March 31, 2004
Gene Lyons: No facts, only motives, in Bush World
"...Pressed by Tim Russert to justify portraying Clinton as far more responsive to the terrorist threat than Bush in his book, Clarke was characteristically blunt: "Well, he did something, and President Bush did nothing prior to Sept. 11." " Against All Enemies" pulls no punches. Clark candidly assesses the Monica Lewinsky scandal's debilitating impact upon Clinton's ability to fight al-Qa'ida. "Like most of his advisors," he writes, "I was beyond mad that the President had not shown enough discretion or self control, although... I was angrier, almost incredulous, that the bitterness of Clinton's enemies knew no bounds, that they intended to hurt not just Clinton but the country by turning the President's personal problem into a global, public circus for their own political ends." Each time Clinton struck al-Qa'ida or warned against terrorism, Republicans accused him of trying to divert attention from his sexual sins. So, yeah, Clarke has an ax to grind. He clearly believes Republicans put party over country during the Clinton years, and that the Bush White House is doing it again. And so far, he's getting the best of the argument."
Democracy for America Web Emblems
Here are some emblems I worked up for Howard Dean's new organization, Democracy for America. They are a re-working of the National Recovery Act (NRA) posters from the '30's. Click the image and you will be taken to a page with different sized images.
Bill Maxwell: No faith-based attacks on Bush allowed
"Bush's attack dog Steve Schmidt pounced on Kerry, intoning that the Massachusetts senator's indictment "was beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and a sad exploitation of Scripture for a political attack." Did Schmidt forget that he speaks for one of the most "faith-based" administrations ever? If Bush can be legitimately attacked on any front, it is that of "faith." In other words, the president's own public declarations of faith as the source of his leadership and designs on the world are fair game for political scrutiny and attack..."
Craig Aaron: Bought and Paid For
"Bush may claim the "political season" is just beginning, but he has spent the past nine months crisscrossing the country on a dash for cash, personally headlining $45 million fundraising events on the way to amassing an unprecedented $170 million campaign war chest. Awestruck by the sheer amount of cash on hand, the media sometimes mistake Bush's piles of money for popularity. Venality is more like it. Bush has turned the election into an auction, an invitation-only opportunity for Corporate America to prove its loyalty to the president..."
Editorial: Of Privilege and Politics
"The White House's initial refusal to allow Ms. Rice to testify and its cynical use of a confidential adviser as a public accuser would have been bad enough. But they fit an unpleasant pattern. This president has repeatedly abused his executive privilege while seeking to hide behind it, starting when Mr. Cheney invoked that privilege to gather business executives in secret to draft the administration's energy policy..."
Randolph T. Holhut: How Kerry can beat the Bush Slime Machine
"...The Bush team is hoping no one will notice the disconnect between its words and its deeds; between the stories they spin and the realities they are trying to hide. The testimony given by Clarke and others before the 9/11 Commission last week was the first crack in President Bush's wall of deceit regarding the Sept. 11 attacks and the run-up to the Iraq invasion. It is up to the rest of us to keep pushing until we get the truth, and make President George W. Bush a one-term president."
Molly Ivins: Right wing continues full frontal attack on air, water -- and immigrants?
"Back to business. There's no way to keep up with the Bush administration's assaults on the environment, they're just endless. Most notable lately was the decision to let mercury pollution, which is extremely toxic, continue. With current technology, we could cut mercury emissions by 90 percent in four years. Instead, the Bushies chose a plan that will reduce it by 50 percent over 14 years, thus saving millions for their big campaign contributors in the power, coal and chemical industries. To make up for it, they warned pregnant women not to eat tuna..."
Editorial: Doomsday cometh
"...The governor and legislators know all this, of course. Apparently, they're willing to let the state's financial problems grow perilous rather than do the responsible thing and raise taxes today. That's not leadership, that's politics at its most fainthearted."
Richard Roeper: 'Special' GOP delivery spreads phoniness liberally
"The letter did have a request for a contribution of ''$1,000, $500, $250 . . . or whatever you can afford,'' and it also includes the charge that the Democrats are engaging in ''political hate speech'' and the complaint that ''the liberal national media won't deliver [our] message to the American people,'' but who can argue with that?..."
Michael C. Dorf: A Federal Appeals Court Bars Release of "Partial Birth" Abortion Records, And Offers an Interesting Perspective on Privacy Rights
"...It is easy to lose sight of this intuition--that anonymity does not ensure privacy--in crafting public policy for other contexts. In an era when nearly all of our private information can be obtained by Judge Posner's enterprising Googlers, there is a temptation to settle for anonymity, and forget about privacy. If we must provide our most intimate details to doctors or health insurance managers, let us do it as numbers rather than people, we say. Of course, anonymous disclosure is better than complete exposure. Yet Judge Posner reminds us that anonymity is at best a substitute for privacy. It's not the real thing."
Howard LaFranchi: On family planning, US vs. much of the world
"America's solitary stance on reproductive rights and international aid for family planning joins other factors in US isolation - among them, withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol and rejection of an International Criminal Court..."
Editorial: Think again/Don't amend to discriminate
"Think about it like this: Society faces all sorts of social quandaries, but almost never does it solve them by constitutional tinkering. Minnesota's Constitution -- like its federal antecedent -- was written to define the structure of government and specify the rights of citizens. It isn't a catch-all collection of moral dicta, but a precise outline of what government owes the governed. That's what it's for -- and all it's for..."
Derrick Z. Jackson: Beacon Hill is stuck in yesteryear
"...Many Americans, even many old-line segregationists, realized they could no longer crowd African-Americans from the conversation. Today, gay and lesbian rights crowd the pages. The conversation already guarantees that Beacon Hill's timetable is too paternalistic to stand the test of time. Monday's vote will become tomorrow's myth."
March 30, 2004
Paul Krugman: This Isn't America
"...Where will it end? In his new book, "Worse Than Watergate," John Dean, of Watergate fame, says, "I've been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy."
