The DPCC Messaging Needs To Defeat Trump-- How Will Ted Lieu, Debbie Dingell And Matt Cartwright Manage?

Liz Cheney, considerably to the right of her father, now holds his old Wyoming House seat. Recently, she leap-frogged over all her colleagues into House GOP leadership as Chair of the House Republican Conference, the 3rd highest-ranking job in the GOP caucus after McCarthy and Scalise. She bumped Cathy McMorris Rodgers out of the position. Jonah Weiner’s piece for the New York Times Magazine, Why The Director of ‘Anchorman’ Decided To Take On Dick Cheney isn’t exactly a celebration of the Cheney family.

Adam McKay, the filmmaker behind Anchorman and Talladega Nights and, more recently an Oscar-winning adaptation of Michael Lewis’s financial-crash caper The Big Short has a new film, Vice, “a grim account of the life of Dick Cheney, with Christian Bale-- smoldering beneath prosthetic jowls and the ample weight he gained for the role-- in the lead.

Far from a grateful tribute, Vice-- which co-stars Amy Adams as Cheney’s wife, Lynne-- proceeds in a spirit of frenetic and ferocious irreverence… Vice is, in tone and form, one of the wildest movies he has made-- and one of the wildest movies ever made about politics, period.

…What is unambiguous, by the end, is McKay’s conviction that the American right, in its post-Reagan consolidation of power, has set our country and our planet on a path to ruin-- and that no single figure illustrates this better than Cheney. “He was the expert safecracker who opened up the safe,” McKay said, alluding to Cheney’s deft dismantling of checks on executive power, “and now the orangutan is in there, throwing around the money and the jewels.” McKay knows that a conservative backlash to his film is very likely, and while he emphasized how diligently he grounded the film in research, he also argued that making a less confrontational movie, hewing to a measured realism would have felt not only boring but also incommensurate to the task.

“I’ve never dealt with a tone like this, and I don’t think it’s by accident,” McKay said. “We’re living in a world with a tone that none of us has ever experienced. Pipe bombs are being sent to the leaders of a political party, and the guy who made Dilbert is saying, You know the bombs were really made by left-wingers because they didn’t work.” He made an incredulous face. “So, you’re claiming the assassination attempts are a false flag operation while slamming the liberals and you’re the guy who did Dilbert?” When it came to the movie’s protean tone, he said, “All I can tell you is that we were very conscious of it, we knew it was challenging and indefinable-- and we knew it had to be.”

This was true, he added, not in spite of the material’s seriousness, but because of it. “I’m suspicious of anything that feels like an old form,” he said. “We’re discovering new styles and forms, because this era we’re in demands it. The world has gotten so cartoonishly exaggerated and over the top. Why be subtle anymore?”

…Like many self-identifying progressives, McKay-- who grew up on food stamps and was raised in suburban Pennsylvania by his waitress single mother (his father, a musician, left the family when McKay was 7)-- has grown steadily disenchanted with what he calls “the corporate left.” This summer he joined the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. He thinks that capitalism must come under greater, Scandinavian-style regulatory control, “especially if we’re going to do anything about climate change.” Earlier this year he left Funny or Die, a comedy website he co-founded in 2007, after it entered into a sponsored-content agreement with Shell, a deal he called “disgusting.”

…In The Big Short, the narrator, played by Ryan Gosling, puts it this way: “Mortgage-backed securities. Subprime loans. Tranches. It’s pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it’s supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or, even better, for you just to leave them the [expletive] alone.” Last year, McKay directed the pilot for and served as an executive producer on Succession, an HBO drama about a Murdoch-style media-empire patriarch and his reprobate heirs-- their nefarious business dealings and abject power moves.

In Vice, he uses Cheney’s life to tell a broader tale about what McKay describes as “the Republican revolution and how it changed our country.” He sees Cheney as a “Zelig-style” figure of the right. His career in national politics began in the Nixon administration as a congressional intern and then apprentice to Donald Rumsfeld and, from there, intersected and coincided with the rise of key conservative figures: among them the Fox News founder, Roger Ailes, who first floated the idea for a conservative news network while working for Nixon; right-wing megadonors like the Koch brothers; conservative strategy shops like the Heritage Foundation; and, finally, George W. Bush, over whose administration-- and over whose decision to invade Iraq after Sept. 11, despite paltry intelligence linking the two-- Cheney exercised unprecedented influence for a vice president.

One of McKay’s models was The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s landmark biography of Robert Moses. “He’s in the middle of all this stuff,” McKay said of Cheney, “and finally he gets his hand on the wheel.” Unlike Caro, McKay had to tell his story through a camera, and so there are compressions, elisions and metaphors in Vice that reflect both a filmmaker’s desire to enthrall the crowd and a prosecutor’s desire to nail the defendant. Reading journalistic accounts of Cheney’s move, in 2000, from the private sector back into public service, we learn that he took elaborate steps to divest from Halliburton, the oil conglomerate where he was C.E.O., to avoid the appearance of conflict; here, the relationship between Cheney and the energy sector is presented as one of clear cronyism. Or take Sept. 11. In Barton Gellman’s play-by-play of that morning in Angler, it’s strongly implied that Cheney usurped Bush’s authority, ignoring the chain of command and giving fighter jets the O.K. to shoot down commercial airliners if they appeared to be hijacked. The official White House version was that Bush gave Cheney permission to pass along this order, and Gellman, poring carefully through communications records and notes taken by administration staff members, leaves open the extremely slim possibility that this is true. In Vice there is no such equivocation. We see Cheney give the order to take out the planes himself. Compression, of course, isn’t the same as distortion: Jane Mayer, the investigative journalist, described this scene to me as “a perfect gem,” and told McKay, after he screened the movie for her, that he “got it right.”

One way McKay might have buttressed Vice against possible charges of liberal bias would be to include the sorts of political critiques he readily offers up in conversation. “When Clinton was elected, he cut welfare and deregulated banks, just like a Republican would have done,” he said, from his couch. “Obama waged a war against whistle-blowers, he let the banks off the hook and he expanded executive power.” McKay did tinker for a while with stitching points like these into Vice-- making it “the story of Dick Cheney and the rise of the Republican Party, and how they got so big they swallowed the Democrats.” To this end, he pieced in footage of Hillary Clinton supporting the Iraq war. “But it’s hard,” McKay went on. “The audience only has a certain amount of oxygen in their lungs.” As he said earlier: “I could have made the movie three and a half hours long, but you can thank me that I didn’t.” (The film runs just over 130 minutes.)

