Author: Greg Saunders

Surprise, surprise. The “rebel” Republicans weren’t so rebellious after all. They’ve spent the last week or two grandstanding and insisting on their opposition to the President’s torture and mock trials, but when it came time to choose between their (supposed) principles and helping their party present a united front in an election year, they sold out. Of course the ever-compliant media will bless this compromise since St. McCain can do no wrong. Even when he’s acting like a partisan ass, he’s somehow a non-partisan maverick. As usual, Digby‘s got the right take on all this :

Can anyone in the know explain to me how letting McCain run with this torture debate benefitted the Democrats in any way?

Here’s how the optics look to me:

McCain, the Republican rebel maverick, showed that Republicans are moral and look out for their troops.

Bush, the Republican statesman and leader, showed that he is committed to protecting Americans but that he is willing to listen and compromise when people of good faith express reservations about tactics.

The Democrats showed they are ciphers who don’t have the stones to even say a word when the most important moral issue confronting the government is being debated.

Unless the Dems ready to threaten to filibuster a national security bill a month before an election — which I doubt — I expect that the Republicans are going to rush this through the conference and force through this piece of shit bill in a hurry, just like they forced the AUMF through in October 2002 and give the republicans a big honking “victory” in the GWOT.

The Dems are all going to be twisted into pretzels and look like they have no backbones as they struggle with a united GOP saying that McCain and Huckleberry Graham made sure “the program” is moral and necessary. Vote for it for for the terrorists. So they’ll end up voting for it without getting any benefit from it.

Digby’s not the only one ready to call this one a defeat for Democrats but it shouldn’t be too hard for them to regain control on this issue (provided that a couple of them grow a spine). A decent rebuttal would go something like this :

“Senators McCain and Graham may have sold out on this issue, but the Democratic party still believes that torture is torture, no matter what the President may choose to call it. We in the Democratic party aren’t willing to sacrifice our humanity in order to protect our way of life, because to do so would destroy the moral foundation upon which this great nation was founded. The inhuman treatment of suspects by this administration is deplorable and if Senator McCain is no longer opposed to torture, then we’ll have to continue this fight without him.”

Don’t let the conventional wisdom coalesce around the notion that rubber stamping the President’s bill is a compromise. The GOP “rebels” are cowards for buckling under the pressure of their President and their party. The only compromise was the one made when those Senators sold their souls.

As I’ve made clear in previous posts, I think Nancy Grace is a loathsome troll whose show defiles the network upon which she appears. Even if this is the third post I’ve done on the subject this month, Dahlia Lithwick’s article “Graceless” is a must-read :

Grace is a former—very successful—prosecutor from Atlanta who has devoted herself to victims’ rights since she lost her college sweetheart to a violent mugging. Grace mixes the sweetness of a Southern debutante with the snarling tenacity of a mad dog, and she has carved out a niche for herself on Headline News and Court TV, as a legal expert/talk-show host/roving prosecutor. She knew Peterson was guilty long before the jury did, and even her mistakes (she knew Gary Condit did it, too) are readily forgotten.

Some of the criticisms Grace faces this week are fair, but many aren’t. Some go to larger problems about what passes for truth on television and the sick culture of O.J.-tainment that has been with us since the Salem witch trials and has exploded with Court TV. Yes, Melinda Duckett was treated like crap by Nancy. But Duckett, after all, freely chose to go on the show.
. . .
Another criticism of Grace is that she privileges sensationalism, raw emotionalism, and victims’ rights over the complexity of the legal process. She declines the journalist’s project of clarifying or explaining the law and aims for the entertainer’s use of the law as a vehicle for the war between good and evil. In her 2005 book, Objection, Grace dismisses “legalese, arguments for argument’s sake. … None of it matters. All that matters is the truth and it remains the same, no matter how attorneys twist it and turn it and repackage it.”

Grace’s conviction that there is a single, simple “truth” to every case, and that lawyers and legal processes work to confound rather than clarify it, is chilling in a lawyer. More troubling still, is her tingly spider-sense that she alone can discern that truth in the earliest days of the investigation. But worst of all is her belief that she has some singular role to play in bringing the criminal to justice.

