“He’s like Bush only without the brains,” cracked one former Republican governor who knows Perry, repeating a joke that has made the rounds.
What’s also important, but not evident, on this chart is that Obama’s major expenses were temporary — the stimulus is over now — while Bush’s were, effectively, recurring. The Bush tax cuts didn’t just lower revenue for 10 years. It’s clear now that they lowered it indefinitely, which means this chart is understating their true cost. Similarly, the Medicare drug benefit is costing money on perpetuity, not just for two or three years. And Boehner, Ryan and others voted for these laws and, in some cases, helped to craft and pass them.
There is no evidence that torture was integral to capturing bin Laden. Of three tortured prisoners among the countless leads and tips and interviewees, one was deemed "quite cooperative" before being tortured, thereby leaving open the question of whether the shred of information he provided could have been gotten by non-barbaric methods; and two denied any knowledge of the courier under the torture technique called "waterboarding." So in order to defend torture, Cheney has to say that it's a success when the tortured tell lies. Heads he wins, tails we lose. Moreover, in the last two years or so, torture has been forbidden - although its legacy remains with war criminals protected by the US government, in violation of Geneva - and it was after those two years of a return to decency that bin Laden was found and killed. As for the Bush administration's over-arching goal - democratization of the Middle East - it was only under Obama that we got the Green Revolution in Iran, the successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the power-struggles now happening in Syria and Libya.Bottom line comes from Bill Maher on his HBO show this week, in his final "New Rule" - why vote Republican for any reason:When these fanatics are presented with clear evidence that Obama has been far more successful against terror and its causes than they ever were, they return to their precious, their torture program, and claim ludicrously that, without it, bin Laden would not have been captured. Rumsfeld joined in the chorus of mass distraction this weekend on the same basis. All this really tells you is that these people realize that if their torture regime is found to have been counter-productive, if bin Laden was caught two years after the torture program was ended and with no evidence it helped, then their barbaric policy is exposed once again as unnecessary and a violation of core human values.
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When a single party holds power, that party appropriately tends to be the focus of attention. But when the possibility that the other party might take over becomes real--and we're certainly at that point--the attention starts to shift. This always struck me as a potential problem. I don't really imagine that Republicans plan to repeal health care or the new financial regulations (although, who knows?). But they haven't offered up much in the way of a compelling alternative agenda.
"We need to go back to the exact same agenda that is empowering the free enterprise system rather than diminishing it," said NRCC chairman Pete Sessions on "Meet the Press" Sunday morning.
For Democrats, the comment was a gift -- one that they plan to use repeatedly between now and the fall.
"We could not have made the case any clearer than Pete Sessions did that Republicans only want to go back to the failed policies of President Bush," said DCCC spokesman Ryan Rudominer.
It's a daring strategy for Republicans -- one which includes explicit arguments for Social Security cuts, deregulation, and the repeal of a broadly popular Wall Street reform bill. And it's one they hope they can ride to victory.
Added a GOP colleague of Sessions:
"Look, I think President Bush's stock has gone up a lot since he left office," Cornyn said. "People appreciate his resolve and commitment in the face of a national security threat like 9/11. He had his challenges no doubt. We have learned a lot about things we could have done better as Republicans in terms of fiscal responsibility...I think a lot of people are looking back with a little more -- with more fondness on President Bush's administration, and I think history will treat him well."
She is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and she has launched a tea-party-linked group that could test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the court.
In January, Virginia Thomas created Liberty Central Inc., a nonprofit lobbying group whose website will organize activism around a set of conservative "core principles," she said.
The group plans to issue score cards for Congress members and be involved in the November election, although Thomas would not specify how. She said it would accept donations from various sources -- including corporations -- as allowed under campaign finance rules recently loosened by the Supreme Court.
"I adore all the new citizen patriots who are rising up across this country," Thomas, who goes by Ginni, said on the panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "I have felt called to the front lines with you, with my fellow citizens, to preserve what made America great."
The move by Virginia Thomas, 52, into the front lines of politics stands in marked contrast to the rarefied culture of the nation's highest court, which normally prizes the appearance of nonpartisanship and a distance from the fisticuffs of the politics of the day.
Justice Thomas, 61, recently expressed sensitivity to such concerns, telling law students in Florida that he doesn't attend the State of the Union because it is "so partisan." Thomas, who was nominated by President George H.W. Bush, has been a reliable conservative vote since he joined the court in 1991.
Virginia Thomas has long been a passionate voice for conservative views. She has worked for former Republican Rep. Dick Armey of Texas and for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with strong ties to the GOP.
