Politics

by hilzoy

Via Steve Benen in TPM, Bill Kristol:

“With the ongoing progress of the surge, and the obvious fact that the vast majority of the troops want to fight and win the war, the “support-the-troops-but-oppose-what-they’re-doing” position has become increasingly untenable. How can you say with a straight face that you support the troops while advancing legislation that would undercut their mission and strengthen their enemies?

You can’t. (…)

Having turned against a war that some of them supported, the left is now turning against the troops they claim still to support. They sense that history is progressing away from them–that these soldiers, fighting courageously in a just cause, could still win the war, that they are proud of their service, and that they will be future leaders of this country. (…) They are our best and bravest, fighting for all of us against a brutal enemy in a difficult and frustrating war. They are the 9/11 generation. The left slanders them. We support them. More than that, we admire them.”

This isn’t just wrong; it’s venomous and destructive. However, let’s deal with ‘wrong’ first:

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“President Bush yesterday rejected entreaties by his Republican allies that he compromise with Democrats on legislation to renew a popular program that provides health coverage to poor children, saying that expanding the program would enlarge the role of the federal government at the expense of private insurance.

The president said he objects on philosophical grounds to a bipartisan Senate proposal to boost the State Children’s Health Insurance Program by $35 billion over five years. Bush has proposed $5 billion in increased funding and has threatened to veto the Senate compromise and a more costly expansion being contemplated in the House.

“I support the initial intent of the program,” Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post after a factory tour and a discussion on health care with small-business owners in Landover. “My concern is that when you expand eligibility . . . you’re really beginning to open up an avenue for people to switch from private insurance to the government.”

The 10-year-old program, which is set to expire on Sept. 30, costs the federal government $5 billion a year and helps provide health coverage to 6.6 million low-income children whose families do not qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance on their own.

About 3.3 million additional children would be covered under the proposal developed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), among others. It would provide the program $60 billion over five years, compared with $30 billion under Bush’s proposal. And it would rely on a 61-cent increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes, to $1 a pack, which Bush opposes.

Grassley and Hatch, in a joint statement this week, implored the president to rescind his veto threat. They warned that Democrats might seek an expansion of $50 billion or more if there is no compromise.”

I find this completely bizarre. Providing health insurance to children, who cannot possibly be thought not to deserve it because of some previous bad choice, and who can suffer from the results of inadequate or nonexistent medical care for the rest of their lives, would seem to be one of those issues that we could all agree on. The administration is picking a fight on this unpromising turf, and it is completely distorting the facts in order to do so. Here’s a good factcheck of administration claims by the CBPP. A few important points below the fold.

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by hilzoy

publius, Scott Lemieux, Jim Henley and Matt Yglesias have already skewered Anne Applebaum’s latest column, so I don’t have to. Instead, I want to provide a little fact-checking. Applebaum writes:

“Out in the world, there are shades of gray. Here inside the Beltway, there are black-and-white solutions. And everybody who is anybody has a plan for Iraq.

Hillary Clinton has a three-point plan; Barack Obama has a “move the soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan” plan. House Democrats have a plan to take most troops out by next March; Senate Democrats have a plan to take them out by April. Some Senate Republicans want the president to shrink the size of the U.S. military in Iraq; other Senate Republicans want to let the surge run its course. Search the Web, listen to the radio and watch the news, and you can hear people arguing that if only we had more troops, fewer troops or no troops at all, everything would be okay again.

What is missing from this conversation is a dose of humility. More to the point, what is missing is the recognition that every single one of these plans contains the seeds of potential disaster, even catastrophe. (…)

Of course, I don’t want to exaggerate. There are people who know that there is no perfect solution for Iraq. However, they tend not to be people who are running for the presidency or any other public office.”

Is it true that none of the candidates for President acknowledge the possibility that some catastrophe will ensue in Iraq even if their plans are implemented? Offhand, it seemed unlikely. So I thought I’d check the major speeches on Iraq that the major Democratic candidates have given in the last year, and see. (‘Major’ means: not Gravel or Kucinich. I looked around on their campaign websites, didn’t see anything that looked promising, and asked myself: self, do you want to spend time looking further? Self said no.)

