Confidential to the Ohio Denali-deniers: If you really can't grasp the name change, bear in mind that it's none of your frigging business

With (Lord help us) Trump update -- see below

Mount Denali (20,237 feet)

"President McKinley never visited, nor did he have any significant historical connection to, the mountain or to Alaska."

-- Interior Secretary Sally Jewell

"I'd like to thank the president for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska."

-- Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)

by Ken

Confidential to Ohio Republicans mouthing off about the Obama administration's redesignation of the continent's highest peak from Mount McKinley to Denali, as it was long known to indigenous peoples, from an Athabascan word meaning, we're told, "the great one," and as it has been known for decades now to Alaskans:

Have you looked at a map lately? (Or ever?) This is none of your frigging business. How about you just shut your frigging pieholes?

Jeez. Every time you think right-wingers who do all their thinking with their stinkybutts have reached the limit of Obama-bashing crackpottery, they kick it up another notch. After all these years they still don't know an effing thing about Barack Obama except the color of his skin -- and, oh yes, that they hate him and everything he believes, whatever that may be. But that's enough for the bully-boy crackpots. Often the only way they know what they believe is by pointing at "that Obummer" and squealing: "The opposite of what he said, the opposite of what he said!"


SO HOW DID IT BECOME "MOUNT McKINLEY"?

Perhaps you think I'm being hyperbolic when I say that President McKinley had no connection whatsoever to the great mountain? Okay, here's how it became "Mount McKinley." A gold prospector named William Dickey who went prospecting in June 1896 later wrote: "We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the Presidency, and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness."

That's it, the entire McKinley connection to the mountain.

The name Mount McKinley was adopted by Congress in 1917, some 16 years after the president's assassination. It is, of course, too bad about President McKinley being assassinated, and I don't think you have to be from Ohio to think so. But that has nothing whatever to do with a mountain in Alaska. In fact, many Alaskans never accepted the new name. In 1975 the Alaska Board of Geographic Names renamed the mountain Denali (and tried to get their federal counterparts to do the same), and since 1980, when the former Mount McKinley National Park was merged with Denali National Monument, the result has been known as Denali National Park and Preserve.

Now in a simple, carefully legally grounded stroke, at the president's behest, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell has restored its most common indigenous name to the mountain itself, replacing the name of a president who had nothing whatsoever to do with the place. So naturally the current crop of Republican doodybrains from McKinley's home state of Ohio go nuts. In a U.S. News piece, "Mt. McKinley to Denali: How A Mountain's Renaming Got Tied Up in Politics," Jon Schuppe reports (I've intentionally omitted all links):

Ohio Republicans lashed out.

"I'm deeply disappointed in this decision," House Speaker John Boehner said.

Boehner cited McKinley's service in the Civil War, in Congress, as Ohio governor and as the 25th president.

Sen. Rob Portman accused Obama of "going around Congress." But he seemed resigned to the renaming.

"I now urge the administration to work with me to find alternative ways to preserve McKinley's legacy somewhere else in the national park that once bore his name."

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, also said Obama had acted outside his authority.

As POTUS once again oversteps his bounds, Ohio knows every carnation is a monument to our own William McKinley.

— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) August 31, 2015

Rep. Bob Gibbs vowed to find a way to block what he called "Constitutional overreach" and a "political stunt" that was "insulting to all Ohioans."

My full statement on @POTUS ignoring an Act of Congress and changing the name of Mount McKinley. [LINK OMITTED]

— Rep. Bob Gibbs (@RepBobGibbs) August 31, 2015

I hold no great brief for President McKinley, about whom what most of us remember is that he was the founding father of 20th-century American imperialism. But still, even he deserves a higher caliber of acolyte than these clowns. Portman, a dismally dull political hack, is at least the sort of fellow he would recognize, and I suppose maybe Kasich as well. They're embarrassments but not disgraces. These other clowns, however . . . well, words fail me.

