August 3, 2000 - August 3, 2008
Jon Perr, writing at Crooks and Liars, recalls George W. Bush’s promise at the Republican National Convention eight years to bring “honor and dignity” back to the office of president of the United States:
Eight years ago today, George W. Bush uttered the now broken promise that has come to define his failed presidency. Accepting his party’s nomination, Governor Bush promised to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House. But as events continue to show, a more accurate - and ironic - mantra for the lawless Bush White House would be “no controlling legal authority.”
At the time it was delivered, Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia was an arrogant, deceitful broadside against the Clinton/Gore years. But the very words Bush used to tar Al Gore with the blight of the Lewinsky scandal may now constitute the epitaph for the Bush presidency:
“So when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not only uphold the laws of our land, I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected, so help me God.”
That hateful address (video excerpts here), of course, was filled with exactly the kind of lies and taunts - the smallness - that came to define George W. Bush.
Read the rest here.
Too Funny
A week ago, four Iowans tried to make a citizens’ arrest of Karl Rove. But that’s not the best part:
Last Friday, police in Des Moines, Iowa arrested four people who attempted to make a citizens’ arrest of former top White House aide Karl Rove, who was in town to speak at a GOP fundraiser. A retired minister and three members of the Des Moines Catholic Workers community were cited for trespassing. However, according to a press release, the judge presiding over the case praised their efforts:
[Mona] Shaw was the first called before Polk County Fifth Judicial District Associate Judge William Price.
After entering her plea, the judge asked Shaw, “Mamn, what were you doing at the Wakonda Country Club?”
“I was attempting to make a citizen’s arrest of Karl Rove, your honor,” Shaw answered.
“Well,” the judge looked up and said, “it’s about time.”
Disabled Veterans’ Group Tells Cheney To Shove It
A disabled veterans’ group has cancelled a visit from Dick Cheney because His Royal Highness demanded security arrangements the vets felt were “Draconian and unreasonable“:
Vice President Cheney’s invitation to address wounded combat veterans next month has been yanked because the group felt his security demands were Draconian and unreasonable.
The veep had planned to speak to the Disabled American Veterans at 8:30 a.m. at its August convention in Las Vegas.
His staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney’s arrival and couldn’t leave until he’d finished talking, officials confirmed.
“Word got back to us … that this would be a prerequisite,” said the veterans executive director, David Gorman, who noted the meeting hall doesn’t have any rest rooms. “We told them it just wasn’t acceptable.”
When Cheney spoke to the group in 2004, his handlers imposed the same stringent security lockdown, upsetting members, officials said.
Many of the vets are elderly and left pieces of themselves on foreign battlefields since World War II, and others were crippled by recent service in Iraq and Afghanistan. For health reasons, many can’t be stuck in a room for hours.
“It was a huge imposition on our delegates,” added David Autry, another Disabled American Veterans official.
Autry said vets would’ve had to get up “at Oh-dark-30 and try to get breakfast and showered and get their prosthetics on.”
Once inside, they “could not leave the meeting room, and the bathrooms are outside,” he said.
Cheney’s office acknowledged the security requests, but insisted he is sensitive to combat veterans’ needs.
How To Do Illegal Torture and Get Away With It
That’s the way Spencer Ackerman sums up the gist of the August 2002 Torture Memo — one of three memos that the ACLU received today pursuant to an FOIA request:
The Articles That Got Away
I admit, I missed some:
The great thing about Tom Friedman is that he never gives us a chance to forget what an idiot he is.
Colonialism off: Pres. Bush will not get his Status of Forces Agreement before he leaves office.
Jeralyn’s post about the Omar Khadr interrogation video includes links to transcripts of previous trial proceedings and TalkLeft’s prior coverage of the case.
Matthew Yglesias’s post, “War for War’s Sake,” is one of his last as an Atlantic contributor (he’s moving to the Center for American Progress).
Ron Beasley writes about a radioactive river.
We already know that John McCain called his wife a “cunt.” Now we find out he is a fan of rape jokes as well.
Did you know that the only way to get around Arizona is by small private plane?
Over 100 University of Chicago professors have signed a letter to the university president objecting to the university’s new $200 million investment.
The Bush administration is trying to push through a new rule requiring recipients of federal health aid funding to certify that opposition to abortion or to contraception will not be a bar to employment. (To bypass compulsory free registration, go to www.bugmenot.com.)
Maliki wants the Green Zone back, too.
4th Circuit Court Rules President Can Indefinitely Detain U.S. Citizens
The New York Times reports the decision of a federal appeals court on the government’s right to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens:
“Standards in Our Society Have Changed Over the Years”
Here’s an investigative series from the Sacramento Bee that might rate a Pulitzer nomination. The Bee spent a year researching the civilian and military records of U.S. service members, “focusing on those who entered the services since the Iraq war began and those linked to in-service problems.”
Torture and Warrantless Surveillance Are the Same Issue
Via Glenn, the Washington Post has a write-up on Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on America’s Ideals. Here is what Mayer reveals in that book, which is due out this week:
“Constraint is Intolerable”
Andrew Bacevich, reviewing Jane Mayer’s new book The Dark Side:
That fear should trump concern for due process and indeed justice qualifies as a recurring phenomenon in American history. In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like déjà vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else’s civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.