Larry C. Johnson: The War On Clarke
"...Here is the bottom line?Richard Clarke was right, and the Bush administration and the people of the United States would have been better off if his warnings in the early days of 2001 had been heeded. Rather than attack Richard Clarke's character, Republican operatives should focus their venom on the terrorists who killed Americans in the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon. George W. Bush should set the tone and thank his former terrorism chief, apologize for this week's ugliness, and focus on getting Osama Bin Laden. As one American, I say thank you, Richard Clarke."
Tom Maertens: Clarke's public service
"Richard Clarke, who served as the national coordinator for counterterrorism in the White House, argues in his new book, "Against All Enemies," that the Bush administration ignored the threat from Al-Qaida and instead chose to fight "the wrong war" by attacking Iraq. The troops who could have been used in Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida were instead held back for the planned invasion of Iraq. In contrast to the 150,000 men sent to Iraq, only about 11,500 troops were sent to Afghanistan, a force smaller than the New York City police. The result is that Bin Laden and his followers escaped across the border into Pakistan..."
Thomas Oliphant: Understanding the real costs of Iraq war
"Worse, the fact that Al Qaeda has "morphed" -- to use another commonly employed word in the terrorism profession -- lends credence to perhaps Clarke's most telling criticism of all, that President Bush's decision to invade Iraq almost unilaterally last year has "seriously undermined" (Clarke's phrase) the more important struggle against worldwide terrorism by Islamic fanatics. His concern that confronting effectively the change in terrorism's structure and tactics has been undercut by the events in Iraq is but one of three major points he is making on this topic, and others would add a fourth...."
Danny Schechter: Mis-Covering Clarke
"More liberal critics or people who reject the Washington cold war foreign policy consensus are rarely heard or taken seriously. This is not new. It is only defectors from the right ? such as Treasury Secretary O'Neil ? that seem to be heard. Even Daniel Ellsberg, who gave us the Pentagon Papers, was seen as credible by the Beltway crowd because he'd worked for the Pentagon and Rand Corporation...."
Editorial: Federal courts should swiftly strike down flawed abortion law
"...Congress seems intent on keeping the abortion issue on the field as a political football. The courts should let them know that this particular game is over."
Vikram David Amar: Must California City Officials Follow Statutes They Believe To Be Unconstitutional?
"Thus, suppose the U.S. Supreme Court had already held, in a case from another state, that the federal Constitution's Equal Protection Clause requires that same-sex couples have equal access to marriage. Suppose further that Governor Schwarzenegger issued a directive telling local officials to continue to honor heterosexual but not homosexual marriages. That directive could be ignored..."
Emil Guillermo: Yee, Lee And Apology
"As a family guy, I kept thinking about those questions when I heard the news that the army had dropped all charges against Yee -- now that they've destroyed his life in the name of national security..."
March 29, 2004
Neil Mackay: White House Whitewash
"But the hammering that Bush took during the hearings did little to appease Rice and other family members like him. To Rice, who chairs the 9/11 Commission Committee of the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows organisation, the whole inquiry is one big fix that will do everything it can to hide the truth of what the US president and his closest advisors knew about the attacks..."
Editorial: Truth haunts Bush
"Calmly, coolly and without hesitation, Clarke has confirmed the worst fears of Americans who believed that this administration was always more concerned about invading the oil-rich nation of Iraq than in hunting down Osama bin Laden and other figures who pose a genuine threat to this country..."
Randolph T. Holhut: U.S. slow to learn the truth about Sept. 11
"However, nothing can stay hidden for long when there are determined people who won't settle for anything less than the truth. The trouble was that there were too few of these people working at the top echelon of American journalism..."
Condoleezza Rice's Credibility Gap
"A point-by-point analysis of how one of America's top national security officials has a severe problem with the truth..."
Dave Zweifel: Remember when banks had a heart?
"A George Mason University professor named John Petersen wrote a column for Governing Magazine this month that underscores what we've been saying on these pages for years about the clever ways many of our corporations have found to avoid paying their fair share of taxes...."
Stephen Pizzo: The Christian Taliban
"But even as President George W. Bush denounced the brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul, he was quietly laying the foundations for his own fundamentalist regime at home. For the first time far right Christian fundamentalists had one of their own in the White House and the opportunity to begin rolling back decades of health and family planning programs they saw as un-Christian, if not downright sinful..."
Robert B. Reich: Investing In Us
"We do have reason to worry about America?s high-tech lead, however. It?s not because of outsourcing. It?s because we?re not preparing enough Americans to do complex research, development and engineering. American companies are doing less and less basic research because the new knowledge that results is often available to everyone. Besides, our companies are fast becoming global networks that go wherever they can get the cheapest research and engineering?whether from India, France, Germany, Israel or anyplace else..."
H.D.S. Greenway: Assassination fallout bodes ill for us
"This perception can have nothing but a negative impact on all U.S. efforts, especially in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all the lands where the United States wants to convince Muslims that it is not their implacable enemy. It discredits Muslim moderates who sympathize with the administration's dreams of more democracy in the Arab world. Failure to resolve the problem, or even to seriously try, may yet prove to be the Bush administration's biggest foreign policy mistake..."
Editorial: When the Umpires Take Sides
"Private companies are playing a large, and growing, role in election administration. This trend has the potential to "professionalize" the system, but unfortunately, most of these companies have hurt their own credibility by getting involved in partisan politics. The chief executive of Diebold, one of the leading electronic voting-machine manufacturers, made headlines when he wrote a fund-raising letter saying he was committed to seeing President Bush re-elected. Other leading companies have, more quietly, abandoned their own neutrality. Accenture, which put together a voter database for Florida and is preparing one for Pennsylvania, is a generous donor to both parties, although it gives about twice as much money to Republicans as Democrats..."
Editorial: Guzzling Gas
"In fact, had 50 cents a gallon been added to the gas tax 10 years ago, when oil costs were lower, demand for gasoline today might well be less. U.S. automakers have fallen far behind their foreign counterparts in the development of hybrid cars and cars that consume very small amounts of fuel. Relatively low fuel prices have discouraged investment in public transportation and energy-efficiency standards. This country does spend a surprising amount of money promoting alternative fuels, from wind to ethanol: a gasoline tax or a more equitable "carbon tax" on the consumption of fossil fuels would render such subsidy spending less necessary. Even better would be removing altogether the subsidies this country gives the oil and gas industries..."
