Category: Politics

Sometimes you just gotta speculate. Sometimes you just can’t wait for others to get around to telling you what’s happening. Besides, I admit I have some spare time.
This comes from my brother in Washington, who writes, “Here is a ‘must-read’ article on the current Coup d’Etat.” If you read billmon’s ruminations, you’ll wonder which Coup he means. Yes! I thought that would pique some interest!
The billmon post links to Brad De Long’s amazing, much longer piece in order to speculate about why the CIA has taken upon itself such a heavy role in l’Affaire Plame. [I feel the urge to use French as much as possible these days.]

But the more I watch the story unfold, the more I think something deeper and darker is at stake. It seems the top career elite at the CIA, plus Tenet, has pulled out all the stops to try to bust up the Rove machine. That suggests they’re worried about something much bigger than just bureaucratic turf or the WMD blame game.

I can’t do Bro justice with a proper credit for the heads-up, since he doesn’t have a weblog, and because I have to protect his anonymity, but I know you’d really like him.

And finally the country is beginning to understand why.
The essential story to this day, of one very-developing White House scandal, from today’s editorial of the Minneapolis Star Tribune via atrios.

Call it Wilson-Plame-gate. It’s not about cigars and blue dresses; it’s about the security of this nation and the danger of revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative. In a word, it is serious.

And getting even more serious:

The Justice Department has responded affirmatively to Tenet’s request for an investigation. But get this: When Justice informed the White House of the investigation Monday evening, it said it would be all right if the staff was notified Tuesday morning to safeguard all material that related to the case. The staff had all night to get rid of anything incriminating.
That incredible tidbit supports calls by Democrats and a slew of others for Attorney General John Ashcroft to appoint a special counsel to investigate this case. They’re right: Ashcroft has no credibility in this, and neither does the White House, given its habitual effort to spin information, mislead the American people and smear anyone who disagrees with it. This developing scandal ultimately goes to the even more serious question of administration manipulation of intelligence on Iraq, where American soldiers continue to die almost every day in a campaign that looks increasingly like a bad mistake.

Read the entire editorial.
Oh yes, there’s a welcome tribute to bloggers, specifically in a generous acknowledgement that it was they and their audiences that kept the Wilson/Plame story from going away.
One more thing. Can’t we drop the “-gate”, especially since this thing’s bigger than an apartment building, and call just call it what it is, “treason”? Ok, maybe “the Plame affair” would do.

Off with their heads!
Yeah, sure, Ashcroft’s going to get right on it.
But actually, is this Bush’s Watergate burglary?
Are the highest members of the adminstration involved in betraying a C.I.A. agent, endangering her and her colleagues and consequently discouraging others from coming forward with information on terrorist threats? Did they do this not just for revenge, but because they hoped to to intimidate others both within and outside government – to shut them up? And is there now a coverup in process?
What did the president know?
We might actually never find out, since every branch of the federal government is controlled by Bush’s Republicans, and an opposition party effectively doesn’t exist.
Our only hope seems to rest on the most primitive impulse of the media, the part that reacts to the smell of blood with enough lust to overcome its corporate dependency and give up the rewards of access available to those who don’t question the status quo.
The signals we’ve been seeing lately in national and international news coverage are certainly propitious.
Is anything going well for the administration these days?

Especially welcome on this laptop after my experience Tuesday near the UN, today’s strong lead NYTimes editorial talks about free speech zones – and much more.

