outside."

As his committee has taken center stage in the battle over health-care reform, Chairman Baucus (D-Mont.) has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage. Health-related companies and their employees gave Baucus's political committees nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008, when he began holding hearings and making preparations for this year's reform debate.

"Top health executives and lobbyists have continued to flock to the senator's often extravagant fundraising events in recent months," the report tells us. "During a Senate break in late June, for example, Baucus held his 10th annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in Big Sky, Mont., for a minimum donation of $2,500. Later this month comes 'Camp Baucus,' a 'trip for the whole family' that adds horseback riding and hiking to the list of activities."

As I said earlier, it's tempting to call Baucus an idiot. He may or may not be, but he isn't just an idiot and incompetence isn't the only explanation for his actions as chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Baucus has toned it down a bit -- he's stopped taking money from health care PACS -- but he's still taking cash from lobbyists and executives. Baucus ruled out single-payer from the git-go because that's what he was paid to do. It would've put all but niche-market private insurance out of business.

But, as I said at the beginning, Barack Obama shares some of the blame here. This isn't the same congress that Clinton had to deal with. Passing this off to Pelosi and Reid was practically a guarantee of suck. Better and earlier leadership could've changed things and he wouldn't have had to send out an SOS to the liberal blogosphere.

We could've been pretending to settle for a public option right now, instead of fighting for it.

-Wisco


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Navigating Conservative Thinking

It must be difficult to be rightwinger. It seems to me that it would require a tremendous amount of mental effort to be able to navigate the logical U-turns it would take to keep on that side of the road. What was true yesterday, what you actually defended as a core principle of your political thought, is no longer true the next day. In fact, it may be that the next day, the exact opposite is true. How they manage this cognitive gear-grinding without blowing some sort of gasket is a mystery to me. I don't understand how you can operate in the world without some sort of constant. You'd think the constantly shifting realities that wingnuts expose themselves to would be hopelessly disorienting. Yet there they are, every day, believing today's truth and forgetting that they ever believed anything else.

Case in point; two somewhat similar legal situations in which two radically different military personnel have made a similar choice. I give you the cases of Lt. Ehren Watada and Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook, both of the Army. In both cases, these soldiers refused to deploy, citing illegal orders. That's pretty much the entirety of the similarity.

In June of 2006, Watada refused orders to deploy to Iraq. Believing -- rightly -- that the war was illegal, Watada argued that he had the responsibility as an officer to refuse to be a party to a war crime. Watada faced a court martial, the government lost the case on what was basically a technicality, and the Justice Department, under Obama, dropped the charges against him in May of 2009. In the end, Watada's case was disappointing for observers, with the anti-war side never having tested the war's legality in court and the pro-war side never having gotten Watada behind bars.

And, boy, did they ever want him behind bars. For the right wing blog Moonbattery, Watada was a "sniveling deserter." For Michelle Malkin, he was a "coward" and the "moonbat left's new hero."





"This is more than just one man refusing to deploy," the conservative blog Wizbang opined. "It’s a coordinated effort by the anti-war left to undermine our troops, our war effort, and President Bush, and Lt. Watada is its pawn."

Looking at these opinions of Watada, you'd believe the right thinks that anyone refusing to deploy in a war was just playing politics to keep their cowardly self out of danger. And you'd be wrong, because that's yesterday's truth. Today's truth is something entirely different and Lt. Watada never existed.

See, it's here that the case of Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook comes in. Of course, in Cook's case, the reasons for his refusal to deploy are absurd. I guess that's what makes it so appealing to the right.

"Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook filed... suit July 8 in federal court here asking for conscientious objector status and a preliminary injunction based upon his belief that President Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to serve as president of the United States and commander-in-chief of the U.S. Armed Forces," reported the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer Friday.

That's right, he's one of those.

So, where Watada's case was based in reality, Cook's case is based in wingnut fantasy. Simple logic rules out the "birthers" claim -- that Barack Obama is a Kenyan posing as a Hawaiian to win the presidency of the United States. You'd kind of think that the INS, the IRS, the Secret Service, or the State of Hawaii would've noticed that this guy running for president wasn't born here. Seems that's the hurdle any foreign-born president would stumble over. There's a reason why you never hear the phrases "high-profile" and "illegal alien" used together.