March 27, 2004
Ron Hutcheson: Insiders Offer Unflattering Accounts of Bush's Decision-Making Style
"O'Neill, who met weekly with Bush when he headed the Treasury Department, offered similar criticism in "The Price of Loyalty," his collaboration with journalist Ron Suskind. Speaking through Suskind, O'Neill concluded that Bush is "cut off from everyone other than a circle around him that's tiny and getting smaller and in concert on everything..."
Editorial: Is There an Ethicist in the House?
"Back in the waning days of the 20th century, ethics battles in the House destroyed or damaged careers. Speaker Jim Wright, a Democrat, had to resign, and Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, was fined $300,000. The lessons the parties drew from this, unfortunately, was not to clean up their act. Instead, they muzzled the ethics panel with a mutually assured destruction pact in which neither side complains about the other..."
Editorial: Dr. Bush making a mess of Medicare
"The political mess that surrounds the Medicare reform bill is probably not what the president had in mind last summer when he made the bill the domestic centerpiece for his re-election campaign.
Republicans have only themselves to blame for the wreckage..."
David Donnelly: Industrial Money Laundry-ing
"On September 30, 2003, Richard T. Farmer, chairman of the Cincinnati-based Cintas Corp. ? the largest industrial launderer in the country ? co-hosted a $1.7 million fundraiser for President Bush.
On November 20, 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released new draft regulations that, if adopted, will weaken federal safeguards for employees who handle poison-soaked "shop" towels. The new rule would exempt industrial laundries like Cintas "from federal hazardous and solid waste requirements for shop towels contaminated with toxic chemicals..."
Editorial: Target is abortion
" Its passage will deliver one of the anti-abortion crowd's fondest wishes: For the first time the controversial notion that a fetus is a person from the instant of conception will be enshrined in federal law. The House has approved a similar bill and President George W. Bush, regrettably, says he will sign it into law..."
Amanda Griscom: GOP Epiphany
tompaine.com
"The administration's budget completely fails to recognize the staggering water resource needs of this nation," Jeffords said as he waved the Luntz memo around during a budget hearing earlier this month in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "The recent poll by Republican pollster Frank Luntz that I am holding in my hand shows that 91 percent of Americans are concerned that our waterways will not be clean for our children and grandchildren..."
Richard A. Stitt: The Hair-raising Truth
"The reason why Bush/Cheney will be gone in November is becoming more obvious now that we have heard public testimony from many high-ranking people from both the Clinton and G. W. Bush administrations during the last three days. The reason is quite simple: the Truth, after three years of being buried by the Bush/Cheney cabal, is finally coming out. .."
Bill Berkowitz: WWGRD: What will gay Republicans do?
"...In a recent edition of The List, John Aravosis asks: Are we trying too hard to play fair when the other team is always playing foul? Is it time for a new outing campaign? While he hasn't come to a conclusion yet, Aravosis is adamant that President Bush is a "traitor to every gay Republican who stayed in the party believing Bush's lies about being a compassionate conservative." And while he isn't suggesting that all gay Republicans should "feel forced to leave the Republican Party, he believes that "leaving President Bush should be a no-brainer for any gay American with an ounce of self-respect."
editorial: Assault on Retiree Benefits
"Which leads to an ugly Medicare subsidy that will hurt all taxpayers. The subsidy is supposed to reward employers for maintaining benefits when Medicare starts offering drug coverage in 2006. A noble idea, but Congress approved an incredible loophole: An employer can qualify for a subsidy even if the healthcare benefits in question are largely or entirely financed by retirees' private contributions..."
March 26, 2004
Normon Solomon: Second Draft
"Whether the Bush campaign can regain control of 9/11 as a political football remains to be seen. We should never forget that real people died on that day, and real people are still dying in Iraq because of depraved political games in Washington..."
David Corn: MIA WMDs--For Bush, It's a Joke
"...Yet there was Bush--apparently having a laugh at his own expense, but actually doing so on the graves of thousands. This was a callous and arrogant display. For Bush, the misinformation--or disinformation--he peddled before the war was no more than material for yucks. As the audience laughed along, he smiled. The false statements (or lies) that had launched a war had become merely another punchline in the nation's capital."
Paul Krugman: The Medicare Muddle
"What actually happened was that private plans skimmed the cream, accepting only relatively healthy retirees. Yet Medicare paid them slightly more per retiree than it spent on traditional benefits. In other words, instead of saving money by subcontracting its role to private plans, Medicare was in effect required to pay H.M.O.'s a hefty subsidy..."
John W. Dean: A Closer Look At The Case From Which Justice Scalia Has Refused To Recuse Himself
" It is an extraordinary case -- in which the Vice-President contends that he is, in essence, beyond the reach of the law. It began as a set of rather pedestrian discovery matters in two consolidated civil lawsuits. Now, however, because of Cheney's stance, it could be a landmark Constitutional decision..."
Derrick Z. Jackson: A fatal distraction
"...That spirit was necessary in World War II. It may be a fatal distraction today. Trying to link Saddam to Hitler may have carried us right over the real terrorists. The more that former Bush administration officials talk, the more it is possible that the spirits of 3,000 Americans are on Bush's hands."
Editorial: Clarke's lament/That Bush downplayed terror
"Clarke's points can be reduced to this: The Bush administration sat on its hands for eight months in 2001 while Al-Qaida prepared its devastating attack on the United States. Then after the attack, the administration moved immediately to prepare an invasion of Iraq, a country the United States knew was not involved. In carrying out that invasion, the Bush administration significantly increased the threat from terrorism while undermining the effort to combat it..."
E. J. Dionne Jr.: Democracy's Revenge
"Well, the commission is going back, and it's learning things. Clarke by no means absolved the Clinton administration of failure. He was tough on Clinton, too, as was the commission's staff report. But at least by Clarke's account -- and the commission will judge it against other accounts -- the Clintonians were rather more engaged in the fight against terror than the Bushies..."
