Paul Krugman on the Ultimate Bush Strategy, or This Administration has Been Lying to Us for This Long So Why Expect Anything Different Now

I think Paul Krugman from the NY Times gets it right in these paragraphs from today's column:

All in all, Mr. Bush’s actions have not been those of a leader seriously trying to win a war. They have, however, been what you’d expect from a man whose plan is to keep up appearances for the next 16 months, never mind the cost in lives and money, then shift the blame for failure onto his successor.

In fact, that’s my interpretation of something that startled many people: Mr. Bush’s decision last month, after spending years denying that the Iraq war had anything in common with Vietnam, to suddenly embrace the parallel.

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/opinion/14krugman.html?hp

Scott Horton on Bullshit

From Scott Horton, once again, reminding us of a word that has become quite timely in the last six years. It is a sad day in America when one can't believe the words that come from an administration. The last time this happened, in my memory, was in the Nixon years. If only this president had the courage to resign, that even one of the men around him could admit a mistake, speak an honest sentence, not hide behind a curtain of secrecy. But these people are not made of that kind of stuff. And so what we get is Bullshit...

What follows is the last paragraph from a piece on I.F. Stone here:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/08/hbc-90000839


I watched President Bush’s news conference yesterday twice and came away with a sinking feeling. Our country is mired in bullshit. It’s dutifully noted and passed on by the media, who never take the time to observe that it’s bullshit. And too many journalists share the infamous view of the New York Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller, that you can’t challenge the statement of a person in authority. What we really, desperately need, is a whole squadron of I.F. Stones to shake things up a bit and give us a more contrarian perspective on truth and reality. In the meantime we have in the memory of I.F. Stone an important beacon.

Pure Truth is for You Alone (or Why I'm Not a Southern Baptist)

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/07/hbc-90000616

This is a quotation from Friedrich Schiller, who was a German historian and scholar. The above URL is to a long post by Scott Horton at No Comment about Shiller. The quote:

If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say, Father, I will take this–the pure Truth is for You alone.

Scott Horton: Justice in Alabama

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000351

Deep in southwestern Alabama sits the town of Monroeville. It’s a sleepy place, not of much consequence since the cotton industry gave out. People in America may think they don’t know it. But then, perhaps they do. This town gave America two of its literary giants. It is the town described in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is the home of Harper’s Magazine contributors Harper Lee and Truman Capote. (Though New York City would go to the mat to contend with Monroeville for the honor of calling itself their home, in fairness the title should be shared.) So inconsequential as Monroeville may be on the Alabama roadmap, in the literary geography of America it is a place of great consequence. It is also a place forever associated with the struggle for justice.

On a searing summer day in the sixties, I went to Monroeville. My grandfather, an administrator with the Alabama Department of Education, had business there. I was visiting for a few weeks in the summer, and he decided to take me along. The humidity was heavy, the heat intense – asphalt seemed to sag under our feet. But my grandfather, who was a compulsive, voracious reader, spoke with some pride. “There’s something about this place,” he said, “to have produced such fine writers. Come along. Maybe some of it will rub off on you.” On the way, what seemed an interminable drive on state roads, we talked about To Kill a Mockingbird, the noble figure of Atticus Finch, and all the bigotry and hatred that lurked just under the surface in Harper Lee’s Monroeville. I couldn’t help thinking that it was not a place we were driving to, but an idea.

“Here in Alabama we have more than our fair share of injustice, we always have. Our people like to go to church and read their Bibles, but the righteous are few and those whose hearts are heavy with thirst for power and money, with hatred, are many.” He told me about the case of the Scottsboro boys, of lynchings, of the pettiness and violence that had marked the courts and law enforcement. He didn’t talk about the march from Selma, which had happened only a few years earlier, but I’m sure he was thinking about that too. It was easy to understand why Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, and why Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, he said – it was about coming to grips with justice.
“If you’d lived through what they did, you’d understand why it was so important. There’s a struggle for justice here, a difficult struggle. Someday justice will come, but not just yet.” I sometimes think back to when I resolved internally to become a lawyer, and I think it was that afternoon, in Monroeville, Alabama. And it was the image of Atticus Finch and his quiet and dignified demand for justice that did it. Standing for justice is an ennobling thing. And it can only be done with a clear sense of what justice is. The word gets used so often that it has been stripped of its meaning. But nothing is so fundamental to us as human beings and to our society.

Was the name Atticus coincidental? It is a Latin name, of course. Later in life, I studied classics and I came across the name of Titus Pomponius Atticus, the dearest friend of Cicero, the man to whom De amicitia is dedicated. The man to whom partisan politics was an abomination: the corruptor of society, the subverter of justice. Rather than become involved in the fratricidal squabbles that marked the last days of the Roman Republic, Atticus withdrew from public life. He believed in a reserved judgment, always carefully detached from any bonds of personal friendship, family or partisan alignment. His character has been taken through history, thanks to the glowing portrait of Cicero, as the essence of what is judicious. And then it struck me. This is why Harper Lee took the name “Atticus.” Atticus Finch is the best-named character in the whole of American literature. His character is defined by a love of justice.

And where today is the spirit of Atticus?

“We have a Justice Department that has substantially been turned into a political arm of the White House,” Bruce Fein told the McClatchy Newspapers earlier this week. He went on to say that the public could have no confidence that federal prosecutions of Democrats by the Justice Department were fair. Mr. Fein is a conservative Republican lawyer and legal scholar of some note–the former senior legal analyst at the Heritage Foundation. As the Deputy Attorney General, he was responsible for the operational management of the Justice Department under President Ronald Reagan. Bruce Fein would not make such a charge lightly. He is speaking from knowledge, not conjecture.

His accusations rest on a growing body of evidence. Two professors at the University of Minnesota looked at the Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of cases involving political figures. It showed seven prosecutions of Democrats for every one Republican. These prosecutions are coordinated and directed by the Public Integrity Unit, a group now under suspicion of being the single most politicized part of the Justice Department.

Under the direction of the White House, and particularly Karl Rove, the Justice Department undertook a series of prosecutions designed to undermine the positions of elected Democratic officeholders and help the Republican Party take their positions. In this space over the last two months, I have catalogued a series of cases which suggest White House-driven manipulation of criminal prosecutions. Sometimes the White House has intervened to shut down or obstruct prosecutions of Republicans – a process that started certainly by the spring of 2002, when Jack Abramoff, a protégé of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay, sought White House intervention to fire the U.S. Attorney in Guam. “I don’t care if they appoint bozo the clown, we need to get rid of Fred Black,” Abramoff wrote in March 2002.. And indeed, following White House intervention, the U.S. attorney was fired, a Republican party functionary was appointed in his place, and the investigation that threatened to expose a seedy Abramoff operation involving human trafficking was shut down. Thanks to the role played directly by the White House, the process took only a few days. Similarly, we have documented meddling to protect Republicans in San Diego, Los Angeles, Little Rock, Kansas City, and Arizona.