In 2000, while at the Heritage Foundation, she was recruiting staff for a possible George W. Bush administration as her husband was hearing the case that would decide the election. When journalists reported her work, Thomas said she saw no conflict of interest and that she rarely discussed court matters with her husband.
The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.
It was unclear whether he was talking, but the officials said his capture had provided a window into the Taliban and could lead to other senior officials. Most immediately, they hope he will provide the whereabouts of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who is the group’s spiritual leader.
Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.
“I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.
He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.
“What I’m looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”
South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford has been hiking the Appalachian Trail, a spokesman said Monday, explaining a dayslong absence that perplexed fellow state leaders.I don't know about any other married gentlemen who may be reading this, those on reasonably good terms with their spouses, but while I may travel extensively for business, my wife always has a decent idea where I am, and can reach me by cellphone.Sanford hadn't been at work for several days and his office hadn't been in touch with him. Lawmakers and his wife said Monday they didn't know where he was, leading critics to question who was in charge of South Carolina.
"I cannot take lightly that his staff has not had communication with him for more than four days, and that no one, including his own family, knows his whereabouts," said Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer.
The single most pertinent question that Dick Cheney is never asked -- at least not by the admiring interviewers he has encountered so far -- is whether he, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush used torture to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq.And as long as he stays out of investigations or hearings, he won't be asked -- not as long as he sticks to either conservative or wussified news media.
Cheney: "I have every reason to believe that he [President Bush] knew [about the interrogation program]-- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. This was a presidential-level decision and the decision went to the president and he signed off on it."So let's take the man at his words -- and parse what he's really saying.
"I have every reason to believe that he [President Bush] knew [about the interrogation program]--What, he doesn't know for sure if Bush knew about the program? He never had a direct conversation with him about it? He kept his hands clean by sending in his henchmen? Or maybe he slipped him the papers to sign in with everything else? Or maybe just never told him until the questions started coming?
-- he knew a great deal about the program.What did you hide from him, Dick?
He basically authorized it.He authorized it or he didn't? He didn't know he authorized it? You did it without authorization because of your Machiavellian view of the legal entitlements of the Vice Presidency? He played along later after he found out about it?
This was a presidential-level decisionDid Bush decider it or didn't he? Does that mean you did it as Vice President under the shield of the general Executive Office or your proximity to the President? Did you make the decision for the country and authorize it at the "presidential-level" yourself?
and the decision went to the presidentWait, so first someone (you?) made the "presidential-level decision" and only after you had decided (implemented?) the torture policy did the President rubber stamp it? Because it sure doesn't sound like the decision came from the President himself but was simply presented to him somewhere along the line without his even asking. (How different from our current Chief Executive.)
and he signed off on it."And so Cheney comes to rest on this closer, recollecting himself, the plan from the moment he got the job of helping W. select his running mate, which Cheney of course made himself, that this would be the second coming of the Nixon White House only shrewder, standing behind rather than in front of the cameras, with the little self-deluded salesboy providing all the cover necessary to enact The Plans, all down the line.
On Monday, the Washington Post reported the impending release of a May 7, 2004 IG report that, the paper added, would show that in several circumstances the techniques used to interrogate terrorist suspects "appeared to violate the U.N. Convention Against Torture" and did not produce desired results. It is difficult, the report will conclude, "to determine conclusively whether interrogations have provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks."That's the Inspector General of the CIA. Is Cheney caught in a dragnet? Per one of Josh's astute readers, Cheney maybe spoke too much on Sunday:
Several interesting things just connected in my mind. Saw Jon Stewart show a clip of Cheney saying that Bush "basically approved" of the interrogation program. His answer was as woozy as it gets. Then on the replay of Hardball, watched Lawrence O'Donnell answer Chris Matthew's musings on a Cheney prosection by suggesting it would be for "usurping" Bush on the issue.This is where I wonder if we're heading deep into E. Howard Hunt territory, with old school CIA George H. W. Bush vs. the "younger" Cheney. The Bush/JFK Assassination conspiracy theory resonates; will someone spike his orange juice with Digitalis?Really, where the torture scandal could break open is the exact nexus of who actually authorized the program and Cheney's frantic efforts to get information linking Saddam Hussein to the Iraq war. Wherever Iraq touches the torture question is going to be the flashpoint--it undercuts the "ticking time bomb" rationale for the program. Its also where politicals are going to have their deepest interactions with the program. That's where people need to look. Somebody needs to superimpose the timeline of the Iraq run-up over what we know about the timeline of the torture program. Anywhere Cheney, Iraq and torture meet is going to be radioactive.
