The enduring cost of Trumpism: Big lies and scapegoating are now the official political norm

Here's where you can go to spin The New Yorker's "Trump and the Truth" spin wheel of lies.

by Ken

Here's how this initial version of the "Trump and the Truth" spin wheel (note that it's going to be updated in two weeks) is presented (with, of course, lots of links onsite):

In recent weeks, writers and fact-checkers at The New Yorker have produced a series of reported essays about Donald Trump and the truth. Presidential candidates have always lied, “but sometimes there really is something new under the political sun,” David Remnick wrote when he introduced the series, last month. Trump, the Republican nominee, “does not so much struggle with the truth as strangle it altogether.” Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has had her bald-faced moments. “But, in the scale and in the depth of his lying, Donald Trump is in another category.”

Or, as Margaret Talbot wrote, “Donald Trump lies, a lot—that’s a fact and easy to prove simply by reference to what he’s on the record saying.” Her piece on Trump and the “lying” media, along with the other essays collected here, offers a way to keep track of Trump’s fabrications—“a record,” Remnick wrote, “that appears to know no bounds and certainly no shame.”

Also in the series: Eyal Press looks at Trump’s claim that immigrants cause crime levels to increase; Adam Gopnik writes about Trump’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s father was a party to the J.F.K. assassination; Jia Tolentino writes about the “Mexican” judge Gonzalo Curiel; Adam Davidson explains both Trump’s flip-flop on the Fed’s interest rate and his attempt to label the official unemployment rate a “hoax”; Jelani Cobb writes about Trump’s claim that “the African-Americans love me because they know I am going to bring back jobs”; and John Cassidy examines Trump’s alleged charitable giving.

Thirty-one days remain before the election. Anything can still happen. This spin wheel contains a Trump whopper pulled from every essay in the series. The topic of each essay appears on the outer ring, and a Trump quote that sums up the topic appears in each wedge, along with a link to the corresponding essay. We will update the wheel in two weeks. Spin with abandon.

LIES AREN'T NEW TO POLITICS. IT'S THE SCOPE
OF AND RELIANCE ON THEM THAT ARE SCARY.

Who's more monstrous, the Billion-Dollar Loser or
the Unspeakable Pence? (Or is it too close to call?)

Let me say this for the umpteenth time. Of course pols lie, and always have lied. And I've frequently noted my conviction that the Right officially went off the truth standard in the 2008 campaign season, where I was hard put to find a word of truth uttered by any Republican candidate at any level. It's just that The Donald, whom I think we now might better call the Billion-Dollar Loser, has escalated the practice to a mania, putting no discernable limit on his lies and casting truth and facts as a conspiracy to undermine America's Greatness.

The long-term problem, though, as I see it, is that America's Greatness is coming to consist more and more of the telling of and believing in lies. I've argued frequently that George W. Bush's popularity, when he was so popular that to his admirers any unkind word was considered the hanging offense of "Bush-bashing," was in his ability, or rather eagerness, to tell America the lies Americans wanted to hear. Which, to our common misfortune, was read by all too many Americans as the quality of a guy you'd like to have a beer with, which is of course the bestest quality we could look for in a president. (Personally, I found it hard to imagine anyone i'd less like to have a beer with, without even considering the general indications that, like so many habitual drinkers, he's a really awful, obnoxious drunk.)

And then when Chimpy became unpopular, it was because, while he wasn't lying any less, the lies he was telling once the poop started hitting the fan were not the lies Americans wanted to hear. When his adorers turned on him, they were exercising their God-given right to better lies. And they responded by essentially ghosting him. Once the economy melted down, on top of the ongoing disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the bills for his free-spending neocon rule started coming due, it was as if, to all those people who had been worshipping him, he had never existed -- and wasn't still president of these United States.

It was an awesome performance by the American public, but again, we have to give proper credit to the people who paved the way, going back to St. Ronnie of Reagan, who taught his worshippers that if you don't like reality, you're free to choose any alternative reality you like and pretend that that's reality. And after two terms of Chimpy the Prez's all-lies-all-time governance, the standard was set.

The Billion-Dollar Loser, in addition to making no lie too big or small or outrageous for public consumption, has added another crucial component to our public discourse: the right, even obligation, to blame somebody else, anybody else, for anything you've done. Again, the basic impulse is hardly new. It is, again, the pervasiveness, scale, and savagery of this set of lies that's new. And it seems to be working -- because, again, the Biggest Loser has glommed onto lies that America loves. The only better than a convenient scapegoat for a particular occasion is a convenient scapegoat for every occasion.

Case in point: the emergence of the Unspeakable Pence as some sort of "compassionate conservative," as described by the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza -- a sort of bellwether sucker. DWT readers surely don't need to be told that the Unspeakble One is as monstrous a specimen of political odiousness as our system has produced. But apply a little polish, and set him alongside the monster who picked him as his running mate, and he can be made to look, to a sufficiently gullible public (raise your hands, America!), like a reasonable, principled guy.

SOLVING REAL PROBLEMS IS HARD. IGNORING
THEM AND FINDING SCAPEGOATS IS EASIER.

Which is to me the real horror going forward, regardless of the election outcome: the perversion of our political discourse to a new and all but irreversible level.

Lately I've been seeing some useful reporting, as part of the new genre of Explaining the Trump Phenomenon. on how the two presidential candidates are viewed in Trump-stronghold areas like what we might call post-industrial Ohio, where the last decade really has been an economic nightmare, and it might be understandable that un- and under-employed people might be blaming any Democrat for their plight and looking for any kind of change.

Under the present degraded standard of discourse, there's no way of fighting back. It clearly doesn't matter that the Billion-Dollar Loser's entire professional career has been built on suckering and taking the fullest possible advantage of just such people. Or that Hillary, in her now-infamous "basket of deplorables" comments, in fact spoke with considerable understanding of just those people, as the other half of the Trump supporters, whose situation unquestionably needs to be addressed.

True, Sonny John himself fell by the wayside, but his
and Miss Mitch's War on America has been a winner.

Since facts no longer matter, it doesn't matter that Republicans have been major architects of those people's legitimate grievances. And since in today's lie-rich and scapegoat-happy discourse, Obama-demonizing has become so natural that no other explanation is required. It doesn't matter, of course, that going back before Day One of the Obama administration, "Miss Mitch" McConnell and "Sunny John" Boehner had already worked out the strategy that congressional Republicans have in fact employed throughout the Obama presidency: making sure that nothing the president tried could happen, or at least work. The cynicism was always stupendous: Their strategy, open and unapologetic, was to make as many Americans as possible suffer as badly as possible, to get them to Vote Right.

There was one aspect of this strategy that might have seemed overly audacious: the assumption that they would never be held to account for the price of their obstruction. Well, it's said that for big gains you have to gamble big, and they've won their gamble. You listen to those people -- not the "deplorables," who have their own agenda, but the victims of a winner-take-all economy -- reflexively blaming all their woes on that [expletives deleted] Obama, and you have to conclude that that gamble has paid off to an extent that even I in my most pessimistic imaginings didn't imagine. "Scot-free" is how the obstructionist have emerged from their Fuck America for Freedom crusade.

Which is a reminder that, even if Hillary is elected, she -- and we -- can expect a level of congressional obstruction that will make these past years look like an era of bipartisan harmony. And we can expect the political gain to accrue to the cynical liars who best understand what lies the American public wants to hear.

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Do The Donald and The Unspeakable Pence and all the others have any glimmering that they're asses?

Last Tango in Halifax's Alan and Celia: Below, normally
soft-spoken Alan shares a striking political insight.

In Series 1 of Last Tango in Halifax, Alan Buttershaw (Derek Jacobi) and Celia Dawson (Anne Reid), both now widowed, had refound each other after 70 years without contact and, discovering that they were both still madly infatuated, and considering their advanced age, hatched a plan to just go ahead and get married. Of course in most ways they hardly knew each other, and in this exchange from Episode 3, which aired originally in December 2012, they fell afoul of each other's politics. (Like all 17 other episodes to date, this one was written by series creator Sally Wainwright.)