In order:

To Boehner: What the living hell are you talking about? Do you have any clue at all? Are you even aware that your gums are flapping without any input from a working brain? Boehner cited McKinley's service in the Civil War, in Congress, as Ohio governor and as the 25th president. So what? None of this has the slightest, remotest connection to the name of the highest mountain in North America. Is your brain so pickled that you're incapable of grasping this pathetically simple concept? Did you give the matter even the merest split second's worth of thought before you opened your yap?

To Portman: Why on God's green earth should anything in Denali National Park be named for McKinley? Are you truly not aware that WM had nothing whatever to do with the place? If so, then you should resign from the Senate on the ground that even by the dismal standards of that body you're too ignorant to serve. On a personal note, this level of arrogance and self-importance piled on top of this level of ignorance and stupidity is a really unattractive combination. If it's your beloved state you're concerned about, don't you worry that people will think that all Ohioans are as mentally incapacitated as you are?

To Kasich: Again, making those bullying noises when you have no effing clue what the eff you're talking about does not put you in a flattering light. The president didn't overstep anything (the governor is no doubt thinking of previous, successful efforts by Ohio hack pols to forestall the name change), and before you make an accusation like that, as the governor of a state you sure the hell should have taken the time to acquaint yourself with the actual legalities. Congratulations on demonstrating that you are an incompetent buffoon.

To Gibbs: Yikes! Do you ever listen to yourself?

To all four of you: If any of you actually has a brain, it's not working. You should check your warranty to see if it's covered; if not, you should really consider the one available remedial action.

For the record, Google Maps has now officially changed the name to Mount Denali. (But Bing, no.)


IF THESE GUYS THINK IT'S THEIR DUTY TO HONOR
AN OHIO GOP PREZ VIA A NAMING OPPORTUNITY --

Then get serious. Do something real instead of wasting everyone's time with this insulting, aggressive, imbecilic mouthing off.

Here's a suggestion. Proclaim that from now on all Ohio Republican men will officially call their penises McKinley. Maybe hold a  competition for a design they can all have tattooed on the little fellers, with the competition winner earning a chance to drink "Sunny John" Boehner under the table.


LIKE MOST ALASKANS, GOP SEN. LISA MURKOWSKI
COULDN'T BE MORE PLEASED BY THE NAME CHANGE

It's only fair to note that not all Republicans have followed the lead of the Ohio Twits.


“For generations Alaskans have known this majestic mountain as the Great One. Today we’re honored to be able to officially recognize the mountain as Denali. I’d like to thank the president for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska.”


UPDATE: GUESS WHO'S JOINED THE OBAMA-BASHING
DENALI-DENIAL CLUB. BY GOLLY, IT'S THE DONALD!

To quote myself above: "Every time you think right-wingers who do all their thinking with their stinkybutts have reached the limit of Obama-bashing crackpottery, they kick it up another notch." Here I thought we could go out on a gracious note with Senator Murkowski's enthusiastic comments. But no. Howie passes along this from The Hill:

Trump pledges to reverse Obama’s mountain renaming



By Timothy Cama - 08/31/15 09:17 PM EDT

Donald Trump promised Monday that he would return the name of North America’s largest mountain to Mount McKinley, undoing President Obama’s decision to call it Denali.

Calling Obama’s act a “great insult to Ohio,” Trump, who is running for president next year, tweeted late Monday that Obama reversed the name the peak had for more than 100 years, in honor of President William McKinley, an Ohio native.

What were some of the epithets I applied above to the Obama-bashing Ohio Denali-deniers? Let's see, there was ignorant and imbecilic and bullying and aggressive. No evidence of a working brain, has apparently never looked at a map, doesn't think before he opens his yap, can't mind his own frigging business. No wonder The Donald wanted to join this club!

I would encourage The D to take my McKinley Penis Picture Pledge, but he might then feel obliged to show it to us, and nobody wants to see that.

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Bye-bye, Gibbsy, and don't worry, if anyone can find a worse WH mouthpiece, it'll be your boss

by Ken

Gibbs tells staffers he is leaving White House

By Anne E. Kornblut and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 5, 2011; 11:46 AM

Robert Gibbs told White House staffers Wednesday that he is leaving his post as President Obama's press secretary, ending a two-year tenure that made him the face of the White House as he sparred with reporters and defended administration policies.

