I’ve been thinking a lot about this comment Ezra made. The context is this—Christopher Hayes wrote a blog post that was a “5 years into the Iraq War” sort of thing, asking two questions:
1) How was it that all of the institutions (the mainstream media, congress, the Fed, regulators) that should have prevented disaster (war, financial crisis) failed at the same time?
2) Why is it that now, particularly as regards to the war, but more broadly on a host of issue, the majority will of the people is not being translated into policy?
1) Beats me. I was asking that at the time. The best I can figure is that the government and media appear to be made out of a bunch of wankers who are easily swept into peer pressure situations. “C’mon, support the war or we’ll call you a big baby,” was an amazingly effective rhetorical ploy, leading me to believe that you should prove that you are perfectly comfortable being called a big baby before you run for office or hold a job in the mainstream media.
2) Well, Ezra nailed this one to the ground:
On some level, isn’t Bush right about about this? When he ran in 2004, he created a campaign that was explicitly about the idea that you don’t want a president who will follow the whims and will of the people. That’s what flip-flopping supposedly was — a tendency to change your position in order to bring it into alignment with the majority of the American electorate. And that’s what Bush ran against. It was an oddly autocratic campaign message, but the people loved it. And now, just as he said, he’s totally ignoring the public’s preferences. But that’s what they elected him to do! I mean, give Bush credit, a lesser man might have flip-flopped on ignoring the public when that became an unpopular governance strategy. Not Bush, though! You may disagree with him, and your children may be dying in his failed war, and your income may be stagnating in his recession, but at least you know where he stands.
In essence, in 2004 we democratically decided to get rid of our democracy. That’s a tough thing to grasp, I think, especially since it’s reversible as far as we know. Bush does seem inclined to leave in 2008. The notion that you should vote away all your power to an authoritarian who will steamroll your will once you wake up from the terror dream and come to your senses doesn’t initially make a lot of sense. But really, it’s a cohesive philosophy on the right. Think about the evangelicals—you turn your life over to this authoritarian religion where there’s not really a lot of room for asking questions or having a healthy debate that might allow logic to seep in. But you do make the choice to stop having choices, so you can sell it as kind of sort of freedom.
This blog post made me feel guilty. Of course, stiff breezes make me feel guilty, since I’m a white liberal, even though I’m one with a healthily and depressing understanding of how much of the world I don’t control. Having thought it over, I can say that I think that bloggers are probably not hammering at what Silber thinks we should at the length and in the tone he dictates because we correctly perceive that there’s no one to convince. We’re not lobbyists. We don’t have direct access to the halls of power. All we have is access to the opinion of The People, and The People are very much against a war on Iran. The People are firmly aligned with The People in Iran on this issue of not wanting everyone to die fiery deaths to fulfill the ego needs of our various religious nut right wing leaders. If we haven’t managed to find an excuse to wage war on Iran yet, it appears to be because their leaders listen more to The People than our leaders do, meaning they’ve held back from responding to American aggression and giving BushCo an excuse to blow up their country.
But we voted our democracy away, didn’t we? Turns out that it’s kind of hard to get it back after a blunder like that. We vote the Democrats in, and they act like they aren’t really a majority party, in part because their backs have been broken by the fact that they haven’t worked in a democracy for god only knows how long and they’re not entirely sure how to get into the swing of things. And let’s face it—we’ve got less of a clue than them. Our ability to influence the government has been based on the idea that this is a democracy, but that idea has been so largely undermined that we don’t really know what it’s going to take to be active on issues where our leaders just decide that our opinions don’t matter.
Of course, I don’t feel too sorry for us. We suck. We’re probably going to vote John McCain into the White House come November, and then we can’t say that voting away our democracy was an accident caused by fantasies brought on by terrorism and war. At that point, we just suck. And no, I’m not buying Silber’s assurance that a Democrat would get us into war with Iran. The Democrats might posture, but there’s only one candidate who is putting his ducks in a row to start the war with Iran, only one candidate cozying up with mega-Zionists and claiming that Iran is providing training in terrorism to people that they don’t, in reality, have anything to do with. And he’s not the Democrat.
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This ain’t even a hard one.
1. Because the people in charge of those institutions benefitted from the disaster,
2. because the majority will of the people is against the disasters from which the aforementioned groups benefit.
For question No.1. It’s fairly easy. It’s been documented at length.
This is not “20 minutes operation” but spanning decades (for eg. Iraq Liberation act was passed during Clinton era. Those was the tool to weaken Iraq. Banking, trade embargo, no fly zone, diplomatic isolation.)
If you follow Iran. the exact same players and methodology is being implemented (curveball, laptop, terrorism, banking, trade embargo, UN resolution, Iran Liberation act clone, etc. etc.)
Anybody know Paul Wolfowitz was album a nominated for CIA director? Interesting eh?
http://www.juancole.com/2008/03/unger-iraq-war-was-conspiracy.html
One could go on at great length with many other examples(as I do in my book). But the point is, the neocons had deliberately gamed the system. As their policy papers show, they knew they wanted to start the war long before the administration took office and in order to do so they knew they had to control intelligence. That’s why Wolfowitz, Perle, and Eliot Abrams began making semi-secret trips to Austin as early as 1998 to convince Bush that an invasion was necessary. That’s why, in December 2000, they tried to put Wolfowitz in as head of the CIA. And that’s why, when that didn’t work, they moved him to the Pentagon where he oversaw the creation of the Office of Special Plans which was in charge of putting out phony intelligence.
Likewise, Cheney put John Bolton in at State to keep an eye on Colin Powell and to make sure that State Department analysts at INR( who had repeatedly discovered the errors in the phony neocon intelligence) were kept out of all the key meetings. As a result, Colin Powell made his presentation to the UN based on intel that came from the neocons in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon–not the professionals at Langley and at [the State Department’s intelligence analysis branch,] INR.
In other words, we went to war not because of intelligence failures, as X seems to think, but because of intelligence successes–successful black propaganda operations, successful disinformation operations–that were deliberately designed to mislead the American people.
As to why, again, I believe that Jim Lobe is on the right track. One has only to read the various neocon policy papers dating back to the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance papers(aka the Wolfowitz Doctrine), A Clean Break in 1996, David Wurmser’s Tyranny’s Ally in 1997, the PNAC papers of 1998, and scores of other articles to see that the neocons had been hoping to start the war for roughly a decade before it actually began. According to these papers, the chief reasons for this grand new strategy of overhauling the Middle East were regional security(ie, Israel) and to protect America’s strategic resources(ie, oil.)
Craig Unger
Vanity Fair Magazine
————-
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1571.html
The 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), crafted by then-Defense Department staffers I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad, is widely regarded as an early formulation of the neoconservatives’ post-Cold War agenda. Under the auspices of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Libby and Wolfowitz, two of the few neoconservatives given posts in the realist-dominated administration of George H.W. Bush, were given the task of producing the DPG, a classified document that outlines U.S. military strategies and provides a framework for developing the defense budget. Because it would be the first DPG since the end of the Cold War, the officials had the daunting task of devising what essentially would be an entirely new framework for U.S. defense policy. In preparation for the drafting, the officials held a number of meetings with outside experts. Notable among the participants were Richard Perle, Albert Wohlstetter (former mentor to Perle and Wolfowitz), and Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (see James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet).