…On the subject of villainy, McKay said: “Cheney and Bush did kill, conservatively, half a million civilians in Iraq. Some estimates have it at more than a million. So he’s pretty bad.” But, he said, “I think you have to humanize him, because unless we see how a regular human being can go down these roads, it’s useless.” (McKay has heard nothing from the Cheneys, who did not participate in the making of the film, although he noted that Mary started following him on Twitter.)

Is Vice part of the story Democrats need to be telling between now and 2020, when there’s an historical imperative that Trump be sent packing in no uncertain terms and certainly no with any kind of uncertainty that will encourage fascism to rear its ugly head in our country again any time soon? Wednesday, the L.A. Times published an interview with George Lakoff on what Democrats don’t understand-- and Republicans do-- about how voters think. She kicked it off by asking him about what the story Democrats have to tell to voters for the next two years.

Thursday the Democratic caucus in the House elected Ted Lieu, Matt Cartwright and Debbie Dingell co-chairs of the DPCC-- the Democratic Policy and Communication Committee. It’s their bailiwick. This is what Lakoff would like them to know:

The story has two parts, and they have to do with progressive values. One of them comes from Abraham Lincoln, that in a democracy, you have a government that is of, by, and for the people.

“Of” means the ordinary folks are in charge, and “by” means that the people who are governing you have the same life experiences that you have and understand that, and “for” means that the role of the government is to take care of people.

The second thing is that the private depends on public resources, both private life and private enterprise. You can’t have a business without public resources like roads and bridges and airports and the electric grids. But private life is like that too. You need the same roads and bridges and airports and electric grid and much more. Without public resources, you can’t have private enterprise or private life.

And that's something that is rarely said. If you ask a Democrat if that’s true, they’ll all say yes and they’ll give examples. But if you ask them, “Have you ever said it?” the answer is, no.

And that’s the point. They haven’t said it.

…Every Democrat should deliver the same messages and repeat them over and over and over. Not only that, they should repeat them every time they have a policy, and they should point out how the policy relates to these values.



You want to say this over and over so that people understand, after a couple of years of hearing it-- maybe getting tired of it. But the point is that they would understand that’s what democratic values are, and why they are so crucial.

…It’s not just democratic values. It’s the values of living in a democracy. You can’t have a business without public resources; that affects every business. It affects Republicans as well as Democrats. When you talk about what Lincoln’s words mean-- of, by and for the people-- that affects all sorts of people, Republicans as well as Democrats.

There is a way of talking to people, to say, “Imagine that you don’t have public resources. Imagine that there were no roads, that there were no airports, that there were no air traffic controllers and so on. Here’s what a public resource is. Imagine that it wasn’t there.”

And the Republicans might just say, “Well, privatize them-- privatize roads, privatize airports.”

All very nice except that that won’t happen. If you privatize them, they become a matter of profit for people, and since you absolutely require them, [the private owners] can bilk you for as much as they want. That’s why they’re public resources.

Framing is a concept you brought to the table-- the way you tell the story, the way you make your point. Democrats don’t seem to be as good at it as [Republicans]. Democrats don’t know how people think. It’s really sad. The problem is what I call the Enlightenment reason. [Former President Barack] Obama, in his [recent] speech, talked about the importance of Enlightenment reason. And a week later, Hillary Clinton is talking at Wellesley about how it was important that Wellesley teach Enlightenment reason.

Enlightenment reason says everybody reasons the same way; that’s what makes them human. Whereas if you have different world views, you’re going to reason differently. Enlightenment reason says that all you need to do is get the facts, and everybody will reason to the right conclusion, since everybody has the same reason. No. If they have different worldviews, they’ll reason to different conclusions.

Enlightenment reason does not recognize different worldviews. Enlightenment reason doesn’t admit framing. It doesn’t admit metaphorical thought. It doesn’t admit the way people really work.

The Democrats don’t understand this. They think that if you just tell people the facts, they will all reason to the right conclusion. That’s why they keep coming up with fact after fact after fact, rather than framing things in a way so that people will understand why these things are important.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Lest we forget, Trump was not the first in government to be massively corrupt. It almost comes with the territory. The thing is, though, Trump is taking corruption to new heights in a massive way. He is pushing the envelope of corruption further and further than it has been ever pushed before. That's what happens when we let those who came earlier push the corruption envelope further than it had ever gone before their time. That's what happens when we let them get away with their corruption. Some other sleazebag is always going to come along in the future, take a look at the past as an example, and decide what they can get away with. Trump knows damn well that no punishment befell Dick Cheney; not for his financial greed or even his war crimes. To the criminal mind, that is known as permission. Hence Trump and his behavior. The biggest question that remains now is what happens if we let Trump walk free. Imagine what, or who, comes after that.

Jeb Didn't Want It To Come To This But His Campaign Is Now An Apologia For His Brother's Reign

When Trump says that Bush (and Cheney) ignored all the flashing red lights that they should have taken as warnings of what was to happen on 9/11, he raises the hackles of Bush-Cheney apologists and touches the rawest of raw nerves. Because, of course, he's 100% correct. Let me go back to a passage from Barton Gellman's absolutely definitive Cheney biography Angler about how they aggressively and vehemently dismissed every serious warning that the American security and intelligence agencies flagged regarding al-Qaeda:

When suicide bombers attacked the USS Cole shortly before the 2000 election, killing seventeen sailors and nearly sinking the Navy destroyer, candidate Cheney said, "Any would-be terrorist out there needs to know that if you're going to attack, you'll be hit very hard and very quick. It's not time for diplomacy and debate. It's time for action." This was an essential point of comparison in the 2000 campaign: the strength and resolve of the Bush-Cheney team in contrast to the ditherings of Clinton and Gore.

At the time, the Cole bombing looked like al Qaeda's doing, but U.S. intelligence lacked proof. Bush and Cheney, on the campaign trail, vowed to retaliate once the perpetrators became clear. Soon after they took office, the facts were in.