Gibbs plans to leave in early February and to become an outside political adviser for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, administration officials said. A successor is expected to be announced in the next couple of weeks. . . .

I kind of checked out a few words into the next sentence, where our boy Gibbsy is described as "an affable Democrat from Alabama." Affable? That smug, supercilious, frequently lying son of a bitch? Affable?

Okay, in fairness, his lack of affability is a minor issue alongside his general wishy-woshiness and incoherence, and persistent uninformedness. After all, like all White House press secretaries, he was given only as much information as his bosses were willing to share with the public, and in this case it turns out to be very little, and when you've got basically nothing to say, wishy-woshiness and incoherence aren't so much vices as simply part of the job descrption.

Add to that how wishy-woshy and incoherent those bosses tend to be, and also the extent to which they really prefer that their real thinking not be a matter of public discussion. (After all, this way they can have the pleasure of hearing sympathetic outsiders attribute the administration's media difficulties to "poor communications" or "messaging difficulties.") In throwing stones at Gibbsy, we may truly just be blaming the messenger.

Surely nobody's thinking: His replacement can hardly be worse, can he? Come on, people! These are the smart folks who came up with the idea of replacing Master Rahm Emanuel with the Daley brother. Don't assume we won't someday be looking back on the Gibbsy Years as the Golden Age of Obama Media Communications.

So maybe I shouldn't be so touchy about the "affability" thing with Gibbsy. Maybe some people are just naturally easy to hate. However, my eyes did make it farther into that graf from the Post story, and there's a thought there that I'd like to salvage:

"According to three Democrats with White House knowledge, Gibbs in recent weeks had been exploring the possibility of leaving the White House, perhaps to set up his own consulting shop and play a leading role in the 2012 campaign."

Speaking as someone who would never wish to denigrate the insight of "three Democrats with White House knowledge," at least when the subject is inside-the-White House machinations, let me say that I find this totally credible. I've heard people, understandably surprised by the vagueness of Gibbsy's announced future plans, suggest that he has simply been cut loose by the administration -- you know, because he apparently isn't being slotted into a job like the briefly rumored DNC chairmanship. (Digging up my post of October 2, I find that I described the Gibbs-to-the-DNC trial balloon this way in a photo caption: "For a couple of hours this morning, White House spokesninny Robert 'Ooh, I Hate That Professional Left So-o-o Much' Gibbs was destined to become, er, the new Tim Kaine.")

It was already assumed that whenever Gibbs made his departure from the White House, he would be marking time for a role in the Obama reelection campaign. Am I the only one for whom this suggestion that he "set up his own consulting shop and play a leading role in the 2012 campaign" rings incredibly true? Think of the scandal Howie has been reporting about the incestuous relationship between the House Democratic leadership and the consultants to whom the DCCC funnels business. Conflict-of-interest-type corruption is no longer incidental or accidental -- it's structural!

So why should Gibbsy have to squeeze Tim Kaine where either Tim doesn't want to vacate or nobody else can be found to take the job? Why should Gibbsy have to wait till his "political player" days are over before he can start cashing in? Nowadays, you can stay in the game and still rake in those consultant suckerbucks!


CONFIDENTIAL TO BARACK O. --

About the political players who'll be raking in all those 2012 election-consultant suckerbucks: It has occurred to you that those consultants rake in their suckerbucks whether they help you win or lose, hasn't it?

Think about it.

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Bye-bye, Rahm -- write if you get work, and don't worry, there's no shortage of Village weasels left to carry on your mission

For a couple of hours this morning, White House spokesninny Robert "Ooh, I Hate That Professional Left So-o-o Much" Gibbs was destined to become, er, the new Tim Kaine.

by Ken

So Master Rahm is gone. From the White House, anyway. And apparently unmourned, except insofar as he now serves as a convenient scapegoat for anyone left behind who feels the need for one. (Witness David Axelrod's astonishing rewrite of history reported by The New Republic's Noam Scheiber as "the disillusionment of Obama's guru.") This is, of course, in perfect accord with one of the basic operating principles of modern-day fake-centrist right-wing Dems:

"Devote all your energies to serving the People Who Really Matter with gutlessness and freedom from principle. Just be sure to have a bus lined up, and at least one well-enough-placed schmuck to throw under it, if the heat falls on you."