And then, still more troubling, there is White House intervention to persecute their political opponents: the telltale sign of tyranny. Georgia Thompson was a state contracting officer in Wisconsin prosecuted for corruption when she awarded a bid to a contractor that had made campaign contributions to the state’s Democratic governor. The fact that the contractor was the low bidder was apparently considered irrelevant to the prosecutor. Records later established that the prosecutor in question had been slated for firing by Karl Rove because he was not doing enough to help the Republican Party. However, the Thompson prosecution was hyped to the media throughout the 2006 election campaign in a transparent effort to bolster the GOP’s election chances. And in the end, the prosecutor’s name disappeared from the list of those to be canned. The case resulted in a conviction. Then it came before an all-Republican panel from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which immediately ordered Thompson’s release and dismissed the whole conviction with a word: “preposterous.” But note: it was a conviction. The U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee actually hoodwinked a group of jurors and a federal district court judge into accepting a ridiculous bucket of slop as a criminal case. It’s a strong testimonial to the fact that in America today, a jury will readily accept that accusations of corruption against a political figure are true, even when there is no evidence, and no corruption.

But the Georgia Thompson case is not the worst. Far, far more troubling still is the conviction of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in a prosecution in Montgomery. When this case got started, I was ready to accept what those Montgomery jurors did – namely, what on earth could be surprising about allegations that a political figure sells appointments for money? Isn’t that indeed just the way our system works? And shouldn’t we throw the book at them when they’re caught doing it? Truth is, I never much cared for Mr. Siegelman anyway.

In the meantime, however, I have spent over a month looking at this case. I have spoken with a number of journalists who covered the trial, pulled out and read the transcripts, talked to figures involved in the case. And I have received tips and messages from Alabamians who are trying feverishly to spin the case one way or the other. My conclusion: I have no idea whether in the end of the day, Mr. Siegelman is guilty or innocent of corruption. But that the prosecution was corruptly conceived and pursued and that the court proceedings were corrupted, almost from the outset: that is already extremely clear. This is not a prosecution of a political figure for corruption. It is a political vendetta, conceived, developed and pursued for a corrupt purpose.

How, you may ask, can a prosecution be corrupt? At Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, where I lecture, we frequently engage in the comparative study of criminal justice administration. I have my students read from the works of Andrey Januaryevich Vyshinsky, Stalin’s great legal choreographer and from Arkady Vaksberg’s authoritative biography of Vyshinsky. For Vyshinsky, of course, the criminal justice system existed to identify and punish criminals. But more essential was its political function. If those in power have political enemies, they can throw the enemies out of power or banish them. But this carries with it some risk. The enemies may gain public sympathy over their treatment, and they may regroup and then in the future present a serious threat. The solution advocated by Comrade Vyshinsky is to use the criminal justice system to vilify political adversaries – they will be branded criminals, stigmatized, driven from all office and power. And people will be afraid to associate with them in any way. The “crime” is in the end of the day irrelevant. The process is critical, and indeed, the process must be a public one and the humiliation complete.

What has happened under Karl Rove is not so daring and dramatic as Vyshinsky prescribed. It does not entail “show trials,” nor the brutal extraction of confessions – the technique Vyshinsky dubbed the “queen of evidence.” But it follows the same general plot line and is pursued for roughly the same purpose. Perhaps Rove read Vyshinsky and perhaps not. In any event, he clearly understands the rules of the game.

The Siegelman prosecution was commenced as the result of a plan hatched between senior figures in the Alabama Republican Party and Karl Rove. This connection is not coincidental, because Rove was once fired by the first President Bush and then had to rehabilitate himself. Rove did this in spades, and the place where he worked his political magic was in Alabama. He put together a campaign to engineer the Alabama GOP’s capture of the state’s judicial machinery. It worked brilliantly. And Rove has retained tight connections with the Alabama GOP ever since. Rove and the Alabama GOP leaders set out to destroy Siegelman’s political career and thus smooth the path by which the Republican Party could secure and retain political control of the Alabama statehouse. It was crafted in such a way as to retard the ability of Democrats to raise money from campaign donors so that they might contest office in Alabama. Each of these purposes is “corrupt.” Key to this plan was the use of the machinery of the Department of Justice for its completion – involving the U.S. attorneys offices in Birmingham and Montgomery, and the Department of Justice in Washington. Rove was in a position to make this work and he did so.

The curtain was pulled back on this plan when Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who previously worked on a campaign against Siegelman, decided to blow the whistle. Her affidavit described William Canary, a legendary figure in the Alabama GOP, bragging that “his girls” would take care of Siegelman. Canary’s wife is Leura Canary, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Alabama. Alice Martin, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama is a close confidante of Canary’s. He referred repeatedly to “Karl,” assuring that “Karl” had worked things out with the Justice Department in Washington to assure a criminal investigation and prosecution of Siegelman. Canary is a close friend of Karl Rove, and I have documented their long relationship in another post.

The response to Simpson’s affidavit has been a series of brusque dismissive statements – all of them unsworn – from others who figured in the discussion and the federal prosecutor in the Siegelman case, who has now made a series of demonstrably false statements concerning the matter. She’s been smeared as “crazy” and as a “disgruntled contract bidder.” And something nastier: after issuing the affidavit, Simpson’s house was burned to the ground, and her car was driven off the road and totaled. Clearly, there are some very powerful people in Alabama who feel threatened. Her case starts to sound like a chapter out of John Grisham’s book The Pelican Brief. However, those who have dismissed Simpson are in for a very rude surprise. Her affidavit stands up on every point, and there is substantial evidence which will corroborate its details.

This disclosure was treated as explosive news by Time Magazine and the New York Times. However, newspapers inside of Alabama reacted with awkward silence, as if these disclosures were very unpleasant news, best swept immediately under the living room carpet. I will single out the Birmingham News and the Mobile Register. I took some time earlier this week to review their coverage of the Siegelman story from the beginning. It left me wondering whether these publications were really newspapers.

True, they have the look and feel of a newspaper. But their coverage has something oily and sulfurous about it. I previously analyzed a single story from the Birmingham News just to show how it was misleading its readership on every significant aspect of the case. The most critical facts were consistently elided from the discussion, and fake facts were touted up front. Even the headline was such a farce that the News was subsequently obliged to run a correction admitting that it was false.

But if anything the coverage in the Mobile Register is still more outlandish and disingenuous. Moreover, the Mobile paper seems to have a rather amazing relationship with the federal prosecutors handling the case – a relationship that certainly raises questions under Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, under which prosecutors are obligated to maintain the secrecy of matters coming before a grand jury. The Mobile Register seems to be the prosecutors’ mouthpiece of choice, in fact, and its extensive knowledge of the prosecutors’ case and evidence was a sure sign that something was wrong. Indeed, when prosecutors begin to conduct a case through the media, that generally means that they are not pursuing a case with the interests of justice in mind, but rather something else.