Cheney told his authorized biographer, "I don't recall it cropping up." That is surprising. At 4 p.m. on February 9, 2001, less than 3 weeks after arriving in the White House, Cheney received a briefing that featured this slide: "Al Qaeda responsible for Nairobi, Dar el Salaam, Tirana, Kampala, Yemen, WTC, NYC tunnels, Jordan millennium, Boston, LA, Washington State bomb materials, USS Cole." … Six days later, in a memo sent directly to Cheney, a senior director on the National Security Council staff suggested that the CIA should be ready to "definitively conclude that al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole. Richard Clarke and others in his counter-terrorism directorate peppered Chaney, Condi Rice, and Steve Hadley with additional evidence-- and recommendations for a military response-- at least 5 more times in writing during the spring.

The vice president, like his colleagues, had other priorities.

Donald Trump, who sometimes appears to have as a major goal to make Jeb unelectable, has lured Jeb and the rest of the Bush-Cheney old guard into the very debate they didn't want to see on the table-- and certainly never thought they would in the Republican primary. With Wall Street still-- if with trepidation and second thoughts-- still backing Jeb as their candidate, as the recent campaign financial filings prove definitively, Jeb still can't get to first base with ordinary Republican voters. According to the Wall Street Journal this weekend, "in a sign of how Mr. Bush’s fundraising pace has slowed down, he raised less from the financial industry in the last three months than he did in the first 15 days of his campaign alone. Of the top 10 employers listed by Mr. Bush’s donors, half are financial firms: Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Neuberger Berman and Barclays, where Mr. Bush previously worked as a consultant making about $2 million a year. In the three months that ended Sept. 30, Mr. Bush raised about $200,000 from the employees of 11 major financial firms, less than 60% of what he raised from those firms in the first 15 days of his campaign, in June. That is roughly seven times the amount collected apiece by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, and 11 times the amount collected by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose wife is on leave from her job as a managing director at Goldman Sachs." Nonetheless, Jeb is starting to feel the fall-off in support, even from his Wall Street devotees. Yesterday Politico reported that an increasingly desperate Jeb has slashed hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign staff salaries.

Still slamming' poor Jeb early this AM

Unfortunately for Jeb, the polling has been uniformly abysmal for him. The newest national poll from CBS shows him in 6th place with a distinctly non-first tier 6%, behind not just Trump and Carson but trailing Ted Cruz, former protégée Marco Rubio, and even Carly Fiorina. Worse yet, he is now viewed more unfavorably (38%) than favorably (32%) by Republican primary voters. But a bitter battled with the clueless Rubio for 4th or 5th place isn't what Jeb or the Bush Machine expected to be fighting in the fall of 2015. Trump claims the credit-- and to some extent he deserves it. He's constant needling and his success at "marketing" Jeb as "low energy" and too weak to be president and not smart enough to be president has stuck. Now, drawing him into a fight over what his brother did or didn't do right around 9/11 could finish the Jeb candidacy off once and for all.

“When you talk about George Bush, I mean, say what you want, the World Trade Center came down during his time,” Mr. Trump said.

Blaming 9/11 on Mr. Bush is taboo for Republicans and has largely been off-limits for Democrats. Pressed on whether he really meant to blame the attacks on Mr. Bush, the billionaire developer did not back down.

“He was president, O.K.?,” Mr. Trump said. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”

Mr Trump has been fiercely critical in recent months of Jeb Bush, who is also seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and in the process has levied attacks on his brother, the former president. At a Republican debate last month, Mr. Trump blamed Mr. Bush’s presidency for helping to elect President Obama.

“Your brother’s administration gave us Barack Obama, because it was such a disaster, those last three months, that Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have been elected,” Mr. Trump said.

Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, defended his brother’s performance, saying he kept the country safe. Mr. Trump rebutted that he did not feel so safe.

At the very top of Jeb Bush's Twitter page yesterday was this:

That was on Jeb's page, not Trump's! But scroll down the page a bit and you find this:

And now even mainstream conservatives like David Frum-- a former employee of Jeb's brother-- are increasingly sickened by how easy it has been for even a silly cardboard bully like Trump to effectively paint Jeb as a weak and pusillanimous straw man with no backbone and no brain. Every time Jeb engages with Trump it becomes more and more apparent he is utterly unfit to be president of anything. The poor sad sack of a man is the furthest thing from a leader of anyone running in either party, save, perhaps, Lincoln Chafee, who at least stands for some decent policies.

Jeb wants to talk to voters about what a successful conservative governor of Florida he was. He doesn't want to re-litigate 9/11-- but he has no choice with Trump bellowing about it now and introducing a new word that is rapidly attaching itself to the definition in voters' minds of Jeb Bush: "pathetic." Whether Trump himself is ultimately the candidate or not, no one wants to vote for someone generally perceived as "pathetic." And that's what the two candidates are now calling each other, "pathetic," a word likely to stick to Bush long after Trump goes back to his successful brand marketing business.




UPDATE: Monday Morning, Early

Trump is still blasting away at Jeb on his most vulnerable point, just pounding the crap out of him. No one can possibly be happier than Bill and Hill.

Should Anyone Be Punished For That Whole Torture Thing? Or No?

Apparently Dick Cheney thinks he caught bin Laden by torturing some people down in Guantánamo. He seemed out of his mind in his Meet The Press appearance yesterday. "I'd do it again in a minute," is as good a reason for indicting him and trying him as any I've ever heard. And he has "no regrets." If the justice system was working properly, he would. Interestingly, Members of Parliament, from both side of their aisle, are pressuring-- to no avail of course-- David Cameron for an official judicial inquiry into the U.K.'s role into the Cheney torture program. Unlike Cheney, U.K. Conservatives are getting nervous. First, though, take a look at political hack Chuck Schumer advocating for a "balanced" use of torture:

Andrew Tyrie, Tory chairman of an all-party group on rendition, said: “That we are talking about here is kidnap and people being taken to places where they can be maltreated or tortured and I never thought in the 21st century that my country would be facilitating such practices, but they have done; the question is: how much?”