It does appear that in the end our Rahm was kind of pushed out of the White House, I assume because once it became a Village fact-on-the-ground that he was on his way out to pursue the Chicago mayoralty, he lost a lot of his magic powers. He was, in a word, history. Now, as I've already noted, we can only hope that the good people of Chicago are sensible enough to look at the astonishing swarm of candidates seeking to replace what we have to hope is the city's last Mayor Daley and say to Rahm, "Nuh-uh, we don't think so."

The thing about Rahm is not just that he's evil, though he is, but that even the things he claims to be good at, like hard-nosed politics, or getting things done, he sucks at. I'm astonished to be hearing people talking about the "toughness" he is imagined to have brought to Democrats, when the guy is scared of his shadow when it comes to mixing it up with anyone who isn't weaker than he is, and has never fought any Republican half as hard as he does every Democrat to the left of, say, Joe Lieberman.

Yesterday on NPR's Morning Edition Mara Liasson was paying teary tribute to Master Rahm for being "prescient" in warning the president of the political risk of staking so much political capital on health care, but of course no one is more responsible than Master Rahm for the crappiness of the crap that was finally passed, with its unapologetic kowtowing to the giant corporate interests that would have suffered from real health care reform. It was the Master, after all, who toiled so tirelessly to mow down opposition within his party with the argument that all they had to do for political salvation was pass a bill, any bill. Was that more of Master Rahm's "prescience," Mara?

(Side note: If I know all of this, how does it happen that Mara doesn't? I don't know whether she's too ignorant or too corrupt to be a political correspondent, but one way or the other shouldn't she be quitting in abject disgrace?)

Again, Master Rahm likes to pass himself off as a political genius, when there's no evidence that he knows any techniques of political operation beyond: (a) pandering to voter apathy and ignorance and (b) behaving like an authoritarian sleazebag who lines his own pockets in the service of corporate masters while abusing the political little people. These are both, in their different ways, correct political expressions. But if they represent the sum total of your political acumen, you aren't fit to lick Karl Rove's shoes.

As we've pointed out so often here at DWT, Rahm had very little to do with the Dems retaking the House. To the extent that he succeeded in putting nominal-Dem fannies in House seats, these are the very people who are Exhibit A anytime the party's House leadership "doesn't have the votes" to enact legislation that would be genuinely beneficial to non-elite Americans. And with the progressives who found their way into Congress, usually not just without his help but with his active opposition, he used all the powers of leaderly strong-arming to spinectomize. He can smell political principle and especially independence a mile off, and do whatever he has to to stamp it out. My guess is that there isn't any Republican who hates Alan Grayson half as much as Rahm does.

Meanwhile back in the White House, a lot of my progressive colleagues have been trying frantically to find out more about Pete Rouse, Master Rahm's apparently interim replacement as chief of staff. I've heard some moderately good things about him, but I can't imagine that'll make any substantive difference, because Rahmism is bigger than Rahm -- no evidence suggests that his counsel was anything other than what the president wanted to hear. And the White House woodwork is crawling with Rahmistas.

Those "senior officials" in the administration may already have forgotten Rahm's name, but the spirit lives, as does the rank political ineptitude. This morning, for example, for a couple of hours White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was more or less signed, sealed, and delivered to replace Tim Kaine as chair of the DNC, at least according to Politico's Mike Allen and Josh Gerstein, in an online "exclusive" posted this morning.

Now if you say that Politico is a dreadful source of information, I couldn't agree more. The thing is Allen and Gerstein, Village hacks though they may be, didn't make this story up. Like most of the drivel their rag circulates, it was fed to them. So the obvious question is, who planted the story? And then the question is: why?

If it was a trial balloon, apparently didn't float. The Politico "exclusive" was posted at 9:41am ET, and by 1:15pm the Washington Post's Philip Rucker and Anne Kornblut had posted: "Gibbs unlikely to become DNC chair, White House says." It seems everybody in the White House (and on a Saturday!), including Gibbs, was denying all.

