The Seventh Sense

That Didn't Take Long

Bill Frist bucks Leader George and comes out for embryonic stem cell research.  Good for him.

Very quickly, he is condemned by the Christian Right, who he has catered to so relentlessly:

WASHINGTON, July 29 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The Christian Defense Coalition says Sen. Bill Frist can no longer consider himself pro-life and vote to expand funding for embryonic stem cell research.

The Coalition also states, Sen. First should not expect support and endorsement from the pro-life community if he votes for embryonic research funding.

Oh, well.  Easy come, easy go.

Word Choice

As we all know by now, George Orwell Bush has deemed that the “war on terror” be renamed the “struggle against violent extremism”, so that history will not depict him as losing a war, but engaging in a struggle.

I’m not sure it gets him where he wants to be.  After all, Mein Kampf translates to “my struggle”.  And the word “jihad” itself also translates to “struggle”. 

That aside, I wish the Bush Administration would be serious about finding actual solutions to actual problems, rather than constantly focusing on the cosmetic battles.  Let's hope that the administration is better at actually combating terrorism than it is in coming up with new catch phrases. 

UPDATE: But let's consider what this new buzz phrase really means:

It is a complete repudiation of roughly four years of counter-terrorism policy out of the White House.

The core of the Bush Doctrine was that the threat of terrorism is still one tied to states rather than non-state-actors. As Doug Feith said some three years ago, the reliance of terrorists on state sponsors has been the "principal strategic thought underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism."

If we take their words at face value, they've now abandoned that cornerstone of their strategy. Shouldn't that prompt some questions?

A Class Act

Bush flips the bird.  Quicktime video here.

And so, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.

- Bush Acceptance Speech, August 3, 2000.

God, are you watching this?

It’s not the first time he’s done this.  Here’s a frame from the famous mov file that’s been around for ages . . .

US Military Throws A Lifeline To Terrorists?

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today rejected calls to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, saying that would be a “mistake” because it would send a “lifeline to terrorists."

- Washington Post, June 23, 2005

Pentagon officials have provided little detail in discussing the possible withdrawal of forces from Iraq. The most specific estimate has come from Lt. Gen. John Vines, who runs day-to-day military operations in Iraq. He said in June that a reduction of “four or five brigades” — perhaps 20,000 troops out of the current 135,000 — was possible sometime next year.

- AP, July 27, 2005

It Was A Summary Execution

Mark Honigsbaum
Thursday July 28, 2005
The Guardian

Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian shot dead in the head, was not wearing a heavy jacket that might have concealed a bomb, and did not jump the ticket barrier when challenged by armed plainclothes police, his cousin said yesterday.

Speaking at a press conference after a meeting with the Metropolitan police, Vivien Figueiredo, 22, said that the first reports of how her 27-year-old cousin had come to be killed in mistake for a suicide bomber on Friday at Stockwell tube station were wrong.

“He used a travel card,” she said. “He had no bulky jacket, he was wearing a jeans jacket. But even if he was wearing a bulky jacket that wouldn’t be an excuse to kill him."

She’s got that right.

The Future Is Here

The woman on the right is an android.  Seriously.

The Slippery Slope of Wingnuttery

Let’s see.  Where are we in the Republican defense of Rove?  Meme roll call:

First: “The White House had nothing to do with the leak of classified information.”

Second: “Okay, maybe the White House did have something to do with the leak, but nobody identified Valerie Plame by her actual name.”

Second and a half: “By the way, Plame had it coming because she married a big fat partisan liar.”

Third: “Okay, maybe the White House didn’t need to identify her by her actual name, but in any event, the White House learned about Plame’s CIA status from reporters—not the other way around.”

Third and a half:  “By the way, here’s some recycled evidence showing some links between Saddam and al Qaeda.  Can we revisit that debate?” [Alternative Glenn Reynolds meme: “This Plamegate issue is for too complicated for my tiny little brain"]

Fourth: “Okay, maybe the White House did reveal her CIA status to reporters, but even if someone did, it’s no big deal, because she wasn’t ‘covert’.”

Fourth and a half:  “Look who Bush nominated for the Supreme Court!”

Fifth: “Okay, maybe she was covert and perhaps a law was broken, but the law is stupid.”

Sixth: “It’s Clinton’s fault.”

(Okay, the last one hasn’t happened yet . . . but don’t be surprised)

I know in my heart that if, three years ago, I asked any conservative (or liberal, or moderate for that matter) if it is “okay” in a time of “war” for anybody (say, Michael Moore) to reveal the name of a CIA operative working on WMD issues, the universal consensus would have been “No.  Absolutely Not.  Hang the traitor from the highest yardarm”.  The continued defense of Bush’s advisors reveals one thing about diehard Bush supporters—they have no moral center.