To me, the “worst of all” can be summed up by this line further in the article :

Grace readily confesses that she isn’t a journalist.

Then what the hell is she doing with a show on the Cable News Network??

CNN, if you insist on giving a platform to people who add little more to public discourse than a sense of righteous rage, could you at least give us a way of setting our expectations accordingly? Which of your hosts should we expect to live up to a reasonable standard of journalistic ethics and which ones are just on the air to provide a shallow thrill? If it’s unfair of us to consider some of he people who appear on CNN as “journalists”, then which ones can we rely on to give us that “most trusted name in news” level of credibility and which ones are just loudmouths you hired to boost ratings?

If you want to ask your favorite CNN personality whether or not they’re considered “journalists”, CNN employee emails are firstname.lastname@turner.com (ex. Jayson.Blair@turner.com). Watch your language, be nice, and be sure to let me know if you hear anything back.

There are a lot of reasons why Keith Olbermann’s speech last night was a masterpiece, but my favorite bit is the way he references the best television show ever :

And long ago, a series called “The Twilight Zone” broadcast a riveting episode entitled “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm.

Suddenly his car — and only his car — starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man’s lights go on.

As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced.

An “alien” is shot — but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help.

The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen, manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there’s no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, “they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it’s themselves.”

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight.

“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men.

“For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own — for the children, and the children yet unborn.”

Rod Serling’s genius was that he found a way to work around the censorship that threatened to neuter his “legitimate” writing. In the process, he created a show that was both socially relevant and artistically brilliant. From the Wikipedia’s entry on The Twilight Zone :

Throughout the 1950s, Rod Serling had established himself as one of the hottest names in television, equally famous for his success in writing televised drama as he was for criticizing the medium’s limitations. His most vocal complaints concerned the censorship frequently practiced by sponsors and networks. “I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem,” he said of his 1957 production “The Arena”, intended to be an involving look into contemporary politics. “To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited… In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. That would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.”

And because of this, Serling wrote episodes that make observations about the world that still hold up today. Like The Obsolete Man :

Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.

And The Shelter

For civilization to survive, man must remain civilized.

We could really use another Rod Serling today.

I can’t believe it’s already been five years since that Tuesday. It’s one of those moments so burned in my brain that it seems like it was both a million years ago and a few days ago at the same time…if that makes any sense. Kind of a fucked-up time to have to relive every year (or as we’re supposed to call it now, Patriot Day). I’ll spare you the sight of me sinking back into the emotional muck of 9/11 (though it would be easy to do) and get right into discussing politics. Besides, I’m sure none of you need much of a reminder how horrible it was to watch the murders of thousands of people on live television.

All last week, there’s been a discussion on NPR and elsewhere on the question of “Why haven’t we been attacked again?”. My short answer would be that multiple attacks don’t fit into the “bleed until bankruptcy” strategy that al Qaeda seems to favor. Besides, that question is almost tailor-made to make our leaders look good. The real question in the aftermath of 9/11 isn’t when we’ll get hit again, but “Is the United States government able to keep its citizens safe?” Of course, that question was answered a year ago :

To me it’s impossible to separate 9/11 from Hurricane Katrina. For four years we’d been promised that the leadership of George Bush and the Republican party could keep us safe, yet the aftermath of a natural disaster showed us that the federal government can’t even protect us from a threat they have a week to prepare for. How could we expect them to respond to a dirty bomb attack, on electromagnetic pulse, a nuclear bomb smuggled in a shipping container, another anthrax attack, a few trucks filled with fertilizer explosives surrounding a sports arena, or more airliners hijacked with terrorists using ceramic or plastic blades and crashing them into chemical plants, the New York Stock Exchange, or the Capitol building during the State of the Union? These are the scenarios that keep me up at night and, al Qaeda’s motives aside, there are still plenty of crazy people out there who’d love to kill as many Americans as possible.

