Having failed to find a Presidential candidate conservative enough to please the wingnuts, the GOP is looking to resort to their other surefire election winner : voting for some famous dude. Since it worked for Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Bono, the Republican starfuckers are setting their sights on a new celebrity, Fred Thompson. Here’s what his ads should look like :
On a side note, have you guys noticed that everything with the “As Seen on TV” logo tends to look cool in ads, but ends up being an overpriced piece of junk that doesn’t work as well as advertised?
…by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.
Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”
Here’s the famous “crazy” section from The Final Days by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein:
On the Sequoia trip the night before, [Nixon’s son-in-law Edward] Cox said, the President had made it clear he was not going to quit…
Cox sounded distraught. He was worried about the President’s mental health. The President was not sleeping, and he had been drinking. The man couldn’t take it much longer, Cox said. The President had been acting irrationally…
“The President…” Cox began. His voice rose momentarily. “The President was up walking the halls last night, talking to pictures of former Presidents—giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.”
The newest issue of the New Yorker has a long piece by Jeffrey Goldberg about the future of the Republican party. At one point Goldberg goes to the White House to interview Karl Rove, who appears surprisingly optimistic:
“There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” [Rove] said. “One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and that equals making you more center-right in your politics.”
Ebay is the primary source of income for seven hundred thousand people? That sounds implausible. And it is:
Entrepreneurs in record numbers are setting up shop on eBay, according to a new survey conducted for eBay by ACNielsen International Research, a leading research firm. More than 724,000 Americans report that eBay is their primary or secondary source of income.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess far more of these 724,000 Americans use eBay as a secondary source of income rather than a primary one. If the ratio’s 75/25, that makes 175,000 people whose primary source of income is eBay. Hard to spin that into a tale of impending Republican ascendancy.
This kind of thing drives me nigh unto madness. Journalists theoretically should be skeptical of what anyone says. They certainly should be skeptical of things that sound implausible. They certainly absolutely should be skeptical of implausible things political operatives say. They certainly absolutely definitely should be skeptical of implausible things political operatives use as a basis for an entire narrative that’s flattering to the operative. They certainly absolutely definitely always always always should be skeptical of implausible things political operatives say when those political operatives have a history of STARTING GIGANTIC WARS BASED ON LIES.
Not Jeffrey Goldberg and the New Yorker, though. If Karl Rove tells them something, they rush it into print without asking a single question.
WASHINGTON, May 29 — As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable.
The psychologists and other specialists, commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, make the case that more than five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has yet to create an elite corps of interrogators trained to glean secrets from terrorism suspects.
While billions are spent each year to upgrade satellites and other high-tech spy machinery, the experts say, interrogation methods — possibly the most important source of information on groups like Al Qaeda — are a hodgepodge that date from the 1950s, or are modeled on old Soviet practices.
Some of the study participants argue that interrogation should be restructured using lessons from many fields, including the tricks of veteran homicide detectives, the persuasive techniques of sophisticated marketing and models from American history.
The science board critique comes as ethical concerns about harsh interrogations are being voiced by current and former government officials. The top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, sent a letter to troops this month warning that “expedient methods” using force violated American values.
In a blistering lecture delivered last month, a former adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “immoral” some interrogation tactics used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon.
But in meetings with intelligence officials and in a 325-page initial report completed in December, the researchers have pressed a more practical critique: there is little evidence, they say, that harsh methods produce the best intelligence.
What will the swimming pool at our gigantic new Iraq embassy look like?
Tom Engelhardt has done something no one else has: track down the architects who are building our $600 million new “embassy” in Baghdad. Not only do they have a website, they’ve put up their sketches of what it’s going to look like.
Memorial Day began as a day to commemorate soldiers killed on both sides in the Civil War. After World War I, it was expanded to honor soldiers killed in all U.S. wars.
In August [1914], sitting at a cafe in Aachen, a German scientist said to the American journalist Irwin Cobb: “We Germans are the most industrious, the most earnest, the best educated race in Europe. Russia stands for reaction, England for selfishness and perfidy, France for decadence, Germany for progress. German Kultur will enlighten the world and after this war there will never be another…”
Talk of this kind for years before the war had not increased friendliness for Germany. “We often got on the world’s nerves,” admitted Bethmann-Hollweg, by frequently proclaiming Germany’s right to lead the world. This, he explained, was interpreted as lust for world domination but was really a “boyish and unbalanced ebullience.”
