[digg-reddit-me]Stephen Colbert lays bare the pure cynicism behind Newt Gingrich’s refusal to acknowledge the silliness of Sarah Palin’s claim that Obama is createing “death panels” in what I think is my favorite response to the crescendo of wingnuttery on the right over health care:
| Death Panels | |
[digg-reddit-me]Congressional Republicans got their knickers in a bunch this week sending off a quite nasty letter in response to what they allege (citing the Politico) to be hardball political tactics of Rahm Emanuel pushing back against Senator Jon Kyl.
This all supposedly started when Senator Kyl on This Week With George Stephanopoulos took on the stimulus bill:
KYL: Yes. And with respect to the stimulus, I think it’s now acknowledged, it hasn’t done what it set out to do.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But your government says it has in Arizona.
KYL: No. What our – look, all governors like “free money” coming to the state. My governor is no different. But the reality is that it has added to our deficit. We’re now going to have a $1.8 trillion deficit this year.
It seems more plausible that these rather mild remarks aren’t what started this, but the general push by Senator Kyl to cancel the stimulus bill that included an op-ed published a week before this in which he explained:
With the results now in, it’s not a surprise that a recent Rasmussen poll found that 45 percent of Americans want to cancel the rest of the stimulus spending. I agree.
In response to Kyl’s attempts to cancel the stimulus bill, Rahm Emanuel – according to Politico – had several department heads responsible for distributing stimulus funds write to the Republican Arizona governor, who is on the record as supporting the bill and saying it is working for her state, asking her if she agreed with Senator Kyl and wished to cancel any future funding from the stimulus. In some variation or another, the letters made this point:
On Sunday, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl publicly questioned whether the stimulus is working and stated that he wants to cancel projects that aren’t presently underway. I believe the stimulus has been very effective in creating job opportunities throughout the country. However, if you prefer to forfeit the money we are making available to your state, as Senator Kyl suggests, please let me know…
Darrell Issa, a California Republican Congressman, accepted Politico’s characterization that it was an “assault” on Kyl, as well as a “fist to the nose,” and a message to “Back off.” In a letter to Emanuel (pdf), Issa asked:
At what point do you believe your practice of Chicago-style politics violates a public official’s right to speak out in favor of alternative policies?
All of this seems fair and good to me – it’s politics. If Issa thinks he’ll win points whining, then all the power to him. If Emanuel thinks he can get the Republican governor of Arizona and potential presidential candidate and Senator from Arizona Jon Kyl squabbling, then all the power to him.
But on style points, Issa loses. His letter which implies that Emanual is violating the right of public officials to speak out in favor of alternative policies. This is the same Issa who sided with Dick Cheney’s office after they outed an undercover CIA agent because her husband spoke out against the Iraq war; and the same Issa who obstructed debate on the reauthorization of FISA until a fellow Congressman withdrew his comments that the Bush administration had broken the law. Over his career then, not much attention given to the right of public officials to speak their minds – unless they agree with him. Blatant hypocrisy while whining about objective standards always loses you style points.
I have a question for Congressman Issa (congressman.issa@mail.house.gov): At what point does your arugula-sniffing, California-style oversensitive, politics of umbrage idiocy get old?
You’re in Congress. Grow up. If you’re in Washington trying to play hardball, don’t whine when someone on your team takes a hit.
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[digg-reddit-me]When I heard Cokie Roberts saying this on Sunday my jaw dropped:
The self-centeredness of the response – and the fact that she showed no shame about explaining this as her reasoning on national television when she was supposed to be acting as a serious commentator. Though it is pretty awesome that she is willing to undergo the inconvenience of the “bad atmosphere” in Washington as a result of attempting to uphold the Rule of Law. I’m glad she is willing to make the sacrifice for the rest of us.
It’s pretty telling that committing war crimes isn’t what is credited with souring the mood – but instead the blame is foisted onto those who uphold the law…
[digg-reddit-me]Watching John Boehner demonstrate his ignorance when asked about global warming on This Week with George Stephanopoulos was surprisingly painful:
The huge amount of waste gasses from livestock do in fact contribute to global warming significantly; and of course it is silly to call carbon dioxide a carcinogen – but that’s very different from calling it a potentially dangerous greenhouse case in significant quantities. The fact that Boehner doesn’t even know the basic terms of this debate is disturbing if telling – as the only way to explain his rejectionist position is a combination of ignorance and greed for fundraising dollars.