So I read over all the speeches on the major Democratic candidates’ sites (and, when the sites don’t provide them and the candidates hold elected office, on the candidates’ official websites.) I was not looking for an acknowledgment that if the candidate’s proposal for more or less troops were adopted, there would be problems that would need dealing with as a result. For instance, every candidate who supports a drawdown, redeployment, or withdrawal acknowledges the need to do something to promote regional stability, help Iraqis to move towards political reconciliation, etc. In so doing, those candidates acknowledge the obvious fact that withdrawing or redeploying troops will not solve all Iraq’s problems all by itself. What I was looking for was what Applebaum seems to want: an acknowledgment that even if the candidate’s favored plan is implemented, things might still go to hell; that there is no way to ensure that if only we did X, for some value of X, then “everything would be okay again”.

When I decided to do this, I had no idea how it would come out. The reason I did it was because I thought that even though Applebaum’s column was idiotic, if she were right on this one point, that would be a real problem. I don’t think that any one candidate’s failure to acknowledge that no plan for Iraq offers any guarantee of success necessarily means anything. After all, it’s not as though this is one of the topics that candidates for President must address, as Iraq itself is. But while I don’t think it’s in any way mandatory to acknowledge that they don’t, I do think it speaks well of a candidate when he or she is willing to say: look, this is a terribly difficult situation. Here’s the proposal that I think has the best shot at making things as bearable as they could reasonably be expected to be, given the fix we’re in. But it’s a very, very bad fix, and the best I have to offer will not come close to making “everything okay again.”

If none of the candidates acknowledged this fact, then, it seemed to me, that would mean that none of the Democrats was willing to tell their audience this hard truth, and that the Democrats as a whole were taking an overly rosy view of the situation in Iraq, and making it sound as though they had it in their power to somehow put things right. And it seemed worthwhile to figure out whether that was true.

The short version of the results: Barack Obama and Bill Richardson are very clear about the risks. Chris Dodd refers to them obliquely. Hillary Clinton and John Edwards do not, as far as I can tell, mention them. (If anyone finds some acknowledgment of this point that I have missed, please let me know.) Joe Biden is a special case: he mentions them, but seems more optimistic about the prospects for what he calls a “soft landing” than anyone else. Details are below the fold.

— Oh, and Anne Applebaum? I think that the fact that two Democratic candidates for President, including one of the top two and one who is perennially on the verge of the top tier, clearly say what she says that none of them say, makes her completely wrong. Especially since one of the candidates who says this is one she mentions by name right before she says that no one acknowledges the possibility of failure.

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by publius

Watching the mass defections from the McCain camp, I couldn’t help but think of King Lear. As the play (Shakespeare’s darkest) progresses, Lear consistently loses half of his army (or “train”) — it dwindles from 100 to 50 to 25 on down to nothing. The loss mirrors his own descent from powerful king to senility and death.

In a similar way, the McCain mutiny foreshadows his campaign’s own demise. While I’m not exactly heart-broken, I can’t help but feel sorry for him. That’s because his fall — unlike the other candidates’ eventual fall — seems to take on more tragic dimensions. Of the entire field, he alone strikes me as worthy of being a Shakespearian character.

First, a word on what I mean by “Shakespearian.” Obviously, it can mean a million different things. To me though, Shakespearian refers to the intersection of the most basic human emotions with the highest-possible realms of politics and power. In other words, it’s a look at how a powerful individual’s (e.g., a king, prince, queen, etc.) raw primal emotions can have world-historical effects. Lust can lead to war; jealousy to loss of power. And so on.

In this sense, the Clinton impeachment was almost as pure Shakespeare as you can get. The President indulged in a basic sexual desire and, as a result, he was almost removed from office. It’s the classic example of a micro-emotion playing out on a grand historical scale with wide-ranging consequences.

