The Real Karl Rove ... (HINT: isn't really all that complicated)

Pundits, analysts and journalists are all atwitter over Karl's possible October surprise. They're all wondering 'what does Karl know that we don't'?

I have a different take -- a more critical analysis of how victims of bullies, brutes and taunters become so obsessed (and identified) with their bullies, victimizers and torturers that they choose to join them instead of standing up to them. In my take, Karl is the ultimate coward and pitiful figure for just such behavior. Much like war captives who become lackeys for their imprisoners -- they deserve but little pity and no respect.

In my analysis of how Karl really became this presidential wunderkind, the focus should finally be on outing how victims like Karlie boy become victimizers instead of standing up for the powerless.

Karl is the poster boy for Stockholm Syndrome -- so identified with the brutality of his tormentors with 'power over' others that internalized self-hate, bullying and victimization have been turned into a political artform. It's a truism that victims have learned how to be victimizers. The question is whether their souls, hearts and minds have been infiltrated, tainted and spoiled to the degree that they become sociopaths and psychopaths -- (sometimes they choose more economically, politically and socially rewarding paths ala Karl) -- OR if from the victimization emerges a resolute steeliness to become a courageous advocate with and for both self and the oppressed. The moral (and intellectual) quandary becomes: Stand up for victims and survivors or continue perpetuating the injustice and brutality?

In Karl's case it's obvious: he much preferred identifying and allying with the brutal bullies who would have knocked him around, teased him, called him 'pantywaist', 'sissyboy', 'fag' and much worse no doubt (after all, his late father was queer). So sleeping (metaphorically speaking of course) with the brutes and moving forward in that zombie-like, submissive zealful dedication to the master was (is) to people like Karl far more appealing than continuing to be the target of mean-spirited bullies -- bullying, now there's something the repugthacons, extremsits and evangelical, homophobic, xenophobic right-wing nuts have perfected -- and no doubt, that's exactly what could have happened to turdblossom (who but bullies come up with names like that anyway?). It seems pretty clear Karl is not the stuff of which heroes are made -- quite the contrary.

So, when they speak glowingly and admiringly of Karl -- maybe we shouldn't be so eager to accept the glib skimming of the surface.

Of note: Froomkin's take on Bush/Rove's Desperate Times in White House Briefing

And borrowing a great quote from a poster in the online chat with the Post's Eugene Robinson today -- a strategy directly engineered by Rove (see above for why/how this supports my analysis):

"The only thing the President has to offer is fear itself."

Michael Abramowitz of WP posted an article from Texas that further supports the Bush-Rove strategy is to instill fear -- to be dividers, not uniters -- not to create solutions -- for all the problems they've caused (see "It's the Incompetence, Stupid). And Bill Mon has some worthwhile musings too.

October surprise Karl Rove NYTimes Washington Post Froomkin Eugene RobinsonNew York Times News Scandals Politics Commentary Bush Republicans Democrats Cheney Rove Iraq War Iraq 2008 Elections 2006 Elections bullies victims moral development courage

It's the Incompetence, Stupid!

... and the economy which has overwhelmingly benefited the top 1% (including Bush's special interest oil buddies, and Cheney's Haliburton cronies).

... and the LYING, dishonesty, mendacity -- however you name it, they did it and they haven't stopped.

....and the hypocrisy and hubris -- the Abramoff/DeLay/Ney/Cunningham money-for-favors scandals and Foley cover-up says it all. The repugnacons are like the Vatican when it comes to protecting sexual predators. Even their faith-based initiative supporters have finally lifted the wizard's curtain on the party of 'we'll say anything to get elected' and 'the rules don't apply to us'

...and the corruption (see the above).

Six years of all that and more is more than enough.

Be sure to read This is Baghdad. What could be worse? by Anthony Shadid in today's Washington Post for a sobering reminder of just how this administration's incompetence has ruined so many lives, cities, an entire nation ... all based on lies and ego. The basic infrastructure of roads, housing, energy, utilities, electricity, sewer, health systems are WORSE than before the U.S. invaded. Here's an excerpt:

It had been almost a year since I was in the Iraqi capital, where I worked as a reporter in the days of Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, and the occupation, guerrilla war and religious resurgence that followed. On my return, it was difficult to grasp how atomized and violent the 1,250-year-old city has become. Even on the worst days, I had always found Baghdad's most redeeming quality to be its resilience, a tenacious refusal among people I met over three years to surrender to the chaos unleashed when the Americans arrived. That resilience is gone, overwhelmed by civil war, anarchy or whatever term could possibly fit. Baghdad now is convulsed by hatred, paralyzed by suspicion; fear has forced many to leave. Carnage its rhythm and despair its mantra, the capital, it seems, no longer embraces life.

"A city of ghosts," a friend told me, her tone almost funereal.