CELIA: D'you know, I'd never had you down for red-hot Labour.
ALAN [trying to say something]: Hmm --
CELIA: I thought you had more about you.
ALAN: You know, the good thing about David Cameron is that even he knows he's an ass. You know, every time he opens his mouth, you can see him thinking, "I was born an ass, I'll die an ass, but at least I know I'm an ass."

by Ken

Okay, this post is mostly an excuse to do something with this delicious rant of Alan's -- a soft-spoken rant, of course, because Alan is almost always soft-spoken, but a rant nevertheless. At the same time, I think it has some significant resonance, not just in more recent British politics, but in our own as well.

After all, the condition of having been born an ass and being destined to die an ass isn't exactly unknown on our side of the pond. What's rare -- on both sides -- is this quality that Alan attributes to the now-unlamented David Cameron: knowing that he is one. To pick a random example, do you suppose that The Donald has even a glimmering? Or his anointed running mate, The Unspeakable Pence? Or, for that matter, many of their fellow pols and the pundits who provide sideline chatter?

In The Donald's case, I think there really are moments when he knows he's being a buffoon, sometimes for entertainment purposes and sometimes in the hope of attracting favorable attention from potential voters he thinks are buffoons. Within a certain range, we have to remember, the man knows how to play an audience.

And so, in a season of almost nothing but political insanities, should I really have done a double take upon sight of this item in yesterday's nytimes.com "FirstDraft"?

But seriously now, Donald Trump attracting contributions from small donors sufficient to seriously alter his campaign-finance situation? People giving money to Donald Trump just for being Donald Trump??? Am I missing something here?

Do I have to add that I didn't pursue that link? (And I haven't given it to you as a link. If you really want to find it, you can do that via nytimes.com.) From the same source, I didn't pursue this link either:

Well now, isn't this a surprise?

Of course there's nothing I see that can be done about it, beyond recognizing that this is where the country is in the year 2016 -- something that isn't likely to be magically changed by the election, whatever the outcome. The disaffection that's driving the would-be Trump voters is real, and as Ian Welsh has been pointing out, when people in desperate need of change come to the determination that no hope of change is to be entertained from any of the existing players, it's not surprising that they may grasp at any straw advanced toward them without intensive scrutiny of the source.

And if they've fixed their hopes on The Donald as their "breath of fresh air," are they likely to be persuaded otherwise even by an episode as egregious as their boy's utterly astonishing response to the DNC appearance by the parents of Capt. Humayun Khan? Aren't we already seeing even loonier responses by the Trump faithful: that it's all a plant by anti-Trump Dems, very likely in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood. It's kind of hard to argue rationally against hopes that have no toehold in reason. (And Democrats might be in a better position to address them if they had made any serious attempt to make government work for any segment of the country other than the 1% and their cadres of hangers-on.)

Nevertheless, for those of us who try to dwell in the domain of reason, or at least try to make regular visits, the stuff that's come out of the mouths of many of the political participants is eye-popping. Like that of the aforementioned Unspeakable Pence, who apparently thought he could paper over the problem with his running mate by offering mouth honor to the heroic captain and his family and laying all the blame on (who else?) President Obama. (This was dealt with nicely by Teacherken in a Daily Kos post, "Pence responds on Capt. Khan - if you can stomach it.")

Of course, as all sorts of folks in the reasoning world have pointed out, Captain Khan's killing can't have had anything to do with Obama or Hillary Clinton since it occurred in 2004 -- in other words, during the first term of Chimpy the Prez Bush, amid the insanity created there by his invasion.

And in the Unspeakable's official statement, in the sentence "Due to the disastrous decisions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a once stable Middle East has now been overrun by ISIS," beyond the lesser delusions embodied, there is the one that at some point in the rememberable past there was such a thing as a "stable Middle East." This represents a level of ignorance and dishonesty that seems to cross some sort of line as to what ought to be permissible. It certainly boggles my mind, which is no longer easily boggled. Unfortunately, our system doesn't allow us any way to define "what ought to be permissible" in political discourse.

At the same time, it's possible for the level of political discourse to descend so low that I find myself passing along a Washington Post column by the normally appalling "Chucky the Hammer" Krauthammer. It's called "Donald Trump and the fitness threshold," though I note in this link to the NY Daily News version that to the original title they added, not inappropriately: "He craves not only validation but adoration." I can't believe I'm saying it about anything penned by Chucky, but -- while it's not the whole story about Trump (it doesn't account for the undeniable success he's had carving out that peculiar but undeniable position he's created for himself), but it's worth a read. Here's the basic premise, jumping off from the candidate's seemingly unaccountable blunder in attacking a Gold Star Family.

Why did Trump do it? It wasn’t a mistake. It was a revelation. It’s that he can’t help himself. His governing rule in life is to strike back when attacked, disrespected or even slighted. To understand Trump, you have to grasp the General Theory: He judges every action, every pronouncement, every person by a single criterion — whether or not it/he is “nice” to Trump. . . .

This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value — indeed exists — only insofar as it sustains and inflates him.

Most politicians seek approval. But Trump lives for the adoration. He doesn’t even try to hide it, boasting incessantly about his crowds, his standing ovations, his TV ratings, his poll numbers, his primary victories. The latter are most prized because they offer empirical evidence of how loved and admired he is.

Prized also because, in our politics, success is self-validating. A candidacy that started out as a joke, as a self-aggrandizing exercise in xenophobia, struck a chord in a certain constituency and took off. The joke was on those who believed that he was not a serious man and therefore would not be taken seriously. They — myself emphatically included — were wrong.

POSTSCRIPT: AREN'T WE ALL GONNA MISS CIVILIZATION, WALLY?

DILBERT     by Scott Adams
Drone Defense System

[Click to enlarge.]

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Who gave the House Republicans the pencil?

One of New York's greatest buildings, Cass Gilbert's U.S. Custom House, is now home to the Museum of the American Indian.

by Ken

It's one of New York's greatest buildings, the Beaux Arts former U.S. Custom House (1902-07) designed by Cass Gilbert, standing proudly below and overlooking historic Bowling Green, near the southern tip of Manhattan -- and now home to the Museum of the American Indian (and also a Citi Bike bike-sharing depot). I was thinking it would be a snap to pick up a copy of the printed schedule for Open House New York, which as I mentioned last night is supposed to be available for pickup at select locations around town. The Custom House, er, museum, is just a short walk from my office.

It actually occurred to me before I had a chance to do that walk that I should probably try to check -- online or somewhere -- to make sure that the museum isn't affected by the shutdown. But I reasoned it through in my head that there wasn't likely to be any federal connection.

As I approached the building, wondering yet again at both its imposing mass and its extraordinary decoration and detailing, I noticed the usual complement of visitors sitting on its welcoming staircase, and threaded my way through them up those stairs. It wasn't till I was near the top that I looked up and noticed that the massive entry door was shut tight. I backed down the stairs a ways and this time looked at the sign: "All Smithsonian museums are closed today due to the government shutdown." Oh, that's right -- isn't it? -- that the Museum of the American Indian is now a Smithsonian outpost.

Not the biggest of deals, of course, but my closest encounter to date with the shutdown. Other Americans are experiencing it more personally, obviously. But I wonder whether enough Americans are experiencing it personally enough to produce the backlash widely predicted against the Republicans. Because I don't think the country is the same country it was at the time of the last U.S. government shutdown, which was before we were officially taken off the reality standard.

Of course in a way it all goes back to Reagan, who introduced to Americans as a national agenda that reality was no longer, you know, real, but whatever made you feel best. His heir-in-confusion George W. "Chimpy the Prez" took this idea the logical step farther and made it national policy. Surely we all remember the Rove-themed sneering at the "reality-based community"?

But the point at which I noticed that we had officially gone off the reality standard was the 2008 presidential campaign of Young Johnny McCranky, who gave us the idea that you could run an entire national campaign without ever once telling the truth about anything. And he still got that 47 or so percent of the vote, not all that much less than his opponent. I wondered at the time whether we should be facing the future with much confidence when that much of the country was endorsing a campaign of utter delusion.

The rise of the Teabaggers was one answer to that question, peddling lies and delusions and general meanness of spirit. This is what America has become.

