The Dish

Ann Romney has given her own assessment of her husband’s speech on faith in America:

"People were saying, ‘It was like George Washington,’ ‘It was the Gettysburg Address.’"

Mine is a little different, in the Sunday Times today:

Romney, it should be remembered, is not the first Mormon to run for president. That distinction is awarded to the founder of Mormonism himself, Joseph Smith Jr, who ran in 1844 on an abolitionist platform and in defence of the rights of religious minorities. Mormon political history has long been strongly secularist in this respect – because Mormons were once a sect brutally persecuted by majority Christians.

But in that campaign, Smith coined a term that strangely resonates today. “There is not a nation or a dynasty now occupying the earth which acknowledges almighty God as their lawgiver,” Smith told the Neighbor newspaper in Nauvoo, Illinois. “I go emphatically, virtuously and humanely, for a theodemocracy, where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.”

Theodemocracy: the blending of government with a universally Christian populace in which faith is the prerequisite of public office. This is the vision of America that Romney is proposing. He has behind him the power brokers of the Protestant right, the theocons of the Catholic right, the Mormon church and the vested interests of a Republican party elite that, in the wake of George W Bush, wants to extend the theodemocratic principles of an antisecular movement.

Under the guise of defending freedom of conscience in the public sphere, Romney is actually attempting to limit it.

Don’t allow a priest to be in the same room as you with the door closed!

Yesterday, I expressed hope that Mike Huckabee might take this opportunity to abandon his previous callous and ignorant statements on HIV and homosexuality. He hasn’t. Astonishingly, he is even denying that he favored quarantining people with HIV, but he said clearly

"If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague."

I fail to grasp the distinction between "isolating the carriers of this plague" and quarantining. So he’s refusing to take responsibility for his previous statements, refuses even to regret what he said, and has also failed to take the opportunity to revise his view of gay people. I guess we need to understand that even for the compassionate Christianists, the hostility to gay people’s lives, relationships and dignity is deeply ingrained. There is no way for a leading Christianist to say anything supportive or inclusive of gay couples that will not kill him with the Republican base. The country and the civilized world may have moved in one direction, but the Republican party has been seized and is now owned by the faction that is bent on moving strongly in the other direction. Huckabee is not some kind of exception to this rule; he is the rule. And he advances the key policy blend begun by George W. Bush: nanny-statism, big government conservatism, fiscal profligacy, and theo-democracy. He is the logical consequence of Bushism, with a pleasing and disarming affect. That’s the underlying reason he is gaining such traction in the party Bush and Rove have remade.

A chilling discussion between former military interrogator Damien Corsetti and former FBI Special Agent and interrogator Jack Cloonan on the potential blowback from the epidemic of torture that spread across all theaters of war after president bush’s approval of it in 2002. From Steve Clemons’ tape after a screening of Alex Gibney’s powerful "Taxi To The Dark Side":

To me the most telling figure in the MSNBC poll is not just the tiny lead Clinton now has – a mere 3 percent – but the data analyzed by age. Among the over 50s, Clinton leads by 32 percent to 18 percent; among the under 50s, Obama leads by 41 to 26 percent. You see in this the old politics versus the new.

The news today that leading Democrats, including Jane Harman and Nancy Pelosi, were informed about the torture of military prisoners and allegedly didn’t just acquiesce but actually approved it is not something that particularly surprises. The descent into war crimes under this administration provoked very little public Democratic anger or resistance for the years in which it was used most promiscuously. The presidential campaign of John Kerry offered only token opposition. The subject never came up in a single presidential debate in 2004. And the way in which the torture issue has subsequently been raised by Democrats bespeaks opportunism as much as principled outrage and opposition. Pelosi’s response to the accusation is the weakest. Harman’s the strongest – she claims she sent a classified letter in opposition in February 2003; Bob Graham says he was not briefed on the matter and mercifully now says that there is no doubt that waterboarding is torture. Rockefeller hasn’t commented. At best, it seems to me, Democratic resistance to these war crimes was anodyne.

But this, of course, does not mean that the methods were or are defensible, legal or useful. Whatever else can be said about this debate, it is not inherently partisan.