And the more we dig into this case, the more irregularities mount. Let’s start with the charges against Siegelman. The main accusation is that he appointed HealthSouth’s scandal-ridden CEO to a state oversight board, and in exchange a donation was made to a not-for-profit education foundation which was supporting Siegelman’s efforts to secure a lottery to fund the state’s education system. You might very well ask what would be corrupt about this, and you would be right to ask. This is almost exactly the sort of accusation that the federal prosecutor in Milwaukee, faced with Rove’s threat to fire him, brought against Thompson – and that the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals labeled as “preposterous.” And indeed, it’s the sort of thing that transpires in the American political environment every single day. For instance, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared on a Donald Trump television program recently, and Trump made a payment of ten thousand dollars to help Schwarzenegger “retire his campaign debts.” Was that corrupt? Added to this is the fact that HealthSouth had no interest in anything before the oversight board in question, and its CEO had been appointed to the same board by three prior governors. This is corruption?

But still more striking – astonishing by any measure – is how this same U.S. Attorney and Department of Justice dealt with Siegelman’s successor, current Governor Bob Riley. Riley and many of his senior-most associates are closely tied to Jack Abramoff, perhaps the single most scandal-ridden figure in U.S. political history. I have detailed some of these relationships earlier. Documents that surfaced in the Abramoff investigation suggested that in exchange for millions of dollars in campaign contributions from a Mississippi tribe with gaming interests to his gubernatorial election campaign, Riley would ensure that an Alabama tribe then seeking a license would be blocked. In fact the millions flowed into Riley’s coffers, and he in fact took steps to block the license sought by his own constituents. So what did the U.S. Attorney, Leura Canary, do? Instigate an investigation for corruption? Bring evidence before a grand jury? No. In fact, Mrs. William Canary seems suspiciously involved in the entire scheme. Indeed, she secured appointment to the licensing board for the matter.

And perhaps one should take a second to scrutinize Governor Riley’s appointments to the same board. Riley appointed to head the board a certain Dr. Swaid Swaid, a man who made contributions to Riley’s gubernatorial campaign during the election, and a hefty sum after the election was over, when his appointment was under consideration. Moreover, Dr. Swaid has personal interests before the board – it approved an invention of his. I am not suggesting that there was anything wrong with Dr. Swaid’s appointment. But these facts make abundantly apparent that in the mind of the federal prosecutors there is one standard to be applied for a Democrat, and an entirely different standard for a Republican. That’s corrupt.

There is a second significant charge brought against Siegelman, namely that he accepted gifts from lobbyists. The record on this is still undeveloped, but what I have seen is very strange. For one thing, it shows that the prosecutors were from the outset obsessed with obtaining a conviction of Siegelman to the extent that they exhibited an attitude of total indifference towards other, far more serious crimes, particularly potential crimes involving Republican officeholders. A lobbyist named Lanny Young secured a plea bargain deal by agreeing to give evidence against Siegelman. Young testified that he gave Siegelman specialty advertising items of some value, but he noted that he did exactly the same thing for Republican U.S. Senator Jeffrey Sessions and Karl Rove’s protégé Bill Pryor. The federal attorney insisted that this information be suppressed, and the judge trying the case concurred. This is one of a number of bizarre rulings by the judge which were consistently highly prejudicial to Siegelman. And, once more, it reflects a double standard: one rule applies to Siegelman, but another rule altogether applies to Sessions and Pryor.

Prosecutors initially brought the case before a judge in the Northern District of Alabama. He dismissed it with prejudice. The prosecutors then decided to go shopping for a new judge. And they liked the one they found. Not surprisingly, the federal judge handling the case – Mark E. Fuller – has a long record of deep engagement in Alabama Republican politics. He has consistently and quickly overruled defense objections, and also quickly overruled a motion that he recuse himself. The recusal motion asserted that Judge Fuller is the owner of a military contractor that received a $178 million dollar contract from the U.S. Government while the case was pending. The motion also ties one of the prosecutors handling the case to the contract awards. If these claims are correct, then Judge Fuller’s decision to preside over the case offers further evidence of irregularity. However, a judge is usually concerned not about improprieties as much as the appearance of improprieties.

This week, former Governor Siegelman faces sentencing before Judge Fuller. The federal prosecutors handling the case have demanded a sentence of thirty years in prison – in a case which should have been dismissed in the first instance and in any event involves no personal gain of any sort by Siegelman. The prosecutors’ sentencing request was further strong evidence that the case is a vendetta. No doubt a very harsh sentence will be issued.

And no doubt the case will not end there. The Siegelman prosecution is now receiving attention across the United States. No less than six attorneys general have written to Congressional oversight committees noting the gross irregularities and suspicious circumstances of the prosecution, and have requested that Congress conduct direct inquiries into what transpired in this case. The Siegelman prosecution will in all likelihood soon be exposed for what it is: one of the blackest moments in Alabama justice since the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. But it provides a moment to remember that even in that case, a clear voice was raised, fearlessly pointing to the injustice that was done – at great personal danger. It was the voice of James Horton, the presiding judge in the first Scottsboro Boys trials in Decatur:

Social order is based on law, and its perpetuity on its fair and impartial administration. Deliberate injustice is more fatal to the one who imposes it than to the one on whom it is imposed. The victim may die quickly and his suffering cease, but the teachings of Christianity and the uniform lesson of all history illustrate without exception that its perpetrators not only pay the penalty themselves, but their children through endless generations . . .

Alabamians have a legacy of those who strive for justice – Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Frank M. Johnson, and James Horton. And they have a legacy which hesitates to show its face in the sunshine and does them no credit. The time has come for them to decide which they will follow.

Scott Horton on "Truthiness"

This is a posting by Scott Horton from "NoComment", a very good blog from Harper's Magazine.
http://harpers.org/archive/2007/05/hbc-90000166

What do you do when it turns out you waged a war predicated on a series of lies, and the war’s going badly to boot? Well, to paraphrase the worst secretary of defense in America’s history, if you’re not happy with the reality you’ve got, you just go and manufacture a new one. And you use Fox News to help invest it with that essential truthiness – as Stephen Colbert calls something that is presented as heart-felt truth, and is presented as fact – not opinion, but is not true. Or as he put it in an interview:

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the President because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?…

Truthiness is ‘What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.

And now Peter Canellos of The Boston Globe takes a penetrating look at the rhetoric of the major GOP presidential candidates and finds truthiness run rampant:

Assertions of connections between bin Laden and terrorists in Iraq have heated up over the last month, as Congress has debated the war funding resolution. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani have endorsed — and expanded on — Bush’s much-debated contention that Al Qaeda is the main cause of instability in Iraq.

Spokespeople for McCain and Romney say the candidates were expressing their deep-seated convictions that terrorists would benefit if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq. The spokesmen say that even if Iraq had no connection to the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Qaeda-inspired terrorists have infiltrated Iraq as security has deteriorated since the invasion, and now pose a direct threat to the United States.

But critics, including some former CIA officials, said those statements could mislead voters into believing that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are now fighting the United States in Iraq.

