9/11 and the case for reality (Part 2): The right-wing worldview has long coupled delusions with lies, not least in matters of "national security"

Has anyone every been less entitled to a say in our national security?

by Ken

Last night I announced an overall subject for that post and tonight's, "9/11 and the case for reality." Part 1 dealt with reality checks "In the world of science, and in the life and work of Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth," and at the end I suggested that I couldn't imagine more suitable material for a 9/11 post" today than a pair of Tom Engelhardt's TomGrams -- a new one from Jeremiah Goulka, "Confessions of a Former Republican," and one from 2010 to which Jeremiah G harks back, Andrew Bacevich's "How Washington Rules."

In the meantime, our friend John Puma added a comment with a link to a NYT op-ed, "The Deafness Before the Storm," by former NYT reporter and current Vanity Fair contributing editor Kurt Eichenwald, based on his new book, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, which is exactly on topic. As it happens, I heard Eichenwald this morning on NPR's Morning Edition, and what he has to say is a good deal more disturbing than what we already knew about the Bush regime's cavalier dismissal, from the time it took office right up to 9/11/2001, of warnings about the threat to the U.S. posed by Osama bin Laden.

We've known for ages about the famous August 6 daily intelligence briefing delivered to Chimpy the Prez with what Eichenwald describes as "the now-infamous heading: 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.'” Let's pick up the story here, from his op-ed piece:

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief -- and only that daily brief -- in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document's significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda'’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration's reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that "a group presently in the United States" was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be "imminent," although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

Nonsense, said the geniuses who had assumed positions of authority in the Bush regime's National Insecurity regime. "An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration" told Eichenwald that the neocon imbeciles (well, that's my word) though bin Laden was bluffing, trying to distract their genius selves from the real threat, Saddam Hussein. The CIA, it appears, did everything in its power to persuade the geniuses -- and the nincompoop president -- that they were wrong.

We know how that worked out. No matter how much information the CIA produced, and no matter how much detail it included, the neocon geniuses not only ignored it but attempted to discredit the people who were trying to penetrate that wall of arrogance and ignorance. And then, after 9/11 happened, those people, whose first instinct apparently is always to lie, lied their corrupt, criminal heads off.

The neocons came into power dead set on war with Iraq, and nothing was going to stop them. So the CIA found itself under sustained assault from "Big Dick" Cheney, who was not only the most corrupt, arrogant, and dishonest person ever to set foot in the White House but the stupidest, forcing its analysts to spew lies that supported, or at least didn't contradict, its lies. By rights, perhaps allowing a decent interval after the 9/11 attacks, "Big Dick" should have gone on TV, accompanied by some of the other architects of U.S. unpreparedness, and they should all have blown their useless brains out.

MAYBE "CONSERVATISM" WAS ONCE AN IDEOLOGY. NOW
IT'S A COMBINATION OF PSYCHOSIS, DELUSION, AND SCAM

Since Andrew Bacevich's repurposed work has been focused on national-security issues, his conversion concerns us more directly tonight. He came to his awakening at age 41, following a couple of decades of military service. As he explained in the introduction to his 2010 book The Unmaking of a Company Man: An Education Begun in the Shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, which Tom Engelhardt reprinted as Andrew B's TomGram:

By temperament and upbringing, I had always taken comfort in orthodoxy. In a life spent subject to authority, deference had become a deeply ingrained habit. I found assurance in conventional wisdom. Now, I started, however hesitantly, to suspect that orthodoxy might be a sham. I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high -- whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops -- is inherently suspect. The powerful, I came to see, reveal truth only to the extent that it suits them. Even then, the truths to which they testify come wrapped in a nearly invisible filament of dissembling, deception, and duplicity. The exercise of power necessarily involves manipulation and is antithetical to candor.

I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. “Nothing is so astonishing in education,” the historian Henry Adams once wrote, “as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Until that moment I had too often confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I had been a naïf. And so, at age 41, I set out, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education.

For Andrew B, it was seeing the reality of the former East Germany, totally at odds with what he had been led to believe, that began opening his eyes.

Bit by bit, my worldview started to crumble.

That worldview had derived from this conviction: that American power manifested a commitment to global leadership, and that both together expressed and affirmed the nation’s enduring devotion to its founding ideals. That American power, policies, and purpose were bound together in a neat, internally consistent package, each element drawing strength from and reinforcing the others, was something I took as a given. That, during my adult life, a penchant for interventionism had become a signature of U.S. policy did not -- to me, at least -- in any way contradict America’s aspirations for peace. Instead, a willingness to expend lives and treasure in distant places testified to the seriousness of those aspirations. That, during this same period, the United States had amassed an arsenal of over 31,000 nuclear weapons, some small number of them assigned to units in which I had served, was not at odds with our belief in the inalienable right to life and liberty; rather, threats to life and liberty had compelled the United States to acquire such an arsenal and maintain it in readiness for instant use.

He has a lot more to say on the subject, but for tonight I think we get the idea. Jeremiah Goulka's awakening from his former life as "a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented" covers a lot more than national security, and we'll come back to that tomorrow, but his original political orientation clearly includes the right-wing mindset:

Lots of Republicans grow up hawks. I certainly did. My sense of what it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that from 1776 to WWII, and even from the 1991 Gulf War to Kosovo and Afghanistan, the American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy in the world, while dispensing a tough and precise global justice.

What both men are talking about are the lies and delusions that lay at the heart of foreign policy -- in the name of "national security" -- in the Bush regime. And today is the anniversary of what should be its eternal shame.

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Is the administration determined to make the Gulf oil-rig disaster "Obama's Katrina"?

Do they think we'll never find out? This May 11 satellite photo showing oil dispersing in the Gulf was finally released -- on the 17th.

by Ken

This Agonist post of Sean Paul Kelley's yesterday was titled, appropriately enough, "I Told You So!":

I told you so, I told you so, I told you so a thousand times:

BP director on MSNBC just now says what's really threatening Gulf states is not the oil leak but "alarmist" claims by scientists

Expect more of this. Expect the Feds and BP to do as much as they can to prevent real science from being performed on the underwater plumes and then flacks to pollute their airwaves denying that the massive dying off of fish stocks, crabs, oysters, porpoises and so much more are natural and had NOTHING, absolutely nothing to do with the Gulf Gusher.

Sean Paul has been all over the oil-gusher disaster, and the insufficiency of the response. The post to which this one immediately refers began by quoting this gem from Digby:

I keep seeing scientists on TV with that "hair on fire" look about them, nearly frantic, trying to get people to understand how serious the spill is. They are followed by oil company flacks saying it's no big deal and politicians turning it into he-said/she-said. It's the strangest disaster coverage I've ever witnessed.

Sean Paul points out, though, that "Much of the oil may never 'wash' ashore," thanks to all those chemical dispersants being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. (And that's not going to cause any problems, nosiree!)

I think the oil companies had a pretty good idea of what would happen by using them, in essence that they would prevent or substantially delay millions of gallons of oil washing up on shore. And with that being the case the damage would be below the sea, in which they could then hire faux-scientists to spew arguments in the media about how fish stocks and oyster stocks (among others) were in terminal decline before the oil spill and their disappearance has nothing to do with the oil spill.

We're only seeing this just begin. But if less oil than any one expects washes ashore and "only" kills coral and wildlife under the sea in the Keys and other places, I guarantee you these arguments will be made and believed. After all, you going to believe your eyes or what the pointy headed libruls tell you?