McCain is not so perfectly Shakespearian, but he still makes for some interesting narrative. In particular, what’s interesting is the amount and type of humiliation he was willing to endure to be President.

Here’s a man whose daughter – daughter – was viciously slandered by the GOP political machine in South Carolina, which included the social conservative hierarchy. Here’s a man who endured unspeakable torture. Here’s a man who, for better or worse, came to prominence through high-profile dissents from party orthodoxy. And in the past three years, he’s abandoned it all.

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by hilzoy

This is pretty interesting:

“Former Tennessee Sen. Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as a “pro-life” Republican, accepted a lobbying assignment from a family-planning group to persuade the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and five people familiar with the matter.

A spokesman for the former senator denied that Thompson did the lobbying work. But minutes of a 1991 board meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Assn. show that the group hired Thompson that year.”

More below the fold.

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by hilzoy

So I asked myself: self, if George W. Bush is so worried about excessive sentences, how has he acted in previous cases in which a sentence might seem excessive? Herewith, some examples, which I’ll put below the fold. Here’s the short version: Serving twelve years for a rape that DNA testing shows you didn’t commit does not get you a pardon. Being represented by a lawyer who slept through large chunks of the trial does not get you a pardon. Being convicted of murder in proceedings that a court-appointed special master describes as “”a breakdown of the adversarial process” caused by the incompetence of your lawyer does not get you a pardon, even when someone else confesses on tape to the murder you were convicted of. Likewise, when someone else confesses to the murder you were convicted of and you ask for a stay of execution in order to conduct tests that will establish your innocence, no dice. And when you are unquestionably incompetent to assist in your own defense but no one seems to take that fact into account, or tells the jury, that’s just too bad. None of these sentences are in any way excessive, as far as George W. Bush is concerned.

But when you are Scooter Libby, convicted of four felony charges, and you face thirty months in jail, that’s excessive.

If anyone wants to do their part to reduce sentences that really are excessive, you can make a contribution to the Innocence Project here, and think of Scooter while you give.

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by hilzoy

Publius was off quoting Cato, so I decided to quote Publius:

“[The President] is also to be authorized to grant “reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, EXCEPT IN CASES OF IMPEACHMENT.” Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel. As the sense of responsibility is always strongest, in proportion as it is undivided, it may be inferred that a single man would be most ready to attend to the force of those motives which might plead for a mitigation of the rigor of the law, and least apt to yield to considerations which were calculated to shelter a fit object of its vengeance. The reflection that the fate of a fellow-creature depended on his sole fiat, would naturally inspire scrupulousness and caution; the dread of being accused of weakness or connivance, would beget equal circumspection, though of a different kind. On the other hand, as men generally derive confidence from their numbers, they might often encourage each other in an act of obduracy, and might be less sensible to the apprehension of suspicion or censure for an injudicious or affected clemency. On these accounts, one man appears to be a more eligible dispenser of the mercy of government, than a body of men.”

Well, that would be a compelling argument if we could assume that our Presidents would always have a sense of of honor and shame. That, in itself, is a good argument for not electing people who don’t have a sense of honor.

Oops.

More below the fold.

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“President Bush today commuted the prison sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, sparing him the 30-month term to which he was sentenced last month for lying to federal investigators about his role in the White House leak of a CIA officer’s identity.

Bush took the action just hours after a federal appeals court ruled that Libby was not entitled to remain free while he was appealing his conviction on four felonies.”

And why? TPMMuckraker has the official statement:

“Mr. Libby was sentenced to thirty months of prison, two years of probation, and a $250,000 fine. In making the sentencing decision, the district court rejected the advice of the probation office, which recommended a lesser sentence and the consideration of factors that could have led to a sentence of home confinement or probation.

I respect the jury’s verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive. Therefore, I am commuting the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.”

Give me a break. If President Bush is so very worried about excessive sentences, he should pardon Genarlow Wilson*. But of course he’s not concerned about that at all, outside of this particular case:

“The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time for nearly all criminals. (…)

In a speech June 1 to announce the bill, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales urged Congress to reimpose mandatory minimum prison sentences against federal convicts — and not let judges consider such penalties “merely a suggestion.”