So, where does that leave us? Well, the presidential administration we’re stuck with for the next two years is a deadly combination of arrogance, stubbornness, and being-wrong-about-everything-ness. But it is an election year (which you may have guessed from the President’s suddenly sparked interest in Osama Bin Laden), so there’s still an opportunity to change course. Who’s holding the President’s feet to the fire to ensure that Russia’s missing nuclear weapons are tracked down? Or that shipping containers entering the United States are searched? Or that people entering this country aren’t here under falsified documents? Or that the FBI and CIA are sharing information? Or that our intelligence agencies have enough people to translate the mountain of data they’re receiving?

Right now the Legislative branch is controlled by people who have bent over backwards to protect the President, despite his string of failures. They excused his stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission, dragged their feet on investigating Iraq’s many scandals (torture, WMD’s, no-bid-contracts), ignored his extra-constitutional dalliances (imperial presidency, signing statements), and they’ve made the extraordinary choice of working to change the laws that the President has been willfully breaking rather than insist that he follow the laws like the rest of us. That’s your Republican party in action.

So on this fifth anniversary of the worst day of my life, I’m tired of watching the country be crippled by its grief and fear. We’re in danger, things aren’t getting better, and we need to keep asking the same goddamn questions until we get answers. Who’s keeping us safe? Well, I know who isn’t.

An odd thing about the President’s recent speeches on 9/11 is how much he’s been quoting Osama Bin Laden. From today’s speech :

The fighting in Iraq has been difficult and it has been bloody, and some say that Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror. The terrorists disagree. Osama bin Laden has proclaimed that the “third world war is raging” in Iraq. Al Qaeda leaders have declared that Baghdad will be the capital of the new caliphate that they wish to establish across the broader Middle East. It’s hard to believe that extremists would make large journeys across dangerous borders to endure heavy fighting, and to blow themselves up on the streets of Baghdad for a so-called “diversion.” The terrorists know that the outcome in the war on terror will depend on the outcome in Iraq — and so to protect our own citizens, the free world must succeed in Iraq.

It’s weird enough to take the “if you don’t believe me, believe Osama” approach to tie the Iraq war with 9/11, but even stranger is this bit from a speech Bush gave two days ago wherein he cites Bin Laden’s strategy without realizing that he’s executing the al Qaeda plan for victory for them :

Bin Laden calls this his “bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.” And he cited the attacks of 9/11 as evidence that such a plan can succeed. With the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden says, “al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event, while America… lost — according to the lowest estimate — $500 billion… Meaning that every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars” of America. Bin Laden concludes from this experience that “America is definitely a great power, with… unbelievable military strength and a vibrant economy, but all of these have been built on a very weak and hollow foundation.” He went on to say, “Therefore, it is very easy to target the flimsy base and concentrate on their weak points, and even if we’re able to target one-tenth of these weak points, we will be able [to] crush and destroy them.”

We’ve sunk untold billions of dollars into homeland security, pissed away even more in Iraq, driven the deficit to its extreme, lost jobs, watched wages sink, given away the treasury to wealthy individuals and corporations, and crawled out of a recession only to find ourselves on the verge of stagflation. Bleed until bankruptcy? Sounds about right to me. And Bin Laden should know. The Afghan mujahideen certainly didn’t help the Soviet Union.

And if watching the President foolishly play into terrorist hands isn’t frustrating enough, Bushie then has the gall to quote Bin Laden again to smear anyone who would question the government :

Secondly, along with this campaign of terror, the enemy has a propaganda strategy. Osama bin Laden laid out this strategy in a letter to the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, that coalition forces uncovered in Afghanistan in 2002. In it, bin Laden says that al Qaeda intends to “[launch],” in his words, “a media campaign… to create a wedge between the American people and their government.” This media campaign, bin Laden says, will send the American people a number of messages, including “that their government [will] bring them more losses, in finances and casualties.”

Get the message? The President is saying that anyone with the temerity to question the government (which he’s been running for six years) is guilty of falling for terrorist propaganda. You’re either with Bush or with Bin Laden, who Bush has been quoting all week to support himself. Okay, now this is getting confusing…