What's really shocking Sean Paul, and not just him, is that the administration has managed -- surprise! -- to locate itself, not just on the side of the oil companies, but in apparent cahoots with them on what has clearly become a massive effort at cover-up. WTF?

Think back to the immediate aftermath of the rig blow-up, when Lyin' Rush led the Right-Wing Scumbag Chorale suggesting that it was all a liberal plot, and then that it was -- what else? -- all Obama's fault. It was grotesque. Yet another demonstration of the far right's total divorce from any semblance of reality, not to mention honesty or decency. "Obama's Katrina," they were calling it.

And at the time it did seem grotesque, beginning with the still-astonishing right-wing whitewash of the Bush regime, which began by playing with their tiny penises while the hurricane took dead aim at the undefended city of New Orleans, its inherent indefensibility having been greatly augmented by the thieving incompetence and ideological putridity of the regime, and then even after the catastrophe befell, those vile effing doodybrains just kept right on playing with their puds.

And the Bush pukepile's own incompetence and malicious indifference to and traitorous disregard for anyone who isn't part of the predatory corporate-criminal subculture of society that invented that swinish nonentity as a national figure had been so thoroughly imprinted on the federal government, which they were so determined to prove can't do nuttin' for nobody (except of course enable their slash-and-burn crusade of predatory thieving), that the entire government sat on its collective fat, lazy, stupid ass and burped and farted the days away as the city and far too many of its inhabitants died.

No, the hurricane itself wasn't the fault of those miserable sons of bitches. Everything else was, though.

Of course that Obama administration hasn't been that inept and disengaged in responding to the Gulf disaster. The mere fact that it has responded puts it in an entire other category. And yet, and yet. As in so many areas, the agenda of the Obama administration is far harder than one would wish to distinguish from that of the Bush regime.

Can anyone explain how it serves the interests of anyone except the people who allowed this to happen to make the first consideration a PR blitz in which the only concern is making believe that it's not such a big deal, everything's under control, when every shred of evidence indicates that, literally, nothing could be further from the truth? Why is it considered even permissible, let alone desirable, for the government to lie to the American people?

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here.

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The Labor Dept. under Hilda Solis gives us a glimpse of how this administration could be working

"Without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's."

-- Harold Meyerson, in his column yesterday (see below)

by Ken

The "Under the Radar" item in Tuesday's Progress Report from Think Progress tipped us off to a New Year's Day AP Business Week report that began:

Labor moves quickly on job safety, workers' rights

By SAM HANANEL

WASHINGTON -- Soon after she became the nation's labor secretary, Hilda Solis warned corporate America there was "a new sheriff in town." Less than a year into her tenure, that figurative badge of authority is unmistakable.

Her aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules.

The changes are a departure from the policies of Solis' predecessor, Elaine Chao. They follow through on President Barack Obama's campaign promise to boost funding for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, increase enforcement and safeguard workers in dangerous industries.

Solis made a splash in October when OSHA slapped the largest fine in its history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery.

Garnering less attention, she just finished hiring 250 new investigators to protect workers from being cheated out of wage and overtime pay. She also started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate. And she is proposing new standards to protect workers from industrial dust explosions -- an effort the Bush administration had long resisted.

Some business groups say they prefer a more cooperative approach between government and businesses -- what the Bush administration called "compliance assistance." . . .

These are, of course, the "business groups" that can be counted on to let out a wounded roar anytime they don't get their way, which is their definition of being "anti-business." Which just goes to show that they haven't learned even the First Lesson of August 2008: that anyone who gives "business groups" everything they want can expect big-time trouble. These people are like children -- especially whiny and, it has to be said, thuggish children -- the kiddies from Lord of the Flies, say. They are incapable of checking their truly insatiable greed, and are prepared to destroy any number of economies in its pursuit.

Put the Republicans in charge of the economy, and it's just a matter of when and how bad the meltdown is going to be. They talk a lot about some mythical "free market," but of course the last thing they want is a truly free market. It's government's job to pave the way for, and grind into dust anyone who opposes, the free expression of their limitless greed. You know, the way the Bush regimistas did so spendidly.

One key component of the scheme is making sure you've always got your heel on the throat of labor. Corporations, you see, must have all the rights -- and none of the obligations -- of humans, but humans, if they happen to be working stiffs, have no rights, or at least none that they don't have to fight for tooth and claw.

And so in Republican administrations, the ideal -- hard to obtain but worth striving for -- is to derail the Department of Labor from its mandated function of protecting the labor force to its opposite, turning it into a functional Anti-Labor Department, the wedge of the organized effort to protect management from any rights mere laborers may try to claim. Previous administrations have striven for this anti-labor nirvana; I don't believe any has achieved it to anything like the degree that the Bush Anti-Labor Department under Elaine Chao did.

The philosophy apparently goes something like this: We value our workforce so much that we are prepared to continue paying them -- the absolute minimum possible, of course -- until they fall, and then goodness knows there are plenty more laborers where that poor sod came from. Probably the Bush regime's most successful area of job creation was the ones that opened up as a result of the Labor Department's "reluctance," to put it mildly, to enforce safety regulations. Hey, every miner who died opened up an available mining job.

If we can believe the AP report on the functioning of the Labor Department under Secretary Hilda Solis, for once it's clear that we had an election in 2008 in which people voted for change. Here's more of the Think Progress Report:

In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery."

[Note: The original text is studded with links.]

Now clearly none of this could be happening against the wishes of the Oval Office, but we have to give credit to Secretary Solis herself for (a) understanding her job very differently from the way her predecessor did, and (b) turning the wreckage of her department around and making it function in the interest of working people. It was shocking to read once again in Mary Jean Collins's DWT post last night, "Happy(?) Anniversary, Dawn Johnsen!," how casual the Obama administration remains about getting the Justice Department staffed and working.

We can't say we're surprised by the job Secretary Solis is doing. Because of Howie's nearness to her old congressional district, he's had a lot of opportunity to observe her at work, and she's remained a proud, committed progressive. It's why Blue America included her in our endorsements. It's not that her reelection was ever in doubt in her safely Democratic district, but that we hoped to add to her visibility and clout in Congress, or as Howie puts it, "to help her increase her profile so she would one day be a contender for a governorship, Senate seat-- or cabinet position." Another budding progressive powerhouse, Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, is the first endorsee of Blue America '10, and we hope you'll keep checking the Blue America '10 page to see the candidates we and our friends at Digby's Hullabaloo and Crooks and Liars are satisfied are worthy of progressive support.


POSTSCRIPT: HAROLD MEYERSON POINTS OUT
TODAY'S LACK OF A PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

"Every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- has raised the hope that he would bring with him a new era of progressive reform," Harold Meyerson began his Washington Post column yesterday ("Without a movement, progressives can't aid Obama's agenda"), and that sure got my attention. "The legislative torrents of the New Deal and the Great Society -- a few brief years in the 1930s and the '60s that fundamentally reshaped the nation's economy and society -- are the templates that fire the liberal imagination."

[Liberals] have responded to the election of every Democratic president since LBJ -- each of whom entered office with a substantial Democratic majority in Congress -- with the hope that this time would be different, that a new burst of progressivism was at hand.

And each time, they have been disappointed. While Carter and Clinton could both point to progressive legislation enacted during their terms, many of their most significant achievements -- the deregulation of transportation, the consolidation and deregulation of finance, the abolition of welfare, the enactment of trade agreements with low-wage nations -- actually eroded the economic security that Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson and their congressional contemporaries had worked to hard to create.