His digs on Colin Powell, choosing Rush Limbaugh over him, Oxycontin-fueled hate speech over the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "politically" because all Cheney knows is power and paranoia, are not exactly statesmanlike, unless you think of yourself as the state:...Here is a former vice-president, who enjoyed unprecedented power for eight long, long years. No veep ever wielded power like he did in the long history of American government. In the months after 9/11, he swept all Congressional resistance away, exerted total executive power, wielded a military and paramilitary apparatus far mightier than all its rivals combined and mightier than any power in history, tapped any phone he wanted, claimed the right to torture any suspect he wanted (and followed through with thousands, from Bagram to Abu Ghraib) and was able to print and borrow money with impunity to finance all of it without a worry in the world. But even after all that, he cannot tolerate a few months of someone else, duly elected, having a chance to govern the country with a decent interval of grace.
What character does this reveal? The same character that sees torture - torture - as a "no-brainer". The same man who believes that freezing naked prisoners to hypothermia or strapping them to a board for a 175th near-drowning or stringing them up in stress positions so long the shackles rust up is in line with America's constitutional history and custom. The same tyrannical temperament that cannot abide another reality existing which isn't hammered or tortured into the shape he wants and demands...
...And as history slowly accepts that this man disgraced his office more profoundly than any before him, as it sinks in that this man did not merely make mistakes, as all flawed politicians do, but committed war crimes, with pre-meditation and elaborate subterfuge, he slowly realizes what's happening to him. He can feel it. And so he resists the way he always resists - by lashing out, attacking, smearing, snearing, and grabbing every inch of the limelight he can.
So here's my questions. Cheney has arguably always been more powerful than Bush. So if he's strapping George to him on this whole torture trip, the possibilities are that not only he believes he'll survive by cloaking himself in Presidential privilege, but the ex-President has to be totally fine with it as well. So what if George W. Bush as, by extension, The Bush Family, isn't?How else to interpret this exchange?
SCHIEFFER: Did President Bush know everything you knew?
CHENEY: I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew -- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it.
He's not going down alone. Could we ask Bush and Cheney if they watched the actual tapes of torture sessions? And were they in the White House if they did so?
As opposed to, say, a decider.The consequence of being a multifaceted person with many fine qualities and strengths is that Obama presents with a lot of looks. What Kander confidently clarifies, however, is possibly the "presidential quality" that distinguishes itself above all others.
Barack Obama, as the image conveys in the most luminous way, is a listener.
Pragmatic, not socialist.He went on. "I don't want to run auto companies, I don't want to run banks. I've got two wars I've got to run already. I've got more than enough to do," he said. "So the sooner we can get out of that business, the better off we're going to be."
A few minutes later, in response to another question, Obama returned to the same theme. "If you could tell me right now that, when I walked into this office that the banks were humming," he said, "that autos were selling, and that all you had to worry about was Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, getting health care passed, figuring out how to deal with energy independence, deal with Iran, and a pandemic flu, I would take that deal."
There's a longstanding myth, bolstered by movie heroes of increasing amorality over the course of the 20th Century, that the only way to really get anything done is to break eggs, break the rules, break arms. Jack Bauer isn't the first or the worst, he's just one in a chain but the one most seems to inform the Bush/Cheney political era. He's the valorization, with the occasional dramatic flaw, of the ends-justify-the-means rationalization which has just enough grains of truth to tempt. After all, is there any of us who has not, at some point, chosen an arguably less ethical means in order to achieve an end. Maybe you needed a more tranquil result, so you held back information. Maybe you needed a little more time to get something done.The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.
Jeffrey Toobin on a particular player who needs to be made accountable:Reading the OLC torture memos is enough to make you ill. The techniques in question are plainly and instinctively abhorrent by any common sense definition, and the authors of the memos obviously know it. But somehow they have to conclude otherwise, so they write page after mind-numbing page of sterile legal language designed to justify authorizing it anyway. It's not torture if the victim survives it intact. It's not against the law if it takes place outside the United States. Waterboarding is OK as long as it isn't performed more than twice in a 24-hour period. Sleep deprivation of shackled prisoners for seven days at a time is permissible as long as the victim's diaper is changed frequently. And on and on and on.
Do they know this is torture? Of course they do.
The author of the memo, which is dated August 1, 2002, is Jay S. Bybee, who was the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel. Bybee concludes that all of these various techniques, including waterboarding, do not constitute torture under American or international law.Of course he is. Membership has its benefits.Bybee is generally the forgotten man in torture studies of the Bush era. The best known of the legal architects of the torture regime is John Yoo, who was a deputy to Bybee. For better or worse, Yoo has been a vocal defender of the various torture policies, and he remains outspoken on these issues. But whatever happened to his bossë/p>
Today, Bybee is a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
