Me: Frank Lynch

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This is what a steady hand at the tiller looks like. The oppressed Republicans (who this past week were comparing their minority difficulties to the genuine plight of the ignored Iranian opposition) have, as you know, been complaining that Obama hasn't been vocal enough in condemning the seeming fraud of last week's Iranian elections.

During the Presidential campaign, John McCain swore that he would provide a "steady hand on the tiller." Admittedly, this is something the nation sorely needs after eight years of Bush/Cheney overreactions to 9/11. It certainly wasn't a committee of level headed people that seized on a national crisis to invade a country that nothing to do with 9/11. So even if McCain had won, had he been able to deliver on that steady hand claim, it would have been a welcome improvement over Bush.

Problem is, in all likelihood McCain wouldn't have been able to; not unless you think the world of campaigning is so completely different from the world of governing that you think someone who frequently went off like a firecracker while running would have suddenly become sedate and deliberate in the Oval Office.

I'm not talking just about his total wig-out a couple days before the first debate with Obama, where he claimed he had to rush back to Washington so that "he" could cap the economic volcano our nation faced — that he, alone, had that capability. He claimed he would suspend all campaign advertising during the crisis (he didn't even have the power to do that apparently, as time slots had already been bought and ads were set to run) and insisted that the debates couldn't occur on schedule. The debates of course did occur on schedule, and the nation felt no different as a result, seeing as how neither Obama nor McCain were in any kind of economic oversight role as it was.

No, I think his reactions to Russia's so-called invasion of Georgia are a better indicator of McCain's potential for overreaction; you'll recall that McCain's first reaction was to warn off Russia, talking about "Russian aggression." Since McCain has been "belligerent towards Russia for years" one could be forgiven for referring to this as a "knee jerk reaction" more than a "steady hand on the tiller." As it turned out, Georgian claims of Russian aggression deserved greater skepticism than McCain had the patience to give them. React, react, react; that was what McCain was about.

The Bush Administration's "sieze the day" attitude was one of the things which OBL loved about Bush: "[T]he policy of the White House that demands the opening of war fronts to keep busy their various corporations -- whether they be working in the field of arms or oil or reconstruction -- has helped al-Qa'ida to achieve those enormous results."

Obama, however, has an awareness of the history of American intervention in Iraq that goes beyond 1979, back to 1953, when the Shah was installed. (Hell, I bet Obama's even seen the movie "Lawrence of Arabia," and has a recollection of earlier international meddling.) The U.S. can't intervene and tip the scales, and no matter what happens, in the morning, the government of Iran will still be ugly. Mousavi is not Tony Blair, and we will still have to carry our foreign policy forward. The Republicans, however, seem to want to provoke a war and screw us up in the region, not yet having had their fill.
Link | | | 12:22 PM
 

Obama's approval ratings. Oh, man, it's dropped to 58%, according to Gallup. Guess what: Gallup had Bush's approval ratings at 50% in June of 2001 (scroll to bottom). Bush's approval ratings skyrocketed, of course, a few months later (immediately after 9/11). No one wants Obama's to rise under the same circumstances, but it's a pretty safe bet that Bush's wouldn't have flown so high had the nation been aware of the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief and Bush's inaction in response. Obama, of course, won't be so foolish as to ignore such a thing. Such are the rewards of opinion polls, especially when the pubilc forgets that economies don't turn on a dime.
Link | | | 8:57 PM | Home

Thomas Bailey. Used to see him playing for change and selling his CD's around Union Square. Seeing him again would make for a lucky day.

But isn't it all part of being accountable? Remember the old admonition that you shouldn't do anything you wouldn't want your mother to hear about? If you reject that guidance under the premise that your mother would never understand, you're kind of belittling your mother. And any politician who doesn't think the American people (or Jon Stewart) is capable of understanding why you do what you do is taking a similar tack - - in kind of a Straussian way, suggesting that we're not worthy of the truth. The Justice Department (it's 2009, so that would be the Obama justice department, not the Bush) is arguing that if FBI notes of an interview with Cheney during the Plame investigation were revealed, future politicians might be less cooperative:

Justice Department lawyers told the judge that future presidents and vice presidents may not cooperate with criminal investigations if they know what they say could become available to their political opponents and late-night comics who would ridicule them.

"If we become a fact-finder for political enemies, they aren't going to cooperate," Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith said during a 90-minute hearing. "I don't want a future vice president to say, `I'm not going to cooperate with you because I don't want to be fodder for 'The Daily Show.'"

Sullivan said the Justice Department must give him more precise reasons for keeping the information confidential than they had in previous court filings.

My personal feelings (perhaps yours, too) are that this is backwards. If justice, alone, isn't sufficient incentive for behaving with integrity, is Jon Stewart some kind of Avenging Angel here? I mean, is the idea here that federal prison is more tolerable than being lampooned on late night TV? Does the Justice Department think that politicians will be less subject to, say, political cartoons? As if Tom Toles waits to see what's on at late night TV before getting an idea?

Preposterous, of course.
Link | | | 9:53 PM | Home
 

KSM fabricated while being tortured. This isn't screamed about? One of the few news stories I caught during my trip to Chicago this week was that the ACLU had extracted previously redacted passages from testimony where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said he fabricated stories to get the torture to stop. Not only is this a further refutation of Cheney's arguments that torture was important to saving lives, it calls into question why this information was withheld before:

WIZNER: You know, obviously, this program wasn't working, but it was a critical lynch pen of their defense of the program, that without it, American lives would be lost.

MADDOW: And, as you point out, this brings us from not only the crime of torture to the crime of covering up the crime of torture.

WIZNER: Well, I think that's right and I think different things are being covered up here. So, the Bush administration critically wanted to cover up how ineffective torture was. They also wanted to cover up information about the specific detainees.

There's a passage from which Abu Zubaydah, who Bush had called an arch-terrorist, the number three in al Qaeda, recounts that eventually his CIA interrogators told him, "We realize you're not the number three, that you're not even a planner or a fighter, you know, that we made a mistake in your identity."

And that's something that again, it contains no legitimately secret information, but just would have been very embarrassing for the Bush administration in carrying on this torture program.

Have you read about this in your newspaper? Tried doing a search on the word "Khalid" at the New York Times web site recently? (Nada.) NOT a lot of U.S. coverage on this.

Any time Dick Cheney or his daughter Liz wants to say something unfounded, like, "don't pick up that nickel, you don't know where it's been," they get coverage out the wazoo, bookings on Wolf, MTP, and so on and so on; indiscriminate coverage to boost ratings (both the shows and the Cheneys), a weird partnership of a dance. Don't you think it's high time, after all that's come out from genuine interrogators (as opposed to cowboys) that torture doesn't work, that the Cheneys would have greater difficulty getting on the air? And some people think Letterman should be boycotted?

There is now. no. legitimate reason to have either Cheney on TV. None. They have nothing to contribute besides obfuscation; they're peddlars of lies. Stop booking them!
Link | | | 10:26 PM | Home
 

Saturday, June 13, 2009

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Thursday, June 11, 2009