And even though Obama "took office at a moment when the intellectual force of laissez-faire economics was plainly spent," and came in with a reform agenda that "was nothing if not ambitious,"

as the first anniversary of his inauguration approaches, it's clear that despite the impending enactment of a genuinely epochal expansion of health care, a progressive era has not burst forth. Major legislation languishes or is watered down. Right-wing pseudo-populism stalks the land. The liberal base is demobilized. The '30s or the '60s it ain't.

Meyerson notes some of the "reasons for the stillbirth of the new progressive era": "the death of liberal and moderate Republicanism, the reluctance of some administration officials and congressional Democrats to challenge the banks, the ever-larger role of money in politics (see reluctance to challenge banks, above), the weakness of labor, the dysfunctionality of the Senate." But, he says, "if there's a common feature to the political landscapes in which Carter, Clinton and now Obama were compelled to work, it's the absence of a vibrant left movement."

He looks back at "the America over which FDR presided" and sees "mass organizations of the unemployed," farmers' groups, militant unions, communiss and democratic socialists who "were enough of a presence in America to help shape these movements, generating so much street heat in so many congressional districts that Democrats were compelled to look leftward as they crafted their response to the Depression." In LBJ's time, the civil rights movement "provided a new generation of street heat that both compelled and abetted the president and Congress to enact fundamental reforms."

In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements, usually led by activists who stand at or beyond liberalism's left fringe. No such movements were around during Carter and Clinton's presidencies. For his part, Obama won election with something new under the political sun: a list of 13 million people who had supported his campaign. But he has consistently declined to activate his activists to help him win legislative battles by pressuring, for instance, those Democratic members of Congress who have weakened or blocked his major bills. To be sure, loosing the activists would have brought problems of its own: Unlike Roosevelt or Johnson, who benefited from autonomous movements, Obama would be answerable for every loopy tactic his followers employed. But in the absence of both a free-standing movement and a legion of loyalists, Congress isn't feeling much pressure from the left to move Obama's agenda.

The construction of social movements is always a bit of a mystery. The right has had great success over the past year in building a movement that isn't really for anything but that has channeled anew the fears and loathings of millions of Americans. If Glenn Beck can help do that for the right, can't, say, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann help build a movement against the banks or for jobs programs? It might well be too little too late, but without left pressure from below, the Obama presidency will end up looking more like Carter's or Clinton's than Roosevelt's or Johnson's.

The most exciting political development of recent times has been the emergence of the progressive blogosphere. We know there's a lot of support out there for progressive principles, with a lot of heat behind it. The question then is, how do we translate that passion to the kind of force that moves the likes of Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid?

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Looking for good info on swine flu (and other public health subjects?) Try the blog Effect Measure

Richard Besser, acting director

of the Centers for Disease Control

"One big thing to know was emphasized by Acting CDC Director Richard Besser at the White House briefing yesterday: the influenza virus is highly unpredictable and our certain knowledge of it very scant. If you've seen one flu pandemic, you've seen one flu pandemic."

-- from this morning's Effect Measure post on the swine flu situation
(note: the writer is not suggesting that we are in a pandemic)

by Ken

The swine flu outbreak has a lot of us scrambling for information (here's a link to CNN's video of yesterday's White House press briefing at which the Dept. of Health and Human Services declared a national health emergency), and I confess I wouldn't have known where to turn for good public health info. So I'm pleased now to be able to suggest Effect Measure, which describes itself as "a forum for progressive public health discussion and argument as well as a source of public health information from around the Web that interests the editor(s)."

On-site we get some additional explanation:

The Editors of Effect Measure are senior public health scientists and practitioners. Paul Revere was a member of the first local Board of Health in the United States (Boston, 1799). The Editors sign their posts "Revere" to recognize the public service of a professional forerunner better known for other things.

This morning's entry, for example, "Swine flu: what did you expect?," is an invaluable guide to the questions we're actually asking, and should be asking, even for those of us who don't really know what we mean to ask.

Answers are more elusive, but at least Revere explains why. For example:

Another thing that most people and probably most clinicians expect is that we know a lot about influenza. Perhaps because of the increased scientific interest since bird flu (an increased interest which will pay off handsomely in this outbreak, by the way) we do know quite a bit, but we also now know many of the things we thought we knew about flu, like the main ways it is transmitted from person to person, we don't really know.

In the world of the 24-hour news cycle, it often happens that even the best experts (assuming the news cyclists have any clue who they might be) don't know the answers. At this point there are two quite different approaches to "covering" the event:

(a) You can have genuine experts frame the correct question(s) as intelligently as possible and explain what the limits of our present knowledge are and how that is likely to evolve, or --

(b) You can have robo-anchors with functional IQs lower than their pets' speculate mindlessly, or put their empty heads together for some mindless chat-speculation, or find someone who might actually know something and browbeat that poor soul with "would you say that" questions which then provide the basis for sky's-the-limit extrapolative speculation.

I'll leave it to you to guess which approach Effect Measure takes. Another nice thing about the blog is that it appears to be read by smart people who actually know stuff about the subject(s) and can actually add information in the comments.


THIS IS SO DEPRESSING, AND SO TEDIOUS, BUT YET AGAIN ALL
THE FINGERS SEEM TO POINT AT RIGHT-WING SHITHEADISM

In the days, weeks, and months ahead we're going to learn a whole lot more than we knew or wanted to know about swine flu and flu epidemics and emergency preparedness. Already, alas, it appears that a good deal of what we learn is going to target the know-nothing shitheadism of the slash-and-burn loons of the Right.

Environmentalists have been screaming for years about the public-health menace of the multidimensional public health hazard of those giant animal-growing "factories" in which most of our commercial chickens and pigs are now raised, producing not only sicker and sicker animals, which are therefore shot up with larger and larger doses of antibiotics (further contaminating not just the animals but the already-toxic waste they produce), but also massive sites that are unfit for human habitation and humongous problems of toxic sludge entering local water supplies.

The punchline here is that research into the very problems of swine "culture" was one of the things the witty wags of the Right roundly ridiculed. It was right up there with Governor Booby's hilarious send-up of spending money to study -- can you imagine? -- volcanoes!

Food specialists also point out that our "improved" food-producing technology, introduced in the process of converting what used to be our agriculture industry into the megaworld of agribusiness, has in fact created a dual nightmare, as a result of separating animals from agricultural land. Once upon a time the animals' manure went directly into fertilizer for the crops. Once the two became separated, however, the animal wastes turned into an increasingly unmanageable crisis of toxic-waste disposal, and fertilizing crop-growing land required increasing dependence on dangerous chemicals, still further compounding the risk factor of the food that reaches our markets as well as the toxic-waste disposal problem.


IN THE MATTER OF EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS: OF COURSE
RIGHTIES DON'T BELIEVE IN EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS

Then there's the question of how prepared we are to cope with a public-health emergency. On the plus side, at least we no longer have Chimpy the Prez and his team of death-dealing clowns on the job. It is, as we learned during the eight grim years of the Bush regime, with its all-out war on human intelligence in all forms, and above all in the form of science, a root principle of the Loony Right that emergency preparedness is irrelevant to government, and in any event can't be accomplished by government, because government is incompetent. And the Loony Rightists have no trouble proving that government is incompetent when they are the government.

This morning on The Nation's blog The Beat, John Nichols posted an item that begins:

GOP Know-Nothings Fought Pandemic Preparedness
posted by John Nichols on 04/27/2009 @ 08:00am

When House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who has long championed investment in pandemic preparation, included roughly $900 million for that purpose in this year's emergency stimulus bill, he was ridiculed by conservative operatives and congressional Republicans.

