Month: December 2008

A reader writes:

Did you actually read the John Henke piece? The idea that there is anything close to equivalency between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to questioning the patriotism of the other party is laughable.

While obviously there are examples of the tactic on both sides, Republicans have turned the charge into an art form; leveling it against anyone with a different opinion. And to be fair, sometimes calling someone unpatriotic is warranted. You’ve been essentially doing so all day with your posts on torture. Anyone, right or left, who sanctions or supports torture, does so in direct opposition to everything America stands for, and is not what I’d call a patriot. The ones with direct involvement are war criminals, and the cheerleaders, while not culpable, are to my mind disgusting, and barely human.

Actually, I think Cheney and Rumsfeld may well have believed that torturing prisoners who have never been subject to minimal due process was an act of patriotism. Evil is usually done by people who believe they are doing good. What’s amazing is that Cheney’s view of American values includes waterboarding. But I have a feeling that if you polled Sarah Palin’s strongest supporters, they’d agree.

Neocon apparatchik and former McCain sleaze-merchant, Michael Goldfarb, explains how he understands that Obama is not actually a radical Islamist terrorist. But "we’ll find something." I bet they will.

Rumors are already flying that Muntander al-Zaidi is being physically abused at Camp Cropper (after Bush and Cheney, America is now instantly associated with the abuse of prisoners in the Middle East). At first, I assumed: naah. After Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper and Bagram and the black sites and the Senate report, the Bush administration isn’t still ordering the beating up and abuse of a prisoner, is it? Least of all a prisoner who has become a hero to much of the Middle East? They aren’t that evil and that stupid, are they? But the BBC reports:

The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody. Muntadar al-Zaidi has suffered a broken hand, broken ribs and internal bleeding, as well as an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC.

We should treat the charges with skepticism, as with all charges of torture, until we know from clear evidence that the act has taken place (we do know that it has been official policy for years now). The Maliki government, meanwhile, is accusing the guy of being a drinker and drug addict. If the abuse turns out to be true and if it happened at Camp Cropper at the hands of US personnel, then we are in the middle of a public relations and military crisis – one that manages to bring all the idiocy and dumb cruelty of the Bush-Cheney years together.

I was wondering how Bush could make his legacy even more toxic in the few weeks left to him. Some thought it impossible in the middle of two failed wars, $10 trillion in debt; $32 trillion in new entitlement liabilties, and a second Great Depression. But we are always misunderestimating him.

Yglesias counters Suroweicki:

The problem newspapers are having with online isn’t that the readers won’t pay, it’s that the advertisers won’t pay. The reduced costs per reader make up for the reduced revenue involved in giving the product away, but a physical newspaper generates far more in terms of ad revenue per reader than does a newspaper website. Probably once physical newspapers all disappear, ad rates for news websites will go up somewhat merely because ad buyers won’t have as many options.

But I think it’s plausible that even when everything shakes out online advertising revenue still won’t support the volume of staff that print advertising revenue once did. In that case we’re going to have to count on a mix of nonprofit media (ProPublica, Center for Independent Media, ThinkProgress, The American Prospect) and value-adding analysis by experts workers on an amateur basis (Brad DeLong, Greg Mankiw, Mark Kleiman) to make up the gap. That and, of course, increased productivity on the part of journalists — Google and email have made it much more efficient to research stories than it once was.

But in terms of revenue for for-profits, the action is all in the advertising — can people come up with ways to raise more money — not in charging readers.

Packer reads the Senate report and a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction:

The trouble is, the information in these reports doesn’t tell the whole story, and it doesn’t tell it as a complete story. The reports only give us fragments, which will be too easily overlooked or forgotten. The official sanction of torture and the woeful management of occupied Iraq are related pieces of a much larger epic: the first is marked by criminality, the second by bureaucratic ineptitude, but they are joined together as expressions and outcomes of the ideas and habits of mind of the highest officials in the Bush Administration.

Eventually the country will need, even if it won’t entirely want, the whole story to be told. The best way to tell it would be to reproduce the 9/11 Commission—to convene a single bipartisan panel, with the authority to look into the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of the war on terror, and give the panel full investigative power, even if its conclusions put some of the principals in legal jeopardy.

The next Administration and the next Congress will have to decide whether it’s worth the agony to look back. The agony will be worse, sooner or later, if we don’t.

ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl gets the following out of Cheney:

KARL: Did you authorize the tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

CHENEY: I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency, in effect, came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn’t do. And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it.

KARL: In hindsight, do you think any of those tactics that were used against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others went too far?

CHENEY: I don’t.

KARL: And on KSM, one of those tactics, of course, widely reported was waterboarding. And that seems to be a tactic we no longer use. Even that you think was appropriate?

CHENEY: I do.

Notice that the first statement is an absolute lie, proven by the Senate report.