Well, not denying all. According to Rucker and Kornblut, "Senior administration and Democratic officials" -- presumably not to be confused with the "senior officials" who had earlier been whispering in Politico's ears -- "sought to squelch the report, saying the idea may have been put out as a trial balloon but that there was no real plan underway."

Now "there was no real plan underway" leaves lots of weasel room, and no modern White House ever seems to have a shortage of weasels. Well, yes, admitted one anonymous WaPo source(once again, this silliness could be whistled dead if the media political whores would stop granting anonymity to every Village ax-grinder peddling a "scoop"), maybe the Gibbs-to-DNC idea has been discussed informally, but not in any high-level meetings. Another senior anonym allows that maybe the idea has been talked about "vaguely," but it's "not currently under active consideration."

At least not since the trial balloon, if that's what it was, burst. The best clue to what such a trial balloon might have been about is this from the Politico scoop: "Donors’ response has been positive, according to people who have been consulted." (Quick: Can anyone count how many layers of anonymity are embedded in that, er, report?)

So the point of fascination remains: Who in the administration political apparatus thinks putting Robert Gibbs in charge of the Democratic Party political operation would be a good idea? Or even an idea worth discussing? As Alan Grayson set forth so cogently some weeks ago ("Gibbs should not resign, he should be fired"), it would be difficult to imagine a more hideously inept job of client representation than Gibbs's. Pretty much every word out of his mouth has seemed perfectly crafted to be used by the Republican obstructionist opposition to trounce, ridiculed, demonize, and otherwise tear the administration to shreds.

However, like other people who have the president's ear, Gibbs seems to have no trouble articulating his loathing for the "professional left," by which they appear to understand the people who have been warning since the administration's panoply of "Bush lite" (and often not-so-lite) policies became clear that they would likely have the effect on the public's perception that they have in fact had.

It's one thing to have to face the political consequences for standing on principle. But when you sneer at pols who have even a shred of principle and still take a political clobbering, well, isn't there something wrong with this picture?

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As usual, inside the Beltway there's never symmetry between Left and Right

"The GOP base wants tax cuts and deregulation, and when the Republicans are in power, they deliver as much of those things as they can. The Democratic base wanted a public option (actually, single-payer) for health care, a trillion-dollar stimulus, and the breakup of the big banks. It never came especially close to getting any of these things."

-- Michael Tomasky, in "The Right Way to Please

the Base," in The American Prospect

by Ken

Especially in the wake of White House Press Worm Robert Gibbs's Left-baiting performance, Michael Tomasky's new piece is an exhilarating must-read. If nothing else, it's nice to be back in the real world. (My favorite comment to date about the Gibbs fiasco was Alan Grayson's "Robert Gibbs has brought America together; both the Right and the Left hate him." Actually, he devotes most of his comment in this Ed Show segment to a brilliantly articulate description of how Gibbs has failed at his job, becoming a tool of the right-wing media. For the record, I've already set out my "I Hate Gibbsy" credentials.)

Michael begins by recalling:

A video that made the rounds last summer summed up the problem nicely. Mike Stark of The Huffington Post hoisted a camera on his shoulder, hung out on the streets near the House office buildings in Washington, and asked passing Republican House members: Do you believe that Barack Obama is a rightful citizen of the United States?

I don't know how many he asked (there were snippets of several ducking into cars or pretending to take calls), but he quoted 11 in the video he posted. Of the 11, only one, Trent Franks of Arizona [right], acknowledged straightforwardly that yes, his staff had intensively researched the question and was forced to conclude that a birth announcement in a 1961 issue of The Honolulu Advertiser likely couldn't have been forged. The other 10, mostly not well known, either ducked the question, marching forward in that West Wing, I've-got-important-business way, or gave too-clever-by-half responses, or just came out and said they weren't sure. "I think there are questions, so we'll have to see," quipped Charles Boustany of Louisiana -- spoken a touch ironically because he, unlike Obama, is in fact of Arab (Lebanese) lineage, an ethnicity frequently and incorrectly assigned to the president.