Obey and other advocates for the spending argued, correctly, that a pandemic hitting in the midst of an economic downturn could turn a recession into something far worse -- with workers ordered to remain in their homes, workplaces shuttered to avoid the spread of disease, transportation systems grinding to a halt and demand for emergency services and public health interventions skyrocketing. Indeed, they suggested, pandemic preparation was essential to any responsible plan for renewing the U.S. economy.

But former White House political czar Karl Rove and key congressional Republicans -- led by Maine Senator Susan Collins -- aggressively attacked the notion that there was a connection between pandemic preparation and economic recovery.

Now, as the World Health Organization says a deadly swine flu outbreak that apparently began in Mexico but has spread to the United States has the potential to develop into a pandemic, Obey's attempt to secure the money seems eerily prescient.

And his partisan attacks on his efforts seem not just creepy, but dangerous. . . .

Nichols points out that what we have now is by no means a pandemic. However, does anyone believe that that money devoted to pandemic-preparation wouldn't have come in mighty handy right about now?


POSTSCRIPT: THE SHITHEAD RIGHT STRIKES AGAIN -- WHY
IS IT THAT WE DON'T HAVE AN ACTUAL HHS SECRETARY?

HHS Secretary-in-waiting Kathleen Sebelius

Politico reports that the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) "has launched an online petition criticizing Republicans for delaying the confirmation of a Health and Human Services secretary in the face of a swine flu outbreak."

The union accuses Senate Republicans of delaying the confirmation of nominee Kathleen Sebelius to “curry favor with extremist outside groups” and depriving the department of leadership as the nation confronts a potential flu pandemic.

“This is simply unacceptable,” the union says on its website. “This disease is spreading as we speak, but right now, a Bush-appointed accountant is running the department. We need an HHS secretary NOW. Sign the petition telling the Senate to vote immediately to confirm Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. If we don't act, the swine flu might just turn into another Hurricane Katrina.”

Senate Democrats attempted to fast-track Sebelius during the first week of April, but Republicans raised objections, saying her nomination needed to follow regular order. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted to schedule a vote Wednesday but was again thwarted.

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Howie, in Mali, sends back an online book preview: "George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews"

Has the Medal of Freedom become a badge of infamy?

by Ken

Howie writes: "I just arrived in Mali. Now I'm REALLY in Africa."

And with this he sent back the following nugget from HuffPost:

George Tenet Screamed About Jews In Saudi Prince's Pool: Book

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting excerpt from " World Of Trouble, a forthcoming book by Patrick Tyler on the White House and the Middle East. In this scene, CIA director George Tenet, drunk on scotch at Saudi Prince Bandar's pool, rants about Bush administration "Jews" who are "setting me up" to take the fall for the false WMD claims:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.

"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

and then:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them, with exasperation, as "the Jews."

For the record, Goldberg adds this:

Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.

Also, I have to say that a lot of us Jews have taken frequent -- and public -- note of the dispiriting preponderance of Jews among the hard-core neocon "thinkers," generally linking it to their close ties to the hardest-core elements in Israel's Likud Party. And it's a good guess that none of us have been in Prince Bandar's pool.

Nevertheless, this reminds us of poor George Tenet and his Medal of Freedom. Earlier today, while I was cutting and pasting Harold Meyerson's fine column on the role of the UAW in modern U.S. history, with its attention to longtime union leader Walter Reuther, I tried for a while to work in a reference to Reuther being a recipient of the Medal of Freedom. However, I realized that under the current U.S. regime, the Medal of Freedom has been so debased (as witness the famous photo above -- how many times you have seen it, or variations thereof, often including fellow medalists Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer, just on DWT?) that it comes close to being a badge of infamy.

#

Oops, the Bushbailers seem to have fucked up that attempt at limiting executive pay! Oh well, it was probably an accident -- stuff happens

by Ken

It's a pretty state of affairs when you're left wondering whether your government's latest fuckup is the result of inattention (we can't expect that nice Secretary Paulson to dot absolutely every "i" and cross every single "t," now can we?), incompetence, or careful sabotage.

Let the Washington Post's Amit R. Paley tell the basic story:

Executive Pay Limits May Prove Toothless
Loophole in Bailout Provision Leaves Enforcement in Doubt

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

"The flimsy executive-compensation restrictions in the original bill are now all but gone," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), ranking Republican on of the Senate Finance Committee.

Oops!

It gets rather complicated from here, having to do with what enforcement mechanisms the Treasury Dept. has, and perhaps more pertinent how much will the Treasury has to enforce any restrictions -- the Bush regime was pretty strenuously opposed to putting any in the bailout law. Of course it's also possible that none of this matters now.

I think it's only fair that, after causing those execs who got that $335B such anxiety over the possibility that they couldn't boost their pay, they should be encouraged to toss an extra $100K or so into their pay envelopes, just to compensate them for the stress.


AND SPEAKING OF WHO GOT THAT $335B . . .

Say, are we just supposed to accept that we're not allowed to know who they are, and how much they got, and get get over it? While the Bushbailers were planning the giant dish-out to their Wall Street cronies, were they so busy fucking up the executive-pay-compensation thing that they somehow forgot to make it mandatory that such a list be made public?

I mean, somebody knows, don't they? The Bushbailers didn't just, like, stand out on a corner handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars, did they? Didn't the recipients at least have to, you know, sign something? Surely somebody somewhere has a shoebox filled with the receipts? Someone on the gov't payroll could make a list of all those scraps of paper, wouldn't you think?

Unless of course we're not supposed to know?

#

Would Arlen Specter's hypocritical bloviating be less obnoxious if he had any real principles besides self-adulation?

A photo not from the senator's website -- where none of
the pictures seem to have been taken in the last 20 years

by Ken

Do you wonder sometimes what some of our pols see when they look in the mirror?

I'm thinking just now of the ever-inscrutable Republican senior senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter.

Okay, I suppose Senator Specter isn't that inscrutable. He used to be what was known in those quaint times as a "moderate Republican." In those bygone days he was kind of hard to predict, because you never knew where he would choose to take a stand on his famous principles -- because in those days, sometimes he did actually take a stand and, you know, follow through.

Then his party went galloping off into the dark sunset of the Oh So Far Right (No, Righter, Righer!), and the senator came to his senses. Oh, he often talked about principles, but there was rarely any question any longer where his real priorities lay: perpetuating his own prestige and, especially, power.

I imagine I'm not the only one for whom the turning point came when he assumed the role of ringleader of the gang rape of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination. It was perhaps the first time I appreciated the stark contrast between the goals, and not just their strategies, of Ds and Rs on the Judiciary Committee.

Faced with Professor Hill's reluctantly proffered accusation of sexual harassment during her association with the nominee, the Ds -- led by then-Chairman Joe Biden -- obsessed over trying to determine the truth of the matter. Pathetic wretches! As if the truth mattered! The Rs, by contrast, focused on the only thing that mattered to them: winning.

I assume that, like the rest of us, the Rs had a pretty good idea that Hill was telling the truth, which gave them all the more reason not to be suckered into the fool's game of truth-seeking. No, they went straight for character assassination, and nobody did it better than our Arlen, who deployed his full prosecutor's bag of tricks in what was, as of then, the vilest public performance I had witnessed in the U.S. Congress. (I'm not counting the film of Sen. Joe McCarthy in action. But if that's where Specter enthusiasts have to reach to surpass their guy's vileness, I think their case is lost.)

Of course, those were more innocent times. Modern-day Republicans have made that sort of gutter-wallowing their model, and built on it (cf. the 2008 presidential campaign of Young Johnny McCranky, and for that matter most every Republican race across the country).