David Davis, the Tory former shadow Home Secretary, told Sky News: “I think this needs to be a judicial inquiry… it needs to be bigger than that [the ISC inquiry]. It needs to be completely independent of the establishment.” What we want out of it is something which says to everybody this will never happen again, indeed, it becomes politically fatal for it to happen on your watch.”

...Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Craig Murray, who was sacked as UK ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2004 after alleging that Britain used intelligence obtained by the CIA under torture, said he attended a meeting at the Foreign Office where he was told that “it was not illegal for us to use intelligence from torture as long as we did not carry out the torture ourselves” and claimed this policy came directly from Mr Straw.

Murray would like to see former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, as well as Tony Blair, stand trial for torture. And he's running for Parliament now to make that point. "When," he wrote, "I then went public with the news that Uzbek territory was part of a global CIA torture programme, I was dismissed as a fantasist by Mr Blair’s henchmen. Now finally, a decade later, I have been vindicated by last week’s shocking Senate Intelligence Committee report... The CIA programme included both torture they conducted themselves and torture conducted for them by allies. Shamefully, the torture-by-proxy details remain classified to protect America’s gruesome ‘allies.' The CIA were flying people to Uzbekistan to be tortured, usually via their secret prison at Szymany in Poland. The Uzbeks were doing the actual torture, sometimes with CIA members in the room." Oops.

"We don’t need," he concluded, "an inquiry into British complicity in torture. We need a trial. And it should be Tony Blair and Jack Straw in the dock." Over the weekend the Institute for Public Accuracy looked at this mess from a different perspective-- the complicity of psychologists, medical professionals, in the Cheney torture regime.

“Earlier this week the Senate Intelligence Committee released the long-awaited executive summary of its 6,000-page classified report on the CIA’s brutal post-9/11 detention and interrogation program. The report provides gruesome details of the abuse that took place in several ‘black site’ prisons-- waterboarding, confinement in a coffin-sized box, threatened harm to family members, forced nudity, freezing temperatures, ‘rectal feeding’ without medical need, stress positions, diapering, days of sleep deprivation, and more.

“Two names appear dozens of times in the committee’s summary: Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar. These are the pseudonyms that were given to James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. It has been known for several years that these two contract psychologists played central roles in designing and implementing the CIA’s torture program. Now we also know how lucrative that work was for Mitchell and Jessen: their company was paid over $80 million by the CIA…

“Responding to the new Senate report, the American Psychological Association (APA) was quick to issue a press release distancing itself from Mitchell and Jessen. The statement emphasized that the two psychologists are not APA members-- although Mitchell was a member until 2006-- and that they are therefore ‘outside the reach of the association’s ethics adjudication process.’ But there is much more to this story. After years of stonewalling and denials, last month the APA Board appointed an investigator to examine allegations that the APA colluded with the CIA and Pentagon in supporting the Bush Administration’s abusive ‘war on terror’ detention and interrogation practices.

Paul Waldman-- this morning in the Washington Post on the significance of Cheney's demonstration of abject moral bankruptcy. "[T]orture advocates from the Bush administration and the CIA," he wrote, "have always insisted that the things they did to prisoners-- like the use of waterboarding or stress positions, the purpose of which is to induce excruciating pain-- are not actually torture, and are therefore perfectly legal and morally unproblematic. This is one of the two pillars on which their advocacy rests, the other being that the torture program produced significant intelligence that couldn’t have been obtained any other way. And it’s precisely what could allow a future administration to start torturing prisoners all over again."

Cheney’s argument here-- and this was hardly the first time-- is that as long as al-Qaeda’s tactics are worse than ours, nothing we do is morally unjustified. His claim that “there’s this notion that somehow there’s moral equivalence between what the terrorists and what we do” is a classic straw man. No one’s asking whether the CIA’s torture program is better or worse than the September 11 attacks; that’s not how you make moral judgments. According to Cheney’s logic, if I approached him on the street, pushed him over and took his wallet, I could escape accountability by telling the judge that I did nothing wrong because it would have been much worse had I hit him over the head with a lead pipe and stolen his car.

Cheney never even attempted to define torture. But that definition isn’t some complex, arcane matter that you need a team of law professors to unravel. It’s very straightforward. Here’s the way U.S. law defines torture: “An act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

The United Nations Convention Against Torture-- a treaty the United States signed and ratified-- defines it in a substantively identical (if somewhat more verbose) way: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

But even after this repeated questioning, we still don’t know how Dick Cheney or any other torture advocate defines it. Why not? It seems pretty clear. There is simply no definition that anyone could devise that wouldn’t apply to things like stress positions or waterboarding. Try to imagine one. Torture is the infliction of severe physical or mental suffering to obtain information or a confession-- but only if it leaves a mark? Or only if it’s done by non-Americans? Any such definition would be absurd on its face.

So when people like Cheney are asked what the definition of torture is, they say, “September 11!” When asked what definition of torture wouldn’t apply to the particular techniques the CIA employed, they just repeat, “We didn’t torture” over and over. They not only defend torture as a means of obtaining intelligence, they sing its praises and insist that it was spectacularly successful, all without having the courage to call the thing by its true and only name... But torture was already illegal, and the Bush administration did it anyway. All it required was a couple of administration lawyers willing to write memos saying, in essence, do whatever you want. In this case, the key memo was written by a lawyer named Jay Bybee, who wrote that if a technique of abuse didn’t cause “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of bodily functions,” then it wasn’t “severe” and therefore wasn’t torture. Jay Bybee sits today on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Every single Republican in the Senate, along with 25 Democrats [including Chuck Schumer], voted to confirm him to that position.

Karl Rove on rectal feeding:

Cheney's Still Not Arrested-- Liu Tienan Just Got A Life Sentence

As close to prison as Cheney will ever get

Despite our best hopes, of course there is no chance Cheney or any of his criminally-minded torturers will be held accountable form anything in the Torture Report. And there's no chance the Wall Street banksters will be held accountable for pillaging the economy. And, worst of all, there's no chance any Members of Congress will be held accountable for writing the laws that create and sustain such a system. Could this really be anything like what Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, George Washington and John Adams had in mind when they sacrificed so much to start a new nation conceived in Enlightenment principles and values?