..."One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing and one-third of us will be widows," she said.

"This is Iraq," Karima added.

2006 elections

Dying to Save the G.O.P. Congress by Frank Rich

NYTimes
OP-ED COLUMNIST

Dying to Save the G.O.P. Congress

By FRANK RICH
October 29, 2006

If there really is light at the end of the tunnel, why after three and a half years can't we yet guarantee light in Baghdad?

IF you happened to be up around dawn on Tuesday, you could witness the death rattle of our adventure in Iraq live on CNN. Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador, and Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the American commander, were making new promises from the bunker of the Green Zone, inspiring about as much confidence as Jackie Gleason and Art Carney hatching a get-rich-quick scheme to sell a kitchen gadget on "The Honeymooners."

"Success in Iraq is possible and can be achieved on a realistic timetable," said Mr. Khalilzad. Iraq can be "in a very good place in 12 months," said General Casey. Even a child could see how much was wrong with this picture.

If there really is light at the end of the tunnel, why after three and a half years can't we yet guarantee light in Baghdad? Symbolically enough, television transmission of the Khalilzad-Casey press conference was interrupted by another of the city's daily power failures. If Iraq's leaders had signed on to the 12-month plan of "benchmarks" the Americans advertised, why were those leaders nowhere in sight? We found out one day later, when the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, mocked the very idea of an America-imposed timetable. "I am positive that this is not the official policy of the American government, but rather a result of the ongoing election campaign," he said, adding dismissively, "And that does not concern us much."

Give the Iraqi leader credit for a Borat-like candor that almost every American in this sorry tale lacks. Of course all the White House's latest jabberwocky about "benchmarks" and "milestones" and "timetables" (never to be confused with those Defeatocrats' "timelines") is nothing more than an election-year P.R. strategy, as is the laughable banishment of "stay the course." There is no new American plan to counter the apocalypse now playing out in Iraq, only new packaging to pacify American voters between now and Nov. 7. And recycled packaging at that: President Bush had last announced that he and Mr. Maliki were developing "benchmarks" to "measure progress" in Iraq back in June.

As Richard Holbrooke, the broker of the Bosnia peace accords, has observed, the only real choice left for the president now is either "escalation or disengagement." But there are no troops, let alone money or national will, for escalation. Disengagement within a year, however, is favored by 54 percent of Americans and, more important, 71 percent of Iraqis. After Election Day, adults in Washington will step in, bow to the obvious and pull the plug. The current administration strategy ? praying for a miracle ? is not an option. The current panacea favored by anxious Republican Congressional candidates ? firing Donald Rumsfeld ? is too little, too late.

The adults in charge of disengagement will include the Bush family consigliere, James Baker, whose bipartisan Iraq Study Group will present its findings after the election, and John Warner, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, who has promised a re-evaluation of Iraq policy within roughly the same time frame. Democrats will have a role in direct proportion to the clout they gain in the midterms.

One way or another the various long-shot exit scenarios being debated in the capital will be sorted out: federalism and partition; reaching out somehow for help from Iran and Syria; replacing Mr. Maliki with a Saddam-lite strongman. There will be some kind of timeline, or whatever you want to call it, with enforced benchmarks, or whatever you want to call them, for phased withdrawal. (Read "Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now" by George McGovern and William R. Polk for a particularly persuasive blueprint.) In any event, the timeline will end no later than Inauguration Day 2009.

In keeping with the political cynicism that gave birth to this war and has recklessly prolonged it, the only ones being kept in the dark about this inevitable denouement are our fighting men and women. They remain trapped, dying in accelerating numbers in a civil war that is now killing so many Iraqi civilians that Mr. Maliki this month ordered his health ministry to stop releasing any figures.

Our troops are held hostage by the White House's political imperatives as much as they are by the violence. Desperate to maintain the election-year P.R. ruse that an undefined "victory" is still within reach, Mr. Bush went so far at Wednesday's press conference as to say that "absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq. He explained his rationale to George Stephanopoulos last weekend, when he asserted that the number of casualties was the enemy's definition of success or failure, not his. "I define success or failure as to whether or not the Iraqis will be able to defend themselves," the president said, and "as to whether the unity government" is making the "difficult decisions necessary to unite the country."

Unfortunately, the war is a calamity by both of those definitions as well. The American command's call for a mere 3,000 more Iraqi troops to help defend Baghdad has gone unanswered. As we've learned from Operation Together Forward, when Iraqis do stand up, violence goes up. And when American and British troops stand down, murderous sectarian militias, some of them allied with that "unity" government, fill the vacuum, taking over entire cities like Amara and Balad in broad daylight. As for those "difficult decisions" Mr. Bush regards as so essential, the Iraqi government's policy is cut and run. Mr. Maliki is not cracking down on rampaging militias but running interference for their kingpin, Moktada al-Sadr. Mr. Maliki treats this radical anti-American Shiite cleric, his political ally, with far more deference than he shows the American president.

