Kids and Values

October 2nd, 2006

Kids are the theme today — first we looked at our home grown predators, while the week’s brought us a new rash of school shootings, and today a truly tragic story about a wingnut who took over a one-room schoolhouse in Amish country and shot all the little girls. Hard stuff; we love our kids. They ARE our family values.

The Bush administration is wobbling all over the place now, accused of being ineffective … I beg to differ; they’ve been remarkably effective in tearing this nation to shreds, following their own personal plan for privatizing, theocratizing, gutting services and protections and rerouting funds. So it’s not their ability at question — it’s their “values.” And that strikes me funny, sorta — since values has been the whole nut to crack, these last years. The last piece here by Krugman addresses the values issue … clearly, the us/them is morphing; it’s not so much Red v. Blue, today, as “who we are now” v. “who [we thought] we used to be.”

So it falls to the Left to point out that the radical Right’s values and the values the rest of us appreciate are growingly dissimilar … the voters will have to decide which is which. The Right is imploding with regularity now — Woodward inadvertently gave us some 9/11 information in his newest offering and folks are connecting those dots. He’ll be on CNN’s Larry King Live tonight … he usually drops some tidbits, so that’s a Don’t Miss.

And the Bushies never have a good defense, ya know? They haven’t read the memo, the article, the analysis … or they simply don’t remember. Condi doesn’t remember today — I’ll bet George Tenent does!

A good many citizens of this country are parents — they wouldn’t accept that kind of lame excuse from a kid coming home late, why do they take it as gospel from the government? Remember that old saw your Dad or Mom laid on you — “As long as you’re living under my roof, you’ll obey the rules of this house!”

Dub and Rummy and Uncle Dick and Condi are living in OUR house, dearhearts! Running out the clock with adolescent fantasies and non-sense dreams of grandeur. It’s time to look at our values again, reach over to grab hands with the Republicans who believe that rule of law still means something — and kick the renegade kids out to fend for themselves. I’m not big on “tough love” … love that’s conditional ain’t worth a pfffft! But these brats are burning the house down! And there should be enough grown up’s out there by now to do the job.

Jude

Condi Rice, 9/11 and Another Nest of Lies
William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 02 October 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100206X.shtml

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may have committed perjury in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission in May of 2004. At a minimum, her testimony was a convenient mishmash of half-truths and omissions which served to paint the White House as innocent bystanders as the attacks of 9/11 unfolded. Certainly, her testimony omitted the fact that the two most senior intelligence officials in the nation delivered a stern warning regarding an impending terror attack two full months before 9/11.

Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post carried a story titled “Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice.” The story described a desperate attempt by CIA chief George Tenet and CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer Black to draw Rice’s attention to the looming threat of an al-Qaeda strike against the United States. Tenet and Black insisted on a meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001. This meeting was first reported by Bob Woodward in his new book, “State of Denial.”

“Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts,” read the Post story, “and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined ‘Bin Laden Threats Are Real.’ Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice.

He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself … Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment - covert, military, whatever - to thwart bin Laden.”

The meeting, according to Tenet and Black, went nowhere. “Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn’t want to swat at flies,” the Post story reported. “Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.”

“Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated,” continued the Post story. “Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks.

Black later said, ‘The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.’”

The Post story concluded with a remarkable Editor’s Note: “How much effort the Bush administration made in going after Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, became an issue last week after former president Bill Clinton accused President Bush’s ‘neocons’ and other Republicans of ignoring bin Laden until the attacks. Rice responded in an interview that ‘what we did in the eight months was at least as aggressive as what the Clinton administration did in the preceding years.’”

This comment suggests the entire Post story was inspired by former President Clinton’s remarkable denunciation of the Bush administration’s efforts to thwart bin Laden in a recent Fox News interview. The seriousness of this meeting, however, goes far beyond political sniping and gamesmanship.

Peter Rundlet served as counsel to the 9/11 Commission, and has accused the White House of hiding the meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice from the commission. Rundlet practiced at the influential law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and was formerly associate counsel to the president and a White House Fellow, serving in the Office of Chief of Staff to the President, before joining the commission.