Bush, Roberts and Government Secrecy

The Bush White House is once again play hide-and-seek, this time with memos written by Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.  While they are turning over some documents from Roberts’ past, they are refusing to turn over documents from 1989 to 1993, when Roberts was deputy solicitor general.  The stated reason?  Attorney-client privilege.

A-C privilege is a sticky wicket, but it makes for a poor excuse in this case.  For one thing, as even conservatives acknowledge, the privilege belongs to the client, not the lawyer.  This means the A-C privilege is meant to protect the client, not the lawyer.  So I had to laugh when I read this from RedState.org’s Pejman Yousefzadeh.  He acknowledged that the privilege belongs to the client, but then writes:

Without the shield of privacy that is traditionally afforded to interoffice memoranda, lawyers will be deterred from spelling out their views and analysis in the honest manner that is necessary to ensure the most accurate appraisal possible of important legal issues.

Yup, the “shield” protects “lawyers” all of a sudden.

But let’s focus on the statement again and ask a simple question:  Is it even true?

Suppose you are a lawyer in the solicitor general’s office, and you are asked to render a legal opinion on an “important legal issue” to your client, the United States of America.  Aren’t you going to render your views and analysis “in an honest manner” regardless of whether or not that information becomes public?  After all, if you honestly argue that the Constitution says X, and you back it up in an internal memo, why would you change that view if you thought the public was going to read that memo?  You wouldn’t!

But Yousefzadeh’s comment demonstrates the dichotomy between the public face of the government and inner workings of the government.  It is a tacit acknowledgement that the government we see is a mere facade, and that what is REALLY going on should be secret.  It reveals the distrust that the Bush government has for the people of America—why would they go to such lengths to hide things from us?

Mind you, we’re not talking about classified information or anything else where there is a present national interest in keeping it hush-hush (although this administration, when it suits them, don’t care about that either).  We’re talking about a government lawyer’s professional opinions, derived from case law and other things in the public domain.  Revealing the legal viewpoints of a Supreme Court nominee are certainly pertinent to a full and fair hearing on his nomination.

This administration seems to forget that they are public servants.  Their role is to serve the people, not themselves, not their party, not their own ideology.  It is in the national interest that we, through our elected representatives, know as much as we can about a man who may play a pivotal role, as a Supreme Court justice, in our futures. 

So why the shadows?

We’ve see it all the time from this administration—Cheney refusing to reveal what was said when he met with oil executives to hash out a national energy policy; secret no-bid contracts being given to preffered corporations like Halliburton; attempts to keep disturbing photos from the public eye (caskets, Abu Ghraib)—the list goes on and on.

As reported here:

For the first time, a majority of Americans, 51%, say the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — the reason Bush emphasized in making the case for invading. The administration’s credibility on the issue has been steadily eroding since 2003.

If the Bush Administration wants to regain its trust with the American people, perhaps it should not be so secretive—or more accurately, selectively secret—about what it knows, and should be more open.  American people will forgive flaws and mistakes, but not attempts to hide them.  Or, as the saying goes, “it’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up”.  So why is Bush & Co. covering things up?  What will it take before they stop playing public-manipulation games, and just put their cards on the table?  Do they hate an open form of government, or what?

Kerry Was Right; Bush Was Wrong

. . . about the “war on terror”

"I will use our military when necessary, but it is not primarily a military operation. It’s an intelligence-gathering, law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort.  And we’re putting far more money into the war on the battlefield than we are into the war of ideas. We need to get it straight."

-- John Kerry, April 13, 2004, Meet The Press

Remember how the delusional comic-book-reading right lambasted Kerry over that?  Now read this:

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had “objected to the use of the term ‘war on terrorism’ before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution.” He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that “terror is the method they use.”

Although the military is heavily engaged in the mission now, he said, future efforts require “all instruments of our national power, all instruments of the international communities’ national power.” The solution is “more diplomatic, more economic, more political than it is military,” he concluded.

WMDs, national security, social security—I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of watching Repubs riding the learning curve to get to the same place that the rest of us were several years ago.

Bush Pulls Access To Classified Info

Not pulled from Rove, but from certain members of Congress.

The date was 10/5/01, and here’s the executive order in which he does it.

What prompted such an action?  Well, apparently, some lawmakers had told the Washington Post that they had been informed that more terrorist attacks were likely, a conjecture derived from intelligence documents.  Bush couldn’t have things like honest intelligence agency assessments leaking out to the sheeple, so he yanked lawmakers’ access, saying:

We can’t have leaks of classified information.  It’s not in our nation’s interest.

So . . . rightly or wrongly, Bush limited access to classified information.  Not only was there no crime, but no investigation of a crime either.  “It’s not in our nation’s interest”, he said.  So why the double standard when it comes to Karl Rove and Scooter Libby?  Does partisan politics trump “national interest”?

With this White House, you bet it does.