Politics and Pragmatism

Yesterday was a rough day for me*. My usual weekend off (Mondays and Tuesdays) was negated due to special events at the theatre and an extra maintenance call... so no days off. I was on my eighth of twelve straight days of work which can tend to leave some people tired and moody, so it was a major disappointment to me when I learned that President Obama had decided to reverse his decision and attempt to block the release of the latest detainee abuse photos in a Pentagon case, in which the Pentagon had sided with the ACLU and agreed to release the photos.

The shoot from the hip response would rightly be, "So much for transparency" and that's what I've been hearing from friends, colleagues and what little I've read on the blogosphere. But since I didn't have constant access to The Internets™ yesterday, I was able to formulate some of my own theories on why the President chose to take this action. I've read his statement but haven't heard others' speculation, so forgive me if I'm repeating what has already been said.

Here is President Obama's statement:

Now, let me also say a few words about an issue that I know you asked Robert Gibbs about quite a bit today, and that’s my decision to argue against the release of additional detainee photos.

Understand these photos are associated with closed investigations of the alleged abuse of detainees in our ongoing war effort. And I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib. But they do represent conduct that did not conform with the Army Manual; that’s precisely why they were investigated and, I might add, investigated long before I took office. And, where appropriate, sanctions have been applied.

In other words, this is not a situation in which the Pentagon has concealed or sought to justify inappropriate action. Rather, it has gone through the appropriate and regular processes. And the individuals who were involved have been identified, and appropriate actions have been taken.

It’s therefore my belief that the publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.

Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.

And, obviously, the thing that is most important in my mind is making sure that we are abiding by the Army Manual and that we are swiftly investigating any -- any instances in which individuals have not acted appropriately and that they are appropriately sanctioned. That’s my aim, and I do not believe that the release of these photos at this time would further that goal.

Now, let me be clear: I am concerned about how the release of these photos would be -- would impact on the safety of our troops. I have made it very clear to all who are within the chain of command, however, of the United States Armed Forces that the abuse of detainees in our custody is prohibited and will not be tolerated.

I have repeated that since I’ve been in office. Secretary Gates understands that. Admiral Mullen understands that. And that has been communicated across the chain of command.

Any abuse of detainees is unacceptable. It is against our values. It endangers our security. It will not be tolerated.

All right? Thank you very much, everybody.

Security

As much as I hate that he used the line, "the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger," because it echos what we've heard before from the previous administration, the fact remains that we cannot disprove that statement. It is his opinion, most likely an informed opinion especially after reviewing the photos, that they could be used as a further recruiting tool for extremists and cause inflammatory actions against our troops. I'm not certain about this theory and I'm not happy about it either. But it can't be ruled out. Most of us agree that our continued presence in the Middle East and our imprisonment of detainees without habeas corpus and our treatment of them under the Bush regime has been a recruitment tool for Al-Qaeda. Why not more photos of abuse?

Distractions

Nothing that the President does can be looked at in a vacuum. Every word he utters, every decision he makes has repercussions. Currently, there are congressional hearings on the use of torture techniques and their effectiveness, or lack of, going on. Just yesterday, FBI interrogator Ali Soufan was before a Senate hearing on the use of "harsh interrogation" techniques and how those techniques actually hindered intelligence gathering in his opinion. I think I'd rather watch the 24/7 news cable talking heads discuss that Senate hearing than get inundated with a slide show presentation of five or six released photos in a continuous loop every 15 minutes on MSNBC. Is this part of President Obama's thinking? That the release of these photos would only serve as yet another distraction rather than trying to get at the heart of the matter in terms of torture? I don't know, and neither does anyone else outside the walls of the West Wing.

Apathy

What's the first image that pops into your mind the second you hear "photos of Abu Ghraib"? I think of two particular photos. The hooded man standing on a crate with electrodes on his hands and naked pyramids. That's what it's been reduced to in my mind. So I ask myself what good would it do to release these new photos? You would think that the actions of Abu Ghraib would have been enough for anyone to protest in the streets with pitchforks and torches, but the "outrage" lasted a month, maybe two, and after Donald Rumsfeld attributed it to "a few bad apples," it has been forgotten by the general public. I have no reason to doubt the President when he says, "these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib." We know abuse happened. We know there are factions in the government trying to cover it up. Why do we need to see the photos? Not only would it serve as a distraction to "future investigations of detainee abuse" but would anyone really care?

Priorities

This is the theory I'm going with. Think about the position in which President Obama finds himself. He takes office in the worst recession (bordering on depression) since the Great Depression. We are fighting a war on two fronts. Job losses mount to the tune of 500,000 to 650,000 per month. The stock market declined 6,000 points in a year before his first day in office. Record home foreclosures are creating homelessness and making tent cities commonplace. The banking industry is tanking and he must take over a $700 billion bailout by the Bush administration. The US auto industry is tanking and he must take over a $17 billion bailout by the Bush administration. 48 million Americans have no health insurance.