I'm put in mind of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in which the WJM news producer Lou Grant (Ed Asner) decides to introduce editorials to the evening newscast, and empty-suit anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight), as always terrified by the prospect of any turf incursion, tosses the script written by newswriter Murray (Gavin MacLeod) and burbles his own imbecilic gibberish. Lou storms into the newsroom spluttering, and Murray tells him not to look at him, that he didn't write it. Ted wrote it himself.

If anything more berserk, Lou splutters, "Who gave him the pencil?"


Who gave Ted Baxter the pencil? Could it be the same person who has now given one to the House Republicans?

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

So what would YOU have said at the opening of Chimpy the Ex-Prez's (giggle) library?

Perhaps the elder former President Bush was learning this afternoon that his boy George now has a library bearing his name?

by Ken

For starters, this whole business of the launch of the Chimpy the Ex-Prez Immemorial Presidential Library has the unmistakable ring of waiting a decade to deliver the punch line of a joke. After all, it wasn't that deep into the criminal nincompoop's constitution-shredding that wags -- like those of NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me! -- were already riffing on this eventual spectacle. It might have been, but probably wasn't, Mo Rocca who answered the question of what you might put in such a facility with the suggestion of pop-up books.

This was, after all, a man who had spent his life farting at the values for which we turn to libraries, notably the gathering and sharing of knowledge. This at least was relatively benign -- "live and let live" might have characterized Chimpy's relationship to knowledge through most of his adult existence. But his catastrophic tenure in the White House was anything but benign with regard to the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge. Over those eight years the federal government did everything in its power to undermine, even destroy knowledge-based values. There were many dimensions to the Bush regime's monstrousness, and I would certainly never underrate its war-crimes-fueled assault on workable and just international relations, but the unbridled savagery of its war on knowledge always seemed, and still seems to me, the apex of its monstrousness.

Somehow, even though I was home all day, I seem to have missed coverage of the actual festivities, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that such was not the tone of the encomia delivered by the speakers, including the current president and all the other living exes.

I'm sure it would be easy to shred what each of them actually said, and I trust that's being done. It's important, because otherwise the inevitable result is to forget the degree of monstrousness of the Bush regime. Which I'm afraid is what appears to be happening -- and in the absence of any impulse to truth-telling seems all but inevitable. There's no question that disappearing was one of the shrewdest -- or luckiest -- things the Chimpster ever did. Remember that by the time the stiff slunk out of the White House he was virtually a forgotten person

I heard on the radio this morning that President Obama's strategy was going to be praising Chimpy for his relatively enlightened position on immigration. Chimpy was, after all, a representative of the 1% who have always understood the importance of this pool of rock-bottom-price, rights-free labor. And as far as it goes, that's a smartish strategy, and never mind that Chimpy the Prez was singularly unable to do anything about his relatively enlightened immigration position. And so, in the desperate quest to find something positive you can say about Chimpy from a policy standpoint, you wind up paying tribute to one of his failures.

However, the real problem with such a strategy is that, in the interest of politeness, it winds up whitewashing all of the Bush regime's monstrous doings. Still, what are you going to do? If you're stuck appearing at such an event, even if you want to honor truth and decency, what the heck can you say?

"He never endorsed criminalizing possession of a library card."

"He never participated in any actual book-burnings that we know of."

"He did marry a librarian, after all."

No, it seems to me that the only hope is not appearing at the event. But how do you manage that?

Dear George,

I'm sorry to have to tell you at this late date that Barack won't be able to attend your library opening because I'm making him clean out the garage. You wouldn't believe how bad it's gotten! He says that if I won't let him come to your shindig, I should be the one to break the news, so here it is.

Have a great opening! Best to Laura.

Yours,

Michelle O

The problem with a last-minute blow-off, though, is that by then it will have been necessary to prepare and circulate a text for the president's remarks. The only far-enough-ahead thing I could think of would be along these lines:

Dear President Bush:

My dad asked me to write to let you know that he will be unable to attend the opening of your presidential library because it conflicts with our dog Bo's obedience class. He says he hopes you'll think of him again the next time you open a new place. Just between us, have you thought of a BBQ restaurant?

Sincerely,

Malia Obama

Once you're committed to speaking, I don't see how our rules of sociopolitical decorum allow you to do anything but lie.

THE FOLKS IN THE THINKPROGRESS WAR ROOM AREN'T
BOUND BY THE RULES OF SOCIOPOLITICAL DECORUM

Miss Him Yet? 13 Reasons to Be Glad George W. Bush Is No Longer President

• Authorized the use of torture
• Politicized climate science
• Ignored Afghanistan to launch a war in Iraq
• Botched the response to Hurricane Katrina
• Defunded stem cell research
• Required Muslim men to register with the government
• Reinstated the global gag rule
• Supported anti-gay discrimination
• Further deregulated Wall Street
• Widened income inequality
• Undermined worker protections
• Ideological court appointments
• Presided over a dysfunctional executive branch

You can read the detailed explanations for yourself onsite. And I would say that even these "reasons" are more respectfully drawn up than I would have managed. At least they've got the basic idea right.

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Were the CIA and MI6 told that Iraq had no WMDs? Tony Blair's "too busy" to comment -- how 'bout George and Big Dick?

Why, if it isn't former British PM Tony "Too Busy" Blair! If he wasn't so busy, he might be able to clear up this matter of MI6 having received high-level secret Iraqi information that Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs.

"There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages."

-- Lord Butler, "the former [British] cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq"

by Ken

My, how time flies! Here we are already plunging into the festivities celebraing George and Dick's Excellent Adventure in Iraq! I know I should have marked it on my calendar, but somehow it just slipped my mind. I feel as if I ought to be baking a cake. Or at least eating some cake.

(I just researched it and found that the traditional celebratory media for a 10th anniversary are tin, aluminum, and diamond. I'm inclined to just go with the cake.)

I'm a little concerned, though, that according to this Guardian piece, then-U.K. Prime Minster Tony Blair is apparently "too busy" to celebrate. (Tony "Too Busy" Blair is what I think we shall have to call him.) At any rate, he was too busy to comment for BBC's Panorama report that both our intelligence agency and theirs, the CIA and MI6, "were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction."

MI6 and CIA were told before invasion that Iraq had no active WMD

BBC's Panorama reveals fresh evidence that agencies dismissed intelligence from Iraqi foreign minister and spy chief

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 March 2013 02.00 EDT

Fresh evidence has been revealed about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein's foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was "active", "growing" and "up and running".

A special BBC Panorama programme aired on Monday night details how British and US intelligence agencies were informed by top sources months before the invasion that Iraq had no active WMD programme, and that the information was not passed to subsequent inquiries.

It describes how Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, told the CIA's station chief in Paris at the time, Bill Murray, through an intermediary that Iraq had "virtually nothing" in terms of WMD.

Sabri said in a statement that the Panorama story was "totally fabricated".

However, Panorama confirms that three months before the war an MI6 officer met Iraq's head of intelligence, Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who also said that Saddam had no active WMD. The meeting in the Jordanian capital, Amman, took place days before the British government published its now widely discredited Iraqi weapons dossier in September 2002.

Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary who led an inquiry into the use of intelligence in the runup to the invasion of Iraq, tells the programme that he was not told about Sabri's comments, and that he should have been.

Butler says of the use of intelligence: "There were ways in which people were misled or misled themselves at all stages."

When it was suggested to him that the body that probably felt most misled of all was the British public, Butler replied: "Yes, I think they're, they're, they got every reason think that."

The programme shows how the then chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, responded to information from Iraqi sources later acknowledged to be unreliable.

One unidentified MI6 officer has told the Chilcot inquiry that at one stage information was "being torn off the teleprinter and rushed across to Number 10".

Another said it was "wishful thinking… [that] promised the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow".

The programme says that MI6 stood by claims that Iraq was buying uranium from Niger, though these were dismissed by other intelligence agencies, including the French.

It also shows how claims by Iraqis were treated seriously by elements in MI6 and the CIA even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball. He admitted to the Guardian in 2011 that all the information he gave to the west was fabricated.

Panorama says it asked for an interview with Blair but he said he was "too busy".