The world somehow failed to see it that way. There was a stridency in the German tone that conveyed more menace than ebullience.
Oprah Winfrey will be arriving in Israel for a solidarity visit in the near future, the queen of American talk shows announced Monday during an event at Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
In the event, Winfrey was honored by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity for her contribution to promoting humanitarian issues.
Wiesel called on Winfrey to visit Israel, where “the major war against terror is currently taking place.”
In her speech, Winfrey said she sympathized with the suffering of the people of Israel, and that she intended to accept Wiesel’s invitation and come with him to Israel.
Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Gillerman, who attended the event, said that a visit of a figure with such influence on the international media could help bring an end to the indifference towards the terror threat faced by Israelis.
In the abstract, of course, there’s nothing wrong with Oprah visiting Israel. Moreover, as strongly as I disagree with Wiesel in this area, I give anyone who lived through what he did a free pass to be as crazy as they wish.
But. If there’s one thing confused America doesn’t need, it’s Oprah giving them a one-sided presentation of this issue. In particular we better hope the Oprah Army doesn’t learn Israel is where “the major war against terror is currently taking place.”
So, peace groups in Israel are asking everyone to take a minute and write to Oprah to ask her to also visit the West Bank and Gaza…and then pass it along to as many friends as possible. Here’s what I said:
Dear Ms. Winfrey,
I’m writing to ask you to please visit the West Bank and/or Gaza as well as Israel during your upcoming trip to the area.
I commend you for your sympathy with the suffering of regular Israelis. However, it’s important to remember the even greater suffering of regular Palestinians. I urge you to use your program to give a platform to the many people on both sides who wish to live together in peace.
Head of CIA’s WMD division believed Iraq had nothing, told underlings to give Bush “the intelligence to allow him to go war”
I’ve been looking through The Italian Letter by Peter Eiser and Knut Royce. There’s some amazing stuff in it about Alan Foley, the head of the CIA’s Weapons Intelligence Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center (WINPAC). WINPAC led the CIA’s analysis of Iraq’s purported WMD, and so Foley is at the very center of what happened.
But what’s even more amazing is how little attention the material about Foley has gotten. The book came out several months ago, but according to Google, this is the first time the below sections have appeared online.
Here’s what Foley believed before the war (p. 125):
There were strong indications that Foley all along was toeing a line he did not believe. Several days after Bush’s State of the Union speech, Foley briefed student officers at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, DC. After the briefing, Melvin Goodman, who had retired from the CIA and was then on the university’s faculty, brought Foley into the secure communications area of the Fort McNair compound. Goodman thanked Foley for addressing the students and asked him what weapons of mass destruction he believed would be found after the invasion. “Not much, if anything,” Goodman recalled that Foley responded. Foley declined to be interviewed for this book.
So why, then, would WINPAC report that Iraq had WMD? Here’s the answer (p. 119):
One day in December 2002, Foley called his senior production managers to his office. He had a clear message for the men and women who controlled the output of the center’s analysts: “If the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” The directive was not quite an order to cook the books, but it was a strong suggestion that cherry-picking and slanting not only would be tolerated, but might even be rewarded.
Interestingly, this event has appeared in other books, although not with Foley’s name attached. Details are here.
Any serious congressional strategy to end this war would include nationally televised hearings about this and all the other lies that got us into Iraq. The seriousness of the Democrats can be judged by such hearings’ non-existence.
In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.
Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored.
In January 2003, two months before the invasion, the intelligence community’s think tank — the National Intelligence Council — issued an assessment warning that after Saddam was toppled, there was “a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”
It also warned that “many angry young recruits” would fuel the rank of Islamic extremists and “Iraqi political culture is so embued with mores (opposed) to the democratic experience … that it may resist the most rigorous and prolonged democratic tutorials.”
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It is likely that Democrats and Republicans on the Hill will question how the administration could have predicted a short, easy war given these warnings and why it has taken more four years for them to surface.
