Month: September 2006

By chance I bumped into Senator John Warner last night at the fifth anniversary party for the Chris Matthews Show. I was able to go up and shake him warmly by the hand and thank him from the depth of my heart for protecting this country’s honor. He replied quite simply: "It’s just the right thing for the country." The sight of so many Republican senators and one former secretary of state finally standing up against the brutality and dishonor of this president’s military detention policies is a sign of great hope. It turns out there is an opposition in this country – it’s called what’s left of the sane wing of the GOP. Slowly, real conservatives are speaking out loud what they have long said in private. The apparatchiks of the pro-torture blogosphere can vent, but it is hard to demonize the new opposition as "leftist" or "hysterical." Warner? McCain? Graham? Powell? These men who have served their country are somehow less reliable on matters of war than a man who never went to the war of his own generation and has bungled the two critical wars on his own watch? Please. These men are less serious about confronting terror than Dick Cheney, whose own record of commentary in Iraq would be dismissed as unhinged and absurd if he were a lowly blogger? Please. This should have happened long, long ago – before the explosion in spending, before the conflation of religious dogma with conservative politics, before the reckless indifference toward the immensely challenging task of occupying a foreign country.

But this is not over. There are rumors that if the president and Rove cannot use the torture issue to browbeat Democrats, they will use it to wage war on those few principled conservatives left in their own party. The president may veto a war-crimes bill that actually keeps war crimes illegal. He may still use the issue as a rallying cry for his base, as a way to help turnout in November. He will argue that only he has the cojones to waterboard a terrorist, and that therefore only he can keep America safe. Running on the president’s prerogative to torture? Why not? There are no ethical boundaries that this president recognizes in political warfare, just as there are no ethical boundaries he will not cross in actual warfare. Here’s the campaign theme:

"I just think John McCain is wrong on this. If we capture bin Laden tomorrow and we have to hold his head under water to find out when the next attack is going to happen, we ought to be able to do it."

This from Pete King, a man who appeased Irish terrorism for much of his political career. I’ve learned one thing about this administration these past few years: they are capable of pulling any lever, using any tactic, to keep the power they have so arrogantly abused. This is not over. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Haynes, Cambone, Rove: they’re warming up.

(Photo: Daniel Ochodeolza/AP.)

"The United States has seen political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The Constitution itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow for “deliberate sense” and checks and balances. President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favor of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. (No wonder Bush supporter Fred Barnes has praised him as a radical.) At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau," РJeffrey Hart, one of the true intellectual architects of American conservatism in the modern era, calling this president what he is: a dangerous, reckless, ideological incompetent.

PBS asked us both the same questions about the political impact of blogs. You can see our contrasting answers here.

I saw this on the main site of my corporate overlords and it made me both immensely sad and yet also hopeful. It’s of a wedding in Iraq by AP photographer, David Guttenfelder. It says more than I can.

The White House’s last gambit to legalize war crimes was to force the military lawyers to sign a letter disowning their previous opposition to the Bush administration military tribunal and Geneva-breach proposal. The kind of political pressure being applied to the professional military by this administration is breath-taking and shameless. These people are beyond belief. Lindsey Graham is rightly furious. Every tactic this Bush-Cheney crew has deployed to retain the right to torture detainees reveals a president as ruthless and scruple-free as he is incompetent. It’s a toxic brew. Here’s a critical interchange on the issue from Tony Snow’s presser today. The JAG’s letter can be read here.

(Hat tip: Josh.)

A large number of American liberals and left-wingers have signed an American version of the Euston Manifesto, dedicated to opposing Islamism, the violence and terrorism it has fomented, and the intolerance and illiberalism at its core. You can read the full text here. Money quote:

We are signers or supporters in the United States of the Euston Manifesto and its reassertion of liberal values. Our views range from those of centrists and independents to liberals of varying hues on to the democratic left. We include supporters of the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 as well as people who opposed this war from the beginning. However, we all welcome and are heartened by the decision of the writers of the Euston Manifesto in Britain to reassert and reinvigorate liberal values in the present context. Now we confront the issue of how to respond to radical Islamism. Some of us view this ideology and its political results as the third major form of totalitarian ideology of the last century, after fascism and Nazism, on the one hand, and Communism, on the other. Others regard it as having a history in the Arab and Islamic world that eludes the label of totalitarianism. We all agree however that it fosters dictatorship, terror, anti-Semitism and sexism of a most retrograde kind. We reject its subordination of politics to the dictates of religious fundamentalists as well as its contempt for the role of individual autonomy and rationality in politics, a rejection not seen on this scale in world politics since the 1940s. We understand that the United States must continue to take the lead with our allies in confronting this danger.

Count them: Republicans John McCain, John Warner, Lindsey Graham and Susan Collins joined with the Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee to vote the Senate bill, retaining Geneva protections, to the full Senate floor. The committee vote was 15 – 9. That’s what I’m hearing. Here’s the latest news story. More later – because I haven’t had a chance to read the small print. But the bottom line is: Rove’s gambit may be backfiring – and for the Senate to rebuff the president even as he lobbies them personally is a stunning rebuff, and a victory for American decency and honor. Now Karl Rove will have to win a Republican re-election by campaigning against at least four Republican senators. Stay tuned.

Zurich, Switzerland, 11 am.