Sunday we looked at how much more seriously China takes political corruption against society. Even though-- it is often a battle between pythons and crocodiles. Before I get into the latest good news from China, let me clarify Sunday's story with an update from a close from in Beijing. Zhou and Xi are both powerful men. And in China nothing gets done unless you grease the person who could help you get something done. Everyone does it; it's simply the way things go. Both guys are corrupt and probably have roughly the same amount of extorted moola. My guess is that Xi has more.

Xi is a 2nd generation guy, from Money, who made his way up the ladder by help from his relatives. For now, we can call him George Dubya. Zhou was a poor kid who worked his way up the ladder and who is relatively well respected by the people. He got into an argument where he refused to kiss Xi's ass at a meeting of big shots. A heated exchange occurred. People were starting to take sides...

Upon leaving the meeting Zhou's driver zoomed out and almost hit Xi, forcing him to dodge the car and he fell on his back. Remember a while back that Xi was missing and recouping from a "bad back" (couldn't meet with Hillary)-- well, now you now it wasn't from golf. It gave Xi impetus and time to concoct a plan, flimsy at best but a plan.

When people like a political opponent of Xi's, something always happens to them. Bo Xilai, a trumped up case of he and his wife poisoning their English partner. And now, a similar treatment is being extended to the peoples favorite and respected Zhou Yongkang. So... things aren't what they seem, huh?

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Liu Tienan, the former head of China’s energy agency was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking 36 million yuan ($5.8 million) in bribes to approve projects.

Liu and his son Liu Decheng took the money from 2002 to 2012, receiving it in stocks, cars, cash, and a phantom job for his son drew a salary, it said. The court ordered the confiscation of all Liu’s personal assets.

“Liu believes the punishment is harsh,” Li Fabao, Liu’s lawyer, said by phone immediately after the sentence was announced. “He did everything because of his son. He’s spoiled his son, and he now regrets that.”

The case of Liu Decheng, who gave testimony at his father’s trial, will be handled separately, according to the postings.

Liu is the latest “tiger” to be punished in President Xi Jinping’s two-year anti-corruption campaign to bolster his power base and curb the graft that he’s warned could erode the party’s legitimacy. More than 80,000 officials have been punished for breaking party rules, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection said last week.

Liu was also former deputy head of the National Development and reform Commission, China’s top planning body, until he was stripped of his position in May 2013. The agency approves infrastructure projects and controls energy prices.

Zhuang Deshui, professor of public administration with Peking University, said the punishment meted out to Liu is intended as a strong deterrent for other officials.

“Liu’s case is high profile and will have a big impact,” Zhang said. “So the sentence could be made not only from a judicial perspective based on the criminal acts, but also after taking into consideration its influence.”

At today’s hearing, Liu stressed he had voluntarily provided information about his case and hadn’t put up a legal defense.

“I don’t have anything to say for myself because I caused huge loss for the country and the party,” according to the court’s records on the Weibo social media service. He also “broke down in tears for his fall from grace,” it said.

The court’s postings also showed several testimonies from the son against him. One case involved the son receiving a Nissan Teana as a gift after his father approved a heavy-polluting chemical plant in the eastern Chinese city of Ningbo.

So what's the real story behind this one? I'm sure it's not as filthy and devastating as Cheney walking around free.

Just kidding

Compromise: Pardon Bush, Execute Cheney And Let's Move On From This Whole Torture Thing

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, had an ironic idea this week-- Obama pardoning Bush and Cheney for torture, making the point that what they did is illegal.

The Obama administration could still take measures to hold accountable the officials who authorized torture. Some of the statutes of limitations have run out, but not all of them have. And the release of the Senate's report provides a blueprint for criminal investigations, even if that's not what the intelligence committee set out to do.

But let's face it: Mr. Obama is not inclined to pursue prosecutions-- no matter how great the outrage, at home or abroad, over the disclosures-- because of the political fallout. He should therefore take ownership of this decision. He should acknowledge that the country's most senior officials authorized conduct that violated fundamental laws, and compromised our standing in the world as well as our security. If the choice is between a tacit pardon and a formal one, a formal one is better. An explicit pardon would lay down a marker, signaling to those considering torture in the future that they could be prosecuted.

Mr. Obama could pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.'s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantanamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all.

...The spectacle of the president's granting pardons to torturers still makes my stomach turn. But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware. Prosecutions would be preferable, but pardons may be the only viable and lasting way to close the Pandora's box of torture once and for all.

Cheney-- who said it's all a bunch of hooey and that the torturers should be decorated, not criticized-- and other avatars of tyranny and inhumanity-- like, for example, most Republican congressionals-- still revel in what they did and deny there was anything improper... despite this. If you read this blog with any regularity, you probably know I'm not opposed, at least not in theory, to the death penalty for crimes against humanity. If you don't think I am an advocate for the death penalty for Cheney and his team of torturers, you don't read DWT closely enough.

But, as you can see in his floor speech from earlier today, John McCain broke with the overtly fascist wing of his party and praised the torture report, which he called "a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose-- to secure actionable intelligence to prevent further attacks on the U.S. and our allies-- but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world."

“I believe the American people have a right-- indeed, a responsibility-- to know what was done in their name; how these practices did or did not serve our interests; and how they comported with our most important values.

...“They must know when the values that define our nation are intentionally disregarded by our security policies, even those policies that are conducted in secret. They must be able to make informed judgments about whether those policies and the personnel who supported them were justified in compromising our values; whether they served a greater good; or whether, as I believe, they stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good.

“What were the policies? What was their purpose? Did they achieve it? Did they make us safer? Less safe? Or did they make no difference? What did they gain us? What did they cost us? The American people need the answers to these questions. Yes, some things must be kept from public disclosure to protect clandestine operations, sources and methods, but not the answers to these questions.

“By providing them, the Committee has empowered the American people to come to their own decisions about whether we should have employed such practices in the past and whether we should consider permitting them in the future. This report strengthens self-government and, ultimately, I believe, America’s security and stature in the world. I thank the Committee for that valuable public service.

“I have long believed some of these practices amounted to torture, as a reasonable person would define it, especially, but not only the practice of waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture. Its use was shameful and unnecessary; and, contrary to assertions made by some of its defenders and as the Committee’s report makes clear, it produced little useful intelligence to help us track down the perpetrators of 9/11 or prevent new attacks and atrocities.