[digg-reddit-me]This isn’t a definitive timeline of the debate over torture in America. These are merely some highlights.
On September 11, 2001 we were attacked by militant islamists as they took advantage of the openness of our society and our technology and committed one of the most foul atrocities in history.
By September 12, 2001, everything had changed for those in power – and for many of us – “The sense of danger in the White House was urgent, palpable.” An associate of Condi Rice explained:
We really thought we were going to be attacked – possibly chemical, biological, even nuclear, the potential that they could blow up entire American cities…And then CIA came and said, ‘You know, this is the only way to question these people. Our experts say this is the only program that will work.’ And Justice said that the [Geneva Conventions] didn’t apply…and that the agency program did comply with the torture statute.
Others in the White House described a feeling of panic imbuing all their actions.
On September 16, 2001 – Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press:
I think the important thing here, Tim, is for people to understand that, you know, things have changed since last Tuesday…We…have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
On August 1, 2002, what becomes known as the Bybee torture memo, written apparently by his deputy John Yoo, re-defines torture as physical pain:
equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.
It is not known if all of the techniques justified using this legal shield have been made public – but a partial list includes:
Sometime in 2002, John Ashcroft exclaims during a meeting of the cabinet-level officials going over the details of how detainees are being interrogated:
History will not judge this kindly.
Donald Rumsfeld writes on 2002 memo describing interrogation techniques:
I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?
Rumsfeld presumably stood at a desk, using it for support and moved around – a very different experience than “forced standing,” a former Communist torture technique which can result in physical effects which Red Cross reports described in detainees:
After 18 to 24 hours of continuous standing, there is an accumulation of fluid in the tissues of the legs. This dependent edema is produced by the extravasation of fluid from the blood vessels. The ankles and feet of the prisoner swell to twice their normal circumference. The edema may rise up the legs as high as the middle of the thighs. The skin becomes tense and intensely painful. Large blisters develop, which break and exude watery serum….
Beginning in 2004, photographs from the Abu Ghraib scandal surface:
Christopher Hitchens – after publicaly calling waterboarding and the other interrogation methods used merely “extreme interrogation” and not “outright torture” – accepts a challenge to undergo it himself. He comes away a changed man:
Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict…
[I]f waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Deroy Murdok writes in the National Review:
Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.
Former CIA operative Barry Eisler:
[T]orture is also an excellent way to get the subject to confess to anything at all, which is why it was a wonderful tool for the Spanish Inquisition and for the secret police of assorted totalitarian regimes. But if the goal is to produce accurate, actionable intelligence, torture is madness… To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, torture is worse than immoral: it’s tactically stupid. It produces false confessions, which can be used to confirm mistaken suspicions and even outright policy fantasies; it instills an insatiable thirst for vengeance in most people who are subjected to it, and so creates new, dedicated enemies; it permanently brutalizes its practitioners; and it cuts us off from intelligence from the local populace because so many people will refuse to inform on someone if they fear he’ll be tortured.
On October 15, 2004, Justice John Stevens wrote:
For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny.
On June 14, 2005, Senator Dick Durbin gave a controversial speech in which he read from an FBI report of detainee interrogations:
If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime – Pol Pot or others – that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners
Malcolm Nance, a former SERE interrogator explained that Senator Dick Durbin was right:
Now, at long last, six years of denials can now be swept aside, and we can say definitively: America engaged in torture and legalized it through paperwork.
Despite all the gyrations – the ducking, dodging and hiding from the facts – there is no way to say that these people were not authorizing torture. Worse yet, they seem to have not cared a wit that these techniques came from the actual manuals of communist, fascist and totalitarian torturers.
On September 28, 2005, Captain Ian Fishback wrote a letter to Senator John McCain:
…the most important question that this generation will answer [is] Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security? Terrorism inspires fear and suppresses ideals like freedom and individual rights. Overcoming the fear posed by terrorist threats is a tremendous test of our courage. Will we confront danger and adversity in order to preserve our ideals, or will our courage and commitment to individual rights wither at the prospect of sacrifice? My response is simple. If we abandon our ideals in the face of adversity and aggression, then those ideals were never really in our possession.I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is “America.
On November 4, 2005, Senator John McCain explained his opposition to torture:
I have said it before but it bears repeating: The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights. They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies, and we can never, never allow our enemies to take those values away.