Of course I respect Senator Specter for his heroic struggles against cancer. But when you look at the use he has made of the additional leases on life he has won, well, "respect" isn't a word that pops to mind.

It was hardly surprising that when it came to the real crunch, which is to say the long darkness for truth, justice, and the American way that was the Bush regime, there aren't many pols who behaved more abominably than our Arlen. Most of the Bush rubber-stampers were at least open about their degraded values. Our Arlen, however, often continued to profess loyalty to the Constitution and legal system that the regime was so ruthlessly dismantling. Every now and then he would make noises that were made to sound like actual acts of defiance of the regime, as in the matter of the blatantly illegal Bush military tribunals. But in the end he always caved. Always, without exception. He racked up what in baseball parlance is known as an ohfer -- 0 for the Bush regime. It's hard to believe that any of the regime malefactors lost as much as a moment's rest over his theatrical posturing.

As the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he can said to have presided over the systematic destruction of the Justice Dept. and the perversion of the federal justice system by people who whose every waking effort was devoted to destroying the country's legal fabric, transforming it all into the enforcement arm of Karl Rove's White House political operation. The confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney general was bad enough. Who knew that the regime would find him too principled, and come up with a replacement, Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales, whose incompetent and corrupt tenure will be studied by historians and legal scholars for decades if not centuries to come?

While the Justice Dept. was being run by America-hating sociopaths and staffed at all levels -- up to the highest -- by thugs, dilettantes, and idiot children whose legal skills wouldn't have qualified them to take orders at Burger King, Arlen Specter sat on his fat, lazy, self-important, corrupt ass and let the good times roll. Remember that for the majority of the Bush regime's existence, he wasn't ranking minority member but chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Every depradation, every breach of justice and trust perpetrated by the Bush Gang had either the active blessing or the passive I-don't-give-a-fuck sign-off of master hypocrite Specter. Just as everyone involved in the running of the Justice Dept. at least under the Gonzales Reign of Legal Horror should now be under indictment, so should their master overseer and enabler, Arlen Specter.

Now the Senate's Lion of Injustice has announced his intention to throw a monkey wrench into the confirmation proceedings of Eric Holder to be attorney general, if not actually jeopardizing the nomination then at least significantly delaying the start of a task so monumental that there's no time to lose: rebuilding the Justice Dept. from the wreckage left behind by the marauders of the Bush regime.

The goniff Specter has announced that his exalted principles require him to look into Holder's role in the pardon of Marc Rich. Now the Rich pardon was far from the Clinton administration's finest hour, but it wasn't Holder's idea, and if President Clinton and his advisers were determined to do it, it's doubtful that Holder could have stopped them. Moreover, the Obama transition team is said to have sounded out the appropriate officials, presumably including Senator Specter, about the appointment.

What it comes down to, I guess, is our Arlen living up to the Grandstander's Pledge: to always do everything possible to draw attention to himself while solemnly promising never to attempt to accomplish anything of substance. The man who sat by and watched the Justice Dept. be dismantled by thugs and goons has gall beyond imagining to say "boo" to Eric Holder. Instead, he ought to take a good look in the mirror and try to figure out what to do with a man who did as much as anyone on the planet to destroy justice in the United States.

#

Al Kamen, back from vacation (finally!), is thinking ahead to the mechanics of the presidential transition

"The personnel chief needs to be someone who's working 'totally below the radar,' said Colby College professor G. Calvin Mackenzie [right]. 'Otherwise he becomes a magnet for resumes.' The best pick would be 'not a political person,' but someone who 'knows government, the pitfalls, the ethics,' and someone who can answer 'what are the key positions for our constituencies that we're going to get a lot of pressure on. Vacuum invites all kinds of pressure.' Not to mention lengthy infighting."

--from Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column in today's Washington Post

I've leaned to live with Paul Krugman's seemingly limitless vacation days, which sometimes appear to verge on the Chimpy-esque.

(Say what you will about Chimpy Our Prez, the man knows how to vacation. Even under what most people would consider the most adverse circumstances, like that spell of rain that fell on New Orleans a few years back.
Did he let it spoil his fun? No, he took the attitude "Let me -- and my snackin' buddy McCranky -- eat cake!")

But when Al Kamen goes on vacation, he takes, you know, real vacations, and I get really antsy. Thank goodness he's back today!

The item that interests me in today's "return" column is one that isn't intended to be humorous. He's thinking ahead to the transition to a new presidential administration, and has gathered some interesting thoughts.

What's Won, Lost in Transition

The Washington chatter is all about whom Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama are going to pick as their running mates. (Yes, we've got your Loop "Pick the Veep" contest entries pending.)

Obama calls it "the most important decision I'll make before I'm president" -- a bit strange when you consider Bush I's pick of Dan Quayle.

But there's another job that both candidates should focus on fairly soon: transition director. Sure, some snarky columnists will gig them for presuming victory by gearing up preelection. But solid transition planning -- and initial personnel decisions -- are simply too important to put off until after the election.

McCain, who would be engaged in a mostly friendly takeover, probably could wait a bit before focusing on this. Obama, looking at a hostile takeover and the need to quickly get his picks in place, will want to move rapidly.

Transition experts single out as the model to follow Ronald Reagan's transition operation, run by former Nixon attorney general Edwin Meese, and the personnel planning of former Nixon aide Pendleton James, who was later a professional headhunter. (The Bush II transition, run by Dick Cheney, with a personnel shop run by Clay Johnson, comes in a close second.)

The personnel chief needs to be someone who's working "totally below the radar," said Colby College professor G. Calvin Mackenzie. "Otherwise he becomes a magnet for resumes." The best pick would be "not a political person," but someone who "knows government, the pitfalls, the ethics," and someone who can answer "what are the key positions for our constituencies that we're going to get a lot of pressure on. Vacuum invites all kinds of pressure." Not to mention lengthy infighting.

Most observers cite Bill Clinton's operation as the worst transition. The Clinton White House, transition expert Paul C. Light observed, would pass potential candidate lists from one official to another, instead of having a joint review, prolonging the process endlessly. Then came the "bean-counting" exercises over appropriate percentages of women and minorities in each department.

The incoming president, Light said, should also "limit the number of transition teams to a bare minimum, if they have any at all." In addition, he should "put someone in charge of transition planning who's going to move into the White House with him . . . and who'll oversee the personnel process." Someone whose decisions would rarely, if ever, be overturned.

McCain, as it turns out, has a solution to at least part of the problem. He joined with Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) in the 1990s to sponsor legislation that would cut in half the bloated number of presidential appointees -- 3,000 -- which could save taxpayers more than $100 million in salaries and benefits.

In addition, as Light points out in his new book, "A Government Ill Executed," the government would actually work more efficiently, with fewer political hacks in federal jobs.

Maybe McCain could get Obama to sign on to the bill?

#

If you want to believe that Karzai is the reason (not "a" reason, but THE reason) why we're not going to be able to leave Afghanistan, OK, believe

Afghanistan's President Karzai -- so he's the problem?

"We are committed in Afghanistan. We are not ready to leave Iraq. In both countries our friends are in trouble. The pride of American arms is at stake. The world is watching. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. To me the logic of events seems inescapable. Unless something quite unexpected happens, four years from now the presidential candidates will be arguing about two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one going into its ninth year, the other into its eleventh. The choice will be the one Americans hate most -- get out or fight on."