The Presidential Bubble
Four progressive political groups sued the Bush administration this week, charging that the Secret Service is systematically keeping protesters away from the president’s public appearances. They make a serious point about free speech rights, but they also point out a disturbing aspect of the Bush White House: the country has a chief executive who seems to embrace the presidential bubble.
Security concerns make it inevitable that a modern American president will be somewhat cut off from the country he leads. He cannot insert himself into any part of normal life without a phalanx of security guards.
Protesters cannot be permitted to get close enough to pose a threat, but they ought to be able to get close enough so the president can see that they are there. Sometimes seeing a glimpse of placard-wielding demonstrators is as close as the commander in chief can get to seeing the face of national discontent.
At Mr. Bush’s public appearances, his critics are routinely shunted into “protest zones” as much as a half-mile away. At the Columbia, S.C., airport last year, a protester with a “No War for Oil” sign was ordered to move a half-mile from the area where Mr. Bush’s supporters were allowed to stand. When the protester refused, he was arrested.
Mr. Bush and his aides also seem to go to great lengths to underline the degree to which the president closes himself off from the news media. In an interview with Fox News this week, the president said he learned most of what he needs to know from morning briefings by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and his chief of staff, Andrew Card.
As for newspapers, Mr. Bush said, “I glance at the headlines” but “rarely read the stories.” The people who brief him on current events encounter many of the newsmakers personally, he said, and in any case “probably read the news themselves.”
Some of this may be a pose that is designed to tweak the media by making the news appear to be below the president’s notice. During the Iraqi invasion, when the rest of the nation was glued to TV, Mr. Bush’s spokesman claimed that his boss had barely glanced at the pictures of what was going on.
But it is worrisome when one of the most incurious men ever to occupy the White House takes pains to insist that he gets his information on what the world is saying only in predigested bits from his appointees.
Mr. Bush thinks of himself as a man of the people, but carefully staged contacts with groups of supporters or small children does not constitute getting in touch with the people. It is in Mr. Bush’s interest, as well as the nation’s, for him to burst the bubble he has been inhabiting, and take a hard look at the real world.

Following up: This is the photo and caption which appeared in the NYTimes print edition on Monday. Fortunately I appear only in silhouette. We should all have been so fortunate with Wolfowitz and Goldberg as well.
[image scanned by Barry from newsprint]

You could consult this morning’s NYTimes for a report on Paul Wolfowitz’s appearance yesterday at the New School. If you have the print edition, you would see an image of me holding my unfolded sign while I stood in front of the architect of our world war, himself sitting on the stage with his publicist, Jeffrey Goldberg.
The text of the news article would only begin to give you an idea of what it was like to be in that room yesterday. For that kind of an account you could not improve on the wonderful writing of my friend Choire published on The Morning News site, where the event is referred to as “the now-infamous Wolfowitz riots.” [it’s located about halfway down the page under “Sunday,” but if you hurry there you’ll miss some delicious fun with his visits to the rest of the New Yorker Festival projects]

1:26 p.m. Outside the New School Auditorium there is a giant yellow New Yorker balloon with the words ‘Sponsored by Kate Spade.’ The wind picks up and the balloon assaults some people. Interns spend the next 30 minutes hilariously attempting to deflate it. A passer-by asks ‘What’s going on here?’ The cute Young Republican in front of me in line says ‘Wolfowitz.’ ‘Oh,’ says the passer-by, ‘What’s he doing?’ ‘Spreading evil,’ I butt in.

I have a few more thoughts of my own today.
In my first post I made no attempt to describe what Wolfowitz or his straw man Goldberg said. I think it was because I was still recovering from the boredom of their conversation, believing that there was no real news in their statements, and feeling unequal to the task of outlining every lie and contradiction I had heard.
Still, there are a few bits which should be aired, and some of them have yet to see print.
I believe the words “Afghan” or “Afganistan” were not uttered, and “Palestine” only after it was lodged from the floor a number of times.
When asked why containment was rejected as a policy toward Hussein’s Iraq, Wolfowitz explained that it had cost us billions, and American lives had been lost in the process. Yes, he really said that.
The reasons we destroyed Iraq were threefold: WMDs, Al Qaeda, human rights.
He did not address Africa, or respond to shouts from the audience which referenced the human rights needs, including AIDS relief, on parts of that continent.
Wolfowitz said theocracy would never be chosen by a democratic Iraq, since half of the voters are women, who would always reject theocracy. He both assumes an opportunity for totally free choice and ignores the desperate history of all paternalistic societies, where women must resort to religion to gain any control – at least in their own homes. As for the men, he personally is friends with many of them, and they would reject theocracy.
He repeatedly asserted that 9/11 had changed everything. I only wish that I could have told him that the destruction of 9/11 did not change me. What has forever changed me, the rest of the country and even the world, was this regime’s violence since that day, or more fundamentally, its destruction of the 2000 presidential election.
Yesterday and still today I have difficulty in describing my reaction to the yelling in the auditorium (I mean that from those on the floor, not the stage, where there were microphones and yelling was unnecessary).
How do you deal with a government whose spokespeople just make things up? What if the media never calls them on it? What if millions of demonstrators in streets here and around the world cannot provoke a response? Finally given the appearance of access, some people will shout their opposition with relative restraint, and some will yell, really yell, possibly even indulging in some hyperbole.
What’s rude here? What’s appropriate in a revolutionary situation?
We did not appoint Wolfowitz, we did not appoint his boss, Rumsfeld, and we did not appoint Rumsfeld’s boss Bush. Wolfowitz, and to some extent his associate Goldberg, are not operating according to the rules . Power and military force are their preferred tools, but they will use the rhetoric of the Constitution and civil rights if it works as well.
Is it rude to yell at a dictarorship? Is it still appropriate to talk about threats to the exercise of free speech if we are talking about a regime which has been imposed upon a great people, and when that regime has rewritten the rules which govern democracy and civil rights?
How are we to be heard above the roar of their violence?

