Month: November 2009

Marcy Wheeler knocks John Yoo's op-ed:

John Yoo pretends he knows the universe of information on KSM. His argument suggests that the only evidence came from illegal or highly sensitive means.

What the trial will likely show, instead, is that there was a great deal of information already available before they started torturing KSM.

It’ll show that the KSM expert in FBI–who we know was never allowed to get close to the Yoo-sanctioned torture sessions–knew much if not all of the stuff that KSM was blabbing away after being waterboarded the 183rd time.

That’s the real risk for Yoo: not the illegal actions that the trial will expose. But how much evidence there was independent of Yoo’s little torture shop.

One begins to wonder if this trial will not in the end be a smoking gun in proving the war crimes of Bush and Cheney in a court of law. It would be classic Obama to play the game this long and this well.

4.57 pm. Now it's a love-fest between two celebrities with talk-shows.

4.53 pm. "You don't need a title to make a difference." Here again she uses the term "title" as opposed to "office." She really does see politics as an extension of being a Beauty Queen, subject to nice p.r. events, interviews that are restricted to the "light-hearted, working mother" puffery that Oprah is enabling, and cover images on magazines. The idea that a politician holding public office is required to address tough questions about policy and record and the truth of various factual statements does not seem to have occurred to her. I find this disturbing in a politician. It means a contempt for the Fourth Estate and for full public accountability.

4.52 pm. She's clearly hoping to run for president in 2012.

4.50 pm. Still no credible reason why she suddenly quit as governor. Until … she's worried about opposition research. Hmmm. And can we verify if Obama sent any researchers? I haven't heard of it. Another possible lie to be checked out.

4.48 pm. A question: how many vice-presidential or presidential male candidates had a just-born infant child when running? Secondly: how would Todd be able to help if he is physically absent for months at a time?

4.47 pm. We need to fact-check this notion that losing vice-presidential candidates get to speak on election night.

4.44 pm. Palin says that she and Todd are physically apart for months at a time.

4.40 pm. Small fact-check. Palin's statement that she anticipated only one interview with Couric is belied by this advance announcement on the web that says in advance that there were two scheduled in advance.

4.39 pm. Who is Auntie Katie?

4.37 pm. Having called him "Ricky Hollywood," and an aspiring porn star, she says he is loved. She also says she doesn't like "drama" which is like Oprah saying she doesn't like food or my saying I don't like beards.

4.35 pm. She describes "so many inconsistencies" in Levi's story. There are no inconsistencies in Levi's stories. There are only massive differences between his account of reality and Palin's. The real inconsistencies are within Palin's own confused and constantly changing stories and lies.

4.34 pm. Who is preventing Levi from seeing his son? Another useful factual question Palin will refuse to answer and the MSM will not ask. Palin is also doubling down on the notion that Levi never stayed with Bristol.

4.30 pm. A reader writes:

Why would Sarah Palin assume that the Couric interview was going to be "lighthearted, working mother" stuff, when she was just picked to be the VP candidate and no one knew anything about her?

Because she doesn't believe in accountability. She wants to be a celebrity, not a politician. And if she could get to be a politician using the prerogatives of a celebrity – and a propaganda channel like Fox News – she would be happy. That's what's at stake here – beneath this farce.

4.25 pm. Here's the key: she loves the crowds but she hates the idea that she is accountable for anything. She wants acclamation and believes that journalism should reflect that deference.

4.24 pm. "I love books." Levi says he never saw her crack open a book.

4.23 pm. A good question: did the campaign agree to multiple interviews with Couric before the interview started? Palin says she thought there was only one interview. Can we verify this, Mr Schmidt? Is this yet another bald-faced lie?

4.21 pm. Oprah gives the game away: "This was in the book so I assume it was fair game." Oprah clearly agreed in advance only to ask questions from the book's own narrative.This is not journalism; it's celebrity puffery. Of course, it's Oprah.

4.18 pm. So far, most of Oprah's questions can be summarized as: "Isn't it weird how great you are?" In the last segment, Palin was actually forced to be more critical of her campaign than Oprah is. One wonders: is Oprah this desperate to boost her ratings? Is anyone on TV actually interested in finding out the truth?

4.17 pm. "I'm sorry I apologized."

4.16 pm. Oprah is simply reiterating the arguments of the book as if they were true, even though all this is disputed. There is no journalism being committed here. As I suspected.

4.15 pm. It was such an ordeal picking out clothes to wear. If only she were a man.

4.14 pm. "I don't like to shop."

4.12 pm. She's now accusing Steve Schmidt of "diet manipulation". Steve should take out a cannon and fire back – with the facts at his disposal. This should not go unanswered.

4.06 pm. Oprah forced Palin to admit that Obama defended her. But how can Palin argue that her kids were off-limits when Trig was brought out onto the stage and made the subject of a campaign speech? I guess we know by now that logic and consistency are not Palin's strong points.

4.05 pm. She said that the written statement about the Bristol pregnancy was put out by someone else. But as I recall, the statement went out from the Palins, not the McCain campaign. I'll double-check that. Then she says that she re-wrote it but that the re-write did not appear.