Understandably, the Guardian report, like the Panorama one it's based on, focuses on British players in this little tragicomedy. Presumably any minute now the U.S. infotainment noozemedia will be picking up on the story and seeking comment from George W. "Chimpy the Prez" Bush and "Big Dick" Cheney from their prison cells. Oh wait, I keep forgetting that none of their trials -- for crimes against international, U.S. federal, and state laws -- have begun yet. Have I missed the announcement of the start dates?

For some time now, though, we've had a pretty good idea how Chimpy and Big Dick spent their time during the run-up to their excellent adventure in the Levant: strong-arming our actual professional intelligence people into ignoring possibly reliable sources in favor of swallowing whole the fables told by every con man and wacko the top guns had gathered unto themselves.

Not to worry, though. I'm sure this will all be thoroughly aired at their trials. Does somebody have those trial start dates handy?

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Once again, a solid Senate majority isn't enough to confirm a judge. Plus, George Will tells Watergate tall tales

Really, you think that, just because Caitlin Halligan has a solid Senate majority wanting to vote to confirm her nomination to the DC Circuit Court, she should be confirmed? Where have you been?

"I don't think any reasonable person would find anything about Caitlin Halligan that would constitute 'extraordinary circumstances. The idea that a position that you took as a public official on behalf of your client amounts to an extraordinary circumstance was pretty astonishing."

-- White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler,
to The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin

by Ken

Nevertheless, because the Right's view is that whatever it can get away with is all right, and obstruction is one of the most reliable things it can bet away with, it appears that Caitlin Halligan's nomination to the DC Circuit Court, generally regarded as the second most influential court in the country behind only the U.S. Supreme Court itself, can't go forward. Not because she couldn't command a comfortable Senate majority for her nomination, but because last week -- "on the same day as Rand Paul's celebrated filibuster against drone strikes last week," as Jeffrey Toobin points out in a newyorker.com blogpost, "For Obama's Judges, It's Already Late" -- Senate Republicans marshaled 41 votes in opposition to bringing Halligan's nomination to the floor for a vote.

The modern-day Senate requirement that anything opposed by right-wingers requires 60 votes in the Senate, says Toobin, "has taken an enormous toll on President Obama's judicial appointments."

This was the second time that Halligan received majority support, but, because she never passed the threshold of sixty, her nomination now appears doomed. And so, in the fifth year of his Presidency, Obama has failed to place even a single judge on the D.C. Circuit, considered the second most important court in the nation, as it deals with cases of national importance. (Its judges -- like John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- also often wind up on the Supreme Court.) The D.C. Circuit now has four vacancies out of eleven seats.

"Halligan is impeccably qualified to be a judge," Toobin writes.

[S]he's a career government lawyer from New York -- and she enjoyed broad support among members of both parties in the legal community. Opposition to her focused almost completely on a single brief she wrote for her boss, then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo had sought to make gun manufacturers legally responsible for some of the violence in New York, a position that the National Rifle Association opposed. The N.R.A. punished Halligan for doing her job for New York, and the Senate Republicans followed.

The business about "extraordinary circumstances" referred to by White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler in the quote atop this post relates to the supposed bipartisan "truce" on Senate confirmation of judicial nominees dating back to 2005. Toobin again:

During the last Bush Administration, Republican Senators grew so frustrated with what they called Democratic obstruction of judicial nominees that they threatened to change Senate rules to limit filibusters on judges. In 2005, the bipartisan "Gang of Fourteen" Senators announced a truce. Democrats agreed to allow votes on Bush's nominees in "all but extraordinary circumstances," and they kept to the deal. Bush's second-term appointees (including two to the Supreme Court) proceeded without obstruction. At least technically, the Gang of Fourteen compromise is still in effect. But Republicans have essentially ignored it -- as the Halligan filibuster demonstrated.

(And let's not forget the point made recently by The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg that the transformation of the filibuster into a 60-vote requirement in the Senate is flatly unconstitutional.)

Of course the life forms Chimpy the Prez was stuffing into the federal judiciary, who were human only in the most technical biological sense, were appointed for either their unrelenting hostility to the Constitution or their screaming ignorance -- or, of course, wherever possible, both. They were appointed for the purpose of subverting and perverting constitutiona law and decency. They should, by and large, have been housed in quarantine cages.

Howie and I have written a fair amount about the Senate Republicans' policy of judicial obstruction; Jeffrey Toobin has written a lot about it. "Judicial appointments," Toobin writes, "represent one of the great missed opportunities of the Obama Presidency."

In his first term, especially in the first two years, Obama himself bore much of the blame for this. When Democrats controlled sixty Senate seats, Obama was slow to nominate lower-court judges, and his moment of greatest leverage passed. But, since the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans have been at fault, almost entirely. Most nominees are not formally stopped, as Halligan was, but rather are delayed and delayed. Bush's nominees got votes within weeks; Obama's take months, even for uncontroversial selections. William Kayatta, Jr., nominated to the First Circuit, waited three hundred days for a vote and then received eighty-eight votes for confirmation. Republicans delay because they can. "The Republican Senators are not punished for it, and they are rewarded by their base," a senior administration official said.

We all know perfectly well that the next time we have a Republican president, a stream of genetic mutants will be blasted from the White House to the Senate for confirmation to all the positions that require Senate approval, and the moment any word of oppposition is heard, the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine will be ratcheted up to deafening level about the nefariousness of the opposition to our constitutional system. And they won't just make noise; they'll enforce their will. If it means what they themselves called "the nuclear option," which is to say decommissioning the filibuster, I think it's safe to say they'll do it.

There is, we have to bear in mind, nothing remotely symmetrical about our current political spectrum. All tactics on the Right are deemed legitimate and appropriate, without even the most minimal obligation to reality or truth, thanks to the right-wing Right to Lie. And against that, what tools are left for a fight?

Toobin asks the obvious question: "What, if anything, can Obama do?"

Given the rules of the Senate, probably not much. (Earlier this year, Senate Democrats backed away from imposing limits on filibusters.) Because the Senate schedule operates by unanimous consent, Republicans must agree to take votes on judicial nominees, and they have been slow and stingy in doing so, even when they have no plans to filibuster or even to vote no. For example, eighteen district court nominees, all uncontroversial, are currently awaiting votes on the floor. All will be confirmed eventually, but Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, parcels out agreements to take votes just one or two judges at a time. "We are not hearing any opposition to the district court nominees," Ruemmler said. "The process is just too slow."

Obama himself, a former teacher of constitutional law, has said little about judicial nominees during his Presidency. (Given the way Republicans feel about him, Obama might just inflame the issue further if he spoke out.) So Ruemmler and the small group of people committed to the issue in the Administration will continue their strategy of filling the pipeline with nominees and hoping for votes. In the new few weeks, Sri Srinivasan, a deputy solicitor general, will have his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for his nomination to the D.C. Circuit. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, will soon attempt to get a vote for Patty Shwartz, a nominee for the Third Circuit. It's still early in Obama's second term, but, given the pace at which judicial nominations proceed, it's actually already pretty late.

SPEAKING OF THE RIGHT-WING RIGHT TO LIE

If you haven't already, you have to read "Revisionist history on Watergate," the blistering reply by Richard Ben-Veniste in today's Washington Post to an astonishing fabrication by infamous WaPo fabricator George Will. In Will's stupefyingly dishonest retelling, the hero of Watergate turns out to be none other than then-Solicitor General Robert Bork, No. 3 man in the Nixon Justice Department, who at the president's behest performed the flagrantly illegal act that two decent men, the attorney general and deputy attorney general, quit rather than do.

At the time of the Watergate scandals Ben-Veniste was chief of the Watergate Task Force of the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Office, and he begs to differ.

Will's acceptance of Robert Bork’s self-serving claim to have been the "protector" of the Watergate investigation is a mischaracterization of history. Bork, then Nixon's solicitor general, famously carried out the president's order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox after Attorney General Eliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus [right] refused in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.