The ultimate chutzpah is that Mr. Bush, the man who sold us Saddam's imminent mushroom clouds and "Mission Accomplished," is trivializing the chaos in Iraq as propaganda. The enemy's "sophisticated" strategy, he said in last weekend's radio address, is to distribute "images of violence" to television networks, Web sites and journalists to "demoralize our country."

This is a morally repugnant argument. The "images of violence" from Iraq are not fake ? like, say, the fiction our government manufactured about the friendly-fire death of Pat Tillman or the upbeat news stories the Pentagon spends millions of dollars planting in Iraqi newspapers today. These images of violence are real. Americans really are dying at the fastest pace in at least a year, and Iraqis in the greatest numbers to date. To imply that this carnage is magnified by the news media, whether the American press or Al Jazeera, is to belittle the gravity of the escalated bloodshed and to duck accountability for the mismanagement of the war. Mr. Bush's logic is reminiscent of Jeffrey Skilling's obtuse view of his innocence in the Enron scandal, though at least Mr. Skilling has been held accountable for the wreckage of lives on his watch.

It is also wrong to liken what's going on now, as Mr. Bush has, to the Tet offensive. That sloppy Vietnam analogy was first made by Mr. Rumsfeld in June 2004 to try to explain away the explosive rise in the war's violence at that time. It made a little more sense then, since both the administration and the American public were still being startled by the persistence of the Iraq insurgency, much as the Johnson administration and Walter Cronkite were by the Viet Cong's tenacity in 1968. Before Tet, as Stanley Karnow's history, "Vietnam," reminds us, public approval of L.B.J.'s conduct of the war still stood at 40 percent, yet to hit rock bottom.

Where we are in Iraq today is not 1968 but 1971, after the bottom had fallen out, Johnson had abdicated and Americahad completely turned on Vietnam. At that point, approval of Richard Nixon's handling of the war was at 34 percent, comparable to Mr. Bush's current 30. The percentage of Americans who thought the Vietnam War was "morally wrong" stood at 51, comparable to the 58 percent who now think the Iraq war was a mistake. Many other Vietnam developments in 1971 have their counterparts in 2006: the leaking of classified Pentagon reports revealing inept and duplicitous war policy, White House demonization of the press, the joining of moderate Republican senators with Democrats to press for a specific date for American withdrawal.

That's why it seemed particularly absurd when, in his interview with Mr. Stephanopoulos last weekend, Mr. Bush said that "the fundamental question" Americans must answer is "should we stay?" They've been answering that question loud and clear for more than a year now.

What we should be thinking about instead are our obligations to those who are doing the staying. Kevin Tillman, who served with his brother in Iraqand Afghanistan, observed in an angry online essay this month: "Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a 5-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet."

If we really support the troops, we'll move past Mr. Bush's "fundamental question" to one from 1971 posed by a 27-year-old Vietnamveteran, John Kerry, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

Frank Rich NYTimes New York Times News Scandals Politics Commentary Bush Republicans Democrats Cheney RoveIraq War Karl Rove Iraq 2008 Elections 2006 Elections

Homophobia as GOP Strategy

The NY Times finally calls the repugnacons on this aspect of their hypocrisy and disingenuousness (ie, using homophonbia to stir their ignorant homophobic base, although the editorial don't really go far enough, but it's a start):

If the last month has taught us anything about the Republican Party, it is that homophobia is campaign strategy, not conviction. Congressmen who trust their careers to gay staffers vote for laws to enshrine second-class citizenship for gays in the Constitution. Gay appointees and their partners are treated as married people at official ceremonies and social gatherings. Then whenever an election rolls around, the whole team pretends it?s on a mission to save America from gay marriage.

Mr. Bush and his faithful acolytes seem perfectly willing to stoke fears that create division and sorrow in a country that doesn?t need any more of either. The president has just a little more than two years left in office. You?d think that for once he?d want to consider devoting his time to making things better instead of worse.

2006 elections NYTimes New York Times editorial homophobia republicans

Ugly Betty: Best Treat of the Season

If you're not enjoying the super smart wit, hilarity, style and lessons-learned fables -- adapted from the spanish-language telenova Yo Soy Betty La Fea -- reborn in English as Ugly Betty you're surely missing something really special.

Both uplifting and smile inducing, it's more than a delicious treat. It's a trick played on the last 30 years of the T&A trend started by Charlie's Angels (so innocent by today's standards). And a regular gay pre-teen character who is charmingly adorable and talented to boot.

Ugly Betty is Beautiful!

Thursdays, 8PM Eastern & Pacific on ABC

Wikipedia entry for Ugly Betty

Highly recommended!

Of note: the gorgeous and talented Salma Hayek is Executive Producer on this new hit show.