4.04 pm "The one skeleton that was in my closet": a D grade in college. Oprah says: "Really?" I said the same thing simultaneously.

4.02 pm Palin says she said yes immediately on the phone. Before she said she had said yes to McCain himself. She has also said that she asked her children for permission first before she said yes. Just trying to keep all the various stories straight here.

4.01 pm It's all about Oprah. Palin says that at the time she thought it was entirely Winfrey's prerogative. Wasn't upset in the slightest. Barely aware of the issue.

Ambers explains.

Mike Crowley reviews the many gaffes of the secretary of state:

The hallmark of Hillary’s tenure as America’s top diplomat has hardly been robotic precision. It has instead been a curious propensity for public statements that require amendment, clarification, and implicit retraction–as illustrated, most recently, by comments she made about Israeli settlement policy that reportedly baffled even her own aides. Perhaps because she is a smart and independent-minded woman, Hillary has taken a self-consciously blunt-speaking approach to her job and shows no sign of apologizing for it. “She’s candid,” says State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. “And, if you look at the response she’s received around the world, I think most people appreciate it.” But it’s not a style in keeping with a White House that generally demands complete message control. For a president who hates drama, Barack Obama has installed a secretary of state who keeps creating it.

Her unwitting (I assume) gift to Netanyahu is part of my column this week. Sucking up to Israelis is a habit that some may find hard to kick.

John Hinderaker of Powerline and Dan Riehl  are annoyed that Obama side-stepped a question about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings while on his trip to Japan. Conor Friedersdorf confronts them:

How dismaying that a loud subset of the right so consistently demands that President Obama privilege their childish desire for self-righteous rhetoric above the actual demands of statesmanship. What good would it possibly do to tell the Japanese, “Yes, I think it was right to incinerate your cities”? It wouldn’t do any good. On the other side of the ledger, it would antagonize an allied nation, put its leadership in a difficult spot that might impede its ability to help the United States.

President Obama is also endeavoring to slow nuclear proliferation, so it would hardly due to have headlines in Iranian newspapers pointing out that even as he demands that other nations give up nuclear weapons, he is saying that their only actual use in history was justified.

Asked whether the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, President Obama correctly calculated that answering either yes or no would harm American interests, so he gave neither answer, the wisest course available to him, even if it didn’t satisfy the jingoistic vanity of certain critics.

Fallows explains:

Thirty years from now, the most important aspect of Barack Obama's interaction with China will be whether the two countries, together, can do anything about environmental and climate issues. If they can, in 2039 we'll look back on this as something like the Silent Spring/Clean Air Act moment in American history, which began a change toward broad environmental improvement. If they can't….

He's "Ricky Hollywood" now? Well that's a new one. If you thought the Sarah-Levi show was winding down any time soon, we're told the Oprah interview will dispel any such doubts:

 "I don't think a national television show is the place to discuss some of things he'd been doing and saying… By the way, I don't know if we call him Levi — I hear he goes by the name Ricky Hollywood now, so, if that's the case, we don't want to mess up this gig he's got going…. Kind of this aspiring, aspiring porn — the things that he's doing. It's kind of heartbreaking."

Them's fighting words. C'mon, Levi: fight back. Tell us what you know. All of it.

By the way, it's pointless to resist. I'll be live-blogging Oprah at 4 pm. Come back then.

Max Blumenthal explores the record of Lynn Vincent, Palin's ghost-writer:

Vincent’s association with Robert Stacy McCain … offers the clearest window into her far-right politics. Indeed, the only political book that Vincent has written in the first-person was done in collaboration with McCain. Published in 2005, Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Democratic Party was a compendium of misdeeds of and accusations against Democratic Party activists and leaders whipped up into an indictment of the party as irredeemably corrupt. Yet many of the authors’ charges proved false.

Vincent and McCain, for example, stated the Democrats were “perilously close” to committing treason for their opposition to the war on Iraq and insisted that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program in the days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They also claimed, based on alleged information supposedly culled by Congressman Richard Nixon on the House Un-American Affairs Committee, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been a “puppet” of Joseph Stalin. And finally they predicted that the Democrats would “surely lose” the 2006 congressional midterms if they made Republican corruption a centerpiece of their campaign. Vincent and McCain might have come to regret this if the book had made any noticeable impact. Instead, Donkey Cons was generally ignored by both the targets of the authors’ invective and conservatives, too.

Andrew Sprung builds off Jonah Lehrer's thoughts on the biology of smell:

I think that we describe sights more precisely than smells and tastes not because smell and taste are more emotionally laden but because they're less precise senses than sight. (Maybe because of some processing in that trip to the thalamus that smells don't make?) You can say of a tree's appearance that it's thirty feet tall, has a spear-shaped leaf crown, reddish bark in fishlike scales, and needle foliage; all you can say about the experience of eating a grapefruit is that it tastes like a more sour orange and smells fragrant and pungent. All language is ultimately relative, comparative — but our range of comparison is much richer with visual data.