When the draft DPG was leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post, it created an uproar among Democrats and many administration figures, spurring the White House to immediately and publicly retract it. Among its more salient points, the draft guidance called for massive increases in defense spending, the assertion of lone superpower status, the prevention of the emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive—or preemptive—force, and the idea of forsaking multilateralism if it did not suit U.S. interests. It called for intervening in disputes throughout the globe, even when the disputes were not directly related to U.S. interests, arguing that the United States should “retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously disrupt international relations.” According to the draft DPG, the United States must also “show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_M._Jackson
Influence on neoconservatism
Jackson believed that evil should be confronted with power.[16] His support for civil rights and equality at home,[7] married to his opposition to detente,[16] his support for human rights[18] and democratic allies,[19] and his firm belief that the United States could be a force for good in the world[20] inspired a legion of loyal aides who went on to propound Jackson’s philosophy as part of neoconservatism. In addition to Richard Perle, neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Charles Horner, and Douglas Feith were former Democratic aides to Jackson who, disillusioned with the Carter administration, supported Ronald Reagan and joined his administration in 1981, later becoming prominent foreign policy makers in the 21st-century Bush administration. Neoconservative Ben Wattenberg was a prominent political aide to Jackson’s 1972 and 1976 presidential campaigns. Wolfowitz has called himself a “Scoop Jackson Republican” on multiple occasions.[18][21] Many journalists and scholars across the political spectrum have noted links between Senator Jackson and modern neoconservatism.[1][22][23][19][16][24][25][26][27][28]
The Lie Factory
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration’s prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon’s Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq’s weapons and ties to terrorists. “It wasn’t intelligence‚ — it was propaganda,” she says. “They’d take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don’t belong together.” It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials‚ — including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell’s testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February‚ — that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which existed from September 2002 to June 2003, was a Pentagon unit created by Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and headed by Feith, as charged by then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to supply senior Bush administration officials with raw intelligence (unvetted by intelligence analysts, see Stovepiping) pertaining to Iraq.[1] An allegedly-similar unit, called the Iranian Directorate, was created several years later, in 2006, to deal with intelligence on Iran.[2]
Allegations of manipulation of intelligence
In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former CIA officer Larry C. Johnson said the OSP was “dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It’s a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated.” (Mackay, 2003)
Seymour Hersh writes that, according to an unnamed Pentagon adviser, “[OSP] was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons (WMD) that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States. […] ‘The agency [CIA] was out to disprove linkage between Iraq and terrorism,’ the Pentagon adviser told me. ‘That’s what drove them. If you’ve ever worked with intelligence data, you can see the ingrained views at C.I.A. that color the way it sees data.’ The goal of Special Plans, he said, was ‘to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see.’” (Hersh, 2003)
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Office_of_Special_Plans
The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning.
“Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon until her retirement, was with the Office of Special Plans: ‘What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline,’ Kwiatkowski wrote recently. ‘If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of ‘intelligence’ found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense.’ She described the activities of Rumsfeld’s Office of Special Plans as, ‘A subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.’ [2].
In July 2003, “due to ever increasing criticism about the role OSP has played in the gathering of intelligence and the conclusions made to justify the war with Iraq, the Pentagon changed the name of OSP back to its original name, Northern Gulf Affairs Office.” [3].
Julian Borger, in his July 17, 2003 article “The spies who pushed for war,” published by the Guardian/UK, writes that Democratic congressman David Obey said concerning the OSP: “‘The office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees’.” [4]
These allegations are supported by an annex to the first part of Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report of Pre-war Intelligence on Iraq published in July 2004. The review, which was highly critical of the CIA’s Iraq intelligence generally but found its judgments were right on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship, suggests that the OSP, if connected to an “Iraqi intelligence cell” also headed by Douglas Feith which is described in the annex, sought to discredit and cast doubt on CIA analysis in an effort to establish a connection between Saddam Hussein and terrorism. In one instance, in response to a cautious CIA report, “Iraq and al-Qa’eda: A Murky Relationship”, the annex relates that “one of the individuals working for the [intelligence cell led by Feith] stated that the June [2002] report, ‘…should be read for content only - and CIA’s interpretation ought to be ignored.’” (Report, 2004)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
We were watching the Frontline episode about the build-up to the Iraq war last night, and it struck me:
The Democrats bought what the PNAC was telling them. They really thought that the US would be able to overthrow Saddam Hussein with very little consequence, so they had to get into line behind the administration so they didn’t look like a bunch of whiny scolds who were all worried about “international law” and other silly irrelevancies.
They thought we would win, and win easily, and then they’d look like assholes for opposing it. So they voted for it, and now they look like assholes for going along with something that all the rest of us tried to tell them was going to be a total disaster.
It sucks to be Cassandra and tell people what they don’t want to hear, because they never forgive you for being right. Only a very few Democrats were willing to step into that role and try to slow the juggernaut down.
The UN Iraq vote for eg. (as you know was very contentious) . Bush was actually spying on every diplomats and pushing it hard. This was interesting because UN permission was key step to attack Iraq. And Bush couldn’t get it fast enough (since they were still dragging on about UN inspection.)
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1054178.htm
Katharine Gunn was charged last November after she admitted leaking information about a dirty tricks spying operation in the United Nations, involving the United States National Security Agency.
Ms Gunn had claimed that the secret email was from American spies asking British officers to tap the phones of nations in the Security Council voting on the war in Iraq.
Overnight, prosecutors in Britain dropped the charges, leading to speculation that the Government was worried about the disclosure of secret documents during the trial, and in particular, the advice from the Attorney General about the legality of the war in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the woman at the centre of the case has been dubbed a “hero of the human spirit.”
Alison Caldwell reports:
ALISON CALDWELL: 29-year-old Katharine Gun was a translator with Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, the security services’ main intelligence monitoring centre, when she decided to leak the top secret information to a newspaper.
We’re probably going to vote John McCain into the White House come November,
With all due respect, this is the kind of thinking that gets the Democrats in trouble. “We’ve hit a little rough patch, waaah, we’re gonna lose FER SHUR, we might as well give up, take our toys and go home!” We can’t afford to get complacent, but OTOH, I don’t see people defecting to McCain in droves nor yet planning to stay home come November. I really believe the Dems are in a better place now than in 2004, plus we have two strong candidates instead of poor old gormless Kerry.
Congress is wimpy, that’s certain; I believe Mnemosyne is correct, in that they didn’t want to look like scolding Cassandras, so they just went along with whatever “the majority” wanted. I was proud of Barbara Lee, my congressperson at the time, for speaking out and up.
What everybody should be aware:
1. We haven’t really ask “how the hell Iraq war could happen? the mechanism of such complex legal undertaking? Who? How? Why?”
2. We know reports of course. But all actual players. The legislator, the planner, the people inside Bush administration are all still in there. Pure musical chair.
3. Because of this, exact same process /group are still operating.
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/24/podhoretz-bush-meeting/
Podhoretz Granted Secret Access To Lobby Bush On ‘The Case For Bombing Iran’
Norman Podhoretz, the “patriarch of neoconservatism,” recently published a book entitled “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” staunchly supporting the Iraq war and pushing for war with Iran. In June, Podhoretz published a controversial piece in Commentary magazine titled “The Case for Bombing Iran.”
The Politico reports today that President Bush has been listening to Podhoretz’s radical agenda, recently enlisting Podhoretz to discuss his views on Iran. In a meeting that “was not on the president’s public schedule,” Bush and Karl Rove “sat listening to Norman Podhoretz for roughly 45 minutes at the White House”:
Rove was silent throughout, though he took notes. The president listened diligently, Podhoretz said as he recounted the conversation months later, but he “didn’t tip his hand.”