(unsolicited) Advice for the Dems

In honor of Will Rogers: I don't belong to any organized political party, I'm a democrat....well, I used to be. I'm not sure if I'm really a democrat or a left-leaning, pragmatic independent. I'm totally disgusted with the scuzziness of the dem party which has abandoned its working class roots to party with wall street and hollywood availing themselves of high salaries, speaking fees, free travel and other perks happily doled out by lobbyists to whoever has power regardless of party affiliation.

Meanwhile during the election season it seems to me the Dems forget to use their 'disorganiztion' and lack of unity as one of their most appealing strong points. They should do that while pointing out more of their fundamental philosophical beliefs and how the ir differences with the Repubs affect people's lives in real ways: like health care, education, low (going lower) wages and income, higher interest, higher gas prices, etc...

Yes the dems are less successful at crafting and IMPOSING a single unified message -- but this is evidence that they value differences of opinion and thought -- and most of all that they trust the American people to think for themselves. In contrast the republicans (especially this admin) are CONTROL FREAKS and miss nosy posies sticking their noses everwhere and into everything when they have no business doing so. (the dems should use the church lady to scold the repubs in commercials showing their hypocrisy and contradictions -- a less brainy and ironic version of stephen colbert).

The repugs say they are for individual freedoms but they've done more to restrict them for US citizens than has ever occurred before. Reality: The republicans are first and foremost all about power and control (controlling the money, the message, imposing morality all while dancing to a different tune and following different rules for themselves....)

The dems should ask: who would you rather have: control freaks who are completely incompetent and historically more corrupt than any administration and congress, control freaks who can't stomach dissent and who demand blind loyalty with unblinking obedience to authority (heil cheney!) OR a somewhat disorganized party which may be less unified and monolithic but who follow in the footsteps of the American founders' tradition of being independent thinkers who resent government intrusion into private lives and minds.

I just think the dems are being too much of the 'me too' party and not enough of the 'look at the implications, contradictions and hypocrisy of the right wing republicans' party and who fail to ask: why would you reward them for such incompetence and hypocrisy?

just my 2 cents off the top of my head on an early morning .... tired of the spin ...

Maybe the Reaganites Actually LOST the Cold War

In the same way that Bush Rove Cheney Rummy prematurely celebrated their 'Mission Accomplished' -- a mission based on lies, lying, liars by the Deceiver in Chief and his neocon cadre of global imperialist adventurists -- apparently the repugnacons also haven't done such a great job bridging Russia into the 21st Century.

What with rogue nuclear missiles and missing weaponized fuel rods, something increasingly wicked this way comes. From the WP, one among many such reports:

The Darkness Spreading Over Russia
By Carl Gershman
Special to washingtonpost.com
Saturday, October 21, 2006; 12:00 AM

Nothing that has happened since the contract-style murder on October 7 of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya shakes the suspicion that this heinous act was arranged by people tied to the Kremlin, which despised her relentless reporting about the brutal war in Chechnya. If Putin's callous dismissal of Politkovskaya as an "extremely insignificant" writer whose work nonetheless damaged Russia's reputation was not enough, the acts of the Russian authorities since the murder all point ominously to an escalation of attacks on human rights defenders and critics of Russian policies in Chechnya.

A report just released by Human Rights First lists a number of these acts: Death threats against Lidia Yusopova, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on human rights in Chechnya; news reports over state-controlled television tying Timur Aliev, the editor of the newspaper "Chechen Society," to the terrorist recently killed terrorist Shamil Basayev, thus placing his life in danger; the violent dispersal in Nazran, Ingushetia, of a peaceful vigil memorializing Politkovskaya; and the investigation and threatened closure of the Nazran-based NGO Mashr, which supports relatives of those who have "disappeared" in the conflict.

In addition, the court in Nizhny Novgorod last week ordered the closure of the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society (RCFS), the leading Russian NGO reporting on human rights violations in Chechnya. The group, which has long been a target of the Russian authorities, has been charged with violating a new law curtailing NGOs for not dismissing its director, Stanislav Dmitrievsky, who was convicted last February of "inciting ethnic hatred." Under the law, the group is also required to condemn him for "extremist activity" or else it is also deemed "extremist" and therefore subject to closure.

The extremist charge against Dmitrievsky involves his publication in 2004 in the RCFS newspaper "Human Rights Defense" of two articles by Chechen leaders, one of them an appeal to the European Parliament to hold Russia responsible for genocide in Chechnya. The author of this article was Aslan Maskhadov, who had been elected President of Chechnya in 1997 following the settlement of the first Chechen war.

In one of her dispatches from Chechnya, Politkovskaya described Maskhadov as the leader of Chechen "Westernizers," meaning Chechens who "mostly look hopefully toward Europe," seeking both to adapt European laws to their society and to appeal their case against Russia before the Council of Europe and other Western institutions. She distinguished Maskhadov from Basayev, the leader of the "Easternizers" and the main Chechen advocate of militant Islam.