But if there's one thing about a conspiracy theory, it's that you'll never convince the theorists that they're wrong. It becomes a belief with as much strength in their mind as religion and, like religion, it doesn't require a whole lot of logical framework to stand in their minds. You've got as much chance of changing a conspiracy theorist's mind -- no matter how much contrary evidence you present -- as you do of getting a creationist to accept evolution. Anyone who disbelieves in the conspiracy is wrong, end of story. You simply cannot change their mind and it's a waste of time to try. The best thing you can do is drop a coin in their cup, compliment them on their tinfoil hat, and keep walking down the street.

And Cook's special brand of conspiracy/religion is becoming a problem for the Republican party.

David Weigel, Washington Independent:

Six months into Obama’s presidency, after scores of embarrassing legal defeats, and even after tussles between the attorneys who’ve turned frivolous lawsuits about the president’s citizenship into full-time jobs, the cottage industry of conspiracy theories about the president’s birth shows no signs of disappearing. The theories have found a home in talk radio and on conservative web sites such as Free Republic and WorldNetDaily. Conspiracy theorists are increasingly sending letters to their local papers, embarrassing members of Congress at town hall meetings, and hounding Hill staffers about challenges to the president’s citizenship.

Imagine people who believe the moon landings were shot on a Hollywood set taking their cases to court and you get an idea of how these suits invariably turn out. The Republican establishment would love to see these nuts just go away. "Crazy" isn't the perfect word for these people, but it's the closest. They aren't actually mentally ill, they're just committed to being wrong. The conspiracy theory is an article of faith. So it doesn't make any difference how many cases they lose, they're going to stay just as wrong until the day they die.

Cook's reason for refusing to deploy isn't as sound as Watada's, but I think that if I were stationed in Afghanistan, I wouldn't want him there. He's obviously a gullible ass of questionable intelligence, so having my life in his hands wouldn't be all that comforting a prospect. Unless, of course, you're a rightwinger -- then Cook's a hero.

I'm not going to read his mind and pretend I know he's a coward. I doubt he is, anyway. I'll just take him at his word and assume that Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook is an idiot. He's not going to Afghanistan, because the Army pulled his orders. I guess it's not worth the effort it would take to court martial him -- as they did, under a previous administration, with Ehren Watada. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I'm not sure I disagree. It's an unsatisfying situation, but there really isn't any way to win here. The birthers won't stop -- ever -- because their lunatic belief system won't allow it.

And all those people who thought Watada was a coward are either silent on Cook or cheering him on. One refusal was the worst thing ever, while the next is the best. There is no consistency on the right, no governing principle, other than that liberals are always as wrong as it's possible to be. That's what it means to be reactionary.

-Wisco


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Institutionalized Ignorance

The less you know, the easier it is to be a Republican. Intellectual powerhouses are not welcome in today's GOP, where their perception of the average, everyday American is Joe the Plumber or Sarah Palin. The right values ignorance, because the facts so often are contrary to their ideas. Take a spin through the right wing blogosphere and you'll see very little actual reporting; you'll see links in opinion pieces that lead to other opinion pieces, you'll see comments written by people who are ignorant as all hell -- and damned proud of it. Right wing talk radio is dominated by mindreaders who tell you what liberals believe, while being 100% wrong.

The Republican party is the party of two constituencies now -- the wealthy and the dumb. Anyone who thinks that the CEO of MegaCorp wastes his time listening to Glenn Beck or reading Michelle Malkin is a fool. The guys in the boardrooms need news, not ignorant blather. They read newspapers. All the right wing media nonsense exists for the chumps. The only way to get the average person to vote Republican is to turn them into an idiot who'll believe anything.

This hasn't been working so well lately, as Americans reject Republican ideas left and right. As things get more desperate for the Grand Old Party, the electorate is stubbornly refusing to get stupider. Luckily, Republicans have a remedy for this lack of idiocy among the populace -- they want to institutionalize ignorance.





As is always the case, the proving ground for this new strategy is in the depths of RedState-istan --this time, in Texas. Texas children are leaving school too well-informed and something is being done about it.

Wall Street Journal:

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state's social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," says Rev. Peter Marshall, a Massachusetts minister shipped into Texas to become an education "expert" for the state. Marshall will join another right wing nutjob, David Barton, in recommending retooling the state's education system to teach BS.

"Never mind that Marshall and Barton are absurdly unqualified to be considered experts by any objective standards," reports the Texas Freedom Network. "Barton, who founded an organization that opposes separation of church and state, has a bachelor’s degree in religious education. Marshall also has no advanced degree in the social sciences. In truth, their 'expertise' is in promoting political agendas, not social studies education."