“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering. Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises that which most distinguishes us from our enemies, our belief that all people, even captured enemies, possess basic human rights, which are protected by international conventions the U.S. not only joined, but for the most part authored.

...“There was considerable misinformation disseminated then about what was and wasn’t achieved using these methods in an effort to discourage support for the legislation. There was a good amount of misinformation used in 2011 to credit the use of these methods with the death of Osama bin Laden. And there is, I fear, misinformation being used today to prevent the release of this report, disputing its findings and warning about the security consequences of their public disclosure.

“What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies, but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow. That could be a real surprise, since it contradicts the many assurances provided by intelligence officials on the record and in private that enhanced interrogation techniques were indispensable in the war against terrorism. And I suspect the objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure-- torture’s ineffectiveness-- because we gave up much in the expectation that torture would make us safer. Too much.

“Obviously, we need intelligence to defeat our enemies, but we need reliable intelligence. Torture produces more misleading information than actionable intelligence. And what the advocates of harsh and cruel interrogation methods have never established is that we couldn’t have gathered as good or more reliable intelligence from using humane methods.

“The most important lead we got in the search for bin Laden came from using conventional interrogation methods. I think it is an insult to the many intelligence officers who have acquired good intelligence without hurting or degrading prisoners to assert we can’t win this war without such methods. Yes we can and we will.

“But in the end, torture’s failure to serve its intended purpose isn’t the main reason to oppose its use. I have often said, and will always maintain, that this question isn’t about our enemies; it’s about us. It’s about who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. It’s about how we represent ourselves to the world.

Remember, the only person prosecuted in association with the CIA torture program is former CIA official John Kiriakou, who refused to take part in the Cheney-ordered torture program and who leaked information about it to reporters. He's currently serving a prison sentence. Cheney is considered a respectable member of society in certain circles. Right after the release of the report Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY, the respected former Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, expressed the outrage over the practices described in it by so many normal Americans (if not most Republicans).

“I am deeply disturbed, even disgusted, by the graphic scenes of torture described in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques. They provide further confirmation of what we have already known for years, that America committed horrific abuses during the 'War on Terror.' Press accounts have informed us about CIA black sites, 'renditions' of terrorism suspects to foreign countries, and multiple instances of mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay Prison.”

“As I said first many years ago, torture is inconsistent with democratic principles of freedom and is a violation of the right to be free from cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment at the hands of the government. Waterboarding-- one of the methods described in the report-- has long been considered torture and committing or ordering torture is a severe crime under both international and U.S. laws. Moreover, torture has never proven to be more effective than other methods of interrogation and did not produce any blockbuster intelligence while in use.

“As these acts are violations of both American law and morality, we must hold those accountable and prevent such abuses from happening in the future. In 2009, I called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations of torture and have today joined with my colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee to advocate for a new round of hearings on the Senate CIA Torture report.

“I am also announcing today plans to reintroduce the American Anti-Torture Act of 2014, which would extend the Army Field Manual standards to all interrogations, ensuring that U.S. law has a single, uniform, baseline of treatment of prisoners. Additionally, the bill would clarify that interrogation techniques that are prohibited for use by the military’s own field manual on interrogations are similarly prohibited if used by the CIA or other government agencies. We must prohibit torture by law once and for all.”

Newly-elected Congressman Ted Lieu is a decorated Air Force Lt. Colonel. He takes protecting the American people and the Constitution very, very seriously. He was recently elected freshman class president by the just elected House Democrats and today I asked him how he thinks of the release of the torture report.

"The two words 'National Security' have been used to justify brutal governmental overreach in our nation's history, from the Red Scare of McCarthyism to internment of over a hundred thousand American citizens in World War II to torture by the CIA. Each time, our country's national security was harmed-- not helped-- when overzealous federal officials thought they were above the law. While we need to be vigilant in our National Security, we cannot allow fear to override basic principles of freedom and human rights.

"Few nations have the capacity, systems, and democratic values in place to investigate and issue a report as important and profound as the US Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA interrogation methods. As America has done in the past when confronted with outrageous governmental actions, we investigated, learn from our mistakes, and became a better nation. Our country wisely makes it a federal crime for US service members-- including US military intelligenc personnel-- to maltreat prisoners. It is time we bring the CIA into the 21st century and make all federal officials follow the same interrogation standards that we apply to our US military."

And then there's this, the unpunished criminals still spouting their insanity. It's all over Fox, of course-- and tomorrow morning Morning Joe will feature Hayden himself (and John Yoo!) on MSNBC, making the network complicit in his coverup, lies and grotesque criminality.

Kissinger: Even Worse Than Cheney

Constantin Costa-Gavras' 1982 film, Missing, had some pretty big stars-- including Jack Lemmon, Charles Cioffi and Sissy Spacek-- and won some pretty big awards-- including the Palme d'Or at Cannes for best male actor and the Academy Award for best writing-- and had a hugely acclaimed score by Vangelis, but there's a good chance you never saw it-- nor read the Tom Hauser book it was based on, The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice. That's because Henry Kissinger didn't want anyone to see that film or read that book. He got it banned. Really… in America. [It was banned in Chile too.] Earlier this morning we looked at the tragedy of war criminals being given a pass, making it inevitable for the destructive work of future war criminals. It was Dick Cheney and King Leopold we were looking at. In between them, though, was, chronologically speaking, Henry Kissinger, who's still alive, still unpunished, still welcomed into polite company, at least in some circles.

So the movie is about an American journalist, Charles Horman, who was as excited as I was when Allende was elected president of Chile. Luckily for me, I was driving a VW van around Asia at the time. Harmon and his wife drove their VW van down to Chile-- right into a bloody coup engineered by Nixon, Kissinger and Chilean fascist Agusto Pinochet. A very bloody coup. The CIA murdered Harmon. The movie is about his dad and his wife looking for him. This week a Chilean court finally admitted what happened, as if anyone whip know anything about the case-- other than Republicans and fascists-- ever suspected anything else.