It was Basayev who was responsible for seizing hostages at a Beslan school in September 2004 and, two years earlier, at a Moscow theater, acts that led Maskhadov to declare that he should be tried before an international tribunal. And it was Maskhadov who announced a unilateral ceasefire early last year, an action that was ignored by the international community and welcomed only by Russia's small community of human rights defenders. The response of the Russian government was to kill Maskhadov on March 8, 2005, even as the ceasefire still held, thereby eliminating any possibility of a negotiated end to the conflict.

By treating all Chechens as terrorists and Islamic militants, and by silencing all criticism of its policies, the Russian government is helping to bring about what it most fears, which is the spread of Islamic radicalism throughout the seven republics of the North Caucasus region. Saner heads among the Russian leadership are aware of this danger, as evidenced by two reports prepared by the office of Dmitri Kozak, Putin's plenipotentiary representative in the Southern Federal District. The reports link the spread of Islamic extremism in the region to official corruption and impunity, pervasive crime, and abnormally high levels (even by Russian standards) of poverty and unemployment.

Most worrisome to the authorities is the possibility that the radicalization of the Muslim population could spread from the North Caucasus to the Volga Muslim republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, bringing to the Russian interior the growing polarization between Islamic militancy and rising Russian nationalism. Russian anxieties are being fed not just by the widening war in the Caucasus but by the declining population of ethnic Russians, whose birth-rate is far below that of Russian Muslims. Such conditions will only increase the appeal of Russian fascism, which now looms realistically in Russia's future.

In this context, the idea that the Russian authorities would be targeting liberal journalists and human rights activists as enemies who need to be silenced should be of the utmost concern to the United States and Europe, which still seem to regard Russia as a responsible partner. With Anna Politkovskaya's killing a light went out, and with the rising crackdown on dissidents that is reminiscent of the Soviet period, a darkness is now spreading over Russia. Politkovskaya spoke of Chechnya as "a small corner of hell" and gave her life trying to expose evil deeds there. Despite growing repression, there are still people in Russia who are trying to avert a looming disaster. We would be kidding ourselves to think that we don't have a stake in their survival.

Carl Gershman is president of The National Endowment for Democracy.

Wonder what Bush sees in the eyes and soul of his buddy Putin these days? Could this administrationyet again be proved to be any more incompetent on both the domestic and international fronts?

Way past time for a change.

Wing Nut Rag Calls on Hastert to Resign Immediately

Even the Reverend Moon's pitiful 100,000 circulation right-wing propaganda rag Washington Times is calling for Hastert to resign in an editorial published today 10/3/06 entitled "Resign, Mr. Speaker."

You can hear the proverbial fan being hit from all directions and all the slinging that's just begun as the corrupticons take cover.

Meanwhile Matt Drudge is among those right-wing holier-than-thou republican self-hating homo-closet-types trying to 'blame the victim' as noted by several at HuffingtonPost here and here.

Finally, Eugene Robinson from the WP said some things particularly well in his column "No Spinning Past this Scandal":

Hastert doesn't remember ever being told of any problem with Foley, but others remember telling him about the e-mail incident. That's one of the questions -- What did I know, and when did I know it? -- that Hastert wants investigators to get to the bottom of. Eventually. Certainly after the November elections.

Former speaker Newt Gingrich suggested over the weekend that House leaders may have worried last year that if they pursued the Foley matter, they'd be "accused of gay-bashing." Clearly, in terms of his spinning skills, Gingrich has lost a step.

The issue was whether a congressman was having improper communications with a child, not whether the congressman was gay; it would have been just as troubling if the e-mail had been sent to a female page. And anyway, it's a little late for the Republicans to denounce gay-bashing after raising it to an art form.

I don't know whether the Republicans will lose control of the House this fall, but I know that they deserve to. That judgment has nothing to do with party politics; there have been times when the Democrats were in control and allowed Congress to sink to a similar level of corruption. But that's surely where we are now, and since the Republicans are the ones in charge, they're the ones who deserve the blame.

You go Eugene!

Can't wait to see some of the takes -- skewers -- (Daily Show maybe? ... Olbermann's and Bill Maher's should be great!) of Bill O'Reilly's half-assed attempted feigned righteous indignation during his stumbling mumbling meandering hypocritical uncomfortable ridiculous discussion of the Foley scandal with Michelle Malkin and some other right wing apologist blonde (not Coulter). What an unknowing unintentional self-satire by one more disingenuous jerk and sexual harasser stalker -- funny if it weren't so pathetic.

Update from the LA Times as to just how serious the FBI and republican controlled government are about investigating Foley's despicable behavior: "As of late Monday, the FBI had not requested access to the computers in Foley's former congressional office."