--Thomas Powers, in the May 29 New York Review of Books

So there I was, perusing the NYT home page, and there it was. The kind of story you expect to see on a news-dump Saturday. The editors get credit for running it ("See, see," they will be able to say, "we didn't let the ball drop"), nobody will pay much attention ("But how could we have known?" we'll all say), and everyone is happy. Happy that it's Saturday, anyway.

No, not "Job Losses and Surge in Oil Spread Gloom on Economy." We could all have seen that one coming, right? No, what caught my eye, to the sound of the Dragnet theme (DUM da-DUM dum), was:

As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster
By HELENE COOPER
Concern is growing that Hamid Karzai, long a darling of the U.S., is not up to addressing his country’s troubles.

It was just a matter of time, right? So let's take a peek:

June 7, 2008

As Ills Persist, Afghan Leader Is Losing Luster
By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON -- After six years in which Hamid Karzai has been the darling of the United States and its allies, his luster may be fading.

Next week, Mr. Karzai, the Afghan president, is to arrive in Paris for a donors conference with attendees from 80 countries and organizations. He will ask for $50 billion to finance a five-year development plan intended to revive Afghanistan's decrepit farming sector, promote economic development and diversify the economy away from its heavy reliance on opium.

But there is a growing concern in Europe, the United Nations and even the Bush administration that Mr. Karzai, while well-spoken, colorful and often larger than life, is not up to addressing Afghanistan's many troubles.

A senior State Department official questioned whether Mr. Karzai had the "trust and the backbone" for the job.

"Of course he's a good guy, and therefore as long as he's president we'll support him," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. "But there's a lot of talk inside the administration saying maybe there's a need for some tough love to push him to do the right thing."

By all means, read on. Me, I'll come to back to it later. Maybe. After all, it's Saturday.

Back on Memorial Day -- another news-dump day if there ever was one -- I dumped some alarming quotes by Thomas Powers, from the New York Review of Books piece referenced at the top, into a post I'm afraid may have been sidestepped as another piece of Bush-bashing. So I've dusted off Powers' gloomy conclusion up top.

Now, if you're reading DWT, chances are you're well aware -- unlike, say, Chimpy the Prez -- that the situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating rapidly since the Bush regime foreign-policy geniuses began diverting their attention, and our resources, to the war they were really itching to fight, in Iraq. That one's gone pretty well too, right?

The thing is, most of us learned as children this fundamental lesson:

It is way easier to make a mess than to clean one up.

Alas, this is one of the infinite number of basic human lessons that Tiny George Bush somehow never managed to learn. Nor, apparently, did the fake-intellectual geniuses who fester in the neocon think tanks.

Because Thomas Powers is familiar with history -- unlike the big neocon babies, to whom there is no past and virtually no present, just a cockamamie distopic future that exists only in their demented adolescent brains -- he is especially disdainful of the blundering in Afghanistan. Oh, there's plenty of history in Iraq too, history that anybody with a working brain would have taken account of before laying waste to the place without an inkling of an idea how to fix it or how to get the hell out of it. But Afghanistan?

As Powers points out, every outside power that has cockily blundered into Afghanistan, taken over Kabul, and thought, "Y'know, that wasn't so difficult," has learned soon enough that in fact it's quite difficult. The British managed to learn the lesson twice, and how long ago was it that the Soviets learned it even more spectacularly?

In making his gloomy forecast that four years from now we're likely to be still trying to figure out how to extract ourselves from our Middle East entanglements, Powers wrote a paragraph that still haunts me. He's talking here specifically about Iraq, and how a situation that seems still somehow manageable can go wrong:

At first, perhaps, all runs smoothly. Then things begin to happen. The situation on the first day has altered by the tenth. Some faction of Iraqis joins or drops out of the fight. A troublesome law is passed, or left standing. A helicopter goes down with casualties in two digits. The Green Zone is hit by a new wave of rockets or mortars from Sadr City in Baghdad. The US Army protests that the rockets or mortars were provided by Iran. The new president warns Iran to stay out of the fight. The government in Tehran dismisses the warning. This is already a long-established pattern. Why should we expect it to change? So it goes. At an unmarked moment between the third and the sixth month a sea change occurs: Bush's war becomes the new president's war, and getting out means failure, means defeat, means rising opposition at home, means no second term. It's not hard to see where this is going.

And with that ringing in my ears, I read stuff like this in the paper (yes, I admit, I did read Ms. Cooper's piece to the end):

A senior United States military officer in Afghanistan said that the disillusionment with Mr. Karzai was palpable among the wide swath of people he dealt with, including allied military and civilian officials. "Their message is consistent," the officer said in an e-mail message, speaking on condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivity. "He's a weak leader."

Frustration over corruption and ineffectiveness in Mr. Karzai's government has grown within Afghanistan as well in recent years. In 2006, for instance, members of the Afghan Parliament signed a measure of protest over the government's poor performance and the low quality of some of Mr. Karzai's appointments.

Western diplomats said that Afghan drug lords and warlords had bought the freedom they exercise throughout the country by bribing members of Mr. Karzai's government.

Gen. James L. Jones, a former NATO commander in Afghanistan who now works as one of Mr. Bush's Middle East envoys, said that while the NATO forces military had been making some strides against insurgents, no amount of additional troops would counter the Afghan government's inability to rein in corruption and the country's exploding opium cultivation.

"The Karzai government, which is benefiting so much from the sacrifice, in both treasure and lives, by so many countries, needs to show more willingness to meet the expectations of the international community," General Jones said in an interview. "This is particularly true with regard to reversing the nation's economic dependency on narcotics, battling corruption within the government and championing judicial reform as a matter of national security."

Oh, I don't doubt that Karzai is a problem, but is he the problem in Afghanistan?

DUM da-DUM dum.

#

You'd think by now the Bush regime has all the experience it needs rationalizing bad employment numbers. Do the regimists just not care anymore?

America's sweethearts: Miss Mitch and Miss Elaine have jobs -- for now.

You've probably heard the news by now: 49,000 jobs lost in May, unemployment up a whopping .5% (from 5.0% to 5.5%), the largest jump since 1986. Into the fray jumps our esteemed secretary of labor, Elaine Chao -- who, it is pointed out on the ShameonElaine website, is not only the wife of our beloved Senate minority leader (and DWT-fave heartthrob) Miss Mitch McConnell but the longest-serving member of the Bush regime cabinet.

Here is ShameonElaine's take on Secretary Chao's contribution to the discussion:

Elaine Chao Lays Blame for May Unemployment Jump

There’s an excuse for everything.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao issued the following statement on the May employment situation report released today:

“Today’s increase in the unemployment rate reflects the fact that unusually large numbers of students and graduates are entering the labor market.”

For those following at home, the aforementioned “May employment situation” is the largest jump in unemployment since 1986. That’s 49,000 lost jobs for a total unemployment rate of 5.5%.

But as EPI notes (via Mother Jones), Elaine’s “blame the kids” excuse doesn’t explain everything.

An increase in the youth labor force played a role in May’s unemployment spike. However, even if we take teenagers out of the data, unemployment still rises from 4.5% to 4.8%, a considerable 0.3% increase, and well above the 4.0% adult rate of one-year ago.

Elaine Chao is still in denial about America’s economic crisis. What will wake her up?

However, even this doesn't exhaust the mysteries surrounding the new unemployment figures. I have theorized before that where the Bush regime has fallen off most grievously in the gone-to-hell second term is in the quality of its lies. Americans expect a certain standard in the lies they're fed, and frankly, this effort strikes me as downright pathetic.

Strange currents have swirled around these numbers since their release -- in particular the role played by those greedy students, damn them, grasping for jobs:

* A reference to this explanation was once in, and then mysteriously out of, the online version of the NYT's story.