To stop the bleeding, President Obama begins a Recovery plan to infuse $787 billion into the country to create jobs, including the largest middle class tax cut in US history, and needs all the support he can muster to reform the health insurance industry. Is this the best time to release these photos? It's very possible that they will be released by the courts anyway, so why should we expect President Obama to rock the boat while he's standing on the bow?

More and more details are coming out daily regarding the torture memos and Dick Cheney's deeper involvement than originally thought. Congressional hearings and investigations are coming to a head. I'm just a little too young to remember Watergate first hand, but I do know that investigative reporting and the hearings during Watergate took a long time to get the truth out. My prediction is that within 18 months, the current snowball of scandal will turn into an avalanche. There will be indictments, prosecutions and jail time for some of the big wigs that were involved in Torturegate, as well as the possibility of war crimes committed for starting a war on intentionally false pretenses. That all takes time.

I'm going to expect President Obama to prioritize and try and get something done for the near future. There will be enough independent investigation without Obama looking like he's out for partisan blood. The last thing we need is self sabotage by initializing investigations that will be misconstrued as partisan witch hunts which can derail his agenda by Day 114. I have to give him that time. I voted for change, but I'm realistic enough to know that change doesn't happen overnight... or over 114 nights.
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* My day concluded with the Mets losing an 8-7 game in 12 innings, the Senate voting against the Credit Card bill and my softball game being rained out this morning. *Sigh*

Outstripped by Reality

posted by Armadillo Joe

I have been struggling to compose a post about the oncoming implosion of the Rethugli-twit Party and the self-induced death spiral they just can't seem to pull out of, but the Specter defection yesterday seems to me to be that threatened implosion made extant. James Wolcott at Vanity Fair quotes from a very glum David Frum:

The Specter defection is too severe a catastrophe to qualify as a “wake-up call.” His defection is the thing we needed the wake-up call to warn us against

About which Wolcott opines:

The iron-girder he-men of the conservative blogosphere have greeted former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter's defection to the Democrats with whiskery hoots of "good riddance/get lost/don't let the door hit your withered buttocks on the way out" and similar pleasantries. Many of them appear defiantly resigned to the Republican Party becoming a regional bastion of true believers, the Branch Davidian compound of the Confederate Jesus. To those, however, who still share the same sky as those in the real world and think that the best escape route out of minority status and possible extinction is to win elections (crazy, I know), the Specter defection is a disaster.

But Lance Mannion is pretty sure that Specter switching labels is something of a collapse (caused by the inhabitants) of the last pole holding up the GOP's decaying tent:

Everything the Republicans and their paid propagandists in the Media have been doing and saying since November 5 has had one goal.

Holding the Party together.

It's always fun to remind them who won the last election, but they really don't need the reminding. They know the results. And they know what the results suggest about what's in store for them. They can read the polls. Barack Obama is wildly popular. Independents have abandoned them. The demographic trends are against them. If things continue this way in less than a generation it will be easier to find a person under forty who identifies as Zoroastrian or philatelist than one who identifies as Republican.

Under these circumstances, the sensible thing to do is fall back and re-group. Gather the most loyal and reliable and determined troops together and do everything you can to keep up their morale and ready to fight back when the time to fight back arrives.

The smart thing to do, then, would seem to rally the base, keep them happy and energized, and donating, and get them out there working for the next election.

The trouble with this for the Republicans is that their base is their problem.

The base is insane.

And Maha sez that such a spin out of control and off into Kukoo-Land is too long a trip from which to walk back:

the Republican Party is acting like an apocalyptic cult — a small number of true believers waiting for some Big Cataclysmic Event that’s going to change everything, to their advantage. For that reason, present reality doesn’t interest them, because present reality is just a temporary aberration (which it may be, but not in the way they think). Thus, movement conservatives brush off opinion polls that show their positions to be wildly unpopular. They don’t need to worry about election losses, shrinking party membership, an aging political base, or senior senators who jump ship. They don’t need to change with the times. They’ll be vindicated when the Mother Ship arrives.

Frankly, I say it couldn't happen to a finer bunch of assholes. They and their fellow travellers have spent the better part of fifty years (to say nothing of kicking it into high gear over the last ten or so) calling me and all my friends traitors and ni**er-lovers and slutty wimmins and faggoty perverts and terrorist-pal-around-ers and otherwise generally spewing eliminationist rhetoric directed at us, yet only thinly disguised as "satire" to avoid being arrested for incitement. They have been inviting this circular feeding frenzy for decades.

But we need to be cautious. The end of the GOP as an effective political party is not the end of the fight. Not hardly.

The Rethugli-puke Party does not circumscribe The Reich Wing or conservatism in toto or the Ruling Class or any other group of those self-identified classes of toxic political actors who are collectively and as individuals all a deep, mortal and existenstial threat to the free and just America that those tending-toward-blueishness among us revere. The GOP has merely been the political wing of that movement since all those dirty fucking hippies and promiscuous wimmin-folk and uppity negroes scared the bejebus out of Ma and Pa Goober back in the 1960's and they decided that war-mongering plutocratic corporate overlords were better political allies than anything to be found in the ranks of LBJ's ni**er-lovin' party. Ever since, the GOP has been acting as the political expression of a particularly nasty, fearful, racist, violent, authoritarian strain of American nativism. The Rethugli-goon Party has been their political wing just as Sinn Fein acts as the political organ of the IRA.