Molly Ivins: A sad tale of arrogance and ignorance
"I need to counsel those innocent little Heathers in the Washington press corps who think the White House attack on Clarke is confused simply because it is often contradictory -- "Democrat," "disgruntled former employee," "out of the loop" and "we did everything he wanted." Y'all, Karl Rove often issues contradictory attacks -- just throws a whole lot of stuff up in the air so people will think, "There must be something to all this noise..."
Editorial: Army Misfires in 'Spy' Case
"...The Army needs to look again at the Yee case and understand where it went wrong. Espionage is a heinous crime that threatens national security; it's not a case for the Keystone Kops."
Editorial: Exit from the Matrix
"Pushed by Attorney General John Ashcroft's Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security as an anti-terrorism tool, the Matrix system has been condemned by civil libertarians as a threat to privacy rights. The bottom line, according to most serious observers, is that, while Matrix would do little to protect against terrorists, it would do a lot to expose law-abiding citizens to potential abuses of their constitutional rights..."
March 25, 2004
William Rivers Pitt: September 11 Should Have Been Stopped
"Of course the Bush administration could never have anticipated an attack like the one that took place on September 11. They weren't paying attention to the threat. Had they done so, the attack could have been stopped. Final proof of this can be found in the events of December 31, 1999. Al Qaeda planned, and put into motion, simultaneous attacks against the national airports in Washington DC and Los Angeles, the Amman Raddison Hotel in Jordan, several holy sites in Israel, and the USS The Sullivans at dock in Yemen. In scope, scale and import, these attacks would have matched the catastrophe of September 11. Each and every single one of these attacks, which ranged from one side of the planet to the other, were foiled by the efforts of the Clinton administration. They were able to stop these attacks because of one simple reason: They were paying attention to the threat..."
Peter Singer: Bush's Meandering Moral Compass
"...In an interview with journalist Bob Woodward, Bush repeatedly referred to his "instincts" or "instinctive reactions" and said: "I'm not a textbook player. I'm a gut player." That may be true. The problem is that Bush's moral instincts seem to allow him to sway in whatever direction seems most convenient."
James Carroll: New World Disorder
"The situation hardly needs rehearsing. In Iraq, many thousands are dead, including 564 Americans. Civil war threatens. Afghanistan, meanwhile, is choked by drug-running warlords. Islamic jihadists have been empowered. The nuclear profiteering of Pakistan has been exposed but not necessarily stopped. Al Qaeda's elusiveness has reinforced its mythic malevolence. The Atlantic Alliance is in ruins. The United States has never been more isolated. A pattern of deception has destroyed its credibility abroad and at home. Disorder spreads from Washington to Israel to Haiti to Spain. Whether the concern is subduing resistance fighters far away or making Americans feel safer, the Pentagon's unprecedented military dominance?the costs of which stifle the U.S. economy?is shown to be essentially impotent..."
Joe Conason: Clarke's book shows why Bush fears truth
"Mr. Clarke is a nonpartisan professional who has devoted his life to national security, serving four Presidents of both parties during a distinguished public career that spanned 30 years. Unlike most of those who have rushed to criticize him, he rose to the highest levels of government strictly on merit rather than family or political connections. His devotion to duty and his qualifications in his field may be measured by his role on Sept. 11, 2001. He ran the Situation Room in the hours immediately after the attacks, while the President flew to Offutt Air Force Base and the Vice President sat in a fortified bunker. When the White House was evacuated in fear of another suicidal crash assault, he stayed there to continue his work..."
Dana Milbank: Clarke Stays Cool as Partisanship Heats Up
"Clarke was ready for that challenge. "Let me talk about partisanship here, since you raised it," he said, noting that he registered as a Republican in 2000 and served President Ronald Reagan. "The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign," Clarke said. "So let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one..."
Editorial: Speaking to America
"...To us, the key moments yesterday were less about facts and more about proportion: Mr. Clarke swearing to tell the truth, and apologizing, and Ms. Rice hiding in the White House, and attacking."
David Sirota, et. al.: Analyzing the Testimony
"In testimony before the 9/11 commission yesterday, top officials from the Clinton and Bush Administrations testified about their counterterrorism policies. The facts that emerged ? both through testimony and two preliminary reports released by the commission ? largely confirm the charges made by the Bush Administration's former chief counterterrorism advisor, Richard Clarke. Though buried beneath an avalanche of doublespeak and word parsing, yesterday's hearing revealed that the Bush Administration subordinated the threat of terrorism prior to 9/11 and, even immediately after the attacks, continued to focus obsessively on Iraq..."
Jeremy Rifkin: The Perfect Storm That's About to Hit
"Verleger says gasoline could climb as high as $3.50 a gallon before leveling off at $2 by the autumn. How high prices eventually soar could depend on still other factors, including potential oil disruptions in Venezuela and the Middle East. There is also the prospect that one or two major refineries might fail during peak demand this summer - not that unusual when increased consumer pressure forces refineries to produce at peak capacity without taking the time for proper maintenance..."
Editorial: IRS' 'chosen people'
"What kind of special tax privileges are members of the Church of Scientology receiving that members of other religions are not? That is a question the Internal Revenue Service refuses to answer - even for a federal appeals court..."
Marci Hamilton: Why the Court Should Reject This Pledge, and Why the Department of Justice Is Wrong To Support It
"Many of the Framers believed in the Christian God, but plenty of the framing generation were nonbelievers, and nonchurchgoers, as well. They founded the United States and its Constitution to create the "freedom of conscience," not some safe haven for only a likeminded hegemonic majority. The latter was precisely what they escaped in Europe.
The Framers wanted not to entrench a permanently Christian nation, but rather to free every citizen from the government's despotic ability to direct citizens to believe what the government approved. This is a glorious heritage that is imperiled, not enriched, by insisting on the Christian God's solitary place of honor in a pledge to the values of this country..."
Joan Vennochi: Strain on local budgets hinders homeland security
"Ambrosino says that he and other mayors have been "screaming, pleading with legislators" to understand that "when you are not raising state revenue at the state level and you are cutting it at the local level, you are absolutely affecting core services." But no one is paying much attention, consumed as Beacon Hill is with more pressing matters such as changing the state constitution to prevent same-sex marriage..."