Bork's assertion that by firing Cox he acted to protect the ongoing investigation of Watergate crimes is akin to the Army major's claim during the Vietnam War that "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it." Secret recordings reveal that well before the controversy surrounding the subpoenaed White House tapes, Nixon discussed with his chief of staff, Alexander Haig, his intention to fire Cox. This was part and parcel of the president’s continuing effort to obstruct the Watergate investigation.

Bork, recently arrived from the Yale Law School faculty, lent his academic credibility to the attempt to justify the firing -- which federal judge Gerhard Gesell later ruled was plainly illegal, as Cox could be fired only for "extraordinary impropriety." (Bork later stipulated that Cox had committed no such impropriety.) The grateful president, Bork recently wrote, promised to nominate him to the Supreme Court upon the next vacancy. . . .

Oh, there's more, and you should read it all, but for our immediate purposes this should be enough to make the point. Really now, allowing a man who built his career on the commission of a crime ordered by a career criminal who then reward him with a nomination to the Supreme Court -- well, really! Surely there are limits!

Well, as I was musing recently, when it comes to right-wing deception, we still haven't found out what, if any, those limits might be. (As I wrote in February 2012 in connection with Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's tightrope walk: "Being a rising right-wing pol means finding that line between the merely preposterous and the too-preposterous.")

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However horrible we thought Willard Inc. might be as president, it looks like he's going to be WORSE

It will undoubtedly be seen as an insult to garbage to describe the Incorporated Willard as a stinking pile of worthless garbage. I'll just have to live with it.

"He's a very accomplished spokesperson, and we select people not based upon their ethnicity or their sexual preference or their gender but upon their capability,"

-- Willard Inc., about Richard Grenell, the foreign policy
"spokesman" his campaign was too scared to let speak

by Ken

Now let's be clear: "Ric" Grenell is a horror show. At least according to what I've read and heard, he seems to be a near-clone of the scumbag he served at the U.N., the inexcusable John Bolton, in both foreign policy ideology (primeval crackpot) and personal style (bullying scumbag). But those are qualities that should have endeared him to the people who froze him off the Willard Campaign Bandwagon -- the neanderthal homophobes of the Toxic Right. It turns out that when they make scary noises, Willard wilts like soggy lettuce.

Howie just wrote about the WCB cave-in "Glass Closet . . . On Capitol Hill," focusing on the Giant Tent that is the DC GOP Closet. Man, it's getting crowded in there! And all that self-loathing packed into the one enclosed space, all sublimated in wackadoodle Far Right ideology and viciousness. Whew!

I want to focus for a moment on what it tells us about what we can expect from Willard if -- heaven help us -- he winds up in a position of authority over us. What it says to me, in combination with the "Willard on China" episode we'll come to in a moment, is: However bad we thought the schlub would be as president, we didn't know the half of it.

Here's how the NYT's Michael Barbaro, Helen Cooper, and Ashley Parker reported it in a "Politics" blogpost, "Romney Camp Stirred Storm Over Gay Aide":

On one level, Mr. Grenell’s short-lived and rocky tenure as Mr. Romney’s foreign policy spokesman is the story of how halting attempts by the campaign to manage its relationship with the most conservative quarter of the Republican Party left an aide feeling badly marginalized and ostracized.

But according to interviews with more than a dozen aides and advisers, it is also about how a fast-growing campaign, operating under the sharp glare of a general election, failed to spot the potential hazards of a high-profile appointment.

Sorry, that second graf is spin. The level we should be concerned with is the one in the first graf. Faced with ugliness from people who are known to produce nothing but ugliness, the campaign folded like a cheap suitcase.

The Willard Bandwagonmasters are in damage-control mode, naturally, in the face of dreadful publicity like the NYT post, which includes this from them:

Aides to Mr. Romney insist they did everything they could to keep Mr. Grenell from resigning, sending the campaign’s highest-level officials to try to persuade him that they valued his expertise and that the matter would soon die down. In the end, they said, he chafed at the limitations of a disciplined presidential campaign.

But, as the NYT team reports in the very next grafs,

those close to Mr. Grenell, known as Ric, insist that when he had sought forceful support from those who had entrusted him with a major role, the campaign seemed to be focused, instead, on quieting a political storm that could detract from Mr. Romney’s message and his appeal to a crucial constituency.

"It's not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay," one Republican adviser said. "They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn't want to confront the religious right." Like many interviewed, this adviser insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

We had to wait till Barack Obama was elected president and began making appointments to learn that he wouldn't stand behind them. This could have been nipped in the bud if Willard and his people, instead of deploying their brilliant strategy of simply waiting for the flap to die down (because we know how easily the wackos of the Far Right let go of red-meat issues), word had been sent out that Mr. Grenell's foreign-policy credentials had not been in any way challenged by his party detractors and he continued to enjoy the full confidence of the candidate, end of story. Instead the campaign geniuses decided to stuff their guy in the Official Willard Inc. Campaign Closet.

I imagine they're still waiting for the matter to die down.

Meanwhile, we have the Man Who Dreamed of Becoming a Corporation mouthing off about the Obama administration's handling of the mess surrounding the fate of beleaguered Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng. Oh, it is a mess, no doubt (see today's report by the NYT's Michael Wines, Sharon La Franiere, and Jane Perlez, "Nascent Deal Would Let Dissident From China Study in U.S."), but the notion of the Incorporated Willard opening his yap on the subject is grotesque beyond imagining. On a scale of zero to a zillion, this sack of garbage's understanding of the situation -- and I mean and and every aspect of the situation, with the sole exception of its possible political exploitability --is the usual zilch, the Willard camp's proprietary number.

Oh, Willard has been making noises about how he wants to be "tough" with the Chinese. Yeah, right. Anybody want to wait till the first time President Willard utters a cross word about official China and gets a prompt reminder of how much of this country the Chinese own? Now that's something Willard knows a little something about -- owning stuff.

Was it regrettable that the U.S. negotiators allowed Chen to be removed from the U.S. embassy in Beijing, where he had apparently unofficial asylum, to be removed to a hospital, presumably to received needed medical treatment? Yes, it was regrettable. Could clown-brained right-wing Republicans have negotiated "tougher" with the Chinese authorities? Anyone who says so is a moron, or maybe just a garden-variety liar.

The U.S. negotiators thought they had "iron-clad guarantees" for Chen's safety. Given the degree to which the Chinese authorities are dug in on his fate, those "guarantees" turn out to have been meaningless, but to suggest that a powder puff like Willard, who poops in his pants at the ravings of loons in his own political party, could stand up to the Chinese is, to put the kindest face on it, delusional. Which doesn't, of course, in any way deter the gutless wimp from running off his mouth.

It's true that for arrant right-wing gutlessness Willard will always have to contend with that other tough-talking born coward, "Chimpy the Deserter" Bush. But this is one challenge I'm betting Willard can rise, or rather sink, to.

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Those aren't "hostilities" we're engaged in with Libya -- I guess it's more of a, you know, tiff

The Republican view of presidential power c2007

by Ken

No doubt you caught the Obama administration's response to the charge that the president has exceeded the permissible "Go to War Free" -- i.e., without congressional approval -- period prescribed by the War Powers Act (1973). Here's how Charlie Savage and Mark Landler reported it in the NYT:

The White House, pushing hard against criticism in Congress over the deepening air war in Libya, asserted Wednesday that President Obama had the authority to continue the military campaign without Congressional approval because American involvement fell short of full-blown hostilities.

In a 38-page report sent to lawmakers describing and defending the NATO-led operation, the White House said the mission was prying loose Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s grip on power. . . . [T]he report asserted that “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.”

I don't know where on earth anyone would get the idea that we're engaged in hostilities with Libya. But "hostilities," as specified by the War Powers Act? Not a bit of it. Oh sure, in the heat of the moment harsh words may have been exchanged, and I suppose a fussbudget could quibble over all those bombs we've dropped, and assorted other military expenditures (which, however, "do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces," according to the administration report, "nor do they involve U.S. ground troops”), for which the tab, as Savage and Landler report the White House acknowledging, has run up to $716 million in the first two months and "at the current scale of operations" will rise to $1.1 billion by September.