Candidates in elections don’t tend to be exactly detached and objective in their political speeches. Still, there is something awfully extreme – and, well, Orwellian, about this. The real fear we should have is this: are these candidates so detached from reality that they actually believe their rhetoric? The good news is probably: no, certainly not the three leading candidates. They fully understand that the realities are quite different from what their vitriolic descriptions. Their dilemma is simple: to come up with a way of justifying the Iraq War and minimizing the damage from a series of grossly inept decisions in its management. No one in the primary phase has opened fire on Bush. And that reflects the inner psyche of the Bush-Rove Republican party and its Caesarian leadership cult. Consequently, what’s left for a good Republican to do other than highlight and personalize the threat. Heighten fear, minimize reasoned analysis.

Brace yourself for much more truthiness. The process has just begun.

Digby on Ashleigh Banfield & Ashleigh's Speech @ K-State

Truth's Consequences

by digby

Since the Moyers show, I have been thinking of many things that happened during that intense period in 2002 and 2003 when the political and media establishment seemed to lose its collective mind (again) and took this country into an inexplicable and unnecessary war. As tristero notes below, the story is long and complicated and it will take years to put it all together, if it ever happens.

I was reminded of one episod, after the invasion, that came as big surprise to me because it came from an unexpected source. And it was one of those stories that was clearly a cautionary tale for any up and coming members of the media who valued their jobs.

On 9/11 those of us who were lucky enough not to be in Manhattan sat glued to our television sets and watched a star being born. Here's how the Wikipedia described it:

On September 11, 2001, Ashleigh Banfield was reporting from the streets of Manhattan, where she was nearly suffocated from the debris cloud from the collapsing World Trade Center. Banfield continued reporting, even as she rescued a NYPD officer, and with him, fled to safety into a streetside shop. After the initial reporting of the tragedy had ended, Banfield received a promotion, as MSNBC sent her around the world as the producer of a new program, A Region in Conflict.

A Region in Conflict was broadcast mainly from Pakistan and Afghanistan, generally considered locations unfriendly to Westerners. To report day-to-day local stories in that area of the world, she sometimes used her Canadian citizenship to provide access where Americans might not be welcome. She would read viewer e-mails on-air, sometimes without reviewing them beforehand, to avoid bias.

During the conflict in Afghanistan, Banfield interviewed Taliban prisoners, and visited a hospital in Kabul. Later entries covered her travels from Jalalabad to Kabul, as well as other experiences in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, she interviewed Father Gregory Rice, a Catholic priest in Pakistan, and an Iraqi woman aiding refugees. While in Afghanistan, Banfield darkened her blonde hair in order to be less obviously a foreigner.


I made terrible fun of Banfield. She seemed to me to be the personification of the infotainment industrial complex, a reporter better known for her stylish spectacles and blond highlights than her journalistic skills. She was their girl hero, a Jessica Lynch of TV news, constructed out of whole cloth in the marketing department of MSNBC. But I was wrong about her. It's true that she was a cable news star who was created out of the rubble of 9/11, but her reporting that day really was pretty riveting. Her stories from Afghanistan were often shallow, but no more than any of the other blow dried hunks they dispatched over there, and they were sometimes better. Still, she symbolized for me the media exploitation of 9/11 and the War on Terror Show and I was unforgiving.

But very shortly after the invasion of Iraq --- even before Codpiece Day --- Banfield delivered a speech that destroyed her career. She was instantly demoted by MSNBC and fired less than a year later.

Do you remember what she said?


Ashleigh Banfield Landon Lecture
Kansas State University
Manhattan, Kansas
April 24, 2003



...I suppose you watch enough television to know that the big TV show is over and that the war is now over essentially -- the major combat operations are over anyway, according to the Pentagon and defense officials -- but there is so much that is left behind. And I'm not just talking about the most important thing, which is, of course, the leadership of a Middle Eastern country that could possibly become an enormous foothold for American and foreign interests. But also what Americans find themselves deciding upon when it comes to news, and when it comes to coverage, and when it comes to war, and when it comes to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate any longer.

I think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process, which I'll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that we've never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we'd never seen before and were witness to for the first time.

And there are all sorts of good things that come from that, and there are all sorts of terrible things that come from that. The good things are the obvious. This is one more perspective that we all got when it comes to warfare, how it's fought and how tough these soldiers are, what the conditions are like and what it really looks like when they're firing those M-16s rapidly across a river, or across a bridge, or into a building.

[...]

So for that element alone it was a wonderful new arm of access that journalists got to warfare. Perhaps not that new, because we all knew what it looked like at Vietnam and what a disaster that was for the government, but this did put us in a very, very close line of sight to the unfolding disasters.

That said, what didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.

I can't tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you've got to be on both sides. You've got to be a unilateral, someone who's able to cover from outside of both front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled, they were everything. But we really don't know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.

That just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. This was a success, it was a charge it took only three weeks. We did wonderful things and we freed the Iraqi people, many of them by the way, who are quite thankless about this. There's got to be a reason for that. And the reason for it is because we don't have a very good image right now overseas, and a lot of Americans aren't quite sure why, given the fact that we sacrificed over a hundred soldiers to give them freedom.

[...]

All they know is that we're crusaders. All they know is that we're imperialists. All they know is that we want their oil. They don't know otherwise. And I'll tell you, a lot of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan had never heard of the Twin Towers and most of them couldn't recognize a picture of George Bush.

[...]

That will be a very interesting story to follow in the coming weeks and months, as to how this vacuum is filled and how we go about presenting a democracy to these people when -- if we give them democracy they probably will ask us to get out, which is exactly what many of them want.

[...]

As a journalist I'm often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, "Here's what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here's what the Lebanese are telling me and here's what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here's what they have to say about the Golan Heights." Like it or lump it, don't shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.

We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al -Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they're prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that's not all, as a porn star. And that's not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

How can you discuss, how can you solve anything when attacks from a mere radio flak is what America hears on a regular basis, let alone at the government level? I mean, if this kind of attitude is prevailing, forget discussion, forget diplomacy, diplomacy is becoming a bad word.

[..]

When I said the war was over I kind of mean that in the sense that cards are being pulled from this famous deck now of the 55 most wanted, and they're sort of falling out of the deck as quickly as the numbers are falling off the rating chart for the cable news stations. We have plummeted into the basement in the last week. We went from millions of viewers to just a few hundred thousand in the course of a couple of days.

Did our broadcasting change? Did we get boring? Did we all a sudden lose our flair? Did we start using language that people didn't want to hear? No, I think you've just had enough. I think you've seen the story, you've' seen how it ended, it ended pretty well in most American's view; it's time to move on.

What's the next big story? Is it Laci Peterson? Because Laci Peterson got a whole lot more minutes' worth of coverage on the cable news channels in the last week than we'd have ever expected just a few days after a regime fell, like Saddam Hussein.

I don't want to suggest for a minute that we are shallow people, we Americans. At times we are, but I do think that the phenomenon of our attention deficit disorder when it comes to watching television news and watching stories and then just being finished with them, I think it might come from the saturation that you have nowadays. You cannot walk by an airport monitor, you can't walk by most televisions in offices these days, in the public, without it being on a cable news channel. And if you're not in front of a TV you're probably in front of your monitor, where there is Internet news available as well.