March 24, 2004
Richard Blow: Court Of Public Opinion
"Anyway, Scalia misses the point. Several points, actually. First, corruption in Washington is rarely a matter of large bribes. It doesn't take a lot to buy a lot; even small gifts create a sense of obligation that can result in much larger payoffs. Even so, no one is seriously suggesting that Scalia's been bought and paid for, or that he and Cheney sat down together and cooked up a response to this nagging court case thing. The argument is that spending a weekend together creates a personal bond that can affect a judge's objectivity, and that judges should therefore avoid such interaction when about to hear an important and closely watched case that will have a profound affect on the political future and personal reputation of the defendant..."
Editorial: GOP must not cover for Bush
"...Following Clarke's revelations, U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., one of the top congressional specialists on foreign policy and defense, said the charges were significant and argued that the administration had a lot of explaining to do. Hagel was a rare Republican voice of concern. Most GOP members of the House and Senate either remained silent or tried to mount tepid defenses of the administration.
This is simply unacceptable. Republicans control the House and Senate. They have a responsibility to police an administration that its own former aides say is mishandling the war on terrorism. Prominent Republicans, such as House Judiciary Committee Chair James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., need to join Hagel in demanding that members of the administration come clean about what they did, or did not do, in response to the terrorist threat - and what they are, or are not doing, now."
Michael Kinsley: Kerry's '350 Tax Increases'
"One of the weapons in Bush's arsenal is an old family heirloom. Bush fired it himself during his big Florida rally over the weekend. He asserted that John Kerry had voted for higher taxes 350 times during his 20 years in the Senate. Vice President Cheney and other presidential surrogates have been using this statistoid for several weeks, and it has been picked up and repeated in the conservative media echo chamber. In 1992, Bush's father charged that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, had raised taxes 128 times. This shabby and deeply disingenuous allegation became an embarrassment to the elder Bush, but it took weeks and months of pounding by the media and the opposition to make it this way. I'm hoping to spare us all that with a Powell doctrine-like strike early on..."
Kathleen Parker: Misplaced compassion for Mel Gibson
"Both Gibsons subscribe to a Pre-Vatican II Catholicism. And while the son can't be held accountable for the wacky views of his father, the younger Gibson refuses to come out and say what everyone wants to hear: "I love my father, but disagree with him about the Holocaust." Instead, he says, "My father has never told me a lie..."
Molly Ivins: Bomb Mexico!
"The people who spend their time keeping track of George W. Bush's fibs, exaggerations, distortions, misleading remarks and flat-out lies are working at a frenzied pace these days. I particularly enjoyed the Bushies' sober new analysis that John Kerry's fiscal plan would leave us $1 trillion in the hole. This is the same set of drunken sailors that wants to leave us $5 trillion in the hole over 10 years by making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Great, let's save $4 trillion and vote for Kerry..."
Robert Kuttner: Fix economy by targeting tax cheats
"A Kerry administration should go after tax cheats, both individual and corporate, who now cost the US Treasury something like $300 billion a year. Going after major tax cheats would be good politics as well as sound policy..."
Editorial: Military Injustice
"More than six months after Capt. James Yee, the former Muslim chaplain at Guant?namo, was arrested on suspicion of espionage, the military has dropped the charges. Military officials insist that the prosecution was halted only to keep sensitive information from becoming public. What they really are trying to hide from view, it seems clear, is not national security secrets, but the incompetence and mean-spiritedness of their prosecution..."
March 23, 2004
Matthew Yglesias: Counter Intelligence
"Iraq really has become, as the president says, a "central front" in the war on terrorism, but this is entirely a consequence of his own mistakes. Stabilizing Iraq, moreover, will only return us to the baseline, not make us any safer from al-Qaeda than we were before. So far, the administration seems unequal to the task, ready to lose allies like Spain over a stubborn unwillingness to cede authority to the United Nations rather than gain the additional international support we require. Moreover, even if it does manage to turn the situation around, there is no indication that the current team has any idea of how to move forward. Its first instinct -- to deny that terrorism is a serious threat -- was proven wrong on 9-11. Its next idea -- that removing Saddam Hussein from power could ameliorate the problem -- has been steadily proven wrong over the past 12 months. The administration seems to have no new ideas left, and if it does, they will likely be as bad as the ones already tried..."
Paul Krugman: Lifting the Shroud
"...Still, the administration would like you to think that Mr. Clarke had base motives in writing his book. But given the hawks' dominance of the best-seller lists until last fall, it's unlikely that he wrote it for the money. Given the assumption by most political pundits, until very recently, that Mr. Bush was guaranteed re-election, it's unlikely that he wrote it in the hopes of getting a political job. And given the Bush administration's penchant for punishing its critics, he must have known that he was taking a huge personal risk.
So why did he write it? How about this: Maybe he just wanted the public to know the truth."
William Rivers Pitt: Before These Crowded Streets
"It occurred to me, as I tried to take in the enormity, that I could be standing on a spot where someone died instantly after jumping from a window that used to stand high above in those lost towers. The street was crowded with ghosts, and I couldn't stay long for the chill they left in their wake. As I dove into another cab, I remembered that George W. Bush wants to give his acceptance speech at the GOP nomination from that sacred, scarred place. You have to stand at Ground Zero to appreciate the staggering arrogance of anyone who would consider, for a nanosecond, using the place for political theater..."
Thomas Oliphant: Wooing the 'army' of the ambivalent
"That is only one road not taken a year ago in the run-up to an invasion with no significant international support beyond Britain, Israel, and oil-rich Arab "royalty." The consequences of all the not-taken roads amounted to a foolish sacrifice of consensus on the altar of know-it-all unilateralism. The major political consequences of that sacrifice are a deep US ambivalence about the war's merits, a deeper ambivalence bordering on opposition to the costs of long-term occupation, a deep Iraqi ambivalence about that occupation, and a split between the United States and Europe over the occupation's future..."