Writing for the online news magazine Think Progress, Rundlet stated, “Many, many questions need to be asked and answered about this revelation, questions that the 9/11 Commission would have asked, had the commission been told about this significant meeting. Suspiciously, the commissioners and the staff investigating the administration’s actions prior to 9/11 were never informed of the meeting. As Commissioner Jamie Gorelick pointed out, ‘We didn’t know about the meeting itself. I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it.’”

This is a remarkable revelation in and of itself. The head of CIA and the head of CIA’s counterterrorism branch delivered a warning in the strongest possible terms to Ms. Rice two months before the attack, yet this meeting was not revealed to the 9/11 Commission. It may well have remained a historical non-event had Woodward not written about it.

Which brings us to Ms. Rice’s sworn testimony in May 2004 before the commission.

At one point in this hearing, Commission Vice-Chair Lee Hamilton directly asked Rice about the so-called intelligence failures leading up to 9/11: “At the end of the day, of course, we were unable to protect our people. And you suggest in your statement - and I want you to elaborate on this, if you want to - that in hindsight it would have been - better information about the threats would have been the single - the single most important thing for us to have done, from your point of view, prior to 9/11, would have been better intelligence, better information about the threats. Is that right? Are there other things that you think stand out?”

Rice responded, “Well, Mr. Chairman, I took an oath of office on the day that I took this job to protect and defend. And like most government officials, I take it very seriously. And so, as you might imagine, I’ve asked myself a thousand times what more we could have done. I know that, had we thought that there was an attack coming in Washington or New York, we would have moved heaven and earth to try and stop it. And I know that there was no single thing that might have prevented that attack.”

Not only did Rice fail to mention the dramatic warnings given to her by Tenet and Black, she goes on to flatly state that neither she nor the administration had a clue that an attack was coming. Further, she claims that “no single thing could have prevented that attack.”

“The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks,” read the Post report on Sunday, “but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda.”

Combined with the August 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing delivered to Bush, which explicitly stated that bin Laden intended to attack the United States, the revelation of this meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice indicates that the Bush White House should have and could have made a far greater effort at thwarting the 9/11 attacks.

Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission on the matter may rise to the level of perjury. At a minimum, it exposes yet another nest of lies delivered by a member of this administration.

“A mixture of shock, anger, and sadness overcame me,” wrote Peter Rundlet in his Think Progress article, “when I read about revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book about a special surprise visit that George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black made to Condi Rice, also on July 10, 2001. If true, it is shocking that the administration failed to heed such an overwhelming alert from the two officials in the best position to know.”

Indeed. ++

Rice: No Memory of CIA Warning of Attack
Rice says she cannot recall CIA warning of coming al-Qaida attack in the U.S.
ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer
Oct. 2, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/e7cdy

SHANNON, Ireland (AP) — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she cannot recall then-CIA chief George Tenet warning her of an impending al-Qaida attack in the United States, as a new book claims he did two months before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“What I am quite certain of is that I would remember if I was told, as this account apparently says, that there was about to be an attack in the United States, and the idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible,” Rice said.

Rice was President Bush’s national security adviser in 2001, when Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial” outlines a July 10 meeting among Rice, Tenet and the CIA’s top counterterror officer.

“I don’t know that this meeting took place, but what I really don’t know, what I’m quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond,” Rice said.

Speaking to reporters en route to Saudi Arabia and other stops in the Middle East, Rice said she met with Tenet daily at that point, and has no memory of the wake-up call from Tenet described in the book.

“It kind of doesn’t ring true that you have to shock me into something I was very involved in,” Rice said.

There was near constant discussion of possible attacks overseas, and high alarm, Rice said.

The meeting between Tenet, Rice and Cofer Black of the CIA was not mentioned in the reports from several investigations of the Sept. 11 attacks, but Woodward wrote that it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the “starkest warning they had given the White House” on al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his network.

Tenet asked for the meeting after receiving a disturbing briefing from Black, according to the book.