You have had more minutes of news on the Iraq war in just the three-week campaign than you likely ever got in the years and years of network news coverage of Vietnam. You were forced to wait for it till six o'clock every night and the likelihood that you got more than about eight minutes of coverage in that half hour show, you probably didn't get a whole lot more than that, and it was about two weeks old, some of that footage, having been shipped back. Now it's real time and it is blanketed to the extent that we could see this one arm of the advance, but not where the bullets landed.

But I think the saturation point is reached faster because you just get so much so fast, so absolutely in real time that it is time to move on. And that makes our job very difficult, because we tend to leave behind these vacuums that are left uncovered. When was the last time you saw a story about Afghanistan? It's only been a year, you know. Only since the major combat ended, you were still in Operation Anaconda in not much more than 11 or 12 months ago, and here we are not touching Afghanistan at all on cable news.

There was just a memorandum that came through saying we're closing the Kabul bureau. The Kabul bureau has only been staffed by one person for the last several months, Maria Fasal, she's Afghan and she wanted to be there, otherwise I don't think anyone would have taken that assignment. There's just been no allotment of TV minutes for Afghanistan.

And I am very concerned that the same thing is about to happen with Iraq, because we're going to have another Gary Condit, and we're going to have another Chandra Levy and we're going to have another Jon Benet, and we're going to have another Elizabeth Smart, and here we are in Laci Peterson, and these stories will dominate. They're easy to cover, they're cheap, they're fast, you don't have to send somebody overseas, you don't have to put them up in a hotel that's expensive overseas, and you don't have to set up satellite time overseas. Very cheap to cover domestic news. Domestic news is music news to directors' ears.

But is that what you need to know? Don't you need to know what our personality is overseas and what the ramifications of these campaigns are? Because we went to Iraq, according to the President, to make sure that we were going to be safe from weapons of mass destruction, that no one would attack us. Well, did everything all of a sudden change? The terror alert went down. All of a sudden everything seems to be better, but I can tell you from living over there, it's not.

[...]

There was a reporter in the New York Times a couple days ago at the Pentagon. It was a report on the ground in Iraq that the Americans were going to have four bases that they would continue to use possibly on a permanent basis inside Iraq, kind of in a star formation, the north, the south, Baghdad and out west. Nobody was able to actually say what these bases would be used for, whether it was forward operations, whether it was simple access, but it did speak volumes to the Arab world who said, "You see, we told you the Americans were coming for their imperialistic need. They needed a foothold, they needed to control something in central and west Asia to make sure that we all next door come into line."

And these reports about Syria, well, they may have been breezed over fairly quickly here, but they are ringing loud still over there. Syria's next. And then Lebanon. And look out lran.

So whether we think it's plausible or whether the government even has any designs like that, the Arabs all think it's happening and they think it's for religious purposes for the most part.

[...]


I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I'm very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people's opinions. It was very sanitized.

It had a very brief respite from the sanitation when Terry Lloyd was killed, the ITN, and when David Bloom was killed and when Michael Kelley was killed. We all sort of sat back for a moment and realized, "God, this is ugly. This is hitting us at home now. This is hitting the noncombatants." But that went away quickly too.

This TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there's nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

War is ugly and it's dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It's a dangerous thing to propagate.

[...]

There is another whole phenomenon that's come about from this war. Many talk about it as the Fox effect, the Fox news effect. I know everyone of you has watched it. It's not a dirty little secret. A lot of people describe Fox as having streamers and banners coming out of the television as you're watching it cover a war. But the Fox effect is very concerning to me.

I'm a journalist and I like to be able to tell the story as I see it, and I hate it when someone tells me I'm one-sided. It's the worst I can hear. Fox has taken so many viewers away from CNN and MSNBC because of their agenda and because of their targeting the market of cable news viewership, that I'm afraid there's not a really big place in cable for news. Cable is for entertainment, as it's turning out, but not news.

I'm hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.

Well, all of this has to do with what you've seen on Fox and its successes. So I do urge you to be very discerning as you continue to watch the development of cable news, and it is changing like lightning. Be very discerning because it behooves you like it never did before to watch with a grain of salt and to choose responsibly, and to demand what you should know.

That's it. I know that there's probably a couple questions. No one's allowed to ask about my hair color, okay? I'm kidding, if you want to ask you can. It's a pretty boring story. But I just wanted to say thank you, and let's all pray and hope in any way that you pray or hope for peace and for democracy around the world, and for more rain this summer in Manhattan. Thank you all.



She may have been hoping for a future in able news, but you can't help but feel she knew she wouldn't after delivering those remarks. (Read the whole thing at the link if you're interested in a further scathing critique of the government.)

Perhaps someone with more stature than Banfield could have gotten away with that speech and maybe it might have even been taken seriously, who knows? But the object lesson could not have been missed by any of the ambitious up and comers in the news business. If a TV journalist publicly spoke the truth anywhere about war, the news, even their competitors --- and Banfield spoke the truth in that speech --- their career was dead in the water. Even the girl hero of 9/11 (maybe especially the girl hero of 9/11) could not get away with breaking the CW code of omerta and she had to pay.

She's now a co-anchor on a Court TV show.

E. Coli #4 (Best to start with #1 and work your way through)

E. coli conservatives (4): LIVE AND IN CONCERT!!!

By Rick Perlstein on Thu, 2007-04-19 23:18.
Last year I attended a major conference of conservative intellectuals and activists at Princeton University as the token liberal. There I heard Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention say that the Democratic Party ostracizes all pro-life Democrats. Reflecting on the pro-life Democrat who happened to hold the obscure position of Senate minority leader, I finally realized I'd met, socialized with, interviewed, and debated enough conservative Republicans to come to a firm conclusion: they could be divided into two groups--those who lied or stonewalled to my faced, and those who hadn't...yet.

I don't know whether it's fair to label Bush administration officials Stephen Sundlof, Michael Rogers, and Captain David Elder--respectively, the FDA's veterinary medicine, field investigations, and enforcement directors--conservatives. I just learned, however, what it feels like to be stonewalled by them.

I just got off with phone from a conference call arranged by the FDA press office to respond to the latest developments in the pet food scandal--that the importer Wilbur-Ellis received rice protein concentrate from the Chinese company Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd. in a bag stamped "melamine"--the same contaminate that killed dogs and cats by shutting down their kidneys--and that the poison showed up in Natural Balance brand pet food. I've been doing a lot of research lately on how the E. coli conservatives running our food safety system instinctively put the interests of corporations over the interests of consumers. Though I have to say I was shocked to hear it happen in real time, and in stereo.

The first reporter's question was, naturally enough, about China: had FDA inspectors been able to get visas to travel there to see what was what? No, not yet. But "we fully expect the Chinese government to cooperate." Later someone asked about a press release they'd received from a Chinese government agency stating that since one of the companies in question only exported for industrial purposes, not for food, it wasn't their responsibility. Another asked if the spiking was accidental or intentional. Dr. Sundlof said no one was sure, because they haven't been able to get into China.

But no worries: they fully expect the Chinese government will cooperate.

