Grownups debating politics

Digby on how the kewl kids are sharpening their claws on Hilary and Obama:

Maureen Dowd does a spectacular Queen Bee Kill today of both Clinton and Obama, basically calling her a sexless schlub and him a metrosexual cipher. With her usual original insight she notes that Clinton is a woman and Obama is black and then ends the piece with this darling little observation:

So there is a second question, perhaps one that will trump race and gender. It’s about whether he’s tough and she’s human.

Told yah. Democrats are a bunch of bitches and girly-men — the kewl kidz are sharpening their claws to do the GOP’s dirty work for them again.

Washington press insider makes snide, childish critiques of Democratic politicians; so what else is new? Well…

The thing about these hitpieces is not that a Hilary Clinton or a Barack Obama is cut down based on their policies, or what they’ve done in their political career, it’s all based on superficialities, on the way they dress or something stupid like that. Again, not a novel observation, but what I haven’t heard anywhere yet is that this makes it more difficult for them to be criticised from the left as well.

After all, the first impulse of a great many Democrats and leftists will be to defend Obama or Clinton against these sneers and so clearly this isn’t the moment to criticise them for e.g. their record on the War on Iraq. Worse, the more the debate is driven by these superficialities the less room there is to actually, you know, talk about the issues, something which suits the Democratic Party establishment fine.

These hitpieces then may be intended to cut down and make ridiculous prominent Democratic politicians like Hilary or Barack, but the first thing they do is help shutdown leftwing critiques of these politicians…

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Bush Admin Accuses American Civil Liberties Union Of Espionage

The White House’s continuing attempts to gag its critics are getting more and more Nixonesque. From the Washington Post:

U.S. Gets Subpoena to Force ACLU to Return Leaked Memo

By Dan Eggen, Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, December 14, 2006; Page A08

Federal prosecutors are demanding that the American Civil Liberties Union turn over all copies of a secret document it has obtained, in what is apparently the first time a criminal grand jury subpoena has been used in an attempt to seize leaked material, the ACLU and legal experts said yesterday.

Prosecutors obtained the subpoena Nov. 20, saying their demand was part of an investigation into an alleged violation of the Espionage Act of 1917.

The ACLU says that the 3 1/2 -page document contains no information that should be classified and that the memo is only “mildly embarrassing” to the government. Some legal scholars said the case bears similarities to events in the “Pentagon Papers” case more than three decades ago.

The subpoena issued in the Southern District of New York provides the latest example of the Justice Department’s aggressive use of the anti-spying law, a broadly worded and little-used statute that has become the bedrock in a series of leak-related investigations by the Bush administration.

In a motion filed in federal court, the ACLU called the subpoena an “unprecedented abuse” of the government’s grand-jury powers that violates the First Amendment and is aimed at suppressing information rather than investigating a crime.

The civil liberties group — which has been sharply critical of the Bush administration’s terrorism and detainee policies — said it is prohibited from disclosing the contents of the document. But it described the document as “nothing more than a policy, promulgated in December 2005, that has nothing to do with national defense.”

“No official secrets act has yet been enacted into law, and the grand jury’s subpoena power cannot be employed to create one,” the ACLU wrote in its brief, which was filed with U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff.

Officials at the Justice Department in Washington referred questions about the case to the office of U.S. Attorney Michael J. Garcia in New York. A spokeswoman there confirmed the subpoena but declined to comment further.

First Amendment advocates and experts in national security law said the subpoena represents a dramatic bid by the government to punish or intimidate media organizations and advocacy groups that attempt to publicize government policies and actions.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the subpoena “disturbing,” saying it would be easy for the government to attempt a similar move against a news outlet that had obtained a sensitive document as part of its investigative work.

“It shows me a pattern of aggressiveness to retrieve information that has escaped from the bubble,” Dalglish said. “It’s intimidation. It’s trying to use all sorts of different methods at their disposal to stop proliferation of leaks from the federal government and to prevent public oversight of the executive branch.”

[My emphasis]

More…

Read more: US Politics, Civil liberties, Espionage Act, Censorship

Vlad The Impaler

Lenin has a very nice piece in The Monthly Review that skewers Christopher Hitchens, and his slow, self-regard-fuelled alcoholic transformation from reasonable facsismile of a human being to sodden, prancing political jester of the bloodthirsty ‘bumpkin billionaires’.