Such an overhaul, in part, “will strengthen our hand in fighting criminals who threaten the safety and security of all Americans,” Gonzales said in the speech, delivered three days before the FBI announced a slight national uptick in violent crime during 2006.”

Nope: for all those other criminals, mandatory jail time is fine. The only one for whom sentences are excessive, even when they’re within the federal guidelines, is Scooter.

Being antiquated, I actually remember when Ford pardoned Nixon. I was horrified: bad people were not supposed to get away with things. But unless I’m completely misremembering, the only reason anyone thought that was a good idea, at least in public, was that the country needed to get past Watergate. It was taken for granted that a President shouldn’t go around pardoning people to keep them from cutting a deal and incriminating others, or because he doesn’t think his friends should go to jail, or even just because he’s the Decider, and if he wants to hand out Get Out Of Jail Free cards to all his friends, hey, that’s his right.**

Bush, typically, didn’t bother even trying to come up with a decent explanation for what he did. He didn’t address questions like: Mightn’t this give people the idea that there are two different standards of justice, one for people with powerful connections and another for the rest of us? Is it OK to exempt your friends from the rule of law? Isn’t it especially problematic to commute someone’s sentence when you yourself might have had a hand in that person’s criminal actions? And double especially when no one other than the now-free criminal has been held to account, despite your earlier promises?

He didn’t bother with any of that.

Not that I expected him to. I mean: remember this?

“At one point, McClellan vowed: “The president has set high standards, the highest of standards, for people in his administration. He’s made it very clear to people in his administration that he expects them to adhere to the highest standards of conduct. If anyone in this administration was involved in it, they would no longer be in this administration.”

Bush replied “yes” when asked in June 2004 if he would fire anyone who leaked the agent’s name.”

Why not go even further back, to this?

“During the year and a half that I covered George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign, I must have heard his stump speech a thousand times. The lines changed little over the months, and the ending almost never changed — Bush would raise his hand, as if taking an oath, and promise to restore honor and dignity to the White House.

He also vowed to restore civility to the poisonous atmosphere of the nation’s capital, declaring at a GOP fundraiser in April 2000 that “it’s time to clean up the toxic environment in Washington, D.C.”

A few months later, Bush told voters at a campaign event in Pittsburgh that his administration would “ask not only what is legal but what is right, not what the lawyers allow but what the public deserves.””

His words mean nothing. He wouldn’t recognize honor or dignity if they sat down next to him on the bus. He’s a narcissistic child with the intellectual curiosity of a limpet, a heart the size of a pea, and a hollow empty void where his character ought to be.

Yippeekiyokiyay.

***

UPDATE: Emptywheel makes an important point (emphasis added):

“He commuted Libby’s sentence, guaranteeing not only that Libby wouldn’t talk, but retaining Libby’s right to invoke the Fifth.“

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve Benen: “Perhaps we should call this what it is: “amnesty.””

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by hilzoy

I had been reading all these suggestions that John McCain’s fundraising numbers were going to be really bad. When I first saw them, I thought: gosh, $11.2 million doesn’t seem that shabby to me. On reflection, it still doesn’t. However, the real story for McCain’s campaign has to be not just the numbers themselves, but the numbers in conjuction with the fact that, as NRO writes: “They raised $11.2 million in the second quarter, but spent $14.4 million,” leaving what the AP describes as “an abysmal $2 million cash on hand.” More from the AP, plus reflections on Obama’s numbers, below the fold.

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by hilzoy

From the NYT:

“The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney’s office and the Justice Department after what the panel’s chairman called “stonewalling of the worst kind” of efforts to investigate the National Security Agency’s policy of wiretapping without warrants.

The move put Senate Democrats squarely on a course they had until now avoided, setting the stage for a showdown with the Bush administration over one of the most contentious issues arising from the White House’s campaign against terrorism. (…)

The panel’s action was the most aggressive move yet by lawmakers to investigate the wiretapping program since the Democrats gained control of Congress this year.