The decision to torture individuals was made by Bush and Cheney before the CIA ever asked for legal cover for the torture they had been ordered to commit. The torture and abuse was planned before even the January 2002 presidential memo that authorized torture:

In December 2001, more than a month before the President signed his memorandum, the Department of Defense (DoD) General Counsel’s Office had already solicited information on detainee “exploitation” from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), an agency whose expertise was in training American personnel to withstand interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

But Cheney’s open, proud defense of a torture technique, waterboarding, that has always and everywhere been understood as torture means he stands vulnerable to war crime prosecutions. Until he is tried, convicted and jailed, the rule of law in this country stands fatally compromised.

And with any luck, a final one. Some readers asked me to comment on Patrick’s post last week. I don’t have much to add except that I totally respect and understand his view and always have. Neither Patrick nor I have baldly asserted something we cannot know for sure: that Trig Palin is Sarah Palin’s biological son. Our difference has merely been that he assumes that the Alaska governor is telling the truth and sees all the circumstantial evidence as very compelling backing for her maternity (as has almost everyone else in the MSM). For my part, I have always clearly conceded that that is perfectly possible, but that the bizarre chronology and facts in the public record raise enough questions that a simple piece of easily produced evidence should have been produced to end the issue at once. The facts of the case and the refusal to defuse it was enough to prevent me from assuming that she was the mother. I know that made and makes me look like a total douche in some people’s eyes, but I figure that journalists who are afraid of looking like douches for doing their job should pick another line of work.

That agnostic but skeptical stance was my position last August and it’s my position now. I have to say that Palin’s inability to tell the truth about much and her bizarre behavior during the campaign did not instill more confidence in me. And I remain puzzled as to why a medical record putting the whole thing to rest could not have been produced months ago. But now the threat of her running our lives has receded for a while, I feel much less need to find out things that are usually best left to the private realm. If she hadn’t been brought out of nowhere to become a potential president, I wouldn’t have given a fig.

And this is an opinionated blog, not a newspaper. I am not here to report facts; I’m here to engage in a discussion of them. I’ve aired every single opinion on the subject, including dissent from my one and only colleague, and aired every bit of evidence I could find on both sides. And I do not apologize for asking rude and persistent questions of a public official and for debating the factual basis for a political platform for someone aspiring to be the vice-president of the US. That’s my job. If I didn’t do it honestly, you would rightly lose your faith in me as a blogger commiited to non-bullshit on a daily basis. I wrestled with this so openly precisely because I wanted to retain honesty and integrity. I couldn’t blog as if I believed something I didn’t. At least not without breaking what I regard as my compact with you.

As I said months ago, Trig is a human being as precious as any other. That he was not aborted is a noble, moral, beautiful act. Who his biological mother is, at this point, is much less important than that he has a loving and caring home, and it seems as if he has. What remains important in the larger scheme of things – and why I continued to ask pesky, awkard questions – is a press that is not afraid and not deferent to elected officials and not more worried about its own reputation than about flushing out the truth. I failed to do that beyond a shadow of a doubt. But I tried. And if the truth does definitively emerge, I will maintain my commitment to bring it to you.

Marc:

Barack Obama has launched the era of the political economy, where, to an unprecedented degree, the White House will determine the course, structure and function of the American economy; where, if reports of $2 trillion worth of stimuli are to be believed, the size and scope of the federal government has the potential to nearly double over the course of eight years.

Italics mine. Without Bush paving the way for socialism, of course, and legitimizing it in every way, this nightmare would not be imminent. But it is, Blanche, it is.

A reader writes:

I’m 18 years old. My politics are still amorphous, shaped largely by my parents’ prejudices (both are liberals). I’m pro-life. I come from a prosperous background; I’m suspicious of big government and increasingly likely to support tax cuts. I’m becoming more viscerally opposed to the ‘nanny state’ as I study law; the rhetoric of many liberals on personal responsibility is becoming increasingly objectionable to me.

And yet, I can not, within the reasonable future, support the Republican Party? Why?

Torture.

I still haven’t come to grips with the idea that American soldiers, those who our culture is brought up to value and respect, could commit acts of torture, on the orders of an American administration. The internet is a libertarian place.

Young people are growing up more suspicious of government, more interested in increasing personal control over their lives, more prepared to challenge government bureaucracy. The rEVOLution (which I did not support) captured this perfectly. This could have been a Republican generation — brought under the big tent under a low-tax, socially moderate, fiscally conservative platform. An earlier John McCain may have been just the man to do this, as he was in 2000. But I cannot imagine how anyone else of my age can look at these reports, look at these pictures — and then vote for the GOP in the foreseeable future. It’s beyond my understanding.

Mine too. Until the GOP purges itself of these fascistic, sadistic elements, lovers of freedom should stay away.