In the process he nails Hitchens in a blatantly self-aggrandisng and stupid lie:

… a curious myth abounds, which appears to have been generated by Hitchens. The myth is that he was in a jeep with some Kurds in 1991 following the Gulf War, who allegedly evinced some warmth for George Bush Senior, and in the course of that exchange he changed his mind about the war on Iraq. Conflict with Saddam, from then on, was both inevitable and devoutly to be wished. 20 That is hardly thrilling political fiction, but fiction it is. As noted before, he in fact opposed the invasion of Iraq as late as 2002, and he had criticized Clinton for bombing Iraq in 1998’s Operation Desert Fox. 21 As Dennis Perrin, a friend of Hitchens, writes:

He may have been in a Kurdish jeep, but the [story about his conversion therein] is a complete lie, and Hitchens knows this. I spent time with him in the period he mentions, and he never stopped criticizing Bush’s “mad contest” with Saddam, much less opined that “co-existence” with Saddam was “no longer possible.” I have a tape of him debating Ken Adelman on C-SPAN in 1993 where he’s still critical of the Gulf War, and again no mention of wanting to overthrow Saddam. As late as 2002, when I asked him directly if he did indeed favor a US invasion, he waffled and said that W. would have to convince him on “about a zillion fronts” before he could sign on. 22

Read article

It never ceases to amaze me how many jourmalists just lie like this, though that Hitchens has done so comes as mo surprise whatsoever.

My only caveat with the article is practical and comes from someone from someone with lousy eyesight; it is that his footnoting makes the article a bugger of an online read, though of course this this may be due to submission guidelines. But layout that reads well on the page doesn’t always work online, and I’d’ve preferred keyword linking to the references rather than actual book-style footnotes. But that doesn’t detract from the actual quality of the article.

Sometimes it’s handy to be une femme d’un certain ?ge: I might be misremembering, but casting my mind back, haven’t a couple of fictional characters been based on Hitchens? Hitchens was a popular target of Private Eye‘s in his London journalistic days and IIRC their continuing character, the sodden correspondent Lunchtime O’Booze, is based on him: then there’s the louche, English, alcoholic journalist Peter Fallow in Wolfe’s Bonfire of The Vanities, leeching off his megarich New York socialite friends while acting the complete drunken asshole.

Well, he seems to have got that schtick down to a fine art to have got to his current position in NY party-literati circles. What else could explain Graydon Carter’s continued employment of Hitchens at Vanity Fair? (Unless, of course, they’re hoping to pick up a few readers because of the outrage. How very cheap of you, VF) But if the magazine has pretensions to being a home of serious political journalism how long do they really want a proven liar writing rubbish in their pages every month?

One might speculate about what levers Hitchens has available to him to ensure his continued imrobable success as a paid journalist, bobbing along from speaking enagemnt to public debate to tv studio.. He must have had companions in such a long career of debauchery and could write quite an illuminating memoir if he chose. Could that be the reason for Hitchen’s continued high public profile?

You might say so, I couldn’t possibly comment.

Read more: Media, Journalism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Christopher Hitchens

Stating The Utterly Bleeding Obvious Or Necessary Truths ?

I’m Spartacus, you’re Spartacus, we’re all bloody Spartacus, blah blah blah. Nonagenarian former actor Kirk Douglas, of all people, is attempting to rally world youth to sort out the mess his generation created:

Kirk Douglas calls on youth to stand up and be counted

Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Monday December 11, 2006
The Guardian

The cleft chin may be familiar to some. But others may have difficulty placing the ageing Hollywood star.

“You may know me,” he writes in an open letter published last Saturday. “If you don’t … Google me. I was a movie star and I’m Michael Douglas’s dad, Catherine Zeta-Jones’s father-in-law, and the grandparents of their two children. Today I celebrate my 90th birthday.”

But Kirk Douglas has loftier things on his mind than summoning up the wind to blow out 90 candles. The man who led the slaves to revolt as Spartacus, the man who embodied the suffering of Van Gogh’s art in Lust For Life is turning his attention to the fate of the planet.

“Let’s face it,” he writes to “America’s young people”, “THE WORLD IS IN A MESS and you are inheriting it.