On January 19, 2009, Dick Cheney explained to the Weekly Standard
I think on the left wing of the Democratic party, there are some people who believe that we really tortured…
On January 14, 2009, Bob Woodward interviewed the top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial in the Washington Post:
“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.
On January 22, 2009, a day after taking office, Barack Obama said:
I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture.
In April 2009, Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books:
[T]he political logic is insidious and, in the aftermath of a future attack, might well prove compelling…
The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the “politics of fear” is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved.
On April 20, 2009, Dick Cheney told Sean Hannity:
I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.
In spring 2008, Eric Holder explained:
We owe the American people a reckoning.
On March 18, 2008 Dawn Johnsen, who has been appointed to head Obama’s Office of Legal Counsel which was responsible for the legal opinions cited above wrote in in Slate:
We must avoid any temptation simply to move on. We must instead be honest with ourselves and the world as we condemn our nation’s past transgressions and reject Bush’s corruption of our American ideals. Our constitutional democracy cannot survive with a government shrouded in secrecy, nor can our nation’s honor be restored without full disclosure.
On April 19, 2009, Peggy Noonan on This Week With George Stephanopoulos:
Some things in life need to be mysterious … Sometimes you need to just keep walking.
(All emphases within quotations are my own.)
This is where we stand today – thanks to the courage of heroes within the Bush administration and the military who stood for American values in a time of crisis and against preemptive surrender of our way of life and thanks to the courage of journalists from Mark Danner to Andrew Sullivan to Glenn Greenwald to Dana Priest to Jane Mayer who exposed these secret actions.
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Such a perfect line. You have to admire the dryness of wit needed to pull this off.
Next time I’m arguing with someone invoking strawman arguments, I’m pulling this off the shelf.
[digg-reddit-me]From Obama’s Inaugural Address:
There are some who question the scale of our ambitions — who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.
What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works — whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account — to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day — because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.
This brings to mind what George Stephanopoulos was so excited about last Sunday on This Week:
(Yes, I need to work on improving my DVR to computer quality.)
It seems that Obama is preparing to bet his presidency on a Grand Bargain – that will allow him (and us) to rewrite the social contract in a more extensive way than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even during Obama’s campaign, he spoke of tackling the challenges that were necessary – and not putting off hard discussions about our country’s long-term stability. But the financial crisis – which at first prompted the endlessly parroted conventional wisdom that whoever won would need to cut all of their projects and focus narrowly on the crisis itself – has instead proved to be an opportunity.
The amount of spending needed to stimulate the economy is enormous – with the numbers being thrown around today dwarfing that of any previous government intervention (save perhaps for our major wars). What Obama understands is that this type of spending, while necessary in the short-term, poses a serious long-term threat. Which is why he is now speaking of the second step – after the financial crisis has passed – of tackling entitlement reform and tax reform, and finally putting America on sound financial footing after years of prolifigacy.
None of these insights are exceptional. What is exceptional is how Obama is already shaping the arch of his first term, using this crisis to set up his next objective, and shaping the conventional wisdom.
The problem I see though is that the Obama administration has not done a good job of conveying to the public the place this stimulus bill has within Obama’s agenda. The word is that in the next week or so, Tim Geithner will present “a ‘comprehensive’ plan that [he] hope[s] will command market confidence.” My hope is that this comprehensive plan will lay out a broad legislative agenda based on Obama’s campaign. Based on the campaign plans and signals sent during the transition, here’s what I see:
Step 1 (The First 100 Days)
The goal of this first period would be to begin to make both short-term and long-term investments into those sectors that will lead to long-term growth – which will stimulate the economy in the short-term. This is the spending stage. After this burst of legislating, Obama would be able to focus on tinkering with education programs and seeing what works, as well as addressing the simmering foreign policy issues which are constantly threatening to take over the agenda.
Step 2 (Post-Crisis)
This is the “cutting back” stage and consolidation stage. The goal of this second stage would be to put America on a solid financial footing again – to eliminate the unsustainable domestic policies that undermine our stability and power.
This is obviously an enormous agenda. And it’s far from clear that Obama can accomplish this. But if he does not lay out the vision – which I have pieced together from numerous statements – then it’s hard to see how he can accomplish it. Of course, Geithner was just confirmed last week – and Obama’s only been in office for two weeks – so he does have a bit more time to lay this out. But he doesn’t have long.