But "hostilities"? Not that anyone in the administration can tell. In a joint interview, the Timesmen report, State Department legal adviser Harold Koh and White House counsel Robert Bauer --

contended that American forces had not been in “hostilities” at least since early April, when NATO took over the responsibility for the no-fly zone and the United States shifted to primarily a supporting role -- providing refueling and surveillance to allied warplanes, although remotely piloted drones operated by the United States periodically fire missiles, too.

It doesn't seem likely that the report is going to satisfy the demand made by House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner for a legal justification for passing the congressional reporting deadline. After all, Sunny John is a veritable tiger when it comes to enforcing the spirit and letter of the War Powers Act, as he showed throughout the warmongering years of the Bush regime.

Ha ha ha! Sometimes I just make myself laugh. Sunny John doesn't give a damn about war powers, or any other executive powers, unless they're being exercised by a Democratic excecutive. Savage and Landler note:

The escalating confrontation with Congress reflects the radically altered political landscape in Washington: a Democratic president asserting sweeping executive powers to deploy American forces overseas, while Republicans call for stricter oversight and voice fears about executive-branch power getting the United States bogged down in a foreign war.

All those years when "Big Dick" Cheney and his Puppet Prez Chimpy were using their 100 percent bogus "doctrine" of the "unitary executive" to expand executive powers in a way never before dreamt by American pols, nothing was heard from Republicans in either house except cheering -- and vicious invective and even threats directed against "Bush-bashers."

But then, Republicans are never called to account for even the most flagrant of their lies and the most blatant of their hypocrisies. A colleague notes the irony (again, not really the right word) of the proposed prohibition, in the House Appropriations Committee's proposed Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Services Appropriations Bill, of the Executive Office of the President's use of funds "to prepare 'signing statements,' which has been used in the past to undermine or circumvent laws passed by Congress." The colleague points out that when the House Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Democrat John Conyers Jr., tried briefly in 2007 to look into the matter of presidential signing statements, the subject was dismissed out of hand and ridiculed by Rpublican Ranking Member (now Committee Chairman) Lamar Smith.

Another colleague, while recognizing the total hypocrisy of the current Republican pushbacks against executive authority, syas we ought nevertheless to go along with their efforts, on the theory that it's at least a way to get some executive limitations legislated. It's a point, I suppose, but a point that misses the point, it seems to me. Congressional Republicans will never attempt to apply any such restrictions against a Republican president, and Congressional Democrats, as we've seen, will never attempt to apply such restrictions against a president of either party.

#

Well, no wonder Rummy and Big Dick and Chimpy were fooled about the Iraqi WMDs -- this guy's, you know, magic!

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, come on down! Would you buy used WMDs from this man? How about fantastical tales about mobile bioweapons trucks and secret laboratories? Okay, maybe you have to hear him to appreciate how charismatic and gosh-darn, mesmerizingly credible he is. Or maybe just how credulous the saps and sucker who listened to him were>

by Ken

I know we're supposed to be looking forward, always forward, and never backward, which is where we've already been, which couldn't possibly have any interest or importance for us. The past, ble-e-ech!

This charmer, this Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi -- this is the schlub who sold the intelligence, er, masterminds of the Western powers on a whole Iraqi WMD program, or rather a whole Iraqi WMD program made up in his head. I'm sorry the clip can't be embedded, but if you click through to the link (here it is again) you'll get to see and hear for yourself (in German, with subtitles) just what a Macchiavellian genius our Rafid is. Who wouldn't believe anything that came out of his mouth?

What, you say the real question is who would believe anything that came out of his mouth? Maybe that's why you're not working as an intelligence mastermind.

guardian.co.uk

Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war

• Man codenamed Curveball 'invented' tales of bioweapons
• Iraqi told lies to try to bring down Saddam Hussein regime
• Fabrications used by US as justification for invasion

Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd in Karlsruhe
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 February 2011 12.58 GMT

Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed Curveball by German and American intelligence officials who dealt with his claims, has told the Guardian that he fabricated tales of mobile bioweapons trucks and clandestine factories in an attempt to bring down the Saddam Hussein regime, from which he had fled in 1995.

"Maybe I was right, maybe I was not right," he said. "They gave me this chance. I had the chance to fabricate something to topple the regime. I and my sons are proud of that and we are proud that we were the reason to give Iraq the margin of democracy."

The admission comes just after the eighth anniversary of Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations in which the then-US secretary of state relied heavily on lies that Janabi had told the German secret service, the BND. It also follows the release of former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's memoirs, in which he admitted Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction programme.

The careers of both men were seriously damaged by their use of Janabi's claims, which he now says could have been – and were – discredited well before Powell's landmark speech to the UN on 5 February 2003.

The former CIA chief in Europe Tyler Drumheller describes Janabi's admission as "fascinating", and said the emergence of the truth "makes me feel better". "I think there are still a number of people who still thought there was something in that. Even now," said Drumheller.

In the only other at length interview Janabi has given he denied all knowledge of his supposed role in helping the US build a case for invading Saddam's Iraq.

In a series of meetings with the Guardian in Germany where he has been granted asylum, he said he had told a German official, who he identified as Dr Paul, about mobile bioweapons trucks throughout 2000. He said the BND had identified him as a Baghdad-trained chemical engineer and approached him shortly after 13 March of that year, looking for inside information about Saddam's Iraq.

"I had a problem with the Saddam regime," he said. "I wanted to get rid of him and now I had this chance."

He portrays the BND as gullible and so eager to tease details from him that they gave him a Perry's Chemical Engineering Handbook to help communicate. He still has the book in his small, rented flat in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany. . .

There's more to the story, not to mention links aplenty, onsite -- for the strong of stomach. It'll all leave you wondering how the guy on 24 -- you know, Donald Sutherland's kid, the worst actor in the Western world -- would handle it.

Say, maybe Rafid could be persuaded to join Rummy on his book tour -- maybe do their version of "Who's on First?"? Or perhaps they could be joined by the trained seal of "presidential historians," Michael Beschloss (see "Should 'presidential historians' 'facilitate' noted war criminals like Donald Rumsfeld?"), and do selected Three Stooges routines, I guess with Rummy as Moe, Michael as Larry, and Rafid as Curly, or Shemp, or maybe Curly Joe.

Thank goodness our intelligence people now consume only the finest Grade A stuff a gullible intelligence operative can buy. Which probably explains our great triumphs in Afghanistan and the rest of the globe's hot spots. Of course if there are any little goofs in our operations there, not to worry -- they'll soon be in the past, and we can forget about them. It's a lovely system, really.

Welcome to this lovely new century of ours, the 21st. You could laugh, or you could cry. Or you could watch another thrill-packed episode of Cupcake Wars.

Do you suppose Rafid does cupcakes? He may have been able to pull the wool over German and American intelligence, but he won't slip any funny business past judge Florian.

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Like most such windows of opportunity, the one for looking at NYC's response to the snowstorm may prove VERY small

by Ken

Although inevitably I'm going to wind up talking mostly about our recent snowstorm and the response (or lack of it) to it, the question I really want to raise is: Will there ever come a time when it will be appropriate to talk about New York City's response to the storm in the view of our Mayor Mike? Our mayor, as I'm sure you know, is the man who seems to be spending substantial quantities of money (well, not for him; for him it's probably pocket change) to find out whether a country fed up with the two major parties might wish to anoint him as a "no label" presidential pretender.

Because, you see, the mayor's standard response this week to questions about the city's response to the storm has been: (1) We're doing the best we can; and (2) now isn't the time to talk about that, it's the time to close ranks and get on with the job of cleaning up those 20 inches of snow. I'm just wondering, though, whether there's actually ever going to be a time to talk about it.

I guess I'm still thinking about the time when it was considered okay to talk about impeaching Chimpy George the Prez. Although his entire administration seemed to be singlemindedly devoted to racking up impeachment-worthy offenses, and although the prospects for impeachment while the House was controlled by Republicans impervious to the rule of law or the sway of the Constitution, when Democrats retook control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, you'll recall that almost immediately new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that impeachment was "off the table." And then, as more and more of those sorry Chimpified chickens came home to roost, and the dimension of the catastrophe of the Bush regime became hard to miss (and I'm talking long before the coup de grace of the economic meltdown), it turned out that it was too late for impeachment. Somehow the time for impeachment had passed, without any notice of the event. Apparently there had been a window of opportunity for it, but it had closed before anybody knew it was open. Maybe that too was scheduled overnight on a weekend, and we missed it.