“I did say to [the president], that people ask: Why are you spending all this time negotiating sanctions? Time is passing. I said, my friend [Robert] Kagan wrote a column which he said you were giving ‘futility its chance.’ And both he and Karl Rove burst out laughing.
“It struck me,” Podhoretz added, “that if they really believed that there was a chance for these negotiations and sanctions to work, they would not have laughed. They would have got their backs up and said, ‘No, no, it’s not futile, there’s a very good chance.’”
President Bush has loyally supported Podhoretz’s agenda in the past. In 2004, he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian honor — on Podhoretz, calling him a “fierce intellectual man” with “fine writing and a “great love for our country.”
Today, Podhoretz’s calls for bombing Iran are being echoed in the administration. According to Newsweek, Vice President Cheney considered a plan to allow Israel to conduct missile strikes against Iran “in an effort to draw a military response from Iran, which could in turn spark a U.S. offensive against targets in the Islamic Republic.”
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II12Ak01.html
Speaking wistfully about the Cold War, Woolsey compared the Islamist political resurgence in the Middle East to the then-communist government in Moscow, describing the latter as the “ideal enemy”.
“I have a certain bizarre nostalgia for the Soviet Union,” said Woolsey. “It is our misfortune that today we have to live with Sunni and Shi’ite totalitarianism.”
However, the panel’s unanimous and confrontational sentiment did not translate into a coherent foreign policy toward the Iranian regime, and ultimately leads to what the panelists described as two equally disturbing options: Iran with a bomb or bomb Iran.
“If our [US] survival is at stake and they [Iranians] are readying themselves to attack us, we will bomb them,” said Woolsey.
Iran’s uranium-enrichment program is operating well below capacity and is far from producing nuclear fuel in significant amounts, according to a confidential International Atomic Energy Agency report obtained by Reuters.
For Ledeen, it seems the problem is not a nuclear-armed Iran as much as it is an Islamist government in Tehran, and his ultimate goal is the removal of the clerical establishment from power.
http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/2008/02/07/news/local/war0208.txt
Scott Ritter, UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and Edward Peck, onetime chief of mission in Baghdad and former ambassador to Mauritania, spoke recently at a forum sponsored by Cleveland Peace Action Now and Trinity Cathedral. Before the event, this reporter and a journalist from The Plain Dealer talked to Ritter and Peck.
The White House is using outright fabrications and exaggerations to persuade the American public that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program, Ritter and Peck claimed. The ultimate goal, they said, is overthrow of Iran’s Islamic theocracy.
Just as he did with Iraq, President Bush is falsely positioning Iran as a threat to U.S. national security and a leading sponsor of terrorism, contended Ritter, a 12-year Marine veteran who spent four years in Israel as lead liaison between the UN and the Jewish state on the issues of Iraq and nuclear weapons.
For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.
The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I’ve spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.
The “Zarqawi letter” which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.
This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of “strategic communications” which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/2/13/21458/5221/870/455765
Kyl - Lieberman amendment (exact clone of Iraq Liberation Act. Before people online screaming and point that out.)
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/kyl-lieberman-amendment/
Did you hear about the War on Iran Authorization bill the Senate is going to vote on perhaps as early as today? No, that’s not how it’s getting billed. But that’s what the ‘Kyl-Lieberman’ amendment is. In fact, the supporters of going to war against Iran are using exactly the same strategy with this amendment that they did to lay the groundwork for the Iraq War.
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/054151.php
(video inside last link)
Ailurophile March 25, 2008 at 7:35 pm
Congress is wimpy ”
Some are wimpy, but majority are on board with the war. (dems and repugs)
Nobody check or ask them why they vote the way they did right? (Even now nobody really push Hillary except few question here and there. But there is no straight 1 hour hard session demanding answer)
for eg. Anybody here actually read the senate Intel report on Iraq intel failure? (my bet. NO. because there is nothing in it saying anything meaningful and they released it on Friday afternoon. They are hiding something) It didn’t ask basic question: What is Niger document. Why did they out Plame? What’s the story of aluminium tube? Why did Rice lied? And of course OSP, AIPAC spying cases, several of wolfowitz deputies. Why no question to this obvious questions? (answer, they can’t investigate. It’s too big and too deep. They are all in it together.)
Dems in senate intel is complicit.
So the quesiton: Why and Who?
I suspect the forces discussed in this paper about “Influence through Ignorance” are crucial.
Basically, the easiest way to fool most of the people most of the time is to fool yourself, too.
But I think President will be elected in November. I really do.
That’s President OBAMA, durn it.
Question No.1
Observe DOJ under ascroft and Gonzo. Why can such big department fails to execute?
Because 1.) they degrade oversight. replace all the people. 2) create distorted report. 3) instal competent hacks in areas they need to get their hackery done 4) instal fool in area that they need to stop.
Take for eg. “1992 Defense Planning Guidance papers” This is where the first time all key neocon palyers work together as a group to tackle defense issue.
http://www.juancole.com/2008/03/unger-iraq-war-was-conspiracy.html
continues…
The 1992 draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), crafted by then-Defense Department staffers I. Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Zalmay Khalilzad, is widely regarded as an early formulation of the neoconservatives’ post-Cold War agenda. Under the auspices of then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Libby and Wolfowitz, two of the few neoconservatives given posts in the realist-dominated administration of George H.W. Bush, were given the task of producing the DPG, a classified document that outlines U.S. military strategies and provides a framework for developing the defense budget. Because it would be the first DPG since the end of the Cold War, the officials had the daunting task of devising what essentially would be an entirely new framework for U.S. defense policy. In preparation for the drafting, the officials held a number of meetings with outside experts. Notable among the participants were Richard Perle, Albert Wohlstetter (former mentor to Perle and Wolfowitz), and Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (see James Mann, The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet).
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1571.html
You can read the actual “product” of that meeting
It’s a road map to how to manipulate congress. (gotta go in and look. all the arrows and box chart)
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm
With all due respect, this is the kind of thinking that gets the Democrats in trouble.
Seconded, and without the due respect. Seriously, Amanda, do you have no friggin’ idea what it does to morale when you write things like that–eight months out and on the strength of polls that show a spread of five or so points, no less? If we don’t believe that we can win, let alone that we will, we’ll lose worse than we would otherwise. Ill-considered comments like yours above make it more likely.
As to Hayes’s second question, I think the answer is simply that America is broken. We have a good first draft for a democracy, but the design flaws have made it well nigh unworkable–it is simply not in the best interests of any elected official, at any time, to act in the best interests of the people they represent. The Republicans are better off sticking to their guns about the war, because otherwise they’ll be primaried out of their safe seats. The Democrats are better off playing softball and using the war as a cudgel against Republicans. Presidential candidates have to hedge their bets so as to appear strong even while advocating a policy that’s going to be more than a bit embarrassing to the country when finally carried out. And we have a system that demands broad consensus to accomplish anything. As a consequence, we have a government that’s working hard to do exactly what we don’t want it to do, and there’s nothing we can do about that. No one’s incentives are in the right place.
In short, while we do have hope in this election, we have none in the long term. We’re totally screwed–first America, then the world. Smoke ‘em while you got ‘em.
Those are all the same institution.
Other people have given other good answers but the question itself is invalid. Regulators, the Fed and Congress are all part of the same government and the political media is little more than PR regurgitators for that government.
The press is not independent and has no desire to be.