Mr. Leahy said Wednesday at a news conference that the committee had issued the subpoenas because the administration had followed a “consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection” in dealing with Congressional efforts to scrutinize the program.

“It’s unacceptable,” Mr. Leahy said. “It is stonewalling of the worst kind.””

Leahy is right. The Congress has been asking nicely for information on the NSA program for ages, without effect. Nor has the administration been particularly forthcoming with other kinds of information: as far as I can tell, TPMMuckraker posts a new exasperated memo from one or another committee chair asking why the White House has not responded to its repeated requests for information about every other day. And this is just wrong. The Congress has the right to ask for this information. It’s essential if Congress is to do its job.

The Depty White House Press Secretary said that “It’s unfortunate that Congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation,” but this is absurd. If your landlord had been asking you for the rent for eight months and you hadn’t even bothered to reply, and she then sent you an eviction notice, it would be a bit much for you to say: “It’s unfortunate that she chooses the road of confrontation.” When you failed to pay your rent, you chose the road of confrontation, and left her with only two choices: to passively accept your failure to meet your obligations, or to initiate eviction. To think that it’s “confrontational” of her to choose the second option is absurd. Same here.

Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel will move tomorrow to cut funding for Dick Cheney’s White House office, on the theory that if he’s not part of the Executive Branch, he doesn’t need it. Here’s Emanuel on Hardball, courtesy of ThinkProgress (which has a very good, and much longer, video; alas, the official Hardball transcript is unavailable, since the link for it goes to Tucker Carlson):

“[Cheney] is acting like he’s unaccountable to anybody…and he’s taking an unbelievable step saying he’s not a member of the executive branch, he’s a member of the legislative branch, therefore he doesn’t have to provide information. … So I said, If that’s your logic, then we shouldn’t be funding you through the executive branch. Either Wednesday or Thursday my amendment will be on the floor, because the funding for the executive branch is on the floor. And I’ll strike the money for the Vice President’s Office. He can live off the Senate presidency budget that funds him up here. And that’s fine. But if he’s going to be funded in the executive branch, he complies with the rules that apply to everybody. He is not above the rules of the executive branch.”

Because, after all, don’t we have better uses for $4.75 million than to spend it on appropriations for someone who claims he isn’t even an entity?

Seriously: Cheney has always acted as though the laws, the Constitution, the Congress, and the will of the American people were just annoying impediments standing between him and what he wanted to do. He has always tried to brush them, meaning us, aside as though we were annoying flies to be flicked away, not taken seriously. He is wrong. The laws and the Constitution are absolute constraints on his actions. The Congress is a coequal branch of government, with the power to defund him. And we, the people, are the sole source of his power. Ordinarily, I would think Emanuel’s proposal was just theater. But given Cheney’s conduct, I think it’s a very welcome sign that someone, somewhere refuses to go along with his fantasy of omnipotence and unaccountability.

With any luck, Cheney won’t pay attention, and the Democrats really will defund him. We should be so lucky.

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by publius

Like everyone else, I’ve been reading the Post series on Cheney with half disgust, half morbid fascination. As difficult as it may be, when assessing Cheney’s actions (as Hilzoy is doing masterfully), it’s important to resist the temptation to blame it on Cheney’s individual “evilness.” While immensely fun, explaining Cheney’s behavior as “evil” is too simple. More to the point, it reduces complex social phenomena to fairy-tale morality narratives. In the terrorism context for instance, words like “evil” are often lazy shortcuts that people use to avoid grappling with the complexities and structural causes of the problem.

Similarly, dismissing Cheney as “evil” is too easy. Cheney is not some one-time moral aberration, he is the product of deeper, more structural flaws in the American political system. For that reason, we can expect future Cheneys if these fundamental flaws aren’t recognized and addressed.

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by hilzoy

This is the third post in a series; the first two are here and here. I’m going to put the whole post below the fold.

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