I can't help feeling that once the beleaguered NYC Sanitation Department has had more time, in combination with the eventual warming that's expected later in the week, and the crisis portion of the storm aftermath has passed, and it's theoretically possible to talk about the city's response, according to Mayor Mike's timetable, it's going to turn out to be equally inappropriate to talk about. We're going to be told how there's no point in looking back, we need to be looking forward in our efforts at improved storm-readiness -- you know, in the way that President Obama told us so forcefully that we should be looking back at bad things that might have happened but should only be looking forward to doing things right.

In other words, I'm thinking it's going to turn out that whenever the window for talking about it was open, it has already closed.

NOW, SPEAKING ABOUT THAT SNOWSTORM
RESPONSE (SORRY, MAYOR MIKE)

This snowy Brooklyn streetscape accompanies George Packer's New Yorker blogpost "Snow Story" (see below).

Since the arrival of the Big Storm on Sunday, my TV has been tuned, first nonstop and later semiregularly, to our local cable-news channel, NY1, where a recurring feature has been angry New Yorkers, generally angry New Yorkers from the "outer boroughs" of Brooklyn and Queens, complain about the city's weak response to the heavy snowfall. My guess is that Bronx residents have even more grounds for grievance, but among the "outer" boroughs no borough -- not even remote, underpopulated, self-contained Staten Island -- is outerer than the Bronx, which hardly exists in the media consciousness except for occasional crime or corruption stories.

Now, outer-borough grievances about poor snow-clearance efforts are hardly new. I'm guessing that the late John Lindsay went to his grave still hearing the outcry that arose during his mayoralty. Still, our Mayor Mike has made a point of pretending to be an all-boroughs mayor -- a theme that surfaced endlessly during all the endless telephone polls he bankrolled during his last reelection campaign. It struck me as bogus then, and I wonder how outer-borough voters who voted for the son of a bitch are feeling about it this week.

To be sure, a 20-inch snowstorm isn't something the city can be expected to expect to happen at any time, and that much snow presents a substantially larger problem than even a heavy, but still ligher, snowstorm: With that much snow, there's no place really to put removed snow, at least not without creating a navigability problem more or less equivalent (albeit likely pedestrian-based) to the one you just "solved." Nevertheless, the fact is, it can happen at any time, and clearly the city wasn't in any way, shape, or form prepared for this one, even though it was fairly well forecast. Certainly part of the problem is that it was a Sunday storm, and the city never seems to go all-out in snow-cleaning efforts on the weekend, I imagine because of overtime costs, coupled with the belief that the city doesn't have to function at full capacity on weekends -- the "thinking," to the extent that it can be called thinking, being that it's entirely possible that by Monday morning temperatures may have risen into the 60s or 70s and melted all the snow. It also didn't help that, substantial as the Sunday snowfall was, the really crippling part of the storm came overnight, and the city also isn't really great at dealing with overnight storms, again (I'm guessing) because it involves a lot of overtime and after all the city doesn't have to be at full capacity during the overnight period either.

Of course, put that all together -- 20 inches of snow from an overnight Sunday-to-Monday storm -- and the likely result is that the digging-out efforts don't really get into full swing until Monday morning. In addition, because the city Sanitation Department is a shrunken shell of its former self, because that's what they city thinks it can get away with paying for, at maximum effort its efforts aren't all that maximal. Today I saw the sanitation commissioner being asked about reports that residents were seeing snow-clearing equipment all over the city sitting idle, and while his response wasn't entirely clear to me, he seemed to be acknowledging that yes, we now actually have more equipment than available personnel to operate it.

I was rummaging around on the New Yorker website looking for a link for another post when I stumbled across this blogpost by staff writer George Packer, called "Snow Story." Packer, it turns out, is a Brooklynite, and one of those who found his neighborhood substantially untouched by New York City's early snow-clearing efforts. His "snow story" begins:

The trouble began Sunday night. Just as the storm was blowing at its wildest, I trudged out to buy milk and found two women trying to maneuver a helpless old-model compact off our Brooklyn street, two-thirds of the way down the block. Stuck at an angle near a buried fire hydrant, they were pushing and spinning and getting nowhere, with the smell of burning rubber noxiously sharp in the cold air. "Do you need some help?" No one ever answers right away, "Yes, thank you." They're too caught in the immediate distraction of their trap, too angry or embarrassed or wary. The women, black and in their thirties, considered the offer of a stranger emerging out of the blizzard. I explained that we could move the car fifty or sixty feet up the street, following the tracks of another car that was stuck farther up. "And how is that going to be helpful?" one of them demanded. My idea was to guide the car into a row of free parking spaces ahead of mine, but she was right: the tracks were disappearing in the snow even as we stood talking, and though we got the car out of its rut, we couldn't advance more than five feet.

By Monday,

the ledge of snow in the doorway was above the knee: no way to leave the house except by digging from inside out. Up and down the block, cars were buried in drifts. Someone had carved a canyon from the sidewalk to a driver's side door through a roof-high snow pile that was partly composed of shovelings. In the economy of a storm this big, there was nowhere to get rid of snow that didn't encroach on someone else's space, and some shovelfuls must have been tossed back and forth a few times. All day we waited for the plows, but they didn't come.

The frustration and helplessness mount.

Twenty inches of snow isn't a 7.5 earthquake or Category 4 hurricane. Unless it's life-threatening, an emergency rarely lifts human beings above themselves. A snowstorm like this is bad enough to make people parochial and aggrieved, but not disastrous enough to make them generous and heroic. The stories of people trapped on subway trains all night, of hundreds of 911 calls going unanswered for hours, remained abstract, because we were in no actual danger. And so, instead, it seemed as if our block was being singled out for idiocy and neglect.

A moving van, with a crew of three Spanish-speakers moving a couple to an apartment on the next block, became the latest and largest obstacle to movement on the block. Eventually, though, the moving crew works wonders.

When I came out, a little after noon, the movers had finished loading and had actually managed to advance their van ten or fifteen feet. They were doing it by shoveling the entire street in front of them -- two or three of them furiously working the snow, without gloves, then laying the blankets they use to protect furniture in front of the van's tires and creeping forward. Stage by stage, they were getting close to the intersection. I walked around the neighborhood to see if there were any passable streets and found an exit route that a four-wheel-drive vehicle might clear to a major avenue. By the time I returned, the van was past the intersection, part way up the next block, and the movers were already unloading it. They had plowed our street with shovels. Outsiders on the clock, they had done the city's work -- our work.

Will you let us know when we can talk about it, Mayor Mike? I didn't think so.


UPDATE: MAYOR MIKE BITES THE BULLET

Late this afternoon the NYT's Patrick McGeehan reports:

Bloomberg Takes Blame for Response to Snowstorm

By PATRICK McGEEHAN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg accepted responsibility Wednesday for the city’s response to a crippling snowstorm, pledging to have every street plowed by morning and then to figure out why his administration’s cleanup efforts were inadequate.

Speaking at a hardware store in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, Mr. Bloomberg said he was “extremely dissatisfied” with the performance of the city’s emergency management system. He said the response was “a lot worse” than after other recent snowstorms and was not as efficient as “the city has a right to expect.”

But he also defended his commissioners, including John J. Doherty, who runs the Sanitation Department. The mayor called him “the best sanitation commissioner this city has ever had, period, bar none.” . . .

You can be sure the name "John Lindsay" has been heard in conversations among hizzoner's inner circle. Still, it's well to watch closely for the time that that window of opportunity for discussion remains ever so slightly open.


MORE TEAM SNOWSTORM COVERAGE

In our next post Noah will reflect on how the city reached this level of, er, "preparedness."

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Say it ain't so, Schmo -- has Chimpy the Ex-Prez abandoned the old prop ranch in Crawford?