Oh, and by the way: Even Franks wanted Stark to understand that while he conceded the citizenship question, he believed Obama to be a socialist and jihad-abettor.

I remember watching this in disbelief and thinking, well, this explains a lot. These people aren't just indulgent of their base. They're terrified of it. The birther movement is crazy. And even on a question of crazy, these sitting members of the United States Congress could not say what is obviously true and uncontroversial to normal earthlings. I'm confident very few of them actually buy this nonsense. But they know exactly what kind of plagues will be unleashed on them if they admit the truth.

How to put this in perspective? Michael comes up with an ingenious hypothetical.

Let's imagine that a right-wing reporter had asked 11 Democratic House members in 2002 whether George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks and let them happen (an imprecise but rough analogy in that it is also, I believe, crazy). One or two Democrats might have played that one coy, but by and large, they'd have turned cartwheels disassociating themselves from such a view. Herein lies one of the most important facts of our politics over the past 20 years: Republicans are terrified of offending even the fringe elements of their base. Democrats are terrified of being associated with theirs.

This is a dynamic that shapes policy-making every day and has shifted the center of gravity rightward over those two decades.

No, indeed, inside the Beltway they sure don't treat Left and Right anywhere near equivalently. D.C. Dems routinely trash progressives to build up cred with their mythical "Center." By contrast, even before the Terror of the Teabaggers it would have been hard to imagine Republican pols saying anything unkind about the blatant ignorance and insanity pouring forth from their rightward flank; now it's all but unthinkable.

After making the comparison I quoted at the top of this post, Michael strolls down Health-Care-Memory Lane.

"It is important for us to build on our traditions here in the United States," Obama said early in the health-care reform process, by way of warning that single-payer was off the table from the start. It's pretty close to impossible to imagine a Republican president taking a policy goal for which tens of thousands of rank-and-file conservatives had petitioned and lobbied over many years and defenestrating it from jump street. When progressive goals like single-payer are not even seen as starting points for negotiation, they become marginalized, non-mainstream; the whole spectrum moves rightward.

Then he reviews some Clinton history: denouncing Sister Souljah, passing NAFTA, supporting welfare reform, signing DOMA.

Clinton may well have believed in all these things. But he also knew that they were smart politics: If he stuck it to the liberal interest groups a few times, Establishment Washington would applaud. I think it's fair to say there is little such equivalent pressure on Republican presidents.

Democrats kowtow to -- and appropriately go to bat for -- their interest groups at times. But it's usually a negative application rather than a positive one. That is: Democrats typically don't go out of their way to embarrass the unions or the pro-choice lobby, as we saw on the health-care debate, when both of those factions won certain side victories. But doing something big and affirmative for labor, for example, like passing card-check legislation? Many Democrats are scared to death of taking action.

The reasons for this are depressingly straightforward. One: About 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative, and 20 percent identify as liberals. If those numbers were reversed, the levels of passion would be as well. Two: The conservative noise machine has done an effective job of painting liberal interest groups -- even ones whose main causes have respectable or even majority levels of support -- as if they're all secret agents of Hugo Chavez. The noise machine accuses; even if the interest group is innocent, which it typically is, it must constantly explain why it's innocent, and the explaining takes up most of the group's time and resources.

"There are," Michael insists, "no quick fixes" for these problems. "America will never be a 40-20 liberal country (even in the mid-1960s, at liberalism's political apex, we were more like 30-30)." And the mild-mannered "liberal noise machine" is no match for the right-wing juggernaut.

[O]ne of these days, a Democratic president -- preferably the sitting one -- is going to have to choose an issue, just one, that is important to the base and enjoys popular support and just say damn the torpedoes and push the throttle. It might be the public option, in an Obama second term, after the full implementation of the health-care law in 2014. It might be a price on carbon, which majorities consistently support in polls. Just one issue: It merely has to be demonstrated that a goal important to the liberal base can be winning politics (and, subsequently, good policy). Things will change; still slowly, but they will. . . .

Ideally, the Democrats will pay somewhat more attention to their base, and the Republicans somewhat less to theirs (which they might, if prominent Tea Party candidates like Marco Rubio and Sharron Angle lose this fall). We'd have a more balanced politics, and liberals would have more of a voice, even if we don't get everything we want. Given the alarming way things might go in this country, I'd count it a victory if that's where we are 20 years from now.