A Chilean court said U.S. military intelligence played a key role that led to the 1973 killings of two Americans, whose story inspired the 1982 Oscar-winning film Missing. The court said former U.S. Navy Capt. Ray E. Davis gave Chilean officials information about journalist Charles Horman, 31, and student Frank Teruggi, 24, that led to their arrest and execution. This took place days after the 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. The movie Missing was about the search for Horman by his wife and father. The case was practically ignored in Chile until 2000, when Horman's widow Joyce filed a lawsuit against Pinochet. Courts in Chile thought Davis was living in Florida and had sought extradition, but he was secretly living in Chile and died there last year. "Judge Zepeda's ruling both implicates and incriminates U.S. intelligence personnel as playing a dark role in the murder of my husband," said Horman's widow Joyce. "My hope is that the record of evidence compiled by the court sheds further light on how and why Charles was targeted."

Former U.S. Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and two other Kissinger stooges sued Costa-Garvas, Hauser, Universal Pictures and MCA for defamation of character in a successful attempt to keep the movie and book from being widely seen in the U.S. The U.S. State Department-- which still publicly displays a picture of Henry Kissinger--half-heartedly persists in denying any involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Horman, half-heartedly because in 1999 a declassified 1976 State Department memo admitted, "U.S. intelligence may have played an unfortunate part."

So do I think, Kissinger should be dragged out of his home and shot like a dog today? I admit that I do but I also believe in due process of law and I would regret if Kissinger (and Cheney) were shot without trials. But unless there are trials and accountability there will be more Kissingers, more Cheney and, alas, more murdered Charles Hormans.

Because Cheney Has Gone Unpunished For His Crimes, Someone Else In His Position Will Do Even Worse In The Future

Yesterday everyone was hating on poor little Belgium. It was over that ballgame in Brazil. I'm not in the Ann Coulter camp or anything, but I just don't get any more excited about soccer than I do about baseball or football or bad mitten. And Belgium… well, I have to admit, was always fly-over country for me when I lived in Amsterdam and visited Paris as frequently as possible-- except I drove. When I did visit Belgium in more recent years, I came to appreciate that the food was pretty amazing-- my faves in Brussels being Comme Chez Soi, L'Épicerie, and Les Brasseries Georges-- but I could never get over Adam Hochschild's 1998 historical masterpiece, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, And Heroism In Colonial Africa. A few years ago I did a post about how the CIA conspired with Belgium to murder the first elected-- and last I think-- president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, based in great part on Hochschild's work.

Monday Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell's chief of staff when he was Secretary of State, wrote about how the national myths of the "civilized countries" like the U.S. and Belgium "mask or even convert most of the crimes, and what the myths don't eliminate or alter poor education and memory lapses do." He was referring too the murder, plunder, slaughter, devastation, torture and massacre the civilized nations, primarily of the Northern Hemisphere, perpetrated against the backward nations of the Southern Hemisphere. And the latest myths about Justice and human rights progress is belied by, for example, the hideous unprosecuted war criminal Dick Cheney. "As has been the case since humankind began to organize itself," wrote Wilkerson, "Dick Cheney believes that wealth and power-- his and his cronies wealth and power foremost-- are still the relevant strategic objectives of empire. King Leopold of Belgium is not dead, simply reincarnated in a more modern form. Torturing people is dependent on a nation's supposed needs, killing people on the expediency of policy, waging war on monetary and commercial gain, and lying to the people is a highly reputable tactic in pursuit of each. Leopold would love Dick Cheney."

Cheney even models Leopold: never in the dangerous fray himself (five draft deferments, e.g.), a master of bureaucratic manipulation and intrigue, in love to a fault with secrecy, willing to undertake any crime under the sun so long as it leads to profit, deeply relishing every moment of evil he is able to engineer, and a master of masking it all through adroit, politically-attuned public relations aimed at people too stupid to question him -- all while paying absolutely no attention to what his past clearly demonstrates he has done, thus thoroughly frustrating the decent folks all around him. Leopold to a "T."

This modern man, Cheney, however needs no kingship, no ornate palaces, no personally-owned colony like the Congo; Cheney's writ is the world. It is all of humankind that Cheney would torture, enslave, murder, or plunder if it were required. And Cheney is the ultimate arbiter of whether it is required. Take a look at that face as he tells the American people and the world in 2002 that "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Now, wait a dozen years and envision the same face, somewhat leaner and-- if possible-- meaner, saying on the editorial pages of his Journal as Iraq implodes: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." He is of course talking about President Obama, not President George W. Bush. Leopold, whom the American poet Vachel Lindsay, has "Burning in Hell...", must be yearning for Dick's arrival because no one, except perhaps for Leopold himself, would register such a claim in the face of such self-demeaning evidence to the contrary.

In the same chapter of his book referenced above, Hochschild writes: "The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting." He is right. But it is more than forgetting. It is an abject lack of political courage to hold people accountable.

In King Leopold's case, Belgium and the wider world want to move on and not look back. Holding people accountable would mean holding themselves accountable. That central Africa is today still an unfolding tragedy of exploitation, commercial rivalries, and indigenous incapacity partly an inheritance of colonialism, matters little. The world moves on relentlessly to fulfill its oligarchies' desires for wealth and power. Suitable rhetoric is developed and delivered to keep the masses quiescent. The Leopolds and Cheneys of the world are privately lauded for their hard-headed realpolitik while appropriately tut-tutted in public. Presidents and prime ministers proclaim that it would be nationally disruptive to hold people accountable for their crimes and, besides, they are more concerned for the future than the past.

Which is why most people in America today live in the moment and in the moment alone. If they realized and cared about the past, if they used that realization and care to make the future better, they would not be able to live in the moment so well. In that respect, Leopold and Cheney are right: wealth and power is all that matters.

Cheney Wants To Send U.S. Troops Back To Iraq. Will That Be The GOP Message? Will It Be Hillary's In 2016?