But though Tenet and Black warned Rice in the starkest terms of the prospects for attack, she brushed them off, Woodward reiterated Monday. He told NBC’s “Today” show that Black told him the two men were so emphatic, it amounted to “holding a gun to her head” and doing everything except pulling the trigger.

Black reportedly laid out secret intercepts and other data “showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaida would soon attack the United States.” Tenet was so worried that he called Rice from his car and asked to see her right away, the book said.

“Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice,” Woodward wrote of the session. “She was polite, but they felt the brush-off.”

Rice referred to the session as “the supposed meeting” and noted that it is not part of the independent Sept. 11 Commission’s report.

“I remember that George was very worried and he expressed that,” Rice told reporters. “We were all very worried because the threat reporting was quite intense. The problem was that it was also quite nebulous.”

Rice, who was promoted to secretary of state in Bush’s second term, also said she never argued that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should be fired. The book’s suggestion that Rumsfeld would not take her calls is “ludicrous,” Rice said.

Rumsfeld and Rice are not close, and he is often considered her rival in administration decision making. Woodward wrote that then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card twice tried to get Bush to sack Rumsfeld and replace him with Bush family counselor James A. Baker III, and that both then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and Rice backed the plan.

Woodward interviewed Rice for his new book.

Rice’s latest Middle East trip is focused on strengthening support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and other moderate Arab leaders after a series of setbacks for democratic and moderate forces in the region.

Her trip includes visits to allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt and a meeting of other friendly nations that ring the Persian Gulf, before visits to Israel and the West Bank.

Rice is looking for new ways to improve Abbas’ standing in his standoff with Hamas radicals trounced Abbas’ secular Fatah Party in Palestinian elections in January. Abbas was elected separately and retains his position, but he has been hamstrung by the divided government and a cutoff of Western aid.

The Bush administration and Israel are increasingly convinced Hamas will crumble, and look to Abbas to capitalize. Rice may ask other countries to do more to bolster Abbas’ security forces, and she hopes to breathe life into stalled agreements and talks that would help Palestinians move more freely across their borders with Israel.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions will also be part of Rice’s discussions, as an unofficial deadline passes this week for Iran to heed a U.N. Security Council demand to shelve disputed nuclear activities.

Rice said Sunday she may close her trip Friday with a meeting of world powers in Europe to look at what to do next. The United States wants to press for U.N. Security Council sanctions, but it is not clear she has full support from other permanent members of the council. ++

Tenet Warned Congress in February 2001 About al-Qaeda
Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Monday 02 October 2006
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100206Y.shtml

In February 2001, seven months before 9/11, George Tenet, then the director of the CIA, testified before Congress and told lawmakers that the single greatest threat to the United States was Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, according to a little known copy of Tenet’s Congressional testimony.

During his report to Congress, Tenet eerily described a scenario that seven months later would become a grim reality.

“Terrorists are also becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated in order to defeat counter-terrorism measures. For example, as we have increased security around government and military facilities, terrorists are seeking out “softer” targets that provide opportunities for mass casualties,” Tenet said, according to a transcript of his testimony.

“Employing increasingly advanced devices and using strategies such as simultaneous attacks, the number of people killed … Usama bin Ladin and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat. Since 1998, Bin Ladin has declared all U.S. citizens legitimate targets of attack. As shown by the bombing of our embassies in Africa in 1998 and his Millennium plots last year, he is capable of planning multiple attacks with little or no warning.”

But instead of heeding the CIA’s warnings about al-Qaeda, the Bush administration brushed it off, and instead turned its attention toward Iraq, claiming Saddam Hussein was stockpiling a cache of weapons of mass destruction that threatened the security of the United States and Iraq’s neighbors in the Middle East, and urged Tenet’s CIA to find the evidence to support the administration’s agenda.

With Monday’s publication of Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial,” questions about what the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 threats and when they knew it have once again resurfaced.

In February 2001, while Tenet was building a case against bin Laden and al-Qaeda, Colin Powell, then secretary of state, was trying to steer the White House away from taking action against Iraq, which administration officials immediately began to focus on just one month after Bush was sworn into office.

