Month: June 2007

Joe Gandelman on Cheney and the GOP.

Orange County, California, 5.45 am.

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The Democrats grow some balls:

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) said he plans to propose next week, as part of a spending bill for executive operations, a measure to place a hold on funds for Cheney’s office and official home until he clarifies to which branch of the government he belongs. Emanuel acknowledged that the proposal is just a stunt, but he said that if Cheney is not part of the executive branch, he should not receive its funds. "As we say in Chicago, follow the money," he said.

Cheney is acting as if he is outside the constitution and above the law. He has been acting that way for quite a while now. When a public official abuses the public trust and refuses any oversight, it’s time for the other branches of government to do what they can to rein him in. Especially when the man has revealed himself to be a blithering incompetent.

I don’t think this is a trivial matter, because it seems to me that Cheney is currently an extremely dangerous man. He has nothing to lose in the next eighteen months. He cannot get any less popular. He thinks the 2004 election is the only legitimacy he needs. He doesn’t believe the Congress should have any role in foreign policy. And he also believes that Iran must not develop nuclear power and that no one apart from him can stop them. The drum beat coming from his office about Iran’s direct involvement in the Iraq war is obviously a preamble to claiming that the 2003 war authorization gives him and Bush the right to bomb Iran without going back to the Congress for approval. He’s a man ready and willing to pull a Cambodia. If the Congress and the press don’t start pushing back now, it may come sooner rather than later.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

The latest leak from the tragic farce known as Gitmo:

Throughout the process, Abraham discovered that officers attempting to comply with CSRT rules to present exculpatory information were frequently obstructed. When he attempted to gather information on a detainee from an intelligence agency aside from a package prepared from him, he was told that no additional information would be forthcoming. An attorney for one intelligence agency refused to certify that no exculpatory information was being withheld. On other occasions, intelligence agencies would overload the intelligence-illiterate Recorders and Case Writers with files, leaving them with "no context for determining whether the information was relevant or probative."

During one CSRT, Abraham found the evidence suggesting one detainee was an enemy combatant "lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence."

Objectively credible evidence? This is the Bush administration, buddy. They don’t believe in that.

A reader writes:

Your post "Scarred For Life" is just so painful. But when you write,

"[‘My body my choice’] is only for women, apparently,"

I think you’re missing the point. This is not a men’s issue – it’s a children’s issue. The desires, aka the rights and humanity, of children are terribly violated in this culture. (And lots of others, sadly.) Circumcision is just one part of it. What we glibly call "separation anxiety," as parents pry their distraught 2-year-olds off them and leave them at day care, is the western world’s equivalent of forcing women into burqas, gender apartheid, and second-class citizenship. Young children who do not want to be separated from their parents should not be forced to do it on a regular basis. They are not developmentally able to understand why this is happening to them, so their objections to it should be taken seriously. Young children unwillingly separated from their parents show obvious, massive distress. Adults trivialize this distress ("She’ll be fine in half an hour") in the exact same way that men have trivialized the distress of women, slave-owners have trivialized the distress and agony of slaves, and so on.

Women, and feminists in particular, should recognize the unhappiness of children as a feminist issue. But that threatens the gains of women the same way that feminism threatened the status of men.

Women fear that giving their children what they want will lead to their own re-entrapment in the kitchen (which would indeed stink). But the alternative is to look at a defenseless being and say "What you want doesn’t matter. My needs come before yours."

Circumcision is the ultimate expression of this. Nobody who saw infants as *human beings* could possibly countenance the pain they endure for an unnecessary procedure. No one would perform such a painful act on an unwilling or unable-to-consent adult just for reasons of habit or custom or religion.

I think we need another civil rights revolution in this country, predicated on the radical idea that babies and young children are people. (And to the extent that mothers might need to make big changes in their priorities to accommodate that revolution, there should be social support for them so they’re not penalized in employment or social status.)

(Photo: Spencer Flatt/Getty.)

"A wrong attitude towards nature implies somewhere a wrong attitude towards God, and the comnsequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time, we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanised, commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this earth," – T. S. Eliot, "The Idea of a Christian Society," 1939.

A reader writes:

My question is this: If everyone is admitting that a Hillary Clinton’s potential nomination to the Democrat Presidential ticket is only fuel for the religious right, then what do you think Senator Clinton’s view is on that? Why is it that this either doesn’t concern her, or she thinks she can overcome it?

If I were in the same position, I would realize that winning the nomination, only to further create a dichotomy between the American politic, would be disastrous for the country. So, why doesn’t Senator Clinton? I can’t get over that. Does she not know? And if she does, what’s she telling herself to motivate her to continue? Is she really that good?

I think if she were elected, we would be dealing with the same Shakespearean themes we’re dealing with now in the Bush administration. She might be looking to simply one up her husband’s performance. I consider her nomination to be like pouring salt on a wound.

So far as I can tell, there is nothing Senator Clinton wouldn’t sacrifice in the cause of her own ambition: her own self-respect as a wife; what once passed for her principles; and group of Americans (like the gays) who get in her way; and any rival who challenges her. She is now and always has been about one thing only: her own power and ego and how to satiate it. If she has to empower the Christianist right in pursuit of her goal, she will. And if she loses, she will blame everyone but herself. Remember the fathomless narcissism of her husband? She fed it as a way to feed her own.

Two women sit at a picnic table and shelter beneath an umbrella during a rain shower at Royal Ascot on June 23, 2007 in Ascot, England (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

The leaked White House meeting to discuss whether to close it down was canceled, and the status quo continues. I’m sadly skeptical that Condi has any chance to balance out the vice-president on the question of illegal detention, rendition and torture. But I found this an interesting nugget:

Ms. Perino, the White House spokeswoman, noted today that the United States plans to release about 80 of the detainees soon. "America does not have any intention of being the world’s jailer," she said.

Now recall the position of the McCarthy-Levin-Malkin-Crittenden right. It is that everyone in there is the "worst of the worst". They’re all terrorists, according to Limbaugh and Romney. Romney’s position is that he wants to "double Gitmo." (Why, by the way, has the press not followed up by asking Mitt what on earth he means by that literally nonsensical piece of pandering?) So, according to Malkin, the president is about to release 80 murderous, guilty Jihadist terrorists into the world. Let’s see if Malkin even utters a squeak.