Hastert Foley Foley scandal resignation resign Republicans GOP Washington Post Washington Times Huffington Post Eugene Robinson Bill O'Reilly Olbermann Bill Maher

Rice: Another Liar with a Failure of Imagination

From the National Security Advisor who stated that 'no one could have imagined' those bad ole terrorists would fly huge jets into tall buildings and heatedly swore and has proclaimed that no one told her anything about any terrorist plot that was about to happen in the summer of 2001.

Oh sorry -- I forgot that she forgot ...... Bush forgot, Cheney forgot, Rummy forgot, Hastert forgot, Allen forgot. Man, they must be suffering from collective, convenient forgetfulness -- either that or signs that dementia and Alzheimer's are rampant in the Nation's Capital/the Capitol/D.C.

Or maybe they're just liars. Either way, more bad news for the repugnacons, party of theocrats, pedophiles and power-worshiping hypocrites.

From the Washington Post:

Tenet Recalled Warning Rice
Former CIA Chief Told 9/11 Commission of Disputed Meeting
By Dan Eggen and Robin Wright

Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, October 3, 2006; Page A03

Former CIA director George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that he had warned of an imminent threat from al-Qaeda in a July 2001 meeting with Condoleezza Rice, adding that he believed Rice took the warning seriously, according to a transcript of the interview and the recollection of a commissioner who was there.

Tenet's statements to the commission in January 2004 confirm the outlines of an event in a new book by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that has been disputed by some Bush administration officials. But the testimony also is at odds with Woodward's depiction of Tenet and former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black as being frustrated that "they were not getting through to Rice" after the July 10, 2001, meeting.

....it turns out that the panel was, in fact, told about the meeting, according to the interview transcript and Democratic commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, who sat in on the interview with Tenet. The meeting was not identified by the July 10 date in the commission's best-selling report.

...At one point in the lengthy session, Tenet recalled a briefing he was given on July 10 by Black and his staff, according to the transcript. He said the information was so important that he quickly called for a car and telephoned Rice to arrange for a White House meeting to share what he had just learned, according to the transcript and Ben-Veniste.

According to the transcript, Tenet told Rice there were signs that there could be an al-Qaeda attack in weeks or perhaps months, that there would be multiple, simultaneous attacks causing major human casualties, and that the focus would be U.S. targets, facilities or interests. But the intelligence reporting focused almost entirely on the attacks occurring overseas, Tenet told the commission.

It was at this session that Tenet said "the system was blinking red," which became a chapter title in the commission report, according to the official who saw the transcript.
=========

The shoes of doom keep a-dropping.

Full story here; related: here .

And in case you think I can't spell George Tenet/Tenant's name correctly, the WP has it spelled Tenet as above. However, I wasn't sure if it was Tenet or Tenant myself since I've seen both (just do a search). But I figured they'd certainly most likely have it spelled correctly at the CIA.

Rice Lied Rice forgot Rice misremembered Tenant Tenet CIA 911 Commission Woodward Washington Post WP

Krugman NYTimes: Things Fall Apart

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The right-wing coalition that has spent 40 years climbing to its current position of political dominance may be cracking up.

Right after the 2004 election, it seemed as if Thomas Frank had been completely vindicated. In his book "What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America," Mr. Frank argued that America's right wing had developed a permanent winning strategy based on the use of "values" issues to mobilize white working-class voters against a largely mythical cultural elite, while actually pursuing policies designed to benefit a small economic elite.

It was and is a brilliant analysis. But the political strategy Mr. Frank described may have less staying power than he feared. In fact, the right-wing coalition that has spent 40 years climbing to its current position of political dominance may be cracking up.

At its core, the political axis that currently controls Congress and the White House is an alliance between the preachers and the plutocrats -- between the religious right, which hates gays, abortion and the theory of evolution, and the economic right, which hates Social Security, Medicare and taxes on rich people. Surrounding this core is a large periphery of politicians and lobbyists who joined the movement not out of conviction, but to share in the spoils.

Together, these groups formed a seemingly invincible political coalition, in which the religious right supplied the passion and the economic right supplied the money.

The coalition has, however, always been more vulnerable than it seemed, because it was an alliance based not on shared goals, but on each group's belief that it could use the other to get what it wants. Bring that belief into question, and the whole thing falls apart.

Future historians may date the beginning of the right-wing crackup to the days immediately following the 2004 election, when President Bush tried to convert a victory won by portraying John Kerry as weak on defense into a mandate for Social Security privatization. The attempted bait-and-switch failed in the face of overwhelming public opposition. If anything, the Bush plan was even less popular in deep-red states like Montana than in states that voted for Mr. Kerry.