Editorial: Richard Clarke/His case is deep, compelling
"A few facts about Clarke: He's a Republican. He served 30 years in government; for 10 years, under three Republican presidents and one Democrat, he served in the White House as one of the nation's most senior national security advisers. Clarke is not a dove. He believes in an assertive foreign policy and a vigorous projection of U.S. military power, which should make him a natural ally of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. Indeed, while serving as an assistant secretary of state in the early 1990s, he worked with Cheney and Wolfowitz to assemble the coalition that pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. He argued, with Wolfowitz, that the war ought to be prolonged until the Iraqi Republican Guard was destroyed. Finally, what Clarke has to say about the current Bush administration's obsession from the start with Iraq is corroborated by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill in his memoir, "The Price of Loyalty..."
Robert Scheer: Blowing a Whistle on Bush's 9/11 Failures
"The appalling indifference of the incoming Bush team in 2001 to the clear and present danger presented by Osama bin Laden's organization has been noted before, perhaps most strikingly by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who reported that Bush and most of his Cabinet were obsessed with Iraq, not Al Qaeda, from the first day of the administration. This, despite the fact that Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. destroyer Cole just weeks before Bush's election, killing 17 U.S. sailors. The outgoing Clinton national security team said it pleaded with the incoming Bush team to make Al Qaeda its No. 1 security priority..."
Andrew Buncombe: Carter Savages Blair and Bush: 'Their War was Based on Lies'
"He said: "There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently. That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And I think that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were based on uncertain intelligence ... a decision was made to go to war [then people said] 'Let's find a reason to do so'..."
Anthony Sampson: Know thine enemy
"He (Bin Laden) wanted to provoke a holy war, a Western crusade which would set Christians against Muslims. And he wanted to get the Americans out of his own home country, Saudi Arabia, to bring back the puritan rule of the Wahabi sect.
In all these objectives, he soon succeeded. President Bush quickly declared a 'crusade' against him and a war against terrorism, though it should never have been seen as a war, as British historian Sir Michael Howard soon pointed out. He sent the American fleet back to the Middle East, undermined the Saudi royal family and removed American troops. He gave bin Laden and al-Qaeda the maximum publicity. And he rapidly antagonised innocent Muslims outside and inside America, with 'racial profiling', draconian legislation, mass arrests and detentions and the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay..."
John Nichols: Murdoch speaks, Condi Rice jumps
"So it seems that, when the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States calls, the Bush administration's national security adviser is not available. But when Rupert Murdoch calls, well, how could Condoleezza Rice refuse?..."
Editorial: Scalia's blind justice
"Using the dismissive tone he usually reserves for dissents, Scalia comes across as more concerned with defending his right to accept "social courtesies," like rides on the vice president's jet, than with protecting the Supreme Court's integrity..."
Editorial: Justice Denied
"If Yee is innocent of all charges of espionage, why hasn't the Army cleared his name and apologized for branding him a traitor?..."
March 22, 2004
Opt-Out Consumerism
Now that we have the Opt-Out for telemarketing, I'm wondering what else might make a good target for opt-outs. Take credit card solicitations in the mail. I had to buy a desktop shredder because I receive these on a daily basis. Besides the number of trees killed in the process, there's the question of fraud whenever someone has their mail stolen and another applies for a card in their name.
In fact, why not opt-out of ALL unsolicited mail. If I want a coupon from my local mechanic or grocer, I could fill out a card the next time I'm in their establishments. The only mail I want to receive is maybe a returnable postcard asking me if I want to opt-in to some companies offer. A one time deal. Otherwise, I'm an opt-out and they can't send ANY mail to me from that point on.
The more I think about it, the more I LIKE it.
(Addendum: Another way to thwart mail marketing is to eliminate bulk mail discounts for commercial businesses.)
Down but not out
I have not had access to FD since about midnight eastern time last night. Firewall issues on my web server according to my service provider. China could see the site but I couldn't here in Maryland. Go figure. So there will be some abbreviated posting for the rest of the day. Every thing will return to normal (for me and the 50 people who visit this site) tomorrow. The Gods willing.
March 21, 2004
Paul Heinbecker: Canada Got it Right on Iraq
"Rarely in life is a decision so quickly and thoroughly vindicated as Canada's decision to opt out of the war in Iraq. A year later, the stated casus belli has evaporated. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, despite the best efforts of more than a thousand American weapons inspectors with free rein. No connection to al-Qaeda has been established. No persuasive argument endures about the urgency of the U.S. need to act..."
Maureen Dowd: Quid Pro Quack
"That incandescent intellect, the Stephen Hawking of jurisprudence, has been kind enough to take time from his busy schedule to explain to us how the Republic really works.
Antonin Scalia has devoted 21 pages to illuminating the impertinence of those who suggest that it is wrong for a Supreme Court justice to take favors from a friend with a case before the court..."
Editorial: Deficit delusions
"The Bush team's cures for a sluggish economy range from A to B -- tax cuts and more tax cuts. Now the president wants to make them permanent. Doing that would balloon the deficit by $1 trillion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. The Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, told Congress last month that exempting tax cuts from the "pay as you go rule" would set back the cause of fiscal discipline..."
Editorial: Medicare fraud/It's of a very different kind
"...Such contempt for Congress is indicative of how this administration operates. Whether it is revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative, stonewalling Congress on information about Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force or misleading the American people and the world on the threat posed by Iraq, the Bush team seems to believe it can bend, twist and break the truth with impunity. The arrogance is breathtaking, and tiresome."
Amanda Ripley/Cheyenne: How We Got Homeland Security Wrong
"While that is a valid point, certain kinds of attacks would kill far fewer people in Casper than they would in Boston, owing to population density. And as it stands, the funding system is vulnerable to opportunism. While money for homeland security has grown, regular state and federal funding for police and fire operations continues to be cut as both state legislatures and the Bush Administration try to control growing budget deficits. In order to get the homeland-security money, states and localities must frame their needs in terms of terrorism. Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal defends his state's allotment but admits there is an incentive to see terrorism all around. "If you're trying to pick up an ambulance, you may know that ambulance will be used for natural disasters, but the paperwork will have to reflect terrorism. That's the problem. Money distorts objectivity..."
Colleen Redman: The Made for TV Presidency
" An early indication of the Bush administration's slick corporate approach happened when White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, was asked about the timing of the Iraq war by a New York Times reporter and replied, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." But even before that, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, John J. DiIulio, revealed in an Esquire magazine interview the Bush administration's preoccupation with political image over substance when he said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm..."