* There was intriguing speculation that the reference to students was not to summer jobs but to 2008's largest-in-memory surge of high school graduates, owing to a 1990 birth spike. And if you look at the wording, it could actually be that something along these lines was what was in the mind of whoever prepared Secretary Chao's remarks, and they just didn't explain it to her -- or maybe she just wasn't paying attention. (There's not much evidence to suggest that the secretary has much interest in, not to mention knowledge of, labor matters. After all, the job of the secretary of labor in Republican adminstrations is to screw labor.)

* The excellent question was asked, How on earth could students entering the job market for the summer already show up as unemployed in May?

* I myself was wondering, through this whole confusing stretch, how it happens that this student-caused surge in unemployment has caught everyone unprepared and unawares, apparently a brand-new phenomenon in A.D. 2008?

* And then our learned friend Michael Froomkin (of Discourse.net), one of our Web go-to guys for legal matters, chimed in -- in a fairly high state of dudgeon, we have to note -- with a reminder that the unemployment figures are always seasonally adjusted.

I guess what matters to America's sweethearts Elaine and Mitch is that they both have jobs, though we like to think that the clock is ticking on both of them.

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David Frum Blames The McClellan Mess On Bush's Lack Of Vision and Lack Of Managerial Skill

Frum now claiming publisher botched title & he meant "Rightist Man?"

Although the GOP reaction To Scott McClellan's book that gets the most ink was prissy Bob Dole's "miserable creature" remark, a few days ago, author Newt Gingrich was questioned about McClellan on Fox and, speaking as a publishing business insider, he claims the whle thing was a big giant ploy to sell books and that the publisher probably encouraged McClellan to "spice it up." Gingrich went on to say that he's "more concerned about 'American Idol' than I am about Scott McClellan... where there are more voters and maybe more to vote for."

Republican Party wordsmith and propaganda agent David Frum has a more serious critique to offer. He thinks the whole tawdy episode is a reflection on the poor managerial qualities of his ex-boss, the man who, pre-9/11 when he became the "War President,"  fancied himself the "CEO-President:

That early team was recruited with one paramount consideration in mind: loyalty. Theoretically, it should be possible to combine loyalty with talent. But that did not happen often with the Bush team.

Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock-- but Rove did it.)

These little abuses would often be followed by unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity. Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.

Had Bush been a more active manager, these subordinated personalities might have done him less harm. But after choosing people he could dominate, he then delegated them enormous power. He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility-- Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

Yet as the proverb warns us, even worms will turn.

...To recruit and hold strong personalities, a president must demand something more than personal loyalty. He must offer a compelling vision and ideal-- a cause that people can serve without feeling servile. Otherwise a president will only get… what Bush has now got.

After Scotty: The Tom Brokaws of the world ask, How could we have known?, while the Bush kooks crawl out of the woodwork to denounce the traitor

"Regardless of whether McClellan is right about [the media] not pushing back hard enough or even, as my friend thereisnospoon says, what they reported after he stonewalled them (although it is an excellent point) . . . there are still so many abuses and lies and stories that they should be reporting on and are not."

-- clammyc, in his Daily Kos diary yesterday,
"While 'defending its honor,' MSM still dropping the ball"

"There's the loyalty trade-off for you: On the one hand, [Bernie] Kerik did a terrible job in a critical assignment in Iraq, allowed himself to be nominated to a hugely important post for which he was ill qualified and showed a stupendous lack of interest in ethical considerations when he served in New York City.

"On the plus side, he will never, ever write a tell-all memoir about any of the great men he has served."

"While the bracing effects of being pushed out of his job have helped [Scott] McClellan face reality, clarity might have come earlier if he'd just been more canny about personal relationships. His White House career could have been so different if, when Bush started babbling about W.M.D.'s in Iraq, McClellan reminded himself that this was coming from a guy who couldn't remember what drugs he had ingested."

-- Gail Collins, in her NYT column today, "What George Forgot"

It occurs to me that I may have been underestimating what poor Scotty McClellan's revelations have to tell us.

Oh, not poor Scotty's revelations themselves. I'm thinking of the reaction to them, in particular among the two groups who feel most challenged by poor Scotty's shocking revelation of, well, stuff we've known for some time now.


(1)
FIRST, THERE ARE THE MEDIA HORDES WHO SCREWED
UP BACK THEN -- JUST LIKE THEY'RE SCREWING UP NOW

Even some of the media mensches who actually got the story right are up in arms about poor Scotty pointing a pudgy finger at them. How dare he? they seem to be asking. Why, why (note how they're reduced to spluttering), by his own admission, he just stood up there and lied to us!

Is it really necessary to explain how fatuous this is? Of course the Bush regime's relentless propagandizing and lying made the media pigeons' job harder. But wasn't it still their job to get at the truth? There were lots of media people who weren't fooled, and who tried to do honest reporting -- and a bunch of them did a splendid job. Of course nobody paid any attention to them, in large part because the fat and lazy big-time media, with their suspicious big-corporate ties, tanked on the job.

But even within those organizations, I think it's safe to say there were people who knew better. I have no inside sources at the New York Times, but I know enough about the organization to venture with confidence that inside the Times building there were a lot of reporters and surely lower-level editors as well (we saw the way it worked in the last season of The Wire) screaming bloody murder about, for example, how Judy Miller had become a shill for the Bush regime.

The depressing thing is that the infotainment media don't seem to have learned a bloody thing. NBC's Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams put their heads together, combining their two generations and years beyond counting (albeit mostly wasted years) of Nightly News managing-editor experience to figure out whether "the right questions were asked, the right tone was employed and should it be viewed in the context to that time?" (That's Brian doing the asking.)

And here's the wisdom of Graybeard Tom:

Look, I think all of us would like to go back and ask questions with the benefit of hindsight of what we know now, but a lot of what was going on was unknowable.

Except, of course, that lots of people knew, and were jumping up and down trying to get the attention of the stonewalling infotainmenteers. "Well," as our pal John Amato notes on Crooks and Liars, "he should have watched Bill Moyers special on the media as a refresher course."

Meanwhile, as our friend clammyc pointed out yesterday in the terrific Daily Kos diary from which I've quoted at the top, those media slugs are providing essentially the same caliber of performance now that they did back then (I should warn that I haven't attempted to reproduce the scads of links embedded in the text -- you can check them out on Daily Kos):

While "defending its honor", MSM still dropping the ball
by clammyc

For starters, I only use "MSM" in the title because "corporate media" or "infotainment media" wouldn’t fit. That being said, the sad irony of the press corps which once again shows how out of touch the village idiots are with reality is that, despite all of the huffing and puffing about how Scott McClellan wouldn’t let them do their jobs, they still are falling flat on their faces at every turn.

I’d use the term jumped the shark (hyperlinked for those who don’t know what it means) to describe them and their role in the whole "reporting the news and professional journalism" thing that they clearly have long given up but I think the term "jump the shark" has kind of jumped the shark...

When news reporters say that their corporate bosses pushed them to take out their "America, Fuck YEAH!!!" pom poms, that is bad enough. But when the same reporter complains about how unfair McClellan was being to criticize them was not only the same one to share a stage with traitor Rove in one of the most eye-burning dances ever and is STILL, to this day the NBC News Chief White House Correspondent, and is not doing the job that McClellan accused him of not doing, well, sorry, I have no sympathies there.

And when someone like Tom Brokaw is shocked, SHOCKED, that his profession were either dumb or complicit or unfit to do the jobs they are supposed to do, it is time to not only call him on this, but to push back forcefully.