As I've noted, in South Africa, a third ingredient, corn gluten, was found to be poisoned by malamine. And so, logically enough, the second question out of the box, from the Sacramento Bee, was whether any the FDA planned to sample any other ingredients besides wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate for the poison at the docks. The FDA reps didn't answer that question. They answered another question, which hadn't been asked, insead: that they only contaminated products they definitely knew about were wheat gluten and rice protein. The official added a distracting, redundant, and entirely extraneous point: "The common variable in all this appears to be the country of origin."

Then, a non sequitor: "We're certainly looking into that." He said it in a steely, determined tone, as if he hoped no one would notice he was saying nothing.

No such luck. Brian Hartman of ABC followed up: "I still don't think I heard an answer to the question from the Sacramento Bee if anything was found in border checks."

The staffer responded with another non-answer: that they only knew of kidney failure problems that had been reported. (That, you should know, is the Orwellian standard by which most food safety scares are "reported": by the companies, after the product proves defective.) He said that, "We would expect the companies, when FDA contacts them...to initiate the appropriate action."

Yes: the FDA would ask them to take tests. If they don't test; well, there's nothing FDA can do.

It was at this point that I noticed that they seemed to be answering questions from prepared texts. It suddenly occured to me that this might be why the call had been scheduled for 4:00 EST, but didn't begin until 4:20--they were refining the stonewall.

The obvious question came. We already know that Natural Brands is only one of five pet food manufacturers to which the suspect rice protein was shipped. What are the other four companies whose products might be poisoned? "Right now we're in the middle of that investigation so we're not releasing the names." Why not? Because "we don't know what if any products have been made" using poisoned ingredients.

A follow-up: "Shouldn't consumers have that information now so we can use it in our decision-making processes?"

Good question, for which the answer was: "We're not aware of all the products that have been made." Captain Elder contributed: "We don't have complete information.... We're not going to share information that is speculative, that is prelminary."

But it wasn't speculative. It wasn't prelminary. They know who these companies are. But they were protecting them, instead of the public, on the off chance that they didn't happen to put the poisons they'd taken deliver of in their product.

"I know this has sort of been asked," another report pleaded, but why can't the FDA tell people which four companies had taken delivery of poisoned pet food ingredients before Fido finds out the hard way? "Our efforts," came the response, "are limited to...finished products that might reach consumers on the shelves."

And there it was. Conservative "government" at work. When it comes to foreign policy, the Bush Administration has propounded a "one percent doctrine": even if there's a one percent chance they represent a threat, they should be invaded anyway. When it comes to pork products people might eat--wouldn't want to put a corporation at risk.

Oh, wait. Did I say pork products?

That's right. I almost forgot. One of the companies that took delivery of delivery of potentially tainted ingredients from China mixed up a batch of something turned out not to be of standards high enough for pets. So they apparently sent it down the supply chain to a less finicky customer. Though the FDA is not sure of the exact details: "I don't know if it was sent to another processor for hog feed but we do understand that it made it into some hog feed."

The reporter who first asked about pork broke in for a follow-up, and was cut off.

Next, someone asked about the "nitrogen spiking theory" of how the ingredients ended up poisoned. One heard in the background--perhaps one of the officials thought their phone was on mute--"Is that something we would do or the company would do?", and one seemed sure.

I asked a question. Belatedly, they had begun testing samples of wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate at the borders. Now that we know that corn gluten had been poisoned, too, from South African authorities, were they testing samples of that at the ports?

An FDA official stammered. He wasn't reading from a paper now. He promised, "We're taking a number of proactive steps." He said, "We're increasing the number of products we're sampling"--but he refused say which.

Which was an extraordinary thing. If they're increasing the number of products they're sampling, but won't confirm that they're sampling the one other ingredients we know has been poisoned--well, isn't that an admission that they they suspect more ingredients have been poisoned, but that they won't tell the public what those ingredients are? Making it impossible for conscientious consumers to search out those ingredients on product labels?

Not to fear. Just feed your dog meat. Avoid, however, the pork. "We will be working closely with USDA to determining the final outcome as to the disposition of those pigs who might have gotten contaminated feed might be."

E. Coli Conservatives #3 is short

E. coli conservatives (3)

By Rick Perlstein on Thu, 2007-04-19 17:37.
Stunning new news in the Bush FDA's pet food scandal. The list of poisoned ingredients keeps expanding. South Africa--whose food safety system is apparently superior to ours--has found contaminated corn gluten.

E. Coli Conservatives #2

E. coli conservatives (2): The China connection

By Rick Perlstein on Wed, 2007-04-18 21:08.
Some of the latest headlines about the pet food scandal: "Nothing But Luck Kept Suspect Wheat Gluten Out Of Food Supply." "New Finds Expand the Threat Beyond Wheat Gluten." Some recent developments: new brands getting recalled all the time (it's up over 5,000 now); corporate flacks spinning at fast enough velocity to escape earth orbit; Senate hearings reminding us of that the central scandal of America's food-safety system under conservative government, that the FDA has now power to order recalls (something I'll be writing much more about in the future).

The part of the story I want to linger on for now, however, concerns our modern-day robber barons' good friends across the sea: the People's Republic of China.

The Chinese company apparently responsible for introducing poison into its wheat gluten, allegedly to increase the protein content so they could charge more, is called Xuzhou Anying. An enterprising American reporter in China asked the news director at Xuzhou's City Morning Post for his thoughts about global attention now suddenly centered on his obscure city. But he hadn't heard of any story: "I didn't know this news about Xuzhou Anying. And even if we had heard about the news, we wouldn't be able to report on it because it's negative news."

The American reporter tracked down another wheat gluten manufacturer in a city 200 miles away; what precautions, it would be interesting to know, were other, similarly positioned companies taking to avoid the same mistakes? "We never heard the news of tainted pet food," the manager responded.

Yes, that would be China, all right, from whence America imports more and more of its foodstuffs and everything else. "The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef's nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella," the Associated Press reports. "Worried about losing access to foreign markets and stung by tainted food products scandals at home, China has in recent years tried to improve inspections, with limited success."

Asks our friend Dr. Phil: how's that working out for you?

If by "you" you mean, like, people in the United States who eat food, not so good. "Just 1.3 percent of imported fish, vegetables, fruit and other foods are inspected--yet those government inspections regularly reveal food unfit for human consumption," another AP article explains. More and more of the contents of that poisoned chalice come from China; since Ronald Reagan became president, Chinese agricultural exports have increased twenty-five-fold.

But if you are a transnational agribusiness concern, or one of the conservative ideologues who enable them--hell, it's working out great!

You see, whatever the Chinese Communist Party's commisars concerted, belated, PR-driven efforts to clean up dangerous factories, it's hard, if not impossible, to coordinate the kind of market incentives it would take to keep swindlers from acting like swindlers when your country is not free. When newspapers aren't allowed to report catastrophes, and whistle-blowers aren't allowed to talk to newspapers, corporations, American or Chinese, can do whatever they please to increase their bottom line at the expense of the public wellbeing, because they don't have to be afraid of getting caught.