And the religious and cultural right, which boasted of having supplied the Bush campaign with its "shock troops" and expected a right-wing cultural agenda in return -- starting with a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage -- was dismayed when the administration put its energy into attacking the welfare state instead. James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, accused Republicans of "just ignoring those that put them in office."

It will be interesting, by the way, to see how Dr. Dobson, who declared of Bill Clinton that "no man has ever done more to debase the presidency," responds to the Foley scandal. Does the failure of Republican leaders to do anything about a sexual predator in their midst outrage him as much as a Democratic president's consensual affair?

In any case, just as the religious right was feeling betrayed by Mr. Bush's focus on the goals of the economic right, the economic right suddenly seemed to become aware of the nature of its political allies. "Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from?" asked Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, in an interview with Ryan Sager, the author of "The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party." The answer, he said, was "blatant pandering to James Dobson." He went on, "Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies."

Some Republicans are switching parties. James Webb, who may pull off a macaca-fueled upset against Senator George Allen of Virginia, was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Charles Barkley, a former N.B.A. star who used to be mentioned as a possible future Republican candidate, recently declared, "I was a Republican until they lost their minds."

So the right-wing coalition is showing signs of coming apart. It seems that we're not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas itself doesn't seem to be in Kansas anymore. Kathleen Sebelius, the state's Democratic governor, has achieved a sky-high favorability rating by focusing on good governance rather than culture wars, and her party believes it will win big this year.

And nine former Kansas Republicans, including Mark Parkinson, the former state G.O.P. chairman, are now running for state office as Democrats. Why did Mr. Parkinson change parties? Because he "got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right."

source: NYTimes
=======

Maybe the repugs should start reading When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times or just get The Pema Chodron Collection!

Krugman NY Times When Things Fall Apart NYTimes Pema Chodron

So You Call This Breaking News? By Frank Rich

Facts? What Facts? Iraq & the US Burn While Bushies Fiddle, Spin & Lie -- along with the feckless leadership of the dems. Against the ominous reality in Iraq, the debate over the National Intelligence Estimate is but a sideshow.

So You Call This Breaking News?
By FRANK RICH
NYTimes Op-Ed Columnist
October 1, 2006

IF your head hurts from listening to the Washington furor over the latest National Intelligence Estimate, by all means tune it out. The entire debate is meaningless except as a damning election-year indicator of just how madly our leaders are fiddling while Iraq burns.

The supposedly shocking key finding in the N.I.E. -- that the Iraq war is a boon to terrorism -- isn't remotely news. It first turned up in a classified C.I.A. report leaked to the press in June 2005. It's also long been visible to the naked eye. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll, conducted before any revelations from the N.I.E., found that nearly half the country believes that the Iraq war is increasing the terrorist threat against America and only 12 percent thinks the war is decreasing that threat. Americans don't have to pore over leaked intelligence documents to learn this. They just have to turn on the television.

Tonight on '60 Minutes,' Bob Woodward will spill another supposedly shocking intelligence finding revealed in his new book: a secret government prediction that the insurgency will grow worse next year. Who'd have thunk it? Given that the insurgency is growing worse every day right now -- last week suicide bombings hit a record high in Baghdad -- the real surprise would be if the government predicted an armistice. A poll released last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that about 6 in 10 Iraqis approved of attacks on American forces. Tardy investigative reporting is hardly needed to figure out that the insurgency is thriving.

There's public and then there's private. But what did they do with the private? They stamp it Secret. No one's supposed to know. Why is that secret? The insurgents know what they're doing, they know the level of violence and how effective they are. Who doesn't know? The American public. -- Bob Woodward during 60 Minutes interview

'the insurgents know what they are doing,' Mr. Woodward is to say on CBS, according to an advance excerpt. 'they know the level of violence and how effective they are. Who doesn't know? -- 'The American public.' He accuses the administration of keeping such information out of sight by stamping it 'secret.' All this, too, apparently comes as eye-opening news to Mr. Woodward three and a half years into the war; his new book's title, 'state of Denial,' has a self-referential ring to it. But the American public does know the level of violence all too well, and it also knows how the administration tries to cover up its failures.

That's why long ago a majority of that public judged the war a mistake and Mr. Bush a dissembler. It's only the variations on the theme that change. When the president declared last month that 'the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military is committed to keeping this country together,' reality was once more busily contradicting him. The Los Angeles Times reported that a third of that government wasn't showing up to parliamentary sessions and that only 1,000 Iraqi soldiers answered the American call for 4,000 reinforcements in the do-or-die battle to secure Baghdad.

Against this ominous reality, the debate over the N.I.E. is but a sideshow: politics as usual on both sides. The president reluctantly declassified what had already been leaked, somehow hoping he could override the bad headlines with Pavlovian repetition of shopworn slogans. (He said America must 'stay on the offense' four times in one speech on Friday alone.) Democrats are huffily demanding that the White House release more than a few scraps of the 30-page-plus N.I.E., a debating point with no payoff. The N.I.E. is already six months out of date, and Americans can guess most of it, classified or not. In this war at this late stage, the devil can be found everywhere, not merely in the details.