Right now the press is busy attending McCain BBQs and birthday parties. If he is elected you think they’ll do something to prevent a war with Iran? That’s expecting a lot from glorified social gadflies.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/01/28/libby_case_witness_details_art_of_media_manipulation/
Libby case witness details art of media manipulation
WASHINGTON — A smorgasbord of Washington insider details emerged during the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff.
No one served up spicier morsels than Cathie Martin, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top press assistant . Martin described the craft of media manipulation — under oath and in blunter terms than politicians like to hear in public.
Most of the techniques were candidly described: the uses of leaks and exclusives, when to hide in anonymity, which news medium was seen as more susceptible to control, and what timing was most propitious.
Even the rating of certain journalists as friends to favor and critics to shun — a faint echo of the enemies list drawn up in Richard Nixon’s White House more than 30 years ago.
Libby’s trial owes its very existence to a news leak, the public disclosure four summers ago of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity.
A private brainstorm of Plame Wilson’s in 2002 brought a rain of public attacks on Cheney the next year. Cheney was accused of suppressing intelligence and allowing President Bush to present false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Plame’s husband, ex-ambassador Joseph Wilson, started the attack. Her unit at the CIA had sent him to Niger in 2002 to check a report that Iraq was buying uranium for nuclear weapons. Cheney and the departments of State and Defense wanted to verify that.
Wilson thought he had debunked the report, but Bush mentioned it anyway in his State of the Union address in 2003. The story helped justify war with Iraq.
List of unresolved Iraq media lies. (with various media outlet who tells them)
Anybody remember there was congress eharing where the Iraq operator produce a list where he pushes “product”? Related to spending on iraq group.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1841
Study: Bush, aides made 935 false statements in run-up to war
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/23/bush.iraq/
President Bush and his top aides publicly made 935 false statements about the security risk posed by Iraq in the two years following September 11, 2001, according to a study released Tuesday by two nonprofit journalism groups.
“In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003,” reads an overview of the examination, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
According to the study, Bush and seven top officials — including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice — made 935 false statements about Iraq during those two years.
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Holy crap, squashed.
well, anybody still asks question No.1 should be automatically castrated. Because that’s just lazy thinking. All the players, mechanism, series of events has been well documented online.
The general answered to that question is more or less well understood (short of few details)
answer No.2 because the ruling class answer to different set of criteria. elected officials only need to lie once, then get free pass for 4 yrs.
Observe Hillary: only need to lie about ‘experience’ once, (or as a campaign strategy create ‘image’ and media narrative to pass through a relatively small windows.)
Had the DNC not change the primary calendar and Hillary won the super tuesday, you would have observe the power of media in modern campaign.
We absolutely knows nothing about Hillary as a person, her leadership styles or to whom exactly she answer.
Majority of voters don’t care, don’t have time to delve deep nor capable to dig everything on his own. He relies on media to inform him.
Thus, the problem with media manipulation in modern democracy. He who owns the media machine owns the process.
Squashed - a wee request. Could you please, please condense your comments into fewer posts? There are twenty-three comments in the thread and it appears a good three-quarters are from you, alone, and you are double, triple and quadruple-posting. This chokes the thread. Thanks!
MikeB - your post made me think of something. I forget where I read this (Guardian UK?) but someone pointed out that most European countries which are working democracies, have constitutions written in the nineteenth or even twentieth century (don’t forget how many monarchies there were not so very long ago!). OTOH, we in the US are struggling with an eighteenth-century constitution. We haven’t had any revolutions or government overthrows - even the Civil War couldn’t quite manage it. So we have a surprisingly antiquated political system. In Europe, the buildings are old and the constitutions are new. In the US, vice versa.
Jesus christ, squashed, just get your own blog and hope Amanda links to it.
My other comment landed in moderation, so I’ll just say this now:
Squashed. Please. For the love of doG. Stop with the quadruple-and-quintuple-posting! You are clogging up the thread!
This is not a new thing. Our government is supposed to be composed of checks and balances, but it breaks all the time. The Japanese Internment during WWII springs immediately to mind.
Oh, and fuck off, nutjob.
Antigone March 25, 2008 at 9:55 pm
This is not a new thing. Our government is supposed to be composed of checks and balances, but it breaks all the time. ”
Some of the things that senate refuses to investigate is downright odd. for eg. the niger document forgery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowcake_forgery
In March 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed not to open a Congressional investigation of the matter, but rather asked the FBI to conduct the investigation.
Why did he do that? in 2003 FBI was under massive re-org turmoil (dhs), not to mention Gonzo was in charge.
Eric, Rejector of Memes March 25, 2008 at 9:58 pm
“…..automatically castrated.”
Oh, and fuck off, nutjob.
people has been compiling every bits of information and piecing the puzzle. for eg. here …
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=iraq_project
Playing dumb is not an excusable. (It’s Cheney/Bush excuse. -I was mislead-It was good intelligence - etc.)
for eg:
Pre-war planning (36)
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq&general_topic_areas=preWarPlanning
Confrontation with Iran
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/project.jsp?project=us_force_against_iran
okay, seriously Squashed, you are ignoring generally accepted nettiquette. Think of this as a conversation: you wouldn’t want to dominate in fleshy world, you don’t want to dominate it online either. If you have so much to say, you give a quick paragraph, and link to your site the more in-depth information. Otherwise, you’re being an ass that we all have to smile at before going “oh look, the punch bowl” and shuffling away.
Squashed is multiplying like zuchini here. Why not just a quick referral to “more” by suggesting a search of the cooperative research website and be done with it.
Proper way to format a link (substitute a pointy bracket for these [])
[a href=url of link]Display Title[/a]
Squashed;
You know how you see some real hot and heavy PDA in some inappropriate place, like say, the mall, church or the middle of the Interstate at noon? So you yell “Get a room!”? (well, I do, anyway
What you’re doing is the thread equivalent of such behavior.
In short, “Get a blog!”
Or it might be that a majority of people think in such a way that they vote for candidates who are going to give them what they want? Of course until it goes a bit TOO far and there begins to be real costs to them, and that’s when it swings back the other way. (like you see now)
Bush’s big mistake was not delivering on the cheap part of the war.
k. nevermind. I’ll get back to making silly haa haa and generally useless comment.
I’ll only get intense on election/hillz stuff.
Squashed, it’s not a matter of getting intense. We’ve all said: get intense ON YOUR OWN BLOG.
I don’t understand the basic premise of this post. If enough Americans keep voting for the party (parties) that enable the colonial wars, then isn’t the democratic will of America to continue said colonial wars?
I suppose I’m trying to say that elections count, not opinion polls.
On 2, why are we surprised that a government that has progressively insulated itself from the will of the people - through the method of its elections, the drawing of its districts, the financing of its campaigns - would ignore the will of the people?
I don’t think we’ve given up our democracy so much as we never had it, or we’ve lost what little we did have. The recent disconnect between the government and the people illustrates that fundamental truth.
1 and 2) Our institutions are hostile to the will of the people.
Our institutions do not fear the people. Our news media openly admits to removing any semblance of journalism and we’ve created an alternate media, but we haven’t boycotted the studios or brought the economic hurt to them (it doesn’t help that they’ve been artificially boosting their influence by invading the commercial sphere (every doctor’s visit and bank visit regaled with lying news).