When Brokaw says that "all wars are based on propaganda", he misses the point. Propaganda means the spreading of ideas or rumor to further your cause or to damage an opposing cause. This was not propaganda. It was lies.

Period.

Hell, even Speaker Pelosi calls it a lie, although that apparently is still not grounds for impeachment.

What makes this worse, and what all of the whiny whiners are missing is that regardless of whether McClellan is right about them not pushing back hard enough or even, as my friend thereisnospoon says, what they reported after he stonewalled them (although it is an excellent point), is that there are still so many abuses and lies and stories that they should be reporting on and are not.

Where to even begin here? Even equating McCain’s total cluelessness about the troop levels and the violence in mosul with Obama’s minor "gaffe" (if it can even be called a gaffe) about a personal story that happened to be accurate in every meaningful way is a great disservice to what Americans should know when judging who should be their next President. Or the way that the Wright/Hagee/Parsley stories were reported -- if they should even have been covered at all in the first place.

And it doesn’t stop there, of course. There are real serious things -- things that should be covered and reported to the American people that we deserve to know about. Things that are imperative -- things that are both accurate but ignored and things that are inaccurate yet covered non-stop as if they were gospel.

Things like the number of troops that are committing suicide and have PTSD. Things like telecom immunity really being about protecting Bush and his illegal programs. Things like the GAO report that shows how unprepared we are to deal with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan. Things like the Pentagon propaganda campaign. Things like FISA. Things like fake "evidence" that overblows the threat that Iran is to the United States (or Israel for that matter). Things like the continued devastation in the Gulf Coast, almost three years later.

Things like Rove and Miers ignoring Congressional subpoenas for no good reason. Things like the hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters from voter ID anti-voter laws and other voter suppression tactics. Things like the same voting machines that were unreliable in 2002, 2004 and 2006 are still being used, despite many not being certified. Things like asking what exactly happened to the millions of dollars in cash that were "lost" in Iraq. Things like why the US was arming both sides of a civil war in Iraq, or exactly what the role of our troops is or the desired end game is in Iraq or the reason we should still be spending billions of dollars every month there.

So many more things. Even things like why Cindy McCain gets a pass when Teresa Heinz Kerry didn’t. Or why McCain still calls himself a "straight talker" when he is either lying, stupid or just losing it. And even bringing it back to McClellan’s bubble bursting smack in their faces, why they STILL aren’t saying that they were lied to.

All the handwringing and finger pointing and blame gaming in the world won’t change the fact that McClellan passed along (either willfully or not) lies and they were not challenged or questioned at the time. And nothing will change the fact that the independence and integrity of those who are in the corporate media were sacrificed to become "buddy buddy" with the very people that lied and destroyed national security secrets and pissed all over the Constitution and made them out for the damn fools that they proved to be.

Regardless of whether it was their choice or the choice of their corporate puppetmasters bosses.

But instead of this "woe is me" nonsense, how about a bit of reflection and actually using it as a learning experience. There is so much that needs to be reported, so much that needs exposing, so much that a bit of research can lead to a huge story that the American public will be interested in.

The sad thing is that instead of doing the job that McClellan said you didn’t do a few years ago, you choose to keep crying that it just isn’t fair.

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THEN THERE ARE THE REGIMISTS AND THEIR GROUPIES
WHO ARE SIMPLY SHOCKED BY SCOTTY'S DISLOYALTY

Here's where it gets hilarious. Presumably on the old theory that there's honor among thieves, the most astonishing people are crawling out of the woodwork. Mary Matalin? Bob Dole? And . . . and . . . Bernie Kerik???

When we venture into the land of the kooks, there's no better tour guide than the Times's Gail Collins:

Op-Ed Columnist
What George Forgot
By GAIL COLLINS

"DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE DISLOYAL, SICKENING AND DESPICABLE," wrote Bernard Kerik in an e-mail that he was circulating around this week. Kerik, you may remember, was the former New York City police commissioner who George W. Bush once tried to make chief of Homeland Security. This was during Kerik's happier, preindictment era.

Kerik's outrage was directed at Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary whose much-discussed memoir, "What Happened," reveals that the Bush White House put politics ahead of truth and openness with the American people.

I know it's a shock, but try to be brave.

The administration's defenders have not really attacked the book's thesis -- really, what could you say? But they've been frothing at the mouth over McClellan's lack of loyalty. "This will stand as the epitome, the ultimate breach of that code of honor," said Mary Matalin.

We've heard a lot about loyalty this year. Remember when Bill Richardson endorsed Barack Obama and James Carville compared Richardson to Judas Iscariot? And the whole Jeremiah Wright drama was mainly about Obama's coming to grips with the sad fact that presidents do not have the luxury of being loyal to anybody outside of their immediate gene pool.

"Having been through all I have been through in the past four years, disloyalty and betrayal seem more prevalent today than ever before in my lifetime, and that in itself, to me, is sickening," Kerik wrote in his e-mail, which also suggested that writing unflattering memoirs about working for the president "should be a crime."

Currently under indictment for multiple counts of fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion, Kerik is not, at this point, a person the administration calls upon when it wants to be defended. But he is a perfect example of what a worthless quality loyalty is in high government officials.

Kerik is stupendously loyal, which is what endeared him to Rudy Giuliani, his great patron. The Bush administration, which also prizes loyalty, shipped him off to Iraq with the critical job of supervising the rebuilding of the Iraqi police. Kerik stayed only three months, during which he devoted himself to giving interviews and being gregarious, the two things he does very well. Management, however, turned out not to be a strong point.

Back home, Bush was embarrassed when Kerik's Homeland Security nomination immediately ran aground on reports of his ethics issues. His downfall was a terrible blow to Giuliani's presidential candidacy -- although given Rudy's multitudinous deficiencies as presidential timber, it's hard to pick the one that made the difference.

Anyway, there's the loyalty trade-off for you: On the one hand, Kerik did a terrible job in a critical assignment in Iraq, allowed himself to be nominated to a hugely important post for which he was ill qualified and showed a stupendous lack of interest in ethical considerations when he served in New York City.

On the plus side, he will never, ever write a tell-all memoir about any of the great men he has served.

Whoever the next president is, I hope he-she picks incredibly well-qualified people who are strong enough to speak their minds and cynical enough not to assume the chief executive knows what he-she is doing. Loyalty does not tend to be a great virtue in these types, and the goal should be to wring as much accomplishment as possible out of them before the inevitable betrayal.

My favorite moment in "What Happened" was from 1999 when George W. Bush was deeply irritated about questions from the press on his past drug use. "The media won't let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors," the future president said. "You know, the truth is I honestly don't remember whether I tried it or not."

"I remember thinking to myself, How can that be? It didn't make a lot of sense," McClellan wrote.

While the bracing effects of being pushed out of his job have helped McClellan face reality, clarity might have come earlier if he'd just been more canny about personal relationships. His White House career could have been so different if, when Bush started babbling about W.M.D.'s in Iraq, McClellan reminded himself that this was coming from a guy who couldn't remember what drugs he had ingested.

Even now, McClellan still appears to have trouble with the critical concept that deeds matter more than words.

"Waging an unnecessary war is a grave mistake," he writes. "But in reflecting on all that happened during the Bush administration, I've come to believe that an even more fundamental mistake was made -- a decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed."

Personally, I'm a huge fan of candor and honesty. But when it comes to fundamental mistakes, I'll start with the unnecessary war.

Man, you can't make this stuff up. Sometimes I wish you could, but when it comes to these people, trust me, you really can't.

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