And this is what we would have to call the "optimistic" scenario!

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General Sheehan demonstrates the fine art of apologizing when all you're really sorry for is getting caught

Retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan, testifying

before the Senate Armed Services Committee

by Ken

You remember Marine Gen. John Sheehan, right? He's the clod who in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee two weeks ago on Don't Ask, Don't Tell blamed the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica on the "socializing" of the Dutch army -- meaning allowing openly gay soldiers and unionization. In view of the latest development, it's important to be clear about what exactly he did or didn't say. Here is the start of Philippe Naughton's March 19 report in the Times of London:

A retired American general has blamed the UN's historic failure to protect the Bosnian "safe haven" of Srebrenica on the fact that there were openly gay soldiers in the Dutch peacekeeping battalion assigned to it.

The comments from former Marine Corps General John Sheehan prompted outrage in the Netherlands, where the humiliation in July 1995 of 400 armed Dutch peacekeepers and the subsequent massacre by Serb forces of 8,000 Muslim men and boys remains a subject of acute national sensitivity.

General Sheehan, one of two Nato "supreme commanders" at the time of the massacre, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee against a proposal to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the US military.

He told the senators how the Armed Forces of various European countries had lost their combat focus after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and turned to peacekeeping because "they did not believe the Germans were going to attack again or the Soviets were coming back".

The general said that Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and other nations all took the decision that there was no longer a need for an active combat capability in the military.

"They declared a peace dividend and made a conscious effort to socialize their military -- that includes the unionisation of their militaries, it includes open homosexuality. That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war," he said.

"The case in point that I’m referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs: the battalion was under-strength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off, and executed them.

"That was the largest massacre in Europe since World War II."

Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat, chairman of the committee, was incredulous. He asked General Sheehan: "Did the Dutch leaders tell you it was because there were gay soldiers there?"

"Yes, they did. They included that as part of the problem," he replied.

"That there were gay soldiers?" the senator asked.

"That the combination was the liberalisation of the military; a net effect was basically social engineering."

Okay, there's already a bit of weaseling there at the end, when Senator Levin was trying to make sure that General Sheehan actually was saying what he had just said.

The good news is that the general's "testimony" indeed caused an uproar, more in Europe than in the U.S., not surprisingly, but even here this turned heads in a way that it wouldn't have ten or even five years ago. Enough of an uproar that the general has been forced to do some damage control, in the form of a letter dated yesterday to his Dutch counterpart, retired Marine Gen. Henk van den Breemen. It begins with a paragraph that actually sounds like an apology -- for possibly misrecollecting what General van den Breemen may have said in their conversations, and especially for dragging him into the current mess:

Thank you for our much appreciated conversations of the past week. During the mid-1990s, you and I discussed a broad range of issues and policies that reflected the social, political and financial pressures under which NATO Alliance members struggled. I am sorry that my recent public recollection of those discussions of 15 years ago inaccurately reflected your thinking on some specific social issues in the military. It is also regrettable that I allowed you to be pulled into a public debate. As a fellow Marine, I have the deepest respect for you personally and professionally. NATO and the Netherlands were well served by your leadership.

So far, not so bad. But now there's a somewhat more opaque paragraph, which ironically begins, "To be clear":

To be clear, the failure on the ground in Srebrenica was in no way the fault of the individual soldiers. The corporals and sergeants executed their orders based on the priorities of the political authorities. Unfortunately, the rules of engagement were developed by a political system with conflicting priorities and an ambivalent understanding of how to use the military. As we know, the consequences of those compromises were devastating.

And that's it. General Sheehan writes, "I wish you the very best during this Easter season," and signs off.

When I glanced quickly at the letter, I thought General Sheehan was apologizing to General van den Breemen for misrepresenting comments made in their conversations in the '90s, and was explaining that all those conflicting political priorities and that ambivalent understanding of how to use the military, all of that had just slipped his mind during his original testimony. 