March 20, 2004
Don Rose: The real reason GOP is losing Illinois
"The trend, 25 years in the making, is all about demographics, economics, social issues and race relations. Democrats would have reigned over the state long ago had they resolved the divisions in their ranks that permitted the GOP to elect governors between 1976 and 2002. Unfortunately for them, they couldn't unify around such nominees as Neil Hartigan, who offended blacks, Dawn Netsch, who was too liberal, and Glenn Poshard, who was too conservative. Rod Blagojevich was just right for all the party's constituencies..."
Randolph T. Holhut: American voters take heed: Spain speaks to you
"We know the press isn't doing its job. Even if it was, we are still dealing with a population that gets most of its information from television. President Bush may have raised an eyebrow or two last year when he said that he doesn't read newspapers, save for glancing at the headlines and looking at the pictures. But he was stating something that is true for many Americans. Most people don't closely follow the news, which may be a good thing in a way when you consider how much misinformation and crap masquerades as news these days..."
Editorial: A War's Woeful Results
"...In March last year, before the invasion, this editorial page agreed that Iraq would be better without Hussein. We still believe that. But we worried that the war would do far more harm than good. We were concerned that combat would fuel a myth of American bullies come to wreak havoc on Muslims, would cost us billions of dollars, not to mention the rebuilding costs, and would divert attention from attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "We desperately hope to be wrong in our trepidation about the consequences here and abroad," we said then. Today we regret that our fears are being realized."
Editorial: Protecting Whistle-blowers
"Those who challenge abuses of power both in and out of government deserve protection. Regardless of the size of the problem, the principles remain the same - creating safe and effective ways to get information out about public harm..."
Editorial: Bovine crapola in the Capitol
"The state budget was signed last July 24. Over the next eight months, Gard and Panzer wasted time and taxpayer dollars on legislative boondoggles that, at best, were silly and, at worst, were damaging to the public interest. Instead of addressing the dramatic erosion of manufacturing employment in Wisconsin, and the continuing farm crisis, Gard and Panzer successfully pressured Gov. Jim Doyle to support an atrocious package of regulatory "reforms" that Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager, veteran state regulators and environmental groups correctly identified as an assault on environmental protections. By creating new threats to the state's natural resources, the so-called Job Creation Act actually made it less likely that Wisconsin will attract quality employers and high-paying jobs..."
Clay Evans: The Trade-off Era
"It may not look like the authoritarianism of China or Russia, but our government is getting awfully comfortable with restricting freedom and manipulating the truth, defining charateristics of iron-fisted rule..."
Editorial: The morning-after pill
" That would be a shame. The morning-after pill, first approved in 1998, is essentially safe and effective with minimal side effects, the FDA has said. The "Plan B" brand pill, which is under FDA scrutiny, contains a higher dose of the same hormones found in regular birth control pills. The pill is most effective if taken within 24 hours of intercourse, although it's still largely effective up to 72 hours. In some instances, it delays ovulation and prevents fertilization of an egg. In other instances, it prevents the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus..."
March 19, 2004
Paul Krugman: Taken for a Ride
"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." So George Bush declared on Sept. 20, 2001. But what was he saying? Surely he didn't mean that everyone was obliged to support all of his policies, that if you opposed him on anything you were aiding terrorists.
Now we know that he meant just that..."
Norman Solomon: Spinning the past, threatening the future
"Political aphorisms don't get any more cogent: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell's famous observation goes a long way toward explaining why - a full year after the invasion of Iraq - the battles in the media over the pre-war lies surrounding Iraq are so ferocious in the United States. Top administration officials are going all out to airbrush yesterday's deceptions on behalf of today's. And tomorrow's..."
Sen. Edward Kennedy: Bush's Distortions Misled Congress in Its War Vote
"Republicans voted overwhelmingly to authorize the war; the Democrats were deeply divided. A mushroom cloud. A threat of unique urgency. No distinction between Hussein and Al Qaeda. These were the administration's reasons, and none of them was true. The GOP prevailed in the 2002 elections and regained control of Congress, but it was a hollow victory..."
Editorial: The Medicare fraud
"Even before the investigation begins, however, it is clear that the Medicare drug benefit was sold to Congress on the basis of cooked numbers. That's nothing but fraud. If the true cost estimates had been known at the time of the vote, the bill almost certainly would have failed to draw support from enough conservatives to pass it..."
Roger Hickey: Onward Deaniacs
"This analysis gets Dean's impact on the other candidates' message right. But what few journalists have understood is that Dean was the creation of an independent progressive citizens' movement, able to generate large amounts of money and common action-even before the Dean campaign took off. This new progressive movement raised the issues of the war and the economy and openly advertised for a candidate who would champion them. Another legacy of the Dean campaign is that now that this citizens' movement has exercised its impact at the highest levels of American politics, it is almost certain to become a permanent fixture, shopping for candidates that meet basic criteria of progressive message, personal integrity, and ideological feistiness. And a movement that can offer to raise $40 or $50 million in small donations for the right candidate (and proportionally large sums for House and Senate candidates) can be sure that every election cycle, it is going to have lots of political leaders competing to be the progressive champion. Dean succeeded in doing what the editorial says he achieved because he was able (at least for a while) to become the leader of the new progressive movement that is just now finding its voice and flexing its political muscle..."
Scot Lehigh: Kerry's model of leadership
"Against that bitter backdrop, Kerry's careful effort to urge Spain to stay in Iraq bespoke a sense of responsibility Cheney did not display. Despite the vice president's characterization, the senator understands the point that foreign policy experts from former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger have made: If the US efforts in Iraq don't succeed, the world will be left with a failed and dangerous state..."
Arianna Huffington: A modest proposal
Let's have two GDPs -- one for Bush Pollyannas, one that tells the truth
"Taking a step in this direction, Redefining Progress, a think tank dedicated to promoting sustainability, has developed what it calls the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), an alternative measure of economic growth that factors in close to two dozen aspects of our economic well-being that the GDP ignores. The group's Executive Director Michel Gelobter describes the GPI as "the GDP minus heart attacks, prison time and clear-cut forests. But adding back in volunteerism and time people spend with their families." Just last week the group released its latest GPI analysis, which found that current GDP figures overestimate the health of our economy by $7 trillion..."