“Generation Y, you are on the cusp. You are the group facing many problems: abject poverty, global warming, genocide, Aids, and suicide bombers to name a few. These problems exist, and the world is silent. We have done very little to solve these problems. Now, we leave it to you. You have to fix it because the situation is intolerable.”

[..]

Cheers for pointing that out Grandad, we’d never have noticed if you hadn’t said.

I had similar feelings at first on reading recent Digby and Hilzoy posts. Shorter Digby: “America has a class system that’s wrecking the country.” Wow, I thought, who knew? So that’s what all those ads and movies and tv shows are about. Shorter Hilzoy: “The methods used to produce chocolate, gold, diamonds and many other commodities produce human misery and ecological disaster.” Do they really? Well, fancy. Oh, OK, that’s why all those Africans are running away from that misery as fast as they can and making new lives in Europe…

Now I was quite peeved. None of these issues are new or unknown or hidden – anyone outside the US with half a brain and a smidgen of conscience who’s followed current events knows these things, even if not in detail. They’ve been out in the open for a long time in the rest of the world, but Americans are acting as though it’s something newly-dicovered! What do you think all the European and S. American leftists have been telling you all this time? Argh, why are you all so stupid?

I was getting a good head of outraged steam up at this point.

But then I thought, am I just being horribly snotty here? It’s that ‘outside the US’ that makes all the difference in perception. To so many US readers who are just switching on to the liberating idea of online dissenting and blogs the idea that by eating a candy bar they are supporting slavery, for example, must be deeply shocking new information which must challenge their view of themselves and their nation’s way of living in some pretty basic ways.

Similarly the truth about their government’s complicity in the torture and murder of thousands in Chile is shocking the US public following Augusto Pinochet‘s death. The information about how the coup was engineered by Kissinger and other neocons and how Pinochet’s murderous regime was supported by the US is something which has, again, been common knowledge for a long time elsewhere, even in the most remote of places. For example the woman doctor who ran the hospice in Devon where my mother died was raped and tortured by Pinochet’s thugs while working in Chile in the seventies. As a result the US’ role in Chile had massive coverage locally.

But at a national and international level coverage of even the most egregious excesses of the Pinochet regime was constantly downplayed, excused and finessed by the US and UK government/media complex particularly so in the US. American Journalists who didn’t sing the right tune were even disappeared themselves, so it’s not surprising that this is all coming as a bit of a shock to many in Leftpondia.

There are many more such shocks to come too, as the citizenry realises the facts are out there, if you only care to look – take Guatemala, Afghanistan, The Marianas, Diego Garcia or East Timor to name just a few- it’s all there for the knowing. There is a whole other mass of people apart from the liberal left blogerati who can only now, because of the wonders of the internet, find out what has been kept from them for so long. Viewed from this standpoint Digby’s and Hilzoy’s posts are objective, trustworthy and essential guides for people to know where to find what’s been hidden in plain sight, rather than just restatements of received wisdom.

So from my initial irritation and snark I’ve changed my position. Rather than being such a horribly European elitist leftist snot I really should be jubilant to find that after all the chipping away at the tunnel face that others have been chipping away on the other side and we’re about to meet in the middle.

In that light even Kirk Douglas’ slightly bizarre call to arms is actually quite laudable – rarely does someone of his generation actually say ‘Sorry, we were wrong’ and make an attempt, however lame, to put it right.

As my son constantly tells me, it’s all good.

Read more: US media, US politics, Blogs, Kirk Douglas, Augusto Pinochet, Chile, Guatemala, Afghanistan, The Marianas, Diego Garcia, East Timor

Barney, It’s A Lot Of Pressure I know, But We’re Counting On You, Boy

Who’s going to tell Bush he’s mad? It’s going to come down to either Laura, if she can speak through the Xanax-induced haze, or failing that, Barney. Do you see anyone else who’s going to do it?

Does anyone at all have the guts to just come out and say to his face “Mr. President, you are insane”?

Daddy’s attempted last-ditch intervention has failed. The ’80s Criminal Cabal Wise Men’ve given their recommendations, publicly and in no uncertain terms (no frills, but politely, as befits a sitting head of state, even one that’s gone insane) and still Bush says he needn’t take any notice.