In fact, Barton is a professional BS artist, making his living rewriting American history to favor conservative views. In Barton's world, the founders wanted a bona fide theocracy. Barton says he's on a mission from God to uncover "America's forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built." Despite his lack of scholarship in the area, Barton says he's an "expert" on the "original intent of our Founding Fathers in the areas of faith and family."

According to People for the American Way, "Whereas people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson are well-known right-wing figures, Barton operates mostly under the national media’s radar, speaking to small groups of activists all over the country and churning out an array of resources that provide the pseudo-historical foundation for much of the right-wing agenda on everything from reigning in 'judicial activism' and impeaching judges to defending the phrase 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and decrying homosexuals in the military."

With Barton and Marshall at the helm, Texas schools would erase inconvenient facts from history, replacing them with an emphasis on how Christian everybody was. They "say they believe that children must learn that America's founding principles are biblical," reports WSJ. "For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man's fall and inherent sinfulness, or 'radical depravity,' which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

"The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good -- and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart."

To give you an idea of how based in reality these ideas are, consider that Marshall "preaches that Watergate, the Vietnam War and Hurricane Katrina were God's judgments on the nation's sexual immorality," Yes, he's that crazy and that ignorant -- and conservatives believe that's exactly what a good American school kid should be. Kids should leave school uncritical enough to believe anything.

It's not guaranteed that this new curriculum will go through. The reviewers were chosen by board members and half the board seems insufficiently crazy. WSJ reports that "three reviewers appointed by the moderate and liberal board members are all professors of history or education at Texas universities" -- i.e. actual experts, not pretend experts like Barton and Marshall.

But we all know that the professional BS artist's expertise isn't in informing, but deceiving. It may turn out that their arguments, though boneheaded, turn out to be more persuasive. People with an agenda have a strategy and people without one don't think they need a strategy. If they can make gains in denying global warming and evolution, they can make gains in denying history. They don't have to actually prove anything, they just need to cast doubt. "Someone has to stand up to the experts!" said former Board Chairman Don McLeroy of evolution education. Now someone has to stand up to the experts on history, because -- godammit! -- those kids are going to believe what they want them to believe. Truth be damned.

So this is the future of the GOP... At least, if they continue on their present course. Public education debates won't be about school funding or redistricting, they'll be about just how smart we're going to allow our children to be. If they're too smart to fall for Republican talking points, then they're just too smart period. And the wealthy CEO of MegaCorp? What does he care? His kids go to private school and his workers don't need to know history -- especially labor history, like the life and work of César Chávez. People like that need to be airbrushed out of the text books, like a former soviet leader who's fallen out of favor with the party.

In the end, this ought to tell you all you need to know about today's Republican party -- the truth is their enemy and the electorate is hampered by being too well-informed. When your arguments require that everyone be an idiot, how good can those arguments actually be? When you have to go back and change reality to fit your worldview, wouldn't that suggest that there might be a tiny little problem with that view?

Give them a generation and no one will ask questions like that, because they won't ask questions at all.

-Wisco


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Leahy has Truth Commissions on the Brain

I'm running really late today, so I'm going to stick you with a fairly short post. Sometimes we just can't get what we want. What I want is time to write my usual post in the neighborhood of 1,000 words, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. When you have enough time and you have enough resources, then you can get what you want and it's then that you should be able to make your best effort. You should be able to buckle in, get serious, and do some good work.

Someone ought to explain that to Pat Leahy.

Raw Story:

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) says that -- rather than a criminal prosecution -- he would prefer to see a commission of inquiry into the growing controversy over the CIA misleading Congress and allegations that then-Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to withhold crucial information.

[...]

Leahy told CBS's Face the Nation that a commission of inquiry is preferable to criminal prosecution because "an inquiry would go into everything; a special prosecutor would be very narrowly focused.

"I just don't want to see an instance where if the higher-ups gave the order to break the law, that the ones who are punished are the lower-level front-line troops," Leahy said.

Leahy's answer to calls for an investigation into Bush torture policies is also a truth commission. It's starting to look like Leahy has truth commissions on the brain.





Of course, Leahy's argument is a lousy one. A special prosecutor may wind up charging "lower-level front-line troops," but Leahy didn't have a problem with that when the lower-level front-line troops were a guy named Scooter Libby. Much better that everyone get off scott-free than have one guilty person take the fall for other guilty people.