Our elections cut out democratically chosen candidates through monetary and information barriers and sound-bite controversies make mockeries of those who try and fix the system from within. Again, creating a new media is helpful, but it is obviously not a proper replacement in reaching the majority of people. Elections thus go predictably and even if they didn’t, only a few are open to any change thanks to decades of gerrymandering.
The two-party system is also the limitation we are running into. The monetary barrier has ensured that democrats and republicans are wedded on policy as things that aid the people do not aid the monetary elite. As such they resist any form of democracy that would take away their new feudalism dukedom from them and subject them to the reality of real people. None of these congressmen fear that by cutting of the people, the people would form a third party to restore democracy by employing fear of the other party to whip people into line as anti-democratic voting machines maintain the illusion of party parity.
Without anyone believing a third party has a chance or is worth the risk, there is a feeling that there is no way to affect the system and no punishment for democrats who support republican policies because the republicans would be worse. As such policies with 80+ % approval ratings like the end of the Iraq War, not attacking Iran, or socialized medicine can all be ignored by our dukes as they need to stand up and have the proper social voting creds with the other dukes.
We are in a French Revolution type of story. Those who run our institutions are hostile to the people and are only focused with their closely held game of comparing “insider” and wealthy issues and cares. Media fears loss of exposure and so shuts out any rogue offenders, Dukes fear the money and bought sound-bite media being used against them more than the people, and the rest are kings and thus untouchable, because only the dukes can unseat them. Meanwhile, the people’s lives get worse and decisions have to be made between open revolt or suffering.
The idea of American exceptionalism will prevent open revolt. We are America, after all, father of democracy and all that. We cannot become a dictatorship, we cannot have anything wrong with us, we still have a voice. We really don’t anymore. Those who do take to the streets are ignored and jailed and threatened with extradition to our new torture/death camps (yes, that’s what Gitmo is). Is that worth it for something that won’t make television, will not reach the majority of people, will not spark riots and revolution? Many of those who have reached the end of our ropes with the destruction of America reach that point in their thoughts.
It’s as Amanda states. With antidemocratic owners, how do we make them fear the people again? How do we get leaders who have no stake, who have little care towards voting and have found that you can be autocratic democratically, to listen to us, to fear us demanding answers? To fear for their power and connections and lives?
I imagine it was a similar feeling after the Weimar Republic ceded to Hitler. What court, what means, can prevent something that doesn’t care? And without a feeling of collective strength, how can one feel comfortable sacrificing their lives even for a worthy cause?
And if you feel I’m Godwinning, look the fuck around at the contempt of the DLC towards democracy, Cheney’s “So” and the very fact that torture can be debated and that being “anti-torture” is sold to us as a liability and not a single candidate can feel comfortable stating that the torture/death camps can be shut down.
We are here, and I’m fighting like you and Amanda to figure out the “and what now? Now that we’ve ceded democracy.”
Sorry for the downer and long post, everyone.
We’re probably going to vote John McCain into the White House come November,
With all due respect, the even larger problem is that when McCain loses and Obama wins, our government will continue to maintain a bloated military and will doubtless start other unnecessary wars of choice.
The biggest problem is not that the people progressives oppose are horrible (though they are). It’s that the people most progressives support aren’t particularly good on these issues, either.
yyzian is exactly right when s/he writes:
I don’t understand the basic premise of this post. If enough Americans keep voting for the party (parties) that enable the colonial wars, then isn’t the democratic will of America to continue said colonial wars?
I suppose I’m trying to say that elections count, not opinion polls.
And let me add: what matters is who and what you are voting for as well as who you are voting against. It’s simply not enough that you defeat the greater evil if the lesser evil buys into many of his policies.
So the answer to question #2 is that too few of those in the majority under discussion (if it is in fact a majority) seem willing to insist that their desires be transfered into policy. As the last year of Democratic Party control of Congress ought to suggest to anyone who didn’t already understand, the leadership of the Democratic Party is pretty uninterested in bringing this war to an immediate end or holding Bush accountable for his crimes and is utterly uninterested in transforming our military into a force that is actually focused on defending our country from potential attackers (as opposed to “projecting power”). Progressive voters are not only unwilling to abandon the Democratic Party, they were even unwilling to back the one candidate in the primary race who actually dissented from the broad, militaristic, bipartisan foreign policy consensus: Dennis Kucinich.
Ultimately you get what you vote for, rather than the (largely illusory) opposite of what you vote against.
The UN Iraq vote for eg. (as you know was very contentious) . Bush was actually spying on every diplomats and pushing it hard. This was interesting because UN permission was key step to attack Iraq.
One teeny tiny minor point, so small I really hesitate to bring it up:
THE U.N. NEVER GAVE PERMISSION TO FUCKING ATTACK IRAQ!!
You have been lied to by your government and your media every time they implied this. THE UN DID NOT GIVE PERMISSION. The invasion of Iraq was - what’s the word again - ILLEGAL. Bush is a war criminal on those grounds alone.
yyzian and Ben,
The problem with only listening to votes and not polls is voting is an inherently “low information” activity.
There are hundreds (if not thousands) of issues at stake in every election - and the higher the office, the more issues are at stake.
Each of those issues has pluses/minuses, costs/benefits, and personal/societal impacts. There are few issues that are as clean as “good” vs. “bad”, “right” vs. “wrong”, or “yes” vs. “no”.
Yet the act of voting involves ONLY “yes” or “no”, this person or that one, etc. There is no nuance, no explanation, no complex communication - simply “acceptance” (“Well, he’s not as bad as the other guy…”) or “rejection” (“What if he’s as crazy as his minister? We just can’t take a chance…”).
So, as Amanda said above, when you vote in people who swear they will not listen, and then they follow through on that promise, we’re caught in a bind. One small yes/no vote, executed once every 4-years is just not adequate to get the government we want…
Questioning the manhood of your opponents is a time honored and very effective campaign tactic.
In other news, universal health care will make us a country of cross-dressing lumberjacks.
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2008&month=01
Cerberus March 26, 2008 at 3:03 am
1 and 2) Our institutions are hostile to the will of the people.”
The people themselves also don’t care all that much. Pointedly, even in this thread, most are busy doing mental masturbation instead of asking basic questions “no really. what happens. Who did it? Why do they do that. Is it making any sense, etc.” And this supposedly a group at prime of age, highly educated and active.
Now imagine a working man or woman after 12 hrs shift plus have to take care house work. Do they even have time asking: the detail and implication of UN res 1441 vis a vis invasion schedule? Who cares. It’s far distant military adventure.
Of course now, 5 yrs later with energy price soaring, inflation feed by dollar run and massive war spending, people start to mildly wonder. (most people still don’t make connection between $3.50 gas price and Iraq war yet.)
I am from school of cynic. Government will always lie as long as they can get away with it. It’s everybody’s responsibility to ask basic questions.
I do think you are right about the country electing McCain, unfortunately.
Both Clinton and Obama are considerably stonger candidates than either Gore or Kerry, but McCain is a lot stronger than Bush ever was. Clinton is a poor campaigner with a ton of baggage, and not all of it is named Bill. Obama is a much better campaigner, but how much will Wright hurt him? Also, what else is out there? Obama handled the situation as well as it could be handled, but I am afraid that he still may be “too black” for white America to elect him.
McCain may not know Shi’ite from shinola, but that doesn’t matter. The average America doesn’t know Shi’ite from shinola either.
The good news is that McCain doesn’t appear to have any coattails, so I expect Democrats to gain down the ballot, no matter who win.