The facts of Iraq are not in dispute. But the truth is that facts don't matter anyway to this administration, and that's what makes this whole N.I.E. debate beside the point. From the start, honest information has never figured into the prosecution of this war. The White House doesn't care about intelligence, good or bad, classified or unclassified, because it believes it knows best, regardless of what anyone else has to say. The debate over the latest N.I.E. or any yet to leak will not alter that fundamental and self-destructive operating principle. That's the truly bad news.

This war has now gone on so long that we tend to forget the early history that foretold the present. Yet this is the history we must remember now more than ever, because it keeps repeating itself, with ever more tragic results. In the run-up to the war, it should be recalled, the administration did not even bother to commission an N.I.E., a summary of the latest findings from every American intelligence agency, on Iraq's weapons.

Why not? The answer can be found in what remains the most revealing Iraq war document leaked to date: the Downing Street memo of July 23, 2002, written eight months before the invasion. In that secret report to the Blair government, the head of British intelligence reported on a trip to Washington, where he learned that the Bush administration was fixing the 'intelligence and facts' around the predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. If we were going to fix the intelligence anyway, there was no need for an N.I.E., except as window dressing, since it might expose the thinness of the administration's case.

A prewar N.I.E. was hastily (and sloppily) assembled only because Congress demanded it. By the time it was delivered to the Capitol after much stalling, on Oct. 1, 2002, less than two weeks remained before the House and Senate would vote on the Iraq war resolution. 'No more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive summary,' according to an article last spring in Foreign Affairs by Paul Pillar, the C.I.A. senior analyst for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005. In a White House press briefing after the war started, an official said Condi Rice hadn't read it at all, leaving that menial duty to her retinue of 'experts.'

When one senator who did read the whole N.I.E., the now retired Democrat Bob Graham of Florida, asked that a declassified version be made public so that Americans could reach their own verdicts on the war's viability, he was rebuffed. Instead the administration released a glossy white paper that trumpeted the N.I.E.'s fictions ('All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons') but not its doubts about much-hyped evidence like aluminum tubes and uranium from Africa. The only time the president cared about the N.I.E., a document he never wanted, was when he thought it would be politically useful in fighting growing criticism in 2003 that he had manipulated prewar intelligence. Then he authorized his own cherry-picked leaks, which Scooter Libby fed to Mr. Woodward and Judith Miller of The Times. (Neither wrote about it at the time.)

As the insurgency continued to grow in the fall of 2003, the White House again showed scant interest in reality. The American military's Central Command called for an N.I.E. instead. The existence of this second N.I.E. was only discovered in February of this year by Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder Newspapers. It found that the growing violence in Iraq was 'fueled by local conditions -- not foreign terrorists -- and drew strength from deep grievances, including the presence of U.S. troops.' Yet the president ignored that accurate intelligence, refusing to raise troop levels and continuing to argue erroneously that the insurgency was mainly linked to Saddam and Al Qaeda. Three years later, he still makes that case rather than acknowledge that our troops are caught in the cross-fire of a civil war.

Having ignored the facts through each avoidable disaster, the White House won't change its game plan now. Quite the contrary. Its main ambition seems to be to prop up its artificial reality no matter what the evidence to the contrary. Nowhere could this be better seen than in Ms. Rice's bizarre behavior after the Bill Clinton-Chris Wallace slapdown on Fox News. Stung by the former president's charge that the Bush administration did nothing about Al Qaeda in the eight months before 9/11, she couldn't resist telling The New York Post that his statement was 'flatly false.'

But proof of Ms. Rice's assertion is as nonexistent as Saddam's W.M.D. As 9/11 approached, both she and Mr. Bush blew off harbingers of the attacks (including a panicked C.I.A. briefer in Crawford, according to Ron Suskind's 'One Percent Doctrine'). The 9/11 commission report, which Ms. Rice cited as a corroborating source for her claims to The Post, in reality 'found no indication of any further discussion' about the Qaeda threat among the president and his top aides between the arrival of that fateful Aug. 6 brief ('Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.') and Sept. 10.

That the secretary of state would rush to defend the indefensible shows where this administration's priorities are: it's now every man and woman in the White House for himself and herself in defending the fictions, even four-year-old fictions, that took us into the war and botched its execution. When they talk about staying the course, what they are really talking about is protecting their spin and their reputations. They'll leave it to the 140,000-plus American troops staying the course in a quagmire to face the facts.
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Don't forget to watch Bob Woodward's interview on 60 Minutes tonight.

Bob Woodward Frank Rich 60 minutes NYTimes New York Times