A truth commission is basically a third-world mechanism that really doesn't do anything other than accurately write history. It doesn't punish crime, it just recognizes it. We don't even know the full extent of either the torture program or Cheney's hit squads and Leahy's already offering the criminals -- if there are any -- a way out. It's frustratingly wrongheaded and, frankly, cowardly. Like any other work, justice can be approached one of two way -- the right way or the easy way. Leahy keeps proposing the easy way.

The right way comes to us from New Jersey Democratic Rep. Rush Holt.

Citing a "significant shift in the mood" of the electorate and elected officials, US Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) told the Newark Star-Ledger that there is now momentum for a full investigation into the CIA's unreported assassination program.

"Holt said he believes the investigation, which he also called a review, should be as intense and comprehensive as the probe conducted more than 30 years ago -- in the wake of the Watergate scandal -- by a special committee headed by U.S. Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat," the New Jersey newspaper reported.

In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee investigated covert US intelligence activities, and uncovered numerous assassination plans, including ones targeting "Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and President John F. Kennedy's plan to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba," according to Wikipedia.

The investigations into covert activities are widely credited with bringing about the surveillance law reforms of the late 1970s, among them the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a court specifically to oversee matters of national security.

A bigger blockquote than I normally like, but as I say, I'm pressed for time. Holt's plan doesn't rule out prosecutions, while Leahy's specifically does -- that's the whole point of his idea. Leahy's truth commissions are suited to countries on the verge of collapse or civil war, when prosecuting everyone guilty of crime would put way too many people behind bars and risk renewing conflict. Using it to look into the crimes of a few corrupt politicians is ridiculous. Hyperbole aside, the Bush administration was not as bad for the US as apartheid was for South Africa. Investigating and prosecuting them wouldn't fill our prisons with ordinary citizens and it wouldn't result in gun battles in the streets. Hell, you could stick them all in Camp Cupcake and have room to spare -- although the Rod Serling in me wants them in Gitmo. Now there's ironic and poetic justice.

Pat Leahy may have some good ideas, but this addiction of his to truth commissions isn't among them. We can go full-scale or we can scale back for no good reason other than political difficulty. Leahy chooses the latter. We should choose the former.

-Wisco


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What's the Secret CIA Scandal Really About?

In February of this year, the CIA flew a pilotless drone into Pakistan, near the Afghan border. The plane fired two missiles into the town of Makeen, killing thirty. According to the report, this number included al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, but there was no immediate information how many of the thirty dead were these fighters. Clearly, there were civilian deaths -- so-called "collateral damage."

The target, although the CIA won't confirm it, was Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. Mehsud is widely believed to have been responsible for the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. When the smoke cleared, Mehsud wasn't among the dead. If he was the target of the strike, his survival seems to have been a matter of luck.

This isn't anything new. Last Friday, CBS News reported that the CIA has flown more than 50 of these missions into Pakistan in the last year alone. According to the report, these missions have been very successful, "killing half of al Qaeda's top leaders and hundreds of its fighters" in that country. Given those numbers, it's hard to believe that these "top leaders" weren't targeted. It's pretty clear that the CIA is flying drones into Pakistan for the purpose of killing specific people.

Other than people -- like myself -- who aren't happy with the indiscriminate killing involved in these missile strikes, there hasn't been a lot of outrage over them. In the grand scheme of things, we can safely say that these aren't controversial.





So what are we to make of the news that the secret scandal, where the CIA supposedly kept details of a Cheney-ordered assassination squad from congress? When agency director Leon Panetta revealed this program, congress members present called it "stunning." It was so secret that Panetta himself didn't find out about until four months after he was sworn in as CIA Director. He shut it down the same day he learned of it.

Here's an interesting question; if the idea that Cheney would order the assassination of top al Qaeda members in friendly nations is so jaw-dropping that the program was shut down the minute Panetta learned of it, if members of congress were so shocked by it that they're considering an official probe into the program, why aren't the CIA's Predator drone attacks just as shocking? After all, the only real differences here are the tactics and the weapons. We're obviously trying to kill al Qaeda members with drones. We're assassinating them with missiles.

TPMMuckraker:

Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism chief, told TPMmuckraker that because we've been in a state of war against al Qaeda since just after September 11, there would have been no need for a secret CIA [assassination] program that received special legal authorization.