No, the deranged GOP clown car of liars, degenerates and reprobates, with their socially corrosive tax codes and hostility to the public sphere, with their racism, sexism, authoritarianism and bigotry, with their love of War and Jesus as the Answer for Everything and their brittle, tinny jingoism, with their haughty sanctimony and sadistic, mean-spirited glee at the sight or even the thought of others suffering in pursuit of their petty aims have all been begging to be blasted into oblivion for decades. Any chance we have now to chase these cockroaches, to pursue these scurrying, slithering hordes as they disguise themselves in women's clothing and shove onto the lifeboats or change into civilian clothes, burn their uniforms and try to blend into the general population ahead of the advancing army, any chance we have at all to chase them relentlessly, to shine a light on their true identities and expose them as liars and thieves, to ruin their chances of making a living anywhere but anonymously shoveling manure out of a barn in southern Patagonia, we must take and take without mercy. Because we didn't clear decks after W's grand-pappy tried to overthrow FDR and we didn't clear the decks after McCarthy and we didn't clear the decks after Watergate and we didn't clear the decks after Iran-Contra, because we failed to track down and destroy the bad actors back then we are at war in Iraq today, cheerlead the whole way by survivors and descendants of all those previous scandals.

The time to end this cycle is now.

Even as Specter's departure marks the likely historical end of the 20th Century Republican Party, the American political landscape left in its wake remains ravaged by the war they've waged, as de-forested as an Agent Orange'd jungle, as pock-marked and cratered as a World War One no-man's land, a smoldering remnant of one political party's scorched-earth march to hegemony, littered with political landmines and unexploded human ordnance, hiding and poised to maim and bedevil our peace-loving descendants for generations, no matter how many swords Obama inspires us convert into plowshares in the coming decades.

Mark Felt Dies at 95

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Fred Thompson - Another Leaker

When asked what he thought of Fred Thompson's criticism of his new movie, Michael Moore smiled and said, "Fred Thompson is one of my favorite television actors!"

Thompson was a vocal proponent of Scooter Libby's pardon and ran a defense fund for him. He thought that the perjury and obstruction of justice conviction of Libby was a ""shocking injustice . . . created and enabled by federal officials." It's no wonder that Thompson felt that way because he's been there before.

As the Boston Globe reports, back in July, 1973,"The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

So Fred Thompson sympathizes with Scooter Libby because he knows what it's like to be a leaker. Birds of a feather... Of course, Thompson did the ol' sidestep when asked about the matter this week, and responded via e-mail without addressing the specific charge of being a Nixon mole: "I'm glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it's taken them over thirty years."

Well we're reading now, Fred. I hope it makes you happy.

CLINTON DID IT TOO

On a side note, I understand the GOP wagons circled again and pulled out the reliable "Clinton did it too" excuse when it came to the commutation of Libby's sentence.

Let's get something straight: Bill Clinton issued 140 pardons and commutations on his last day in office. All of the people he pardoned had served part or all of their jail sentence. He never pardoned or commuted the sentence of anyone working in his administration during the middle of a term.

As for the pardon of Marc Rich, the international commodities trader who fled the US while being prosecuted on charges of tax evasion, let's not forget that even Rich's attorney, whom Clinton described as a "distinguished Republican lawyer", supported Rich's pardon and never wavered on his claim of innocence.

That distinguished Republican lawyer was Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

UPDATE:

Also read: Dan Froomkin's White House Watch

Ford's JFK Connection

Jesse at TVNewsLies.org gives us his take on Gerald Ford.

Jesse from "So Gerald Ford Is Dead. So What?": "For those of you who do not already know this, Gerald Ford is a special man in American history in that he took part in not one, but two cover ups related to the JFK assassination. First off, he was one of the authors of the fictional piece known as the Warren Report. Then he pardoned Richard Nixon so that the real reason for the Watergate break-in would not be revealed."

There is evidence that Gerald Ford altered the autopsy reports on JFK. Ford's explanation: "My changes had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory," he said. "My changes were only an attempt to be more precise." Unfortunately, his changes look like an attempt to make the "Magic Bullet Theory" more plausible. Read them for yourself.

For all you conspiracy "nuts", (and I have to admit, I'm slowly becoming one) this is something you have to see. If you read on and have the patience to watch the 90 minute video linked on Jesse's page regarding the ever-increasing evidence that has amassed over the last 40+ years, you probably won't have many doubts about the JFK assassination and cover up. Remember, this is just a theory, but a very viable one.

I personally never believed the JFK's assassination was the result of a lone gunman after I had the time to do some minor research. I do believe that Oswald was a patsy. If not, why are certain documents still classified? Who would be implicated if these documents were allowed to be seen? Hopefully, I'll still be alive when they finally release them.

Still, you have to see this video to understand the depths of what could have happened and how close-knit the people in power really are.

Here's the video. It took me two days to get through it. Sit back and concentrate.