He’s the deciderer, see, and no-one can do the deciderin’ like he can even if the decisions are for shit:

White House advisers say Bush won’t react in detail to the ISG report for several weeks, while he assesses it and awaits various internal government reports on the situation from his own advisers. Bush tells aides he doesn’t want to “outsource” his role as commander in chief. Some Bush allies say this is a way to buy some time as the president tries to decide how to deal with rising pressure to alter his strategy in Iraq and hopes the critical media focus on the Iraq war will soften.

He wants to buy time? What time? There is no bloody time. The streets of Baghdad are littered with the corpses of the tortured and murdered. 1000 people are leaving Iraq every single day:

More than 1,000 Iraqis a day are being displaced by the sectarian violence that began on Feb. 22 with the bombing of the Shiite Askariya shrine in Samarra, according to a report released this week by the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, a U.N.-associated group.

This increasing movement of Iraqi families, caused by the lack of security and by the growth of armed local militias and criminal gangs, is adding to the already chaotic governmental situation in Baghdad, according to U.N., U.S. and non-governmental reports released over the past weeks.

When families who fled from Baghdad to Qadisiyah, a fairly safe district south of the capital, were questioned by the IOM about why they left their homes, “almost all said it was due to direct threats to their lives . . . letters, anonymous calls, graffiti on their homes or in their neighborhoods.” All were Shiites.

The internal refugees are creating a growing humanitarian crisis that, the IOM report says, will primarily affect single women, children, and the sick and elderly as winter approaches. Security fears appear well-founded: A report Wednesday by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq said the number of Iraqi civilians killed in October reached 3,709, a monthly high.

Many residents, especially professionals, are fleeing the country in larger numbers. The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees said earlier this month that up to 2,000 Iraqis a day are going to Syria and an additional 1,000 a day to Jordan. Overall, the High Commissioner estimates that since the war began in March 2003, 1.6 million Iraqis have been displaced internally and up to 1.8 million are living outside the country.

For every minute Bush tries to deny the inevitable, for every moment the people around Bush pander to his madness, the more they stand frozen like rabbits in the headlights as sycophantic impotence personified, more people die for no good reason, civilians and troops alike.

The cowardly Democrats don’t have the guts to do a damned thing either (except for Cynthia McKinney, whose parting shot to Congress was an impeachment bill). And, in the middle of a constitutional crisis the likes of which the US has never seen, what is the Democrat political hopeful doing? Denouncing the regime and calling for immediate change?

Hell, no. Hillary Marie Antoinette bloody Clinton, unbelievably, is out campaigning against video game violence with Turncoat Joe bloody Leiberman. Fantastic.

The best the opposition’s come up with so far is some pussyfooting, ‘we have no plans to impeach’ triangulating obfuscation, while the world is crying out, desperate for someone, somebody – anybody, even a dog – to step up and tell it straight to the boy Chimperor’s face.

Blair won’t do it: he’s had his chance and bottled it too many times to count. Despite his continued sycophancy and the fact that British forces are filling the gaps in his own ranks Bush is turning on his former allies. Even if Blair were to get finally a grip, pick up the phone tomorrow mrning to call Washington and finally expiate the sin of Iraq by giving it to Bush straight, I doubt Bush’d even take his call.

The president is as isolated and alone as any president has ever been, so now is the perfect time to strike and put an end to this tragic farce of a presidency. Somebody get this psycho out of the Oval Office before he kills all of us, please.

If somebody does, that somebody, human or canine, will win the undying gratitude of the whole planet.

But what’s this? It looks like Barney may actually be too busy to save the world:

WASHINGTON Dec 8, 2006 (AP)? Just in time for the holidays, America’s best-known Scottish terrier is back with a new video on the White House Web site.

It’s “Barney’s Holiday Extravaganza,” a production that follows Barney around the White House as he plans a holiday show, runs into trouble developing a plot and then wrangles over his budget with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Budget Director Rob Portman.

The supporting cast includes President Bush, his wife, Laura, entertainer Dolly Parton, three-time Super Bowl champion and “Dancing with the Stars” winner Emmitt Smith, political strategist Karl Rove, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, Press Secretary Tony Snow and others.

Miss Beazley, the Bushes’ other Scottish terrier, and the first cat, Willie, also make appearances.

We really, really are fucked, aren’t we?

Read more: Bush, Insanity, Impeachment, Barney the dog