Since the war on terror began, said Cannistraro, the CIA has routinely conducted operations targeting top Qaeda leaders. "The CIA runs drones and targets al Qaeda safe houses all the time," said Cannistraro, explaining that there's no important difference between those kinds of attacks and "assassinations" with a gun or a knife.

This isn't to say that the assassination squads aren't the program that's so controversial, just that they may not be exactly what's being advertised. TPMMuckraker points us to a 2005 New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh:

Under Rumsfeld's new approach, I was told, U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities. Some operations will likely take place in nations in which there is an American diplomatic mission, with an Ambassador and a C.I.A. station chief, the Pentagon consultant said. The Ambassador and the station chief would not necessarily have a need to know, under the Pentagon's current interpretation of its reporting requirement.

The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls "action teams" in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. "Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys."

So, if Hersh was right (and he hasn't been wrong yet), Rumsfeld's program -- which may later have become Cheney's program -- would have us hiring locals to engage in terrorism. That's pretty bad. It would have us paying militaries to commit atrocities. That's worse. This isn't just killing al Qaeda leaders, this is indiscriminate killing to provide cover for the killing of al Qaeda leaders. The collateral damage of missile strikes would probably pale in comparison.

Further evidence that the secret scandal isn't about what it's reportedly about comes from Greg Sargent's Plumline. In a post yesterday, Sargent noted that Republicans want to spin the Cheney hit squad story into a plus for Republicans, by painting Democrats as weak on terrorism. But they don't want a probe into the program.

"This raises the question: If keeping these allegations in the news is so good for Republicans, why don’t they want a probe of the program?" he asks. "If the House did launch an investigation into the CIA’s secret program, of course, the media attention to this story would ratchet up exponentially. Yet Republicans mysteriously don’t support any such efforts... It’s possible that Republicans secretly think a probe would be bad for Dems and want it to look like Dems instigated it. Or maybe the GOP claim that revelations about Bush-Cheney-era CIA deception are really good for Republicans deserve a tad more skepticism."

It might be that the hit squads sound like the sort of strong-armed, take-no-prisoners approach that Republicans think would appeal to Americans, but that the details aren't so appealing. Recruiting people to engage in terrorism would sound a little counterproductive to your average American (mostly because it is), so they want to be able to talk about it in broad terms, without getting down to the bloody and corrupt nitty-gritty. If "assassination squad" becomes "death squad," then things get a little too dark and a little too evil for anyone other than the wingnuttiest to sit comfortably with.

Whatever the reason for the secrecy surrounding the program, we can be pretty damned sure it isn't just about killing terrorist leaders. We're doing that now and no one's especially freaked out about it. If missile attacks by pilotless drones don't strike anyone as criminal, it's hard to see how a guy with a sniper rifle would. In fact, you'd think the hit man would be preferable, since collateral civilian deaths in big fireballs make us more enemies than friends.

Whatever the real story here, whatever the secret in the secret scandal, it's clear we aren't getting the whole thing. Not yet, anyway. There's some bad, bad stuff in there somewhere. And it'll come out eventually.

-Wisco


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The Activist in Chief

With the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor rolling along, the phrase "judicial activism" is being thrown around a lot. It's actually pretty hard to define, since it seems to apply only to liberal, moderate, or even insufficiently conservative judges. Judicial activists "legislate from the bench," handing down decisions that overturn law or have the effect of creating new laws. The problem here -- at least, if you listen to the people who use these phrases -- is that none of this is constitutional. But the problem with this reasoning is that the Constitution allows it. In fact, it's the job of judge on a Court of Appeals or a Supreme Court to weigh the constitutionality of law and to rule in cases were the law is unclear or fails to cover the situtation. If their favorite example, Roe v. Wade, which struck down laws banning abortion was judicial activism, so was Loving v. Virginia, which did the same for laws banning mixed race marriages. The courts are where you turn for justice when legislation fails to provide it. If you believe a law is unconstitutional, you go ahead and sue to have it overturned. You may win, you may lose. That's the way this whole justice system thing works, because that's the way this whole justice system thing was designed to work.

What people who use the term "judicial activism" argue is that the judicial branch is encroaching on the legislative branch. There's a clear separation of powers and having judges "legislate from the bench" violates it. That's the argument anyway. The truth is that these people don't like losing games and want to blame the referee. As I said, you may win, you may lose -- they're not extremely happy with that "you may lose" part.