they didn’t want her to stay
I didn’t want to be there. They made me go. That is, the clearly perverse creators of the New Yorker Festival made an offer I could not refuse. The New School, storied for most of a century as a refuge for artists and thinkers fleeing prejudice and persecution, was asked to be host today to an obviously rehearsed Q & A session between Jeffrey Goldberg and Paul Wolfowitz. The former is a writer who has served as an important propagandist for the current regime in Washington, and the latter is the chief architect of and spokesman for that regime’s policy of diplomacy by military might alone.
We note that this is supposed to be a “cultural fest, celebrating the finest in the arts, music, fiction, poetry, journalism, and humor.” I didn’t read anything on their site about agents of newspeak or architects of world hegemony, but what do I know about American culture?
It was a miserable three hours, door-to-door-to-door. After arriving we stood patiently in line while security searched each of the 500-some members of the audience individually, even emptying their bags. Somewhat less diverting was the period actually spent sitting through the undistinguished guests’ extraordinarily banal exchange of the same words repeated over and over again. Even the opportunity presented by the soliciting of questions from an overwhelmingly unsympathetic audience failed to enliven the afternoon.
Only the drama of many, many extraordinarily angry interruptions from the floor, beginning at the moment the speakers were introduced, managed to raise the day’s political theater above the level of insufferable cant.
Those who spoke out during the presentation were summarily removed from the auditorium by a very beefed-up security, sometimes quite physically. My favorite impatient protester was the woman who laid out her sound bite halfway through the program – very effectively – and then announced that she was ready to go. I envied her, but I felt I had to stay.
During the last few minutes of the afternoon, while Goldberg and Wolfowitz were summing up their humbug but had already announced that questions from the floor were ended, I stood up from my seat and held high the folding sign I had improvised earlier in the afternoon and hidden in a small shoulder bag. I said nothing, and no one lifted a hand against me. The hand-printed messages, one on each side, read:

ON TRIAL!
NOT
ON STAGE!
LIKE GOEBBELS
AND LORD HAW HAW

It seemed like half an hour passed while I stood there, but actually it was over in a few minutes. In that interval I saw hundreds of camera flashes, and I never turned around. The cameras were ravenous by this time. Later I was told that mine was the only sign in the room, although inside the auditorium we could all hear the whistles and shouts from the protestors outside on 12th Street.
The most profound impression I took away from what should have been an unnecessary experience for almost all of us in Joseph Urban’s beautiful room today was how uninteresting, how extraordinaryily incompetent, these two men were. It’s not the proximity to arguable wrongheadedness or evil works, greed or the grasping for fame or power, but rather the confrontation with such stupidity in high places that haunts me this evening.