And guess what? That's why E. coli conservatives love China. As one of them, Edward Gleaser of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, put it at the Wall Street Journal's Econoblog, China's "dictators are even better than democrats at restraining the growth-killing practices of expropriating private wealth."

(Let me translate that from foreign language spoken by E. coli conservatives. Professor Glaeser means: How often do you hear of a highway patrolman giving himself a ticket for speeding?.)

E. Coli Conservatives from Rick Perlstein's blog "Campaign For America's Future

E. coli conservatives

By Rick Perlstein on Tue, 2007-04-17 20:35.
First, they came for the spinach.

I remember the day last September. The supermarket had a new kind of salad dressing, one that looked like it would taste good with spinach. I went to the produce section to buy a bag. But they all had been recalled. Three people had died from E. coli contamination from eating spinach. I decided I could live without the spinach.

Next they came for the peanut butter, and I didn't pay much attention. I don't much like peanut butter.

Then they came for the tomatoes. Then the Taco Bell lettuce.

Then the mushrooms, then ham steaks, then summer sausage. I started worrying.

Then, they came for the pet food.

I remember the sinking feeling, hearing that dogs and cats had died eating contaminated food. Then the flash of guilt—had we poisoned our dogs? I remember hearing the name of the manufacturer, my wife searching the web frantically for a catalogue of its products, the stab of fear when we found the name of the food our own dogs eat. Then the wave of relief—it was only canned food; our dogs eat dry. I began investigating more. One of the things I learned was that the Food and Drug Administration hasn't been able to confirm "with 100 percent certainty" that the offending agent didn't go into human food. Then it neglected to reveal the name of the tainted product's U.S. distributor.

It is time to get to the root of the problem. I blame the conservatism.

I've been studying the conservative turn in American politics pretty much fulltime since 1997. I never was a conservative. But I admired conservatives. The people then running the Democratic Party just did not seem to me strong people. They were "triangulators"—splitting every difference, selling out any principle, in the ever-illusive quest to divine the American people's fickle beliefs at that particular moment. They did not lead. They followed—Chamberlains, not Churchills.

I wrote a book that came out in 2001 about the conservatives who took over the Republican Party in the early 1960s. Whatever my differences with them ideologically, I didn't write a single negative word about the conservative movement for nearly seven years. Until then, I considered them honorable adversaries. They inspired me. They took risks for a cause. They were principled. They were endlessly determined.

I've come to different conclusions now. They were, yes, endlessly determined. It was over 35 years ago, in Conscience of a Conservative, when Barry Goldwater wrote these stirring words: "I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size." Twenty years after that, President Reagan intoned at his first inaugural address, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

But Barry Goldwater lost his 1964 presidential race in a landslide. Reagan was inaugurated, and we began seeing headlines like "Wide Spectrum of Regulations Set for Reagan Team's Scalpel." But actually, the Reagan team wasn't able to deregulate all that much, or nearly as much as they wished; the political obstacles, in the 1980s, were just too great.

For these brief four years, however, between the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2002 under President Bush and the recent return of Congress to Democratic control, the scalpel has become a machete. We've been able to witness a natural experiment: What would have happened if Goldwater and Reagan had been able to get their way?

Surveying the results, what once looked to me like principle now looks to me now like mania. Conservatism has been killing Americans. The recent food safety crisis is only one case study.

Let's start connecting the dots.

The Associated Press studied the records and found that between 2003 and 2006 the Food and Drug Administration conducted 47 percent fewer safety inspections. FDA field offices have 12 percent fewer employees. Safety tests for food produced in the United States have gone down by three quarters—have almost ground to a halt—in the previous year alone.

What does that mean, in practical terms? Consider the peanut butter.

Factories producing the foods most susceptible to contamination, such as fresh fruits and vegetables, are supposed to be inspected every year. (That's cold comfort to those who ate this year's bad batches of spinach, lettuce, cantaloupes and tomatoes.) Since the last known outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter was in Australia in the 1990s, that puts it in the "low-risk" category; peanut butter factories are inspected only every two to three years.

People started getting sick in February. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control traced the illnesses back to a single plant in Sylvester, Ga. The next day, the FDA arrived for a post hoc inspection (by then 425 people in 44 states had been sickened). Then they covered their own back: "What you saw with the spinach and certainly what you saw with the spinach and certainly what you saw with the peanut butter, is when we see those signals, we're going to act to protect the public health," a spokesman promised.

He was saying: The system worked. In a sense, he was right. This was the system working as it is presently designed. Barn door: closed. Cow: already long gone. That, basically, is as good as it gets in the modern FDA.

As Dr. Phil would say: How's that working out for you?

Not so well, it turns out. It was months later before we learned the eminently preventable reason our peanut butter had been poisoned: a leaky roof and a faulty sprinkler provided the culture for the salmonella bug at the Georgia plant. How did we find that out? Not from the FDA inspection. We had to rely on the company's own investigation. They had a public relations crisis on their hands. They want to return Peter Pan Peanut Butter to shelves in the middle of July. So they undertook their own belated, two-month investigation. The Georgia plant will open in August—with the new roof the FDA never noticed they needed in February.

Public relations has a lot to do with the way you've been learning about the Third Worlding of America's food safety system. The Georgia source of the bad peanut butter was discovered in the middle of February. The very next day Dole recalled several thousand cartons of cantaloupe that their own "routine" inspections suggested might be carrying salmonella. Four days later, B.J.'s Wholesale Club recalled packaged fresh mushrooms: more routine inspections, this time coming up with E. coli. They always say the inspections are "routine." But they also always manage to somehow come in clusters.

Connect the dots, and you suddenly notice a lot of these...coincidences. Last month the FDA abruptly announced new rules for fresh-cut produce. They claim it's a huge step forward. "We've never before formally recommended that the industry adopt such regulations," said a spokesman. But, oops: he's hustling you. Meat inspections are mandatory. Produce inspections will remain voluntary.

George Bush's Food and Drug Administration—and our other major food-inspection arm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture—are Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan's noble words made flesh. But don't let your family get too close to the flesh. They might get sick and die.

I'll be writing a lot more about this on The Big Con. A lot more. I'll leave you, for now, with this quote from a disgruntled FDA inspector on this "huge step forward"—voluntary inspections. "Let's be honest," he said. "The plant people are not going to slow down the lines for something they find wrong. How often do you hear of a highway patrolman giving himself a ticket for speeding?"

I'd love to provide a link for the quote but it's too old. It's from an Atlanta Journal Constitution article on May 26, 1991.

"I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient for I mean to reduce its size."

"Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

"How often do you hear of a highway patrolman giving himself a ticket for speeding?"

This con's been in the works for some time now. Check back frequently. I'll be filling out the story in all its rancid particulars.