But is the judicial branch the only branch of government capable of usurping the responsibilities of other branches? Obviously not. And you've got to wonder where these people were when the Bush administration was pushing it's theory of the "unitary executive." With the use of signing statements, Bush gave himself the power to enforce only those laws he believed were constitutional. The test of constitutionality is the job of the courts, not the president. This is why Bush was responsible for so few vetos -- why risk an override by congress when you can just add a note to the law that says, "Yeah, I'm not going to do that?" Just sign it into law, then create a signing statement saying it's bad law and you're not going to use it or that you're going to interpret it in a way that's clearly contrary to the law's intention. Call it "legislating from the Oval Office."

But that isn't the only way Bush abused the unitary executive theory. When it came to torture, when it came to illegal wiretaps, when it came to the detention of terrorist suspects, Bush became not just a legislature unto himself, but a judge and jury. In the case of Dick Cheney's hit squad, the executive became legislature, judge, jury, and executioner.





This struck me when I read this story about torture, the White House, and the Department of Justice.

Raw Story:

A former U.S. intelligence agent said in a report published Monday that terror suspect Abu Zubaydah was subjected to simulated drowning months before the Bush administration’s Department of Justice had written memos approving the use of waterboarding.

The claim strikes a serious blow to repeated Bush administration arguments that no laws were broken in the torture of prisoners because legal guidelines had been closely followed.

Former Central Intelligence Agency officer John Kiriakou, speaking with BBC’s Panorama, said that internal communications detailed Zubaydah’s torture beginning “at the very end of May or the very beginning of June 2002.”

So, when the Bush administration said they had legal cover to commit torture, they didn't actually have that cover. They jumped the gun and went ahead and tortured Zubaydah. But here's my question; why would that make any difference?

The Bush administration went to great lengths to pretend that memos and briefs from the Justice Department -- an executive branch agency -- were as solid in legal force as a ruling by a court. And the media has done an excellent job of reinforcing this false impression. By relying on legal findings from Justice to support torture, the Bush White House was acting as both the judicial and legislative branches. In other words, the neocon version of the unitary executive could be called "executive activism."

But it doesn't seem that even the Bush administration bought this. They decided that torture was the way to go, went with it, then decided they needed some sort of legal CYA. So they turned to compliant lawyers within their own branch of government and ordered them to come up with something. To everyone's tremendous surprise, they did. What luck. They had legal memos and these were supposed to be exactly the same as a law passed by congress and tested by the courts. If all this is constitutional, you've really got to wonder what the hell we've got courts and a congress for -- clearly, they're redundant. In the United States, we elect our kings. The entire US government sits behind one desk in one building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Courts and legislatures are pretty much ceremonial.

Or maybe not. Attorney General Eric Holder hasn't ruled out appointing a special prosecutor to investigate torture. If this happens, the Bushies are going to find their legal fiction that a memo from a Justice Department toady means anything is a bunch of BS. Which is what everyone -- media included -- should've been saying all along. When neocons pointed to the torture memos, the proper response should've been "who cares?" Or, at least, "so what?"

And now it turns out that they didn't even have this pretend-authorization. They just went ahead and did it, because the law doesn't apply to the king.

Whether or not Holder actually goes ahead with an investigation is an open question and, frankly, I'll believe it when I see it. The law says he has to, but if Bush was a king, then so is Obama. The law doesn't apply to the executive. Holder can prosecute or not prosecute or recommend that tortures get freakin' medals, because the guy in the White House is a unitary executive and everything he does -- no matter what -- is golden. As Richard Nixon once put it, "If the president does it, then that means it is not illegal."

So it's not "judicial activism" that's our problem -- that's all BS from a bunch of sore losers anyway. It's executive activism that's a problem. And so far, they've all been silent about it.

-Wisco


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A Logical Tilt-a-Whirl

There are few things in politics so constant as the principle that Republicans are never, ever wrong. Even when they're proven wrong, they aren't wrong. The proof is just the result of a big conspiracy to make them look wrong, because Republican perfection is beyond question. If reality doesn't agree with a Republican argument, then reality is wrong. This is the case with Nancy Pelosi, the CIA, and what I've come to think of as the "secret scandal."

A few months ago, Speaker Pelosi said that the CIA hadn't been extremely honest in briefing congress on the Bush White House's program of "harsh interrogation techniques."