The Democrats bought what the PNAC was telling them. They really thought that the US would be able to overthrow Saddam Hussein with very little consequence, so they had to get into line behind the administration so they didn’t look like a bunch of whiny scolds who were all worried about “international law” and other silly irrelevancies.
Sounds about right. I’ll never understand why they didn’t realize that the country contained more people than Saddam Hussein and a few members of the army, though.
With all due respect, this is the kind of thinking that gets the Democrats in trouble. “We’ve hit a little rough patch, waaah, we’re gonna lose FER SHUR, we might as well give up, take our toys and go home!”
Sorry, but that’s the exact opposite attitude I’m seeing. I’m seeing a general unwillingness to believe that McCain is a formidable candidate that will be hard to beat, and that we should concentrate on that.
Seriously, Amanda, do you have no friggin’ idea what it does to morale when you write things like that–eight months out and on the strength of polls that show a spread of five or so points, no less?
I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m serious. The Democrats need to take this election seriously. We need to take McCain seriously. Pretending this is going to be a cakewalk of a campaign is exactly what’s going to let them sneak up on us and smash us over the head. I’m sorry if “morale” is lowered. Maybe “morale” should be lowered to the point where we actually assess the opposition correctly and campaign against them correctly instead of sticking our thumbs up our asses.
“Maybe “morale” should be lowered to the point where we actually assess the opposition correctly and campaign against them correctly instead of sticking our thumbs up our asses.”
…or tear each other new assholes while the Reichwing watches eagerly from the sidelines, tossing an occasional grenade into the fray to make sure their opponents are weakened enough to defeat in November…
I haven’t seen anyone pretending that the Democrat will sweep into office without a fight,but Democrats aren’t focusing on the general election yet. Maybe we should wait until we have, you know, an actual nominee before we freak out about how McCain is invincible?
Sadly, I agree with this entire post.
I’m sorry you feel that way, but I’m serious. The Democrats need to take this election seriously. We need to take McCain seriously. Pretending this is going to be a cakewalk of a campaign is exactly what’s going to let them sneak up on us and smash us over the head. I’m sorry if “morale” is lowered. Maybe “morale” should be lowered to the point where we actually assess the opposition correctly and campaign against them correctly instead of sticking our thumbs up our asses.
I usually view the upcoming election as a metaphor - one that is inevitably farming-related since I live in those sticks. This election is like planting a years-fallow field; the attention and waste dumped on the public makes it an potentially ideal ground with which to harvest a bumper crop of elected officials. But Democrats will have to work the field as they should a dispirited electorate in which to maximize their gains.
Then you haven’t been reading Daily Kos. Which is understandable.
Blue Jean March 26, 2008 at 9:32 am
Aw, squashed, don’t be so hard on yourself.
… Part of Bill Clinton’s success is that he always runs as he’s ten points behind, even when he’s ahead. That’s what the Dems need to be doing. Regardless of whether Obama or HRC is on the ticket (and I think the strongest pairing would be both of them) we need to start thinking now how to counter the inevitable GOP narrative that s/he is “out of touch” and “not authentic.”
Comedy hour is over. (Warning: not pretty entry for Hillary supporters) There is enough material in the last 2 months to decide that Hillary is fairly incompetent and dangerously inadequate. She is not very grounded and consider the entire campaign as no more than series of tactic and strategy to get vote then hop on the seat.
Take the bosnia embellishment. Of course everybody knows it’s a campaign trick to push narrative that hillary is ready from day one. Yes she get cought and it reveals she her lacks experience. big deal.
Here what’s important to me. She lies about a military mission. In her mind it’s some safe photo-op trip, an external event to prop her campaign narrative. What’s a boost to story here and there? But to a lot of people it’s a matter of giving life to the country. A duty. It is insulting to talk about getting shot like it’s a camping scary story. It trivialize life and death experience. So the question: Will she be able to command an army as Commander in Chief? Will a soldier able to say”I’ll carry the order because I trust my life she knows what she is ordering”
There is a reason why there are so many generals and military men rule countries. Because war is still the life and death of a nation. A cackling clown is liable to be putsched.
If one look hillary’s larger campaign pattern, how she decide to lie about inevitability, nafta, using race baiting, etc, they suffers from same problem.
Her tactic is good but collapses against larger strategy. Is simply unable to anticipate larger long term consequence.
inevitability: it’s massive and fatal campaign strategy. Combined with ’super tuesday/50+1′ instead of boot on the ground strategy, she losts the primary.
nafta: she will get cought lying and lost important states like Penn, Ind. At the cost of winning Ohio by sliver of delegate.
race baiting: to boost short term morale after post super tuesday debacle, she lost southern states with large AA votes. (nevermind the viability of racial harmony.) She will lost NC massive enough to render 20 or so delegates win nil.
She is not ready. She is a good player, but not a leader. She knows how to cook up political tricks and playing party machine string pulling. But as a leader, she is a sucker. She doesn’t understand the larger game.
relevant to this thread: Why did Hillary lies/spins about Iraq war vote? (and why do some pandagon readers actually eat that up?)
This is relevant right? Why do people who votes for increasingly fatal Iraq war actually able to act like she is inevitable?
Remember: Iraq war and its effect are highly predictable. Nobody here can say “I didn’t know. voting for pro-war candidate will be this bad.”
the internet contains enough material to judge how the world will react on a candidate most probable course of action.
LOL! Thanks, squashie, for the laugh.
You’d do even better if you quit bogying the thread, which is about democracy and elections, not Hillary. If you really want to rail about Her Evilness, try DailyKos, Balloon Juice, or even better, Little Green Footballs or RedState. I’m sure they’d appreciate you more over there.
Blue Jean March 26, 2008 at 10:43 am
LOL! Thanks, squashie, for the laugh.
You’d do even better if you quit bogying the thread, which is about democracy and elections, not Hillary.”
Like I say. Hillary supporters are still in clown show mode. Hasn’t started asking “real” and basic question. It’s all about campaign/election gag.
I can give you several very hard questions complete with links and youtube speeches. All those that gives me trouble about Hillary candidacy.
but I am pretty sure you’ll just giggle like it’s actually funny then pretend nothing happens.
.. you now where to find me when you want the questions.
I’d take you seriously if you knew how to spell. Or use grammar. Or link properly, etc. As it is, I have to laugh.
If there’s one thing that Obama and HRC supporters here can agree on, it’s the need to defeat John McCain in the fall. This constant demonization of one and/or the other is going to alienate half the voters needed to do that, as this Obama supporter makes clear..
On the question of why all sections of the establishment supported Bush - the one section that was most important, the media, has moved into a position that it ws more or less going to move into. The idea that we have an East Coast Liberal media was partly true. It was due to the Democratic dominance of the 30s and 40s, and relative dominance after a short interval in the 50s in Congress. For a long time, liberalism of a sort described the political establishment. But since 1980, that hasn’t been so. Gradually, the media reshaped itself to the new era - it hired conservatives, it learned to live with a corporate culture that began to buy up tv networks and newspapers, the new owners stripped out a lot of resistance on the way to profitability, and by 2001, we had a rightleaning media in place in the shell of what had traditionally been a liberal media. The shock was mitigated by the Clinton years, during which issues became highly personalized - there really were no ideological questions involved in the Lewinsky kerfluffle, or none that were relevant to the press. Bush 2 was the media’s hero for good reason. He had stripped away the overt racism, talked about compassion, and then emphasized toughness - and toughness is the true, vacuous ideology of the D.C. establishment. To be tough is supposed to be the great virtue. To be weak is this terrible vice. In real life, that is absurd, a viewpoint only a psychopath could love - but not for the powers that be in D.C.