Although Mayer does not dwell on this historical context, her account suggests implicitly that the present period differs in at least one crucial respect. Whereas the earlier departures from the rule of law represented momentary if egregious lapses in democratic practice, the abuses orchestrated from within the Bush administration suggest that democracy itself is fast becoming something of a sham. From Mayer, we learn that in George W. Bush’s Washington, the decisions that matter are made in secret by a handful of presidential appointees committed to the proposition that nothing should inhibit the exercise of executive power. The Congress, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the “interagency process” — all of these constitute impediments that threaten to constrain the president. In a national security crisis, constraint is intolerable. Much the same applies to the media and, by extension, to the American people: The public’s right to know extends no further than whatever the White House wishes to make known.
h/t Laura Rozen
FISA and Journalists
Chris Hedges — one of my favorite writers — has an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about the chilling effect the new FISA law will have on journalists and their sources:
Lawbreaking Is Now the Law
The Senate earlier this afternoon passed the so-called “compromise” FISA bill, 69-28. Obama voted yes; Hillary Clinton voted no. Obama and Clinton also voted yes and no, respectively, on the vote to invoke cloture (which ended debate on the legislation and allowed the Senate to vote on the bill itself). Three separate amendments concerning the telecom immunity provision failed. The first, and strongest, amendment, would have stripped immunity from the bill. The second one would have delayed immunity to allow the Supreme Court to determine whether the NSA spy program is constitutional. The third (and weakest) amendment called for the immunity provision to take effect only upon completion of an audit of the NSA program by the Inspector General.
Obama voted for all three amendments (as did Clinton), but Obama’s yes votes were merely for show. They became meaningless the moment he voted for cloture, and then joined Senate Republicans in approving the underlying legislation.
Glenn Greenwald has two massive posts on the shameful proceedings (the second is linked from the first). There really is no need to go elsewhere, because his pieces have all the details, all the authoritative commentary, and all the links to additional information that you might need.
It is minimally comforting to know that my senator, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, voted for all the amendments, and against the final bill. One source of anger and outrage that I am spared from having to feel.
I also want to say here that Glenn deserves all of our thanks and appreciation for his unending, consistent, and truly fierce efforts to keep this issue front and center, not to mention the work he has done to prevent this disastrous legislation from passing. He, and the folks at Firedoglake — in particular, Jane Hamsher and Christy Hardin Smith — have labored tirelessly to inform and advocate on FISA and warrantless surveillance. The fight to hold the betrayers of the Constitution accountable continues; for more on that, you can start here.
Believe in Jesus, Or Die
John McCain, the Bush Administration, and Iraq
Interesting developments going on over the past few days vis à vis plans and agreements for Iraq’s future. On Monday, Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, announced that he wanted to work out a timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops:
If I Write About It, I’ll Feel Better
I’m starting to notice a trend among far right bloggers. Instead of insisting that particular interrogation techniques like waterboarding are not torture, and that what the rest of the world calls torture is not torture at all but simply “aggressive interrogation,” bloggers on the right are starting to acknowledge — sometimes tacitly, sometimes outright — that torture is torture.
Christopher Hitchens Finds Out That Waterboarding Is Torture
We could have told him that, but he had to find out for himself:
Late last year, the writer, polemicist and fierce proponent of the US-led invasion of Iraq Christopher Hitchens attempted, in a piece for the online magazine Slate, to draw a distinction between what he called techniques of “extreme interrogation” and “outright torture”.
From this, his foes inferred that since it was Hitchens’ belief that America did not stoop to the latter, the practice of waterboarding - known to be perpetrated by US forces against certain “high-value clients” in Iraq and elsewhere - must fall under the former heading.
Enraged by what they saw as an exercise in elegant but offensive sophistry, some of the writer’s critics suggested that Hitchens give waterboarding (which may sound like some kind of fun aquatic pastime, but is probably best summarised as enforced partial drowning) a whirl, just to see what it was like. Did the experience feel like torture?
Read’ems
If anyone missed the NY Times scoop on the Bush Administration’s failures concerning the hunt for bin Laden and our Pakistan policy, it’s a must read. To summarize, between Bush’s over-reliance on former Pakistani President Musharraf to remove al-Qa’ida from his country’s soil, shifting too many resources to the Iraq war, and squabbling between the CIA Kabul and Islamabad field offices along with the Pentagon, al-Qa’ida has been allowed to shift its bases from Afghanistan to Pakistan and return to its pre-Sept. 11 strength. My favorite part of the article is when it discusses how the CIA team whose objective was to find bin Laden was booted out of the Langley headquarters building to, instead, reside on the lawn at Langley:
The Bush Legacy
The Bush legacy goes much deeper than the disastrous, ill-conceived, and abominably managed invasion and occupation of Iraq. Andrew Bacevich explores the war’s ideological underpinnings in a masterful essay published in today’s Boston Globe: