Politics

by hilzoy

It was lunchtime, and I was (and am) at home, since it’s spring break, so I made myself lunch and flipped on CSPAN, where, as luck would have it, the House Oversight Committee holding its hearings on Valerie Plame Wilson. Wilson had finished testifying, and the committee was questioning James Knodell, the Director of the White House’s security office, and the person in charge of overseeing classified information. Rep. Waxman, in questioning, established that anyone who believed that s/he might have disclosed classified information, advertently or inadvertently, has an affirmative obligation to file a report on that fact with his office, and that no such report was ever filed in connection with the disclosure of Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity. (Knodell seemed very, very uncomfortable; apparently, he was appearing voluntarily, but the White House had not wanted him to appear, and he had showed up under threat of subpoena.)

Then my Congressman, Elijah Cummings, started to question Dr. Knodell, and said that he was shocked that no such report had been filed. Had there been any investigation into this failure? After more discomfort, Knodell said: no. Under further questioning, including some by a completely incredulous Henry Waxman, he said that his office had not, at any time, investigated the leak of Wilson’s identity, and that there was an affirmative obligation to do that too.

This really is extraordinary. The point of investigating a leak of classified information is not just to assign blame; it’s also to figure out how to fix things so that no similar leaks ever happen again. The best possible spin one could put on this, for the White House, is that they were completely unconcerned with covert agents getting outed. The more likely story, of course, is that they knew perfectly well who had leaked the information, and didn’t want it investigated because they knew that the more details found their way onto paper, the worse it would be.

But think about it: a covert agent’s identity was leaked. Her networks, front organizations, and so on, as well as any people she might have had entirely innocent contacts with abroad, were put in jeopardy. Agents all over the world had to ask themselves whether they, too, might be outed for purely political reasons.

And the White House never bothered to investigate, even though they had a legal obligation to do so.

Remember how the President kept saying that he wanted to get to the bottom of this? Ha ha ha.

***

UPDATE: Excerpt from Wilson’s opening statement below the fold.

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by hilzoy

Of all the things people have said recently on the subject of Barack Obama’s negritude, the stupidest comes from a predictable source: CNN’s Beck, on his radio show:

“BECK: Yeah, I — you know, I was driving in today, and I was seeing — because I saw this piece with him on 60 Minutes — and I thought to myself, he is — he’s very white in many ways.

GIORDANO: Uh-huh.

BECK: And I thought to myself: Gee, can I even say that? Can I even say that without somebody else starting a campaign saying, “What does he mean, ‘He’s very white?’ ” He is. He’s very white.”

[Ed.: No, Beck, you can’t say that. The problem is not that the PC thought police disapprove; it’s that it’s just plain stupid. Also, we know what ‘white’ means in this context. It means ‘articulate.’ Just don’t go there.]

Beck goes on, now talking to his baffled producer:

“BECK: He is — he’s very — he is — he’s colorless. He is colorless.

STU: So he’s clear?

BECK: When he says — yes. When he said, you don’t notice his color, as a white guy — and I don’t know if African-Americans feel the same way — but for whites, I think he’s colorless. You don’t notice that he is black. So he might as well be white, you know what I mean? You see him — listen to me, listen to me.

STU: I’m trying.

BECK: You see him colorless —

STU: Yeah.

BECK: — OK, until he starts talking about race issues and he says things, like on this 60 Minutes piece last night, he said, “When I hail a cab.” And I thought, “What?” And then all of a sudden, I noticed his color.”

Ah. Colorless. Back in the day, a friend of mine and I used to refer to ourselves as pigmentationally challenged, but apparently we’ve got nothing on Barack Obama: he literally has no color at all. That explains why he always wears a hat and dark glasses, and has those bandages on his face:

The wonderful thing about Obama’s having no color is that it prevents people like Beck from being able to tell that he’s black — until he mentions hailing a cab, at which point his actual features briefly become visible, before fading away again.

This explains a lot.

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by publius

A big news story is often significant not for its facts, but for the deeper sociological forces and fault lines lurking beneath the surface. Rodney King is the classic example. This story exploded not simply because the police severely beat King, but because it raised larger, more fundamental questions about race and class and criminal justice in the early 1990s.

Something similar is happening with the Marcotte/McEwan controversy, which (as Memeorandum illustrates) has simply exploded across the blogosphere. The reason, I think, is that the story not only hits bloggers in a personal and even threatening way, it also strikes at a very deep political nerve for liberals still recovering from the Clinton Wars and Swift Boats.

Anyway, I’ll get to all this, but there’s a lot of other interesting stuff to chew on here. So rather than trying to fit everything into an overarching narrative, here are some scattered observations:

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by hilzoy

As I’ve said in the earlier posts on the Fairness Doctrine, I’m ambivalent about it. But I can’t think of a better way for the right-wing media to make the case for it than running with an unsourced story about Barack Obama having gone to a madrassa that teaches Wahhabism, even after it has been thoroughly discredited.

It started in the Washington Times’ Insight Magazine:

“Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?

This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.

An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia. (…)

In Indonesia, the young Obama was enrolled in a Madrassa and was raised and educated as a Muslim. Although Indonesia is regarded as a moderate Muslim state, the U.S. intelligence community has determined that today most of these schools are financed by the Saudi Arabian government and they teach a Wahhabi doctrine that denies the rights of non-Muslims.

Although the background check has not confirmed that the specific Madrassa Mr. Obama attended was espousing Wahhabism, the sources said his Democratic opponents believe this to be the case—and are seeking to prove it. The sources said the opponents are searching for evidence that Mr. Obama is still a Muslim or has ties to Islam.”

(Parenthetical note: given the journalistic standards shown by the nameless author of this article, I’ll need a lot more than his/her word before I believe that this comes from Hillary Clinton’s people.)

Then Fox News picked up the story and ran with it, asserting as fact that Obama went to a madrassa, that madrassas are funded by the Saudis and teach Wahhabism, etc., etc. “Later, a caller to the show questioned whether Obama’s schooling means that “maybe he doesn’t consider terrorists the enemy.” Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade responded, “Well, we’ll see about that.””

Think Progress has the video.

Yesterday, CNN sent a reporter to the school in question, which turns out to be a public school with children of various faiths. Again, ThinkProgress has the video (so, of course, does CNN, but I gave up waiting for it to load, and I have broadband.) It’s worth watching, just to get a feel of the sheer ordinariness of the school, and the bafflement of the headmaster and one of Obama’s classmates.

This morning, Obama sent out a sharply worded memo about the story:

“Insight Magazine published these allegations without a single named source, and without doing any independent reporting to confirm or deny the allegations. Fox News quickly parroted the charges, and Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy went so far as to ask, “Why didn’t anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised — spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father — as a Muslim and was educated in a Madrassa?”

All of the claims about Senator Obama raised in the Insight Magazine piece were thoroughly debunked by CNN, which, instead of relying on unnamed sources, sent a reporter to Obama’s former school in Jakarta to check the facts.

If Doocy or the staff at Fox and Friends had taken [time] to check their facts, or simply made a call to his office, they would have learned that Senator Obama was not educated in a Madrassa, was not raised as a Muslim, and was not raised by his father – an atheist Obama met once in his life before he died.

Later in the day, Fox News host John Gibson again discussed the Insight Magazine story without any attempt to independently confirm the charges.

All of the claims about Senator Obama’s faith and education raised in the Insight Magazine story and repeated on Fox News are false. Senator Obama was raised in a secular household in Indonesia by his stepfather and mother. Obama’s stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company, and sent his stepson to two years of Catholic school, as well as two years of public school. As Obama described it, “Without the money to go to the international school that most expatriate children attended, I went to local Indonesian schools and ran the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors, and clerks.” [The Audacity of Hope, p. 274]

To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa.”

But after all that, Fox’s John Gibson (on his radio show) said that the reporter CNN sent out “probably went to the very madrassa, now he works for CNN”:

“GIBSON [W]hat did they see when they went to the madrassa where Barack Obama went to school?

HOST: Kids playing volleyball.

GIBSON: Playing volleyball, right. They didn’t see them in any terrorist training camps?

HOST: No.

GIBSON: No. Um, but they probably didn’t show them in their little lessons where they’re bobbing their heads and memorizing the Koran.

HOST: I didn’t see any tape of that, no.”

Again, ThinkProgress has the audio.

***

I see the problems with the Fairness Doctrine. I really do. But this is exactly the sort of thing that makes it seem like a good idea: news organizations with an obvious political slant saying things that are simply and demonstrably false for political purposes, and pretending that it’s news. In a fair universe, anyone who did this, on the right or on the left, would be drummed out of the journalistic profession, the way Jayson Blair was, and regarded with bewilderment and horror by people everywhere.

In this universe, does anyone have a good idea about how to deal with manifest lies like this?

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by hilzoy

Rumor has it that President Bush is going to address health insurance in his State of the Union Address:

“President Bush intends to use his State of the Union address Tuesday to tackle the rising cost of health care with a one-two punch: tax breaks to help low-income people buy health insurance and tax increases for some workers whose health plans cost significantly more than the national average.”

He gave us a preview in his radio address yesterday:

“One of the most promising ways to make private health insurance more affordable is by reforming the Federal tax code. Today, the tax code unfairly penalizes people who do not get health insurance through their job. It unwisely encourages workers to choose overly expensive, gold-plated plans. The result is that insurance premiums rise, and many Americans cannot afford the coverage they need.

We need to fix these problems, and one way to do so is to treat health insurance more like home ownership. The current tax code encourages home ownership by allowing you to deduct the interest on your mortgage from your taxes. We can reform the tax code, so that it provides a similar incentive for you to buy health insurance. So in my State of the Union Address next Tuesday, I will propose a tax reform designed to help make basic private health insurance more affordable — whether you get it through your job or on your own. (…)

All of these changes are based on a clear principle: Health insurance should be available, it should be affordable, and it should put you and your doctor in charge of your medical decisions.”

Before I get to specifics, one note: President Bush justifies his proposals on the grounds that we need to cut health care spending. That means that it’s time for me to repost this handy chart (from this report; 2002 data):

A test of whether any proposal to control health care spending is at all serious is whether it addresses itself to spending by the 50% of the population who account for 96.6% of all health care expenditures, or to spending by the 50% who account for only 3.4%. Things like higher deductibles and copays, which are (I imagine) part of what goes into stripping off the gold plating from health insurance policies, address themselves almost entirely to the second group: the group that accounts for only a tiny fraction of US health care spending.

Which is to say: as a way of controlling health care spending, this is not a serious plan.

Specific problems below the fold.

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