..tee hee. like I say. teh clownzer.
k. nother one. defeating McCain? She was praising McCain with that “threshold” speech. As people quickly point out, that strategy is detrimental to the party. (She is giving McCain talking point and legitimacy.)
so obviously, that was pretty laughable. Not even you can cover that up.
Here is one you need to answer in serious manner.
Hillary is a racist.
From Wright, one has to conclude Hillary is a racist. Definition of racist it to use race to gain/maintain power structure. Wright was used to prove that Obama probably is dangerous black man, radical black liberation of some sort. This is to boost poor white voters. (nixon southern strategy/dixiecrat scheme)
Had Wright been white, I seriously doubt Hillary would care that much about what he said. Because that would provide her no voting boost. (plus, plenty of crazy pastors she can scream at)
Unfortunately, this event makes any non white voters think. Obviously Hillary is more than ready to screw black person to get where she wants to go. What if Wright were me? Will Hillary screw me too?
You think Wright case is cute/laughing matter to you?
Have you ever asked who else will Hillary toss out to get her bus moving? Bill Richardson is Judas. (obviously his value is no more as prop to latinos voters to the clintons.)
so, chew on that for a moment.
It’s called leadership. A politician can choose to follow his or her own judgment or follow polls. The American public was dead-set against entering WWII, until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Imagine how that history would have turned out if the U.S. had jumped in earlier.
There are many examples of the American public opposing liberal values. Most Americans oppose same sex marriage. A slim majority oppose abortion in many/most cases. Should politicians always follow the will of the people?
I’ll make this easy for you. No, they shouldn’t.
Pretending this is going to be a cakewalk of a campaign is exactly what’s going to let them sneak up on us and smash us over the head.
There’s a world of difference between “this will be a cakewalk” and “we are probably going to lose”—between “complacent” and “resigned.” We’re going to have challenges, yes, but so many metrics favor us that the odds are at least even by any reasonable standard. Or would be, if people weren’t so awed by the strength of a candidate who lucked into his nomination and is, at the moment, not being criticized by anyone at all.
When you repeat “McCain’s probably going to win,” you depress enthusiasm for our eventual candidate—fundraising, volunteering, turnout. When it becomes a steady buzz, it encourages down-ticket candidates to run away from their party’s nominee, and discourages that nominee from running an ambitious campaign. If this were a ten-point race and it were October, perhaps it’d be beyond the point where such things mattered. But this is a very close race and the general has not yet started. Saying things like that when you have a big microphone is, frankly, irresponsible.
Then you haven’t been reading Daily Kos. Which is understandable.
I tend to avoid Kos like the plague, so you may be right.
Myself, I’m with most Democratic voters, who seem to be insanely evenly split between the candidates. Apparently, today Drudge is pushing a story that a whole 22 percent of Obama voters say they wouldn’t vote for Hillary. And, interestingly, the exact same number of Hillary voters say the same thing about Obama.
If we keep infighting over candidates who are — let’s face it — virtually identical except in race and gender and acting as though it will be the end of the goddamned world if the “wrong” one gets nominated, we may well lose in November.
A humble request: Will people please ignore squashed? This is an interesting discussion that shouldn’t be derailed by someone who lacks such self-awareness that he/she is being incredibly rude and annoying.
Raging Red March 26, 2008 at 12:13 pm
This is an interesting discussion that shouldn’t be derailed by someone who lacks such self-awareness that he/she is being incredibly rude and annoying.”
Sure I maybe annoying, but I’ve posted core information containing names, agencies, probable sequence of event, date. hypothetical modus related to the question. I don’t see your take.
——–
It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over the past decade, effectively conspired with his supporters in and around the administration to take the United States to war on pretenses they knew, or had reason to know, were false.
Indeed, it now appears increasingly clear that defectors handled by the INC were sources for the most spectacular and detailed — if completely unfounded — information about Hussein’s alleged WMD programs, offered not only to U.S. intelligence agencies, but also to U.S. mainstream media, especially the New York Times, according to a recent report in the New York Review of Books.
Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neoconservatives close to Cheney and Rumsfeld — Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
Feith’s office was home to the Office of Special Plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were given the task of reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case for war. OSP also worked with the Defense Policy Board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neoconservative hawks, which was chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a long-time Chalabi friend.
http://www.alternet.org/story/17923/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F02%2F19%2Fwirq19.xml
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8798997/the_man_who_sold_the_war/
No, I will not ignore squashed. He/she raises some valid points, especially that the answer to point #1 is now glaringly obvious (I’m not so sure it was as obvious in early 2003, however). Hillary’s campaigning has gone rapidly downhill since March 4th (when I voted for her). I’m still blaming her advisors, not her, for the amazing series of gaffes that have come out (and of course the media who just luvv a good Clinton-bashing opportunity); but she did choose these people to be on her campaign.
There is a school of thought, or at least there was, that by prolonging the Clinton/Obama contest all the way to the convention it would keep Democrats and the Democratic agenda in the news, while McCain and the Republicans are overshadowed (their race being over). I think that’s a valid premise, but not the way the campaign has been covered lately. I think it would be better for both candidates to be attacking McCain, and highlighting the differences in how they would go about that, rather than attacking each other’s credibility.
Amanda is right, we did vote away our democracy (over the past 30-40 years). We’re just witnessing the culmination of a couple of generations’ worth of xenophobia and racist hate; this is the government the American people wanted and therefore deserve. Hopefully the lesson is painful enough that a majority will arise dedicated to a more progressive, and yes more democratic government. That assumes, however, that the lesson is recognized for what it is. That’s the mission the blogosphere should be taking on: ensuring that there is no room for Americans to delude themselves that this disaster was not our fault.
There’s a world of difference between “this will be a cakewalk” and “we are probably going to lose”—between “complacent” and “resigned.” We’re going to have challenges, yes, but so many metrics favor us that the odds are at least even by any reasonable standard. Or would be, if people weren’t so awed by the strength of a candidate who lucked into his nomination and is, at the moment, not being criticized by anyone at all.
When you repeat “McCain’s probably going to win,” you depress enthusiasm for our eventual candidate—fundraising, volunteering, turnout. When it becomes a steady buzz, it encourages down-ticket candidates to run away from their party’s nominee, and discourages that nominee from running an ambitious campaign. If this were a ten-point race and it were October, perhaps it’d be beyond the point where such things mattered. But this is a very close race and the general has not yet started. Saying things like that when you have a big microphone is, frankly, irresponsible.
What Mike said, and I agree so much that I will quote his post in its entirety.
HUGE, HUGE, HUGE difference between, “We Democrats can’t assume this is a walk, so we’d better be on our toes” and “beh, McCain is invincible, he’s gonna win, we might as well give up” which is what “McCain will probably win in November” amounts to.
Sure, we must be on our toes. This is a race, not a cakewalk, for the Dems. BUT NO, McCain is not invincible. He’s far from universally liked or loved except maybe by the media. And Obama is no Kerry. (Nor is Hillary for that matter.)
MikeEss,
From my perspective, in the view of much of the American electorate, there is no bind. Judging by how they vote, they are quite happy with your country’s current leadership. They have thought about the issues, and voted in the manner that has produced the current government. Maybe you’re caught in a bind yourself, but I couldn’t say the same for the average Republican or moderate-right swing voter.