A new CBSNews/NYTimes poll was released yesterday showing that 50% of Americans say the U.S. has no responsibility to act on violence in Iraq. Even 42% of Republicans think it's not our responsibility. But that hasn't translated to Members of Congress, 250 of whom voted last Thursday against Barbara Lee's amendment to require that no funds in next year's Department of Defense appropriations bill go towards combat operations in Iraq. 142 Democrats and just 23 Republicans voted for peace. 44 Democrats-- lead for Military Industrial Complex trolls Steny Hoyer, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Steve Israel and Eliot Engel-- joined 206 Republicans who want more more in Iraq, regardless of what they own constituents want. Alan Grayson started a simple, straight-forward 2-sentence petition to President Obama:

U.S. military action in Iraq: It sure didn’t work out well last time. Let’s not make that mistake again.

U.S. "training" in and arms aid to Iraq, which cost American taxpayers billions of dollars and made part of the conservative donor base immensely more wealthy, was a colossal waste of resources, that-- in a more just world-- should land policy makers, starting with Dick Cheney, in front of a firing squad. Instead of contemplating what it's like to feel a hail of bullets rip through his flesh, Cheney is all over the mass media calling President Obama a traitor and picking fights with Rand Paul for trying to stop the madness.

10 years and a month ago, Anthony Zinni, retired head if the U.S. Central Command, in charge of all American troops in the Middle East, broke with the Cheneyites over Iraq, saying "There has been poor strategic thinking in this. There has been poor operational planning and execution on the ground. And to think that we are going to 'stay the course,' the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure."

In the book, Zinni writes: "In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."

"I think there was dereliction in insufficient forces being put on the ground and fully understanding the military dimensions of the plan. I think there was dereliction in lack of planning," says Zinni. "The president is owed the finest strategic thinking. He is owed the finest operational planning. He is owed the finest tactical execution on the ground. … He got the latter. He didn't get the first two."

Zinni says Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time-- with the wrong strategy. And he was saying it before the U.S. invasion. In the months leading up to the war, while still Middle East envoy, Zinni carried the message to Congress: "This is, in my view, the worst time to take this on. And I don't feel it needs to be done now."

But he wasn't the only former military leader with doubts about the invasion of Iraq. Former General and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, former Centcom Commander Norman Schwarzkopf, former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, and former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki all voiced their reservations.

…[Bremer] has made mistake after mistake after mistake."

What mistakes?

"Disbanding the army," says Zinni. "De-Baathifying, down to a level where we removed people that were competent and didn't have blood on their hands that you needed in the aftermath of reconstruction-- alienating certain elements of that society."

Zinni says he blames the Pentagon for what happened. "I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it-- certain elements in there certainly-- even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility," he says.

"But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most."

Adds Zinni: "If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go."

On Sunday, Paul told CNN viewers that "there needs to be a full-throated debate in Congress, and Congress has to decide. Militarily, we could go back in. The surge worked. Obviously, we have the military might and power. But the country as a whole has to decide, do we want to send 100,000 troops in? Are we willing to have 4,500 young Americans die to save a city like Mosul that the Shiites won't even save, that they have fled?… We went into Libya and we got rid of that terrible Qaddafi, now it's a jihadist wonderland over there. There's jihadists everywhere. If we were to get rid of Assad it would be a jihadist wonderland in Syria. It's now a jihadist wonderland in Iraq, precisely because we got over-involved." Infuriated, Cheney started hissing all over the Beltway that Paul is "an isolationist." Although I didn't hear any hissing directed towards Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan (AKA, "Bandar Bush"), who is bankrolling ISIS and, along with the U.S., terrorists in Syria as well. And now Cheney is screeching that the U.S. must send troops back to Iraq.

This dichotomy between Rand Paul and Dick Cheney leaves the Republican Party in a quandary as we approach the 2016 presidential elections. Imagine Hillary-- a stubborn and unrehabilitated warmonger-- as the Democratic nominee. Will the Republicans run a me-too warmonger from the Cheney wing of the party, like Ted Cruz (or almost anyone else) or will they turn to the "isolationist" who went on Meet the Press Sunday and said "I don’t blame on President Obama. Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame the Iraq war on the chaos that is in the Middle East."

As Sam Stein reported at HuffPo, another of the GOP warmonger's from the Cheney wing, Rick Santorum sought to denigrate Paul and put his views beyond the pale, offering what he termed a message "to the Rand Paul types" inside the GOP.

"You can see what happens when America creates a vacuum," Santorum said. "Other people fill it, and it is not to our security interests."

…Michael Goldfarb, founder of the unapologetically hawkish Free Beacon, distilled Paul’s message on foreign policy into a simple: “Don’t blame Obama.” After tweeting his disdain, he elaborated in an email to the Huffington Post.

"The hawks in the party well know the dangers of supporting Obama policies out of principle-- the Afghan surge, NSA surveillance, strikes against Assad, all Obama policies that we supported because they were the right thing to do," Goldfarb wrote. "In each case we saw the Republican base recoil at the administration's incompetence and mismanagement. Now Rand, who shares Obama's view of the limits of American power, is supporting Obama's policy of doing nothing in Iraq and Syria. Good luck with that!"

These are not uncharted waters for Paul, who has been unapologetic in his position that U.S. interventions overseas have caused as many (if not more) problems than they’ve solved. His father campaigned on a similar doctrine during his last two presidential runs and earned a healthy following among war-weary conservatives in the process.

The younger Paul has been careful to assure his fellow party members that he’s no isolationist. And in his own speech at the Faith and Freedom Conference, he made sure to assure the crowd that "if attacked, it is our duty to defend your family, to defend your country, or defend our freedom."

But Paul also spent much of Friday making the case that the Iraq war was a mistake and that similar enterprises needed to be avoided in the future. There is, he said in his speech, "a misguided belief that we should project strength through war."

"During the Iraq war, think about what happened," he said. "A quarter of a million Iraqi Christians fled Iraq. They feared the Shiite government that is there now that we helped put in place after Saddam. They fled in droves by the hundreds of thousands."

I wonder how many Republicans would vote for a hawkish Hillary Clinton instead of amore dovish Paul-- and how many Democrats would do just the opposite. And what about in congressional races? Will it make a difference in South Dakota, for example, where Democratic underdog Rick Weiland came out in full-throated opposition to the war, while he Republican opponent, Mike Rounds, is just another run-of-the-mill right-wing hawk? Or in Maine, where Shenna Bellows is the anti-Military Industrial Establishment candidate and her Republican opponent, Susan Collins, is the poster child for the same Military Industrial Complex that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about?