Some of the strongest resisters have come from within the military and intelligence services, and a Republican, McCain has been the most dogged critic. Moral issues as profound as this one transcend party. This is not to say that there is no difference between the parties, with the GOP shamefully defending war crimes the United States once prosecuted as such. The Democrats, for the most part, have been their usual selves on this: still in a defensive crouch against any notion that they might be soft on terror, and implicitly adopting the fallacious logic that somehow opposing torture means being soft on terror. Au contraire. Torture has weakened the West’s war against barbarism by blurring the critical lines needed to win the long war, and by injecting into intelligence the falsehoods, exaggerations and lies that always come from the tortured.

With Obama, McCain, and Paul and (less assuredly) Clinton (because nothing she says can be trusted) and Huckabee (whose position seems to me moving against torture), we finally have clarity on a future ban. That’s what we have to focus on now – including the bill in the Congress banning torture for CIA officials. Then we will have to go back and investigate who authorized these war crimes and who knew about and acquiesced to them. That is an arduous process. But a necessary one, if America is to regain its moral standing and strategic bearings again.

Loved this ad with a parody voice-over.

A reader writes:

Now that I’m looking into this Huckabee/Dumond case, I’m astounded at the similarities to Bush’s mindset and actions – the lack of judgment, the undue influence, the lawlessness, the resulting disaster, then the lies, the lack of accountability, the coverup – this is not a man we need in the White House.

Murray Wass’ original reporting on the case from the Arkansas Times is a must-read. Money quote, citing Deborah Suttlar, former member of the parole board in question:

“For Governor Huckabee to say that he had no influence with the board is something that he knows to be untrue. He came before the board and made his views known that [Dumond] should have been paroled … “

Suttlar noted that just prior to Huckabee’s appearance before the board the board had voted 4-1 against Dumond’s parole. After Huckabee’s board appearance, her colleagues largely reversed themselves, voting 4-1 for Dumond’s release.

“Why did all the votes change?” Suttlar asked. The board members knew the governor’s position. And Huckabee knows what influence a governor has over a board. Who’s going to turn down a governor?”

Max Brantley, executive editor of the Arkansas Times, put it best:

"The whole deal about the Dumond case, and it can be overanalyzed, was that this was a bad guy with a proven record of sexual misconduct and violence. This is the last guy you want to set free…. And Huckabee formed the judgment to do this not after consulting anyone but after being sold a story and buying it. It’s kind of like Bush and weapons and mass destruction."

(Photo: Yana Paskova/Getty.)

Kevin Drum gets it exactly right. The torture of Zubaydah has several critical elements: direct involvement by the president, barbaric forms of torture, and the fact that this already mentally-ill man spewed countless threats that turned out to be meaningless. Nothing could better reveal the sadism, stupidity and illegality of Dick Cheney’s "Program." Some details worth remembering via Kevin follow. First from Spencer:

Risen charges that Tenet caved to Bush entirely on the torture of al-Qaeda detainees. After the 2002 capture of Abu Zubaydah, a bin Laden deputy, failed to yield much information due to his drowsiness from medical treatment, Bush allegedly told Tenet, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?" Not only did Tenet get the message — brutality while questioning an enemy prisoner was no problem — but Tenet also never sought explicit White House approval for permissible interrogation techniques, contributing to what Risen speculates is an effort by senior officials "to insulate Bush and give him deniability" on torture.

Then there is the critical role of George W. Bush in insisting on the torture of Zubaydah, primarily, according to Suskind via Gellman, to save his own face:

Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be….Abu Zubaydah also appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics…

Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?"

Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."

These tapes could have brought all this home to the American public and the world, revealing the president to be an active proponent of torture, even of a mentally ill man who provided nothing of any worth. They were and are critical to proving – in  way that could not be denied or buried – that we have a war ciminal in the Oval Office. That is surely the simplest and most obvious reason they were destroyed. And it’s the most plausible reason that on a matter in which he was very personally involved, a matter where he risked being exposed as a war criminal, the president "has no recollection" of being informed about the tapes’ destruction.

I’ve long argued that the simple facts of the detention and interrogation program leave no doubt in my mind that war crimes have occurred. I’ve also believed that at some point, the guilty men would be exposed and brought to justice. That may be about to happen. And it is the Congress’s and the Attorney Genera’s vital responsibility to see that justice is served, whomever it applies to.

The Google Trends way: Red is Hillary Clinton; blue is Ron Paul.