The former Yellow Rose in Crawford, TX, one of four souvenir shops that have gone belly up since the town's former First Rancher decamped

"'Ever since he got that new place in Dallas, he hasn’t been around much,' said Carter Blenden, the waiter at the Coffee Station who served Mr. Bush a cheeseburger with jalapeño fries on July 28 last year, his last trip to the local restaurant. (The ticket is preserved on the wall of the kitchen.)"

-- from James C. McKinley Jr.'s Monday NYT report,

"Texas Town Adusts to Life Without Bush"

by Ken

Remember how being a president always seemed to be a distraction for poor George W. Bush, taking him away from his never-an-idle-moment chores on the ol' ranch? There was always another vacation to take, some riding around in his golf cart to do, and of course his mountain bike to fall off.

All bunk, of course. His Chimpiness was as much a rancher as, say, PeeWee Herman. But an awful lot of gullible Americans swallowed the act whole, cheering him on as he set about destroying the country, and any other county he could get his grubby mitts on. And it seems no sooner did he drag his sad carcass out of the White House, relocating to his $3 million pad in Dallas, than he lost the need to play rancher. James McKinley reports:

He still comes to his 1,400-acre ranch on holidays and on some weekends, but he does not arrive with the thwap-thwap-thwap of helicopters anymore. He slips quietly through town in a black sport utility vehicle and leaves just as quietly, townspeople say. . . .

Mr. Bush has seldom appeared in Crawford, where he bought the ranch from a local family just before becoming president. He still comes to the ranch to ride his mountain bike over trails, and he likes to fish for bass in two ponds he had created behind his house.

Last August, he held a barbecue for about 100 local ranchers, some neighbors said, to make amends for all the traffic headaches they had dealt with during his presidency, when peace protesters regularly clogged the road to his land. The former president himself flipped burgers for the guests.

"Most of the former president’s energy," McKinley reports, "has gone into starting up a conservative research and policy center, the George W. Bush Institute, and planning his presidential library at Southern Methodist University." It's a shame they don't call the "conservative research and policy center" a think tank, which would set up the same joke as the idea of a Bush library.

Just because Chimpy has given up play-acting his role as the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan doesn't mean, though, that he's permanently abandoned Crawford. It appears, by his own testimony, that he never will.

"I asked him how long he was going to keep that ranch, and he said, 'As long as I live,'" recalled Newt Westerfield, 86, who owns land next to the Bushes’ place.

After all, sometimes a fake cowboy's just gotta git out in the open spaces and air out the ol' golf cart. Plus, it's such a long way to the Bush family homestead in Paraguay. (Besides, they've no longer got that friendly fascist regime down there.)

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The people who voted twice for Chimpy the Prez already seem to have forgotten him. The rest of us, suggests Tom Schaller, can at least try

by Ken

I think it was in a comment that I mentioned I was going to a periodic brunch of some New York-area bloggers, and it came off fine -- either helped by or in spite of the weird weather, with temperatures in the 60s! (Around Christmas we had a stretch of several days where the temperature didn't get up to freezing.) But there was a heavy gray overcast all day, and a uniform coat of wet on the pavement everywhere, even though no one could recall it raining.

Anyway, over the dim sum someone mentioned something that someone had mentioned, or proposed, or something for the final day of Chimpy the Prez in office. I honestly don't recall what the proposal was, and I'm not even sure it really registered at the same time. I was just overwhelmed with the thought of "the final day of Chimpy the Prez in office." We knew it had to happen eventually, but there were times, I tell you, when I wondered. (For years my poor mother, now just past midway between her 89th and 90th birthdays, would say that she wouldn't live to see it, and while it looks like she may be proved technically wrong, I'm afraid it's coming to late for her to be aware.)

Anyway, today's Baltimore Sun column by our colleague and friend Tom Schaller caught Howie's eye (still in Mali, if my calculations are correct), and we'd like to share it with you. Tom, a regular columnist for the Sun, is a political scientist by profession, and is perhaps famliar to you as the author of the enormously influential 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Given the "countdown" format (it took all I had to resist spoiling the buildup by pulling "No. 1" out to exerpt at the top of this post), rather than try to excerpt the column, I'm just going to pass it on whole:

43 reasons we won't miss President Bush

Thomas F. Schaller
December 30, 2008

The Bush family devised a simple, numerical means to distinguish between the presidencies of father and son: George H.W. Bush was called "41," and George W. Bush became "43." To mark the imminent -- and merciful -- end of 43's reign, here are 43 remembrances of the departing administration.

There were actions to pacify or mobilize the right-wing elements that brought Mr. Bush to power:

43. Restoring the so-called Mexico City policy prohibiting American aid to groups that provide abortion counseling in other countries.

42. Brokering an embryonic stem cell compromise by falsely claiming there were 60 viable cell lines (about five times the actual number).

41. Attorney General John Ashcroft's puritanical cloaking of the Justice Department's semi-nude "Spirit of Justice" statue.

40. Political adviser Karl Rove's use of gay marriage ballot measures to rally evangelicals for the 2004 election.

There were poor staffing choices and the willful ignoring of sound advice:

39. White House adviser Claude A. Allen's arrest for illegal merchandise exchanges at Target.

38. The Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers, whose sycophancy trumped her lack of qualifications for the bench.

37. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill's puzzlement that the president could sit through an entire briefing without asking a single thoughtful question.

36. "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."

35. Rejecting Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's estimate that "several hundred thousand" American troops would be needed in Iraq.

34. Dumping Secretary of State Colin L. Powell even though he risked his reputation with the 2003 U.N. testimony about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which he later deemed the "lowest point" of his life.

33. The president's petulant refusal to consult with his actual father, who knew something about invading Iraq, in favor of war counsel from a "higher father."

There was a penchant for deception and secrecy:

32. A gay male escort, working under a pseudonym for a bogus news agency, was permitted access to White House press conferences.

31. The executive order rebuking the Presidential Records Act, sealing 41's vice presidential papers from public view.

30. The altering of a 2003 Environmental Protection Agency report showing evidence of global warming.

29. Hiding from Congress the Medicare prescription plan's internal cost estimate until the bill passed.

28. The creation under Vice President Dick Cheney's supervision of the Office of Special Plans to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence data.

27. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction stored "around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

26. The later attempt to blame pre-war intelligence failures on CIA Director George J. Tenet.

And, at No. 25, Mr. Bush's infamous 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Though Mr. Bush in 2004 couldn't cite a single mistake he had made (No. 24), for the self-described "Decider" (No. 23) indecision was often costly:

22 through 18: As the terrorist attacks unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001, he froze for seven precious minutes in that Sarasota, Fla., classroom, reading The Pet Goat; he wasted vital weeks that autumn before dispatching special forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden; his re-election at stake in summer 2004, he delayed for six months sending troops into Fallujah to suppress the growing insurgency; he fiddled for three days in August 2005 before delivering federal resources to New Orleans after Katrina; and he sank four years, 4,000 deaths and billions of dollars into Iraq before changing his failed strategy there.

On the domestic front, there were tax cuts for the wealthiest sold as an economic stimulus that never occurred (No. 17), a failed attempt to privatize Social Security that would have cost the treasury billions (No. 16), and budget deficits all eight years (No. 15). Despite trillions borrowed or lost to tax cuts, the administration claimed there were insufficient funds for children's health insurance (No. 14), college tuition assistance (No. 13) or veterans' benefits (No. 12).

Nos. 11, 10 and 9: Opponents were smeared, from John Kerry via the Swift Boat Veterans front group to Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV by outing his wife, CIA asset Valerie Plame, to triple-amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland during the 2002 Georgia U.S. Senate race.

American values were sullied abroad in Abu Ghraib (No. 8), at home through domestic wiretapping (No. 7) and in between at the jurisdictionally murky Guantanamo prison (No. 6).

Most of all, there was hubris, from Mr. Rumsfeld's glib "known unknowns" monologues at press conferences (No. 5) to Mr. Cheney's media-dodging after shooting his friend in the face (No. 4), and from Mr. Bush's infantilizing habit of giving everyone nicknames (No. 3) to his failed promise to be a "uniter, not a divider" (No. 2).

If polarizing the country, wrecking the economy and turning the world against us was the goal, then the No. 1 entry is painfully obvious: "Mission accomplished."

Thanks, Tom! Mission accomplished!

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