Then I read it a little more carefully, and it occurred to me that just possibly what he's saying is that those political "compromises," that "ambivalent understanding of how to use the military," which led to such "devastating consequences" -- what all that is, is the very "socializing" of the Dutch military he was whining about in the first place. You know, with the inclusion of gays, as Senator Levin had made certain he was testifying, and unionizing of the army, all of which added up, you'll recall, to "a force that was ill-equipped to go to war."

In other words, it just may be that, even as General Sheehan is apologizing to General van den Breemen for misrecollecting the exact words of their conversations, what he's actually saying is: "What I said before." Only without actually saying it, 'cause you get jumped on if you dare to tell God's honest truth about, you know, those people, and I don't mean people who join unions.

Here's how my colleague Jim Burroway summarized his reading of the letter at Box Turtle Bulltetin:

This is a climbdown from Sheehan’s placing blame on individual gay soldiers in Srebrenica, but it is not a complete disavowal of Sheehan’s position. In this letter, he now shifts his blame to “a political system with conflicting priorities and an ambivalent understanding of how to use the military.” This echoes accusations hurled by opponents to DADT that allowing soldiers to serve with honesty and integrity — two core values of all branches of the armed services — somehow represents a political meddling in the conduct of military affairs. (I would also hasten to add that civilian control of the military is also a core value insisted upon by our founding fathers and enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.) So while media outlets and DADT repeal advocates may celebrate over this climb-down, I have a feeling that Sheehan’s position hasn’t changed one bit.

I have a feeling that Jim's feeling is exactly right. It seems clear that General van den Breemen isn't satisfied, because the letter was clearly released at his end. However, even if you accept that General Sheehan has genuinely changed his position in some substantive way, there remains the rather important question of General Sheehan's committee testimony, assuming his testimony had any importance. My colleague Chris Geidner reports at Metro Weekly:

The letter to Breemen, however, did not alter the testimony given by Sheehan. In a response from the Senate Armed Services Committee, a spokesman told Metro Weekly via e-mail, ''We have not received any communication from Gen. Sheehan, at least not yet.''

MORE ON DADT: THE WHITE HOUSE'S POSITION
ISN'T AT ALL MUDDLED (SNICKER, SNICKER)

Am I the only one who's coming to think of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs as just the next in succession to the line of odious Bush regime press secretaries? Does the guy ever actually answer a question? And is it my imagination that there's a tone of mockery, or even scorn, when talking about anyone who isn't in lockstep agreement with an administration policy from the left?

A colleague provides this transcription of an exchange at today's press briefing:

Q: Over successive weeks, Congressman Barney Frank has asked the White House to clarify whether it would like to see legislative action taken this year on “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  He’s said that direction from the White House has been muddled, and then at one point said that you guys were actually sort of ducking whether or not you wanted to see legislation action taken on repeal.  Would the President like to see that law --

ROBERT GIBBS:  Well, Carol, I would just say this. I don’t think what Admiral Mullen and Secretary Gates have enunciated on this appears muddled to anyone. I don’t -- there is a process that’s in place to move forward on the President’s commitment to repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

I don’t -- Admiral Mullen is the first chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to sit up in front of Congress and say that the law ought to be repealed -- not somebody who is retired, not somebody who is long past their commitment of serving their country, but somebody who sat up there and said that. And Secretary Gates and the commission at the Pentagon have taken some important steps.

We’re following that process.  We’ll see where the legislative road takes us as we continue to build support to keep the commitment that the President has made.

Well, excuse me, Mr. Press Secretary, but this still seems to me kind of muddled as to what the president actually wants to happen and what he might be prepared to do to make it happen. And you may have noticed that you didn't address Congressman Frank's unanswered question at all.

The one thing that's kind of new is the cavalier dismissal of all the high-ranking former military offices who have come out for DADT repeal. Granted, it could be viewed that you are speaking of the potential impact on the process of testimony from the sitting chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but you'll forgive me if the reference to "not somebody who is retired, not somebody who is long past their commitment of serving their country" sounds sneering if not outright contemptuous of a lot of distinguished retired officers who probably don't think of themselves as "long past their commitment of serving their country."

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