Does freedom of speech mean that distinguished institutions of higher education are required to invite nuts and war criminals in order to support a commercially-organized event described as New Yorker magazine’s “three-day cultural fest, celebrating the finest in the arts, music, fiction, poetry, journalism, and humor”?
Jeffrey Goldberg will interview Paul Wolfowitz in the New School’s Tishman Auditorium at 3 pm tomorrow, Sunday, afternoon.
The possibilities of this piece de theatre sound even more delicious than that presented by the holy visit of the old lama in our own secular and public Central Park tomorrow at roughly the same time.* Numbers count, whether huge or manageable, so a disturbance near either altar might attract some attention. Creative signage can be very effective.
In any event, it seems that kind of disturbance would be very appropriate at each venue.
The West 12th Street event is certainly timely, since Goldberg is one of the most important sponsors of the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s ties to September 11, Wolfowitz was one of the key architects of our invasion of Iraq, and just this week Bush has finally had to deny the connection authored by Goldberg, a connection which made the Wolfowitz-championed invasion acceptable to a frightened and gullible American public.
There will be no representation on that stage of those who either knew the truth, or who opposed our massive destruction of an entire nation – except of course for the protesters in the audience and outside the theatre. All such are welcome, at the very least to save the honor of the New School.
*
From the lama’s website:

Backpacks, large purses, briefcases, bags, cameras and recording equipment will not be permitted in the Park [my emphasis]. All articles are subject to search upon entry.

Al Franken at Borders Books this afternoon
So I wandered downtown to Wall Street again this morning. This time the attraction was the possibility of encountering and photographing bankers and brokers screaming as Al Franken entered their neighborhood Borders Books for a signing of his latest tome, already an over-the-top (in both senses) Best Seller titled, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.”
I was disappointed, since there was not even the hint of an altercation, and the friendly Borders people were outfitted in smart “TEAM FRANKEN” t-shirts. One of the people waiting to greet the great man, a middle-aged Lefty intellectual who had already read the book, suggested that the Republicans don’t read, so they had not heard what was going on just 100 feet from the Stock Exchange.
The crowd was a pretty mixed, although remarkably white, group of bookies, several hundreds of them in fact. I had missed the photo-op that I had come for, so I decided to buy the book (a totally unnecessary purchase in my case, but it was a good cause, and good for me too at a special 30% discount today) and get in line myself. Besides, the fact that a lot of them were very cute made for a pleasant market area visit. Those of us in the line unfortunately missed Franken’s brief remarks delivered on another floor – bad organization on the part of the special events people at the store.
Some will have another chance tomorrow, as he will be part of a large Howard Dean event at 7 o’clock tomorrow to open the new club, Avalon, once known as The Limelight. Performers and speakers include Franken, Dean, Whoopi Goldberg and Gloria Gaynor, who will be performing “I Will Survive”. Yes, that’s right.
It sounds like the space is being re-consecrated in noble purpose, perhaps suggesting an attempt to exorcize the spirits of owners, promoters and club-kids past. Not a bad start, but it’s not likely to determine the course of Avalon nights to follow. Nor should it.
Sounds like a certain amount of fun tomorrow night, possibly even for Dr. Dean himself.

Phew! I’m relieved, both as an atheist and as a small-“d” democrat, to find that the Tibetan political and religious leader, the Dalai Lama, has feet of clay.
Lama now says that the Iraq war may be justified, and has always said that homosexuality is not. It seems that his reputation for peace and understanding is something of an artificial creation.
On Bush’s wars:

The Dalai Lama said Wednesday that the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan may have been justified to win a larger peace, but that is it too soon to judge whether the Iraq war was warranted.
“I think history will tell,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday, just after he met with President Bush.

And, as for my wretchedness:

For example, the Dalai Lama explicitly condemns homosexuality, as well as all oral and anal sex. His stand is close to that of Pope John Paul II, something his Western followers find embarrassing and prefer to ignore. His American publisher even asked him to remove the injunctions against homosexuality from his book, “Ethics for the New Millennium,” for fear they would offend American readers, and the Dalai Lama acquiesced.

He sounds like a not-so-moderate Republican to me.
What’s the good of a lama if he won’t defend truth and justice everywhere? And besides, we can even weep and fight for Tibet itself without the ministrations of a Buddhist fakir.