And to the thread more generally,
I wonder if this is something that the American right has figured out better than the American centre (I’m not sure Pandagonians would count as left in Canada or Europe). It’s not the level of your information on the issues that’s important, it’s the level of your political power that ultimately matters. If you’re not able to exercise political power, then your judgement on the “pluses/minuses, costs/benefits, and personal/societal impacts” matters only (within the usual constitutional limitations) as far as the incumbent thinks it does.
If you don’t like it… maybe you’d be better off with a government that thinks more like you? Vote for the ones that don’t start wars or shoot cruise missiles at people, perhaps?
And I still don’t understand the premise of the original post. You (vast plural you) voted for this, and keep doing so. How is this undemocratic?
“You (vast plural you) voted for this, and keep doing so. How is this undemocratic?”
Realize that “vast plural you” consists (in 2000) of 55% of eligible voters actually voting - and Bush got American Idol…
“You (vast plural you) voted for this, and keep doing so. How is this undemocratic?”
Realize that “vast plural you” consists (in 2000) of 55% of eligible voters actually voting - and Bush got American Idol…
…that’s weird…first time it’s ever actually munched one of my comments…
Trying this again:
Realize that “vast plural you” consists (in 2000) of 55% of eligible voters actually voting - and Bush got less than 50% of those.
Basically, Bush was elected by about 27% of the eligible voting public.
So the “vast plural us” didn’t vote for Bush, we just got stuck with him.
Given the continual effort (particularly by the “right wing”) to keep voting rates low (voting during the week, piling all sorts of burdens on voters in various states, “mysterious” voting machine malfunctions in predominantly-Democratic minority areas, etc.), I would say calling what we do “undemocratic” is a pretty fair evaluation…
Elections in the US right now are only a couple notches above the bogus phone voting in American Idol…
yyzian, you’re forgetting something about our insane electoral system: in 2000, more people voted for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. Gore got 50.9 million votes. Bush got 50.4 million votes. In any other country, Bush would have made his concession speech that very night.
But because the founders of our country decided that elections should be decided proportionally rather than by the popular vote, Bush was able to bring a case in front of the Supreme Court and get them to shut down any further recounts. Which is why Bush’s limo was egged by protesters on the way to his inauguration.
So, to be perfectly fair, Bush has served two terms as president, but was only elected for one of them.
Oh, and to be fair, it’s not true that more people vote for “American Idol” than vote in the presidential election. “Idol” may get 65 million votes, but that’s for all of the contestants combined. Presidential elections, even low turnout ones, still get at least 100 million voters overall.
I thought the point of the electoral college was that the states chose the electors for the office of president (Article 2, section 1). It’s not a popular vote election, so until your constitution gets amended, the popular vote is something of a straw man in the exercise of politics. I’m not sure what you mean by proportional, come to that. The candidate needs a majority of E.C. voters.
Looking back, the Florida result was rather muddied even after the flying fur settled (PBS article). The margins at issue were or would have been hundreds (but not thousands plural) of votes in a single state depending on your favoured technique for counting. Given the bloody mess, and other issues such as the use of voting machines and disenfranchisement of certain classes of voters, I’m not convinced either way that Bush was or was not elected.
To the original post, voting away your democracy would imply that you have voted in the last American presidential election, which is obviously not the case. Maybe the issue is more that a plurality of American voters like American exceptionalism, corn subsidies, organizing other countries’ governments, voting chest-beating macho paragons of manliness into government office, having the biggest military, having dibs on client states’ oil reserves, ad nauseam. My own impression is that this is what many Americans are voting for, which is why I can’t reconcile the notion that what happened in 2004 was a vote to remove American democracy.
All that said, please vote for the candidate that isn’t going to start any more manly wars. It might be fatal to many people who don’t get to vote in your elections.
I’m not sure what you mean by proportional, come to that.
Each state gets X number of electors based on population, and that number can go up or down every 10 years depending on the census. So even if exactly the same number of people vote in Illinois and Indiana, Illinois has more say in who the president is because that state has 21 electoral votes and Indiana only has 11 electoral votes. In fact, even if more people turn out to vote in Indiana than in Illinois, it doesn’t matter, because Illinois has more electoral votes, and those trump the popular vote. When we cast our votes, we’re electing electors, not a president.
That’s why Bush was so desperate to hang on to Florida in 2000 — it was the only possible way he could win since he’d lost the popular vote. There’s only one other time in US history where the electoral and popular votes did not match up. What really pissed people off is that we have a procedure spelled out in the Constitution about how to handle that situation, but Bush forestalled it with his lawsuit.
You can see a chart here that spells out how many electoral votes each state has, and you’ll see why the candidates spend a huge amount of time campaigning in California, but not as much in Oregon, even though the states border each other.
More precisely, each state gets a number of electors based on the number of representatives and senators that state gets (Article 2, section 1). Representatives are apportioned based on population (Article 1, Section 2), while each state has two senators (Article 2, section 3). It’s not quite population proportional, is it?
I think the procedure you’re talking about is from the 12th Amendment, where the President of the Senate counts the electoral college ballots, and the House of Representatives votes by state in case of no majority in the electoral college. Is there a procedure in the constitution about settling state-level questions about electing the college members themselves?
As an aside, here’s the article I tried to link to, since Pandagon ate my careful href attribute:
http://www.pbs.org/
newshour/media/media_watch/jan-june01/
recount_4-3.html
(Interestingly, it was Al Gore acting as President of the Senate who presided over the electoral college count that made Bush president. Or so sayeth the wiki, I haven’t found a footnoted reference.)
Sorry to wax all long-winded, I think the US system of government is very elegantly designed. Though in that way it’s like the Canadian constitution, their apparent purpose is possibly not their actual purpose. Another reason why I don’t think the 2004 election stole any level of democracy.
More precisely, each state gets a number of electors based on the number of representatives and senators that state gets (Article 2, section 1). Representatives are apportioned based on population (Article 1, Section 2), while each state has two senators (Article 2, section 3). It’s not quite population proportional, is it?
It is, because the number of representatives in the House of Representatives goes up and down based on the population of the state in question. It was a compromise between the more populous states and the less populous ones — the little guys were afraid that their concerns would be drowned out by the bigger ones, so it’s supposed to provide a balance of power.
But since every state has two senators, that means that their representation in the House of Representatives and their electoral votes are completely population proportional. Everyone starts with 2, and then get more depending on population.
I think the procedure you’re talking about is from the 12th Amendment, where the President of the Senate counts the electoral college ballots, and the House of Representatives votes by state in case of no majority in the electoral college. Is there a procedure in the constitution about settling state-level questions about electing the college members themselves?
That’s the exact argument that Bush v. Gore made to the Supreme Court: that Gore was trying to dictate how Florida appointed their electors by getting recounts. The talking heads newspeople were all freaking out and talking about how if neither candidate had the 270 votes required to become President, all hell would break loose and cats and dogs would start raining from the sky, even though it’s written right in the Constitution what you’re supposed to do in that case.
Our Constitution is actually a lovely and flexible document — the problem right now is that we have powerful people “interpreting” it in ways that are most convenient for them. The three branches of government are supposed to keep one another in check like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, but once the legislative and judicial branches decided that , despite what it says in the Constitution, the executive branch should be allowed to control the other two branches, the whole thing fell apart.
Of course, once there’s a Democrat as chief executive again, suddenly Congress and the courts will discover that they have all of these powers that they were supposed to be using all along. It’s the eternal game of Calvinball that Republicans love to play: one set of rules for Republicans, another set for everyone else.