Dick Cheney, Before He Dicks the Whole Damn World

(with thanks to Glenn Greenwald)

None of this, of course, is new. Historian Richard Hofstadter, in his influential 1964 Harper's essay entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics, described this dynamic perfectly (and, in doing so, he emphasized, accurately, that it "is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon"):
Emulating the Enemy
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. ("Time is running out," said [John Birch Society founder Robert] Welch in 1951. "Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack").
As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman -- sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.
The paranoid's interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).
It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

David Kurtz on what the hell Dick Cheney is up to

(February 04, 2007 -- 09:01 AM EST // link)

In a piece headlined "Vice President's Shadow Hangs Over Trial," the WaPo has a nice synopsis of Cheney's involvement in the Plame matter.

Actually, you could headline just about every story that way these days: "Vice President's Shadow Hangs Over _________."

Fill in the blank: Iraq. Iran. Global warming. Renditions. Domestic surveillance.

I will confess to having been extremely skeptical in the early years of the Bush Presidency that Cheney was really running the show. It seemed too facile an explanation for what I was convinced was a far more complicated situation. Until the 9/11 Commission report came out.

Even the watered-down version of events in the Commission's report made it absolutely clear that Cheney, ensconced in the White House bunker on the morning of the attacks, had issued shootdown orders outside of the chain of command and then conspired with the President to conceal this fact from the Commission.

Since then, I've gone from being open to the idea of an Imperial Vice Presidency to being convinced that historians will debate whether something approaching a Cheney-led coup d'etat has occurred, in which some of the powers of the Executive were extra-constitutionally usurped by the Office of the Vice President.

Last week, in trying to break the lock on who actually works in the OVP--which the Vice President refuses to reveal--the guys at Muckraker stumbled across this entry from a government directory known as the "Plum Book":

The Vice Presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch, but is attached by the Constitution to the latter. The Vice Presidency performs functions in both the legislative branch (see article I, section 3 of the Constitution) and in the executive branch (see article II, and amendments XII and XXV, of the Constitution, and section 106 of title 3 of the United States Code).
It appears that Cheney's office submitted this entry in lieu of a list of its employees, as federal agencies must do. It sounds like something Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, might have written. Cheney and Addington have been the among the most powerful proponents of the theory of a "unitary executive," but there are indications that they have also advanced, though less publicly, a theory of a constitutionally distinct and independent vice presidency.

For a long time, talk of Cheney's unprecedented power carried with it a whiff of left-wing radicalism and Oliver Stone conspiracies. But in the last year, several serious journalistic efforts have explored the Cheney vice presidency. Robert Kuttner surveyed the field in his essay, "See Dick Run (the Country)," for The American Prospect. While it is axiomatic that Cheney is the power behind throne, what remains missing, as Kuttner pointed out, is the sort of relentless, day-to-day media coverage of Cheney that befits his claims to constitutional power:

If Cheney were the actual president, not just the de facto one, he simply could not govern with the same set of policies and approval ratings of 20 percent. The media focuses relentless attention on the president, on the premise that he is actually the chief executive. But for all intents and purposes, Cheney is chief, and Bush is more in the ceremonial role of the queen of England.
Yet the press buys the pretense of Bush being "the decider," and relentlessly covers Bush -- meeting with world leaders, cutting brush, holding press conferences, while Cheney works in secret, largely undisturbed. So let's take half the members of the overblown White House press corps, which has almost nothing to do anyway, and send them over to Cheney Boot Camp for Reporters. They might learn how to be journalists again, and we might learn who is running the government.

The other thing missing has been congressional oversight. Since Kuttner penned his essay, Democrats have gained control of Congress. A hearing on the constitutional role of the vice president might be an excellent place to start. From all indications, Cheney has amassed considerable power due to his experience and savvy vis-a-vis the President's relative lack thereof. But that is a separate issue from the constitutional role of the OVP, and whether, or in what ways, various statutory regimens, particularly in the national security arena, apply to the OVP.

By custom and tradition, the Vice President's role had been circumscribed by how little express power and authority the Constitution granted the position. Hence, all the jokes over the years about the vice presidency. But in a move that is decidedly anti-conservative, in the conventional sense, Cheney moved to fill the void. I fear that what we will eventually find are structural flaws that were deliberately exploited by the OVP, which in turn further undermined constitutional and statutory structures.

Still, I can't help but be fascinated by the more pedestrian issue of how Cheney continues to assert himself so vigorously without running up against the ego of a cocksure President. How is it that Bush, who is so caught up in macho public demonstrations of his own personal strength and courage, can tolerate a shadow presidency within his own White House? What kind of spell has Cheney cast that allows Bush to continue to believe he is the decider? You can imagine all sorts of dysfunctional psychological dramas playing out behind the scenes.

But whether it's the legal or political aspect of Cheney's role, it all comes down to the same thing: we just don't know.

It's about time we find out.

-- David Kurtz

Reed Hundt on What the Hell Dick Cheney is Up To

Here in South Asia

By Reed Hundt
At a conference on the shores of the Bay of Bengal I happened to have a long talk with a former general who while on active service ran an army engaged in conflict with a major Muslim nation. His comment about the "surge" was this: "You never reinforce a losing situation."

But reinforcing the American military commitment to the Middle East is the maxim of the Administration. It is the Vice President's essential thesis: the American military must be firmly installed in the Middle East until the end of oil, and until anti-American Islamic fervor fades away, no matter how long that may take. He sees American dependence on Middle Eastern oil lasting at least 60 to 80 years, notwithstanding the impact on the environment, not to mention the current account deficit. He sees armed opposition to Islamic fundamentalism as lasting at least as long as the Cold War, and of course he thinks of the conflict as the successor to the Soviet threat against capitalism and democracy. The Vice President has explained all this many times, in various ways, and in his heyday he persuaded virtually all of the mainstream media to agree with him.

Even now the Vice President plays the essential role in running the White House foreign policy strategy and, especially in the wake of Secretary Rumsfeld's departure, military strategy as well. From his perspective, withdrawal of the American military from Iraq or anywhere else in the Middle East is wishful thinking at best, dangerous to America's economic future at worst, and, additionally, catastrophic for Israel. On this last point, Senator Lieberman is in strident agreement.

From the Vice President's point of view, the dire assessment of the security analysts about Iraq only underscores the importance of reinforcing the American commitment. He thinks that tactics may need to be changed, but the prospect of greater violence spreading from Iraq across the region only underscores the importance of the strategic goal: locking in American access to the region's resources and precluding the formation of significant military power under the control of any Islamic theocratic regime.



The Democratic Presidential candidates are not likely to be able to avoid direct debate over the Vice President's thesis for the whole long period until the election. John McCain and Mitt Romney agree with the Vice President and will articulate his views forcefully.

The Administration's actions with respect to Iran are part of this larger narrative. It isn't that the Administration actually wants war with Iran, but on the other hand it does want to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. What Democrat will disagree with that? And if that goal is stipulated, what then will Democrats argue in the general election about policy with respect to Iran? Just saying we should talk to Iran is not likely to suffice.

Arthur Schlesinger on Iraq

Link

Three decades ago, we suffered defeat in an unwinnable war against tribalism, the most fanatic of political emotions, fighting against a country about which we knew nothing and in which we had no vital interests. Vietnam was hopeless enough, but to repeat the same arrogant folly 30 years later in Iraq is unforgivable.