"The CIA briefed me only once on enhanced interrogation techniques in September 2002 in my capacity as ranking member of the Intelligence Committee," she said in May. "I was informed then that the Department of Justice opinions had concluded that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques were legal. The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed."

Of course, this was the worst thing anyone ever said in the long history of people saying stuff. "It's outrageous that a member of Congress should call a terror-fighter a liar," said Sen. Kit Bond, the Republican vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It seems the playbook is, blame terror-fighters. We ought to be supporting them." Imagine, someone accusing the CIA of dishonesty. That's really going out on a limb. What would Nancy Pelosi do next, accuse the Pentagon of being loose with money?





Despite Republican efforts to turn this into a big scandal for Nancy Pelosi, they failed to get Americans to believe that saying bad things about the agency was tantamount to treason. Among the federal agencies out there, the CIA probably ranks somewhere around the IRS in terms of popularity. Rushing to the agency's defense wasn't the surefire political winner they seemed to think it would be and the whole thing blew over -- the story lasted about a week, then everyone moved on and forgot about it. The news cycle rolled on and the "Nancy Pelosi hates the CIA and, therefore, America" story cycled out pretty quickly. The Republican strategy of complaining about everything failed, once again, to create a scandal out of thin air.

And then came the secret scandal. It turns out that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to keep a program from congress and they complied. I call this the secret scandal because we have no idea what the hell this program was, what was kept from congress, or what the program was supposed to accomplish. All we know is that members of congress say the CIA misled them about it -- i.e., they lied.

And this is where the big conspiracy comes in. You must always remember that Republicans are never wrong, so any explanation of why they may seem to have been wrong -- no matter how wild or inane -- must be credible. Nancy Pelosi's statement that the CIA lied to her is still the worst thing ever, so it must be that the CIA is lying now to cover for her. In an appearance on a Sunday morning talking head show, Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein said that the program was probably illegal and that the CIA and the Bush administration were wrong to keep congress out of the loop on the matter. "We were kept in the dark. That's something that should never, ever happen again," she said.

On the same show, however, John Cornyn had a different take.

Associated Press:

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said he agreed with Feinstein that the CIA should keep Congress informed. But Cornyn said the new assertion "looks to me suspiciously like an attempt to provide political cover" to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats. Pelosi has accused the CIA of lying to her in 2002 about its use of waterboarding, or simulated drowning.

Yes, that must be it. When CIA director Leon Panetta revealed the program to congress, he was trying to draw fire away from Pelosi. Never mind that the whole Pelosi-CIA story blew over about two months ago and no one's talking about it anymore, it's clear that the CIA is now lying to cover for her horrible, irresponsible statement that the CIA lied.

Now follow the reasoning here. Pelosi says the CIA lied to her about torture. The GOP climbs the walls, freaking out that she'd do that. Then the CIA says they lied to congress -- including Pelosi -- about something (remember, it's not clear what). Since the CIA is invariably honest and Republicans are never wrong, the CIA must be lying.

OK, so that's not exactly reasoning. But that seems to be the argument here, internal contradictions and all; the CIA is unfairly attacking the CIA, in an attempt to provide political cover to Nancy Pelosi. And Pelosi needs that cover to protect her from criticism of her nearly-forgotten attack on the CIA.

Got a headache yet?

To make matters worse, there's no evidence that this whole secret scandal is about torture at all. More likely, it's about something like wiretaps or intercepting emails -- many wonder if it isn't about Dick Cheney's hit squad. Cornyn would know what it's about and he'd know whether or not it has anything to do with what Nancy Pelosi was talking about back in May. If it's not about torture, then Cornyn's argument gets even worse -- and, believe me, we'll find out what this is all about eventually. Investigative journalists aren't likely to just leave it at "undetermined program." Scandal sells papers and journalists need to sell papers right now.

But you're thinking that Cornyn isn't explicitly saying that the CIA is lying. That's true enough, but how does that make the argument any better? If he's not, then the argument is that the CIA has proved it lies in order to provide cover for Pelosi, who got into a "scandal" by saying the CIA lied. I'm sorry, but that doesn't make any sense either. That's not covering for her, that's vindicating her. Either way, this line of reasoning doesn't exactly qualify as a line of reasoning.

But the important thing is that Republicans are never wrong. Pelosi's statement, mostly forgotten as it was, is still the worst thing ever. And if Republicans have to turn logic on its head to keep that argument afloat, then on its head it goes.

-Wisco


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