Bill’s Temper

By Patrick
The San Francisco Chronicle on Bill’s tirade at a super delegate meeting:

…as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media’s unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. It ended with him asking delegates to imagine what the reaction would be if Obama was trailing by just 1 percent and people were telling him to drop out.

"It was very, very intense," said one attendee. "Not at all like the Bill of earlier campaigns."

I’m reminded why Bill Clinton has been kept on the sidelines since South Carolina.

Voting From Prison

By Patrick

A reader makes some good points:

You write, "I also think former prisoners should be given voting rights."  I think that current prisoners should not lose their voting rights.  Prisoners surely have the same interests in issues such as war and peace that the rest of us have, and have other interests as well, in addition to having something done to prevent rapes in prison.  And, in the self-interest of the rest of us, allowing prisoners to vote would encourage them take an interest in outside affairs and to remain integrated, to some extent, in society.  I don’t know why it seems to be taken for granted that prisoners should lose the right to vote on top of their other punishment.

The Green Light

By Patrick
A key passage from Pillippe Sands’s excellent Vanity Fair article on how torture under Bush began and spread:

Gonzales and Haynes laid out their case with considerable care. The only flaw was that every element of the argument contained untruths. The real story, pieced together from many hours of interviews with most of the people involved in the decisions about interrogation, goes something like this: The Geneva decision was not a case of following the logic of the law but rather was designed to give effect to a prior decision to take the gloves off and allow coercive interrogation; it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall. The new interrogation techniques did not arise spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of intense pressure and input from Rumsfeld’s office. The Yoo-Bybee Memo was not simply some theoretical document, an academic exercise in blue-sky hypothesizing, but rather played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantánamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.

The fingerprints of the most senior lawyers in the administration were all over the design and implementation of the abusive interrogation policies. Addington, Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes, and Yoo became, in effect, a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse.

Abortion And The GOP

By Patrick

Pivoting off Andrew Bacevich’s endorsement of Obama, Ross started a heated discussion last week about abortion and the GOP. Since then, Larison, Dan McCarthy, and Jim Antle have responded. Excerpts from two of the most recent posts:

Larison:

For decades the GOP kept luring pro-life voters to the polls by saying, “We just need the majority in Congress and control of the White House, and then you’ll see things change.”  So these people faithfully turned out every time for candidates, some of them quite mediocre and undeserving, and finally gave the GOP the unified government it had said it needed, and in return they received nothing more than they had under Reagan at the beginning.  It was also obviously during this time that the GOP was wasting all of its time and energy launching and defending the war in Iraq, while scarcely being able to expend an ounce of political capital on anything important to pro-life conservatives.

Ross:

Obviously, if you agree with McCarthy that the intervention in Iraq represents a graver evil than the post-Roe abortion regime – and, more importantly, that the continuation of that intervention only compounds the initial evil of the war – the case for voting against McCain, whether for Obama or for a third party candidate, is more or less airtight. The weaker, but to my mind more plausible case that would justify a pro-lifer casting a protest vote against McCain on foreign policy grounds is the one that Antle and Larison put forward – namely, that there’s little reason to think that the Senator from Arizona will put an anti-Roe Justice on the Court, so a vote for McCain isn’t really a vote against abortion anyway. I think they are mistaken on this point, just as I think that Larison is mistaken when he suggests that Roberts and Alito would vote to uphold Roe, and I suspect that pro-lifers who choose this election cycle to give up on the GOP would end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Questions For Gore

By Patrick

Jon Rynn’s offers his thoughts on Gore’s new $300 million environmental campaign:

…wouldn’t it be better to spend that money on building grassroots organizations pushing for climate change legislation instead of spending it mostly, I presume, on advertising? If $100 million was spent each year on grassroots organizations in 30 major cities, that would work out to $3 million per each major metropolitan area, enough for a decent-sized effort to organize citizens to push their legislators.

Or how about setting up some think tanks and media outlets, as the conservative movement did? Or is raising money for ads much easier than raising money for grassroots organizing? Color me confused.

The Torture Memos

By Patrick

Greenwald provides context: 

John Yoo’s Memorandum, as intended, directly led to — caused — a whole series of war crimes at both Guantanamo and in Iraq. The reason such a relatively low-level DOJ official was able to issue such influential and extraordinary opinions was because he was working directly with, and at the behest of, the two most important legal officials in the administration: George Bush’s White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and Dick Cheney’s counsel (and current Chief of Staff) David Addington. Together, they deliberately created and authorized a regime of torture and other brutal interrogation methods that are, by all measures, very serious war crimes.[…]

While Yoo’s specific Torture Memos were ultimately rescinded by subsequent DOJ officials — primarily Jack Goldsmith — the underlying theories of omnipotent executive power remain largely in place. The administration continues to embrace precisely these same theories to assert that it has the power to violate a whole array of laws — from our nation’s spying and surveillance statutes to countless Congressional oversight requirements — and to detain even U.S. citizens, detained on American soil, as "enemy combatants." So for all of the dramatic outrage that this Yoo memo will generate for a day or so, the general framework on which it rests, despite being weakened by the Supreme Court in Hamdan, is the one under which we continue to live, without much protest or objection.