Leonard Pitts, Jr.: For once, I really wish I'd been wrong
"...Yes, it is said by Bush men and women that we fought to strike against terrorism -- except that Iraq had no documented role in the Sept. 11 attacks. It is said that we fought from a moral objection to tyranny -- except that we don't seem all that troubled by tyrants in nations that lack huge oil reserves. Everything is said except the truth: that we rushed into an unnecessary war on a half-baked mission. And that the repercussions of our hubris will shadow us for years."
March 18, 2004
billmon.org: In Kaiser Wilhelm's Shadow
"On the one hand, I agree with much of the strategic analysis -- like, for example, Robert Kagen's anxious piece in the Washington Post. On the other hand, I'm amazed, and more than a little impressed, by the ability of so many conservative pundits to evade the inescapable conclusion: That the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq has been a complete disaster for the United States -- a disaster enormously magnified by Bush's willfully destructive attitude towards our former European allies.
In the past, I've called it the worst strategic blunder since the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But at this point I'd go further. It may have been the worse strategic blunder since Wilhelm II dragged Germany into a two-front war in 1914. And while the outcome ultimately may not be as catastrophic (we can only hope), the causes of the fiasco are quite similar. Like Kaiser Willy's Germany, Bush's America has gone out of its way to turn friends into enemies. And in this, at least, it has succeeded..."
In Kaiser Wilhelm's Shadow
I've been reading the right-wing media's take on the Spanish election, and I have to say it's left me with a stronge sense of disconnect -- what the psychologists call cognitive dissonance.
On the one hand, I agree with much of the strategic analysis -- like, for example, Robert Kagen's anxious piece in the Washington Post. On the other hand, I'm amazed, and more than a little impressed, by the ability of so many conservative pundits to evade the inescapable conclusion: That the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq has been a complete disaster for the United States -- a disaster enormously magnified by Bush's willfully destructive attitude towards our former European allies.
In the past, I've called it the worst strategic blunder since the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But at this point I'd go further. It may have been the worse strategic blunder since Wilhelm II dragged Germany into a two-front war in 1914. And while the outcome ultimately may not be as catastrophic (we can only hope), the causes of the fiasco are quite similar. Like Kaiser Willy's Germany, Bush's America has gone out of its way to turn friends into enemies. And in this, at least, it has succeeded.
Kagan, who's one of the more reasonable neocons (a relative term) sums the situation up this way:
There's no denying that al Qaeda has struck a strategic and not merely a tactical blow. To murder and terrorize people is one thing, but to unseat a pro-U.S. government in a nation that was a linchpin of America's alliance with the so-called New Europe -- that is al Qaeda's most significant geopolitical success since Sept. 11, 2001.
As I said in several recent posts, I find it impossible to disagree with this point. Just a few months ago, the conventional wisdom was that Al Qaeda was all but finished -- with most of its leadership dead or in custody, cut off from its funding sources in the Gulf countries, reduced to a headless affilation of fugitive foot soldiers.
Last year's bombing in Istambul was supposedly the proof -- launched by a small-time local group against a soft target, the attack was said to demonstrate that Al Qaeda had lost the ability to launch a strategic offensive.
Guess again. And whether the timing of the attack -- three days before a general election -- was coincidence, or a shrewdly plotted strike at the ruling Popular Party, the election result was a stunning defeat for the Bush Administration's "New Europe" ploy. This is a victory, by just about any definition. Al Qaeda's obvious objective is to break up the "Coalition of the Willing," and take advantage of the enormous anti-American (or, more accurately, anti-Bush) sentiment in Europe. And it succeeded.
The immediate, visceral, instinctive reaction from the right, of course, is to blame the foreigners -- and if they can't be the French, then Spaniards will do almost as well. You already know the drill by now -- appeasement, shameful, Munich, cowards, decline of the West, yada yada yada.
Right now, my favorite example is David Brooks, who, doing his best Uriah Heep impression, slams the Spanish (shameful, Munich, etc.) while loudly declaiming his intention not to do so:
I am trying not to think harshly of the Spanish ... What is the Spanish word for appeasement?
Heep: I'm a very 'umble person, I am.
Even Kagan, who's usually above that sort of thing (unless you count his famous "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" quip) can't resist the kneejerk cliche:
Are Europeans prepared to grant all of al Qaeda's conditions in exchange for a promise of security? Thoughts of Munich and 1938 come to mind.
What's missing -- intentionally, I think -- is any acknowledgement of how we got from a place where Le Monde could declare Nous sommes tous Am?ricains, to a place where being seen as a U.S. ally has become a serious political health risk across most of Europe.
From day one of the war against Al Qaeda, the Bush administration has treated "old" Europe with a barely (if that) disguised contempt. It refused to give NATO a meaningful role in the war in Afghanistan -- even though such support was offered immediately, and unconditionally, in the aftermath of 9/11. Following the the fall of Kabul, it resisted efforts to expand and internationalize the peacekeeping force, and gave only tepid support to European efforts to strengthen the Karzai government, at the expense of the regional warlords with whom the Pentagon prefers to do business.
Then came the administration's decision to invade Iraq, taken with out any consultation with the Europeans whatsoever -- even though they had significant economic and strategic interests in Iraq (just as America does in the Saudi theocratic police state) and were far more exposed to the potential fallout (oil shocks, refugees, etc.) than the United States.
Then came Bush's imperative demands to the U.N. Security Council, and his absolute refusal to compromise -- even slightly -- on his timetable for the invasion, despite strong hints from the French and the Germans that they would be willing to vote for a war resolution if the administration would just give the U.N. inspectors a little more time in country, if only for appearances sake.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in an interview with CNN shortly before the invasion:
We have in effect said to them, "Line up." We have treated them as if they were the Warsaw Pact. The United States issued orders, and they have to follow.
Then came the war, the inexplicable incompetence of the occupation, and