Behind the scenes that month, hardliners in the Bush administration were privately discussing ways to remove Saddam Hussein from power, virtually ignoring credible intelligence about the pending threat posed by al-Qaeda.

Privately, Powell disagreed with the administration’s stance on Iraq. In interviews, Powell said that the US had successfully “contained” Iraq in the years since the first Gulf War and that, because of economic sanctions placed on the country, Iraq was unable to obtain WMD.

“We have been able to keep weapons from going into Iraq,” Powell said during a February 11, 2001, interview with “Face the Nation.” “We have been able to keep the sanctions in place to the extent that items that might support weapons of mass destruction development have had some controls on them … it’s been quite a success for ten years …”

Moreover, during a meeting with Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, in February 2001 - the same month Tenet testified before Congress about bin Laden and al-Qaeda - Powell said the UN, the US and its allies “have succeeded in containing Saddam Hussein and his ambitions.”

Saddam’s “forces are about one-third their original size. They don’t really possess the capability to attack their neighbors the way they did ten years ago,” Powell said during the meeting with Fischer, a transcript of which can be found here.

“Containment has been a successful policy, and I think we should make sure that we continue it until such time as Saddam Hussein comes into compliance with the agreements he made at the end of the (Gulf) war.”

Powell, who a year later would publicly support the administration’s case for war, added that Iraq is “not threatening America.”

Indeed, a day after Powell’s “Face the Nation” interview, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with Fox News that “Iraq is probably not a nuclear threat at the present time,” according to a copy of the transcript of Rumsfeld’s February 12, 2001, interview with the cable news channel.

By mid-February 2001, the sudden shift in policy toward Iraq was apparent. Bush administration officials went from describing Iraq as being a threat only to its own people to now posing an imminent threat to the world. By focusing heavily on regime change in Iraq, the White House ignored documented warnings about the al-Qaeda terrorist organization from career intelligence officers.

Even after 9/11, the administration still could not shake off its obsession with launching a war against Iraq. Immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, CIA intelligence reports on Iraq radically changed from previous months, which said Iraq posed no immediate threat to the US, to suddenly showing that Iraq was stockpiling chemical and biological weapons and was in hot pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration, linking Iraq to 9/11, seized upon the reports to build public support for the war and used the information to eventually justify a pre-emptive strike against the country in March 2003.

Intelligence reports released by the CIA in 2001 and 2002 and more than 100 interviews with top officials in the Bush administration, including Powell, Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, given to various Senate and Congressional committees and media outlets prior to 9/11 show that the US had never believed Saddam Hussein to be an imminent threat other than to his own people. Moreover, the CIA reported in February 2001 that Iraq was “probably” pursuing chemical and biological weapons programs, but that it had no direct evidence that Iraq had actually obtained such weapons.

“We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since [Operation] Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD programs, although given its past behavior, this type of activity must be regarded as likely,” CIA director Tenet said in an agency report to Congress on February 7, 2001.

“We assess that since the suspension of [United Nations] inspections in December of 1998, Baghdad has had the capability to reinitiate both its [chemical and biological weapons] programs … without an inspection monitoring program, however, it is more difficult to determine if Iraq has done so,” Tenet added. “Moreover, the automated video monitoring systems installed by the UN at known and suspect WMD facilities in Iraq are still not operating, according to the 2001 CIA report. Having lost this on-the-ground access, it is more difficult for the UN or the US to accurately assess the current state of Iraq’s WMD programs.”

In October 2002, when the CIA issued another report, it told a dramatically different story, that this time included details of Iraq’s alleged vast chemical and biological weapons.

The October 2002 CIA report into Iraq’s WMD identifies sarin, mustard gas, VX and numerous other chemical weapons that the CIA claimed Iraq had been stockpiling over the years, in stark contrast to earlier reports by Tenet that said the agency had no evidence to support such claims. And unlike testimony Tenet gave a year earlier, in which he said the CIA had no direct evidence of Iraq’s WMD programs, the intelligence information in the 2002 report, Tenet said, was rock solid.

“This information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence,” Tenet said during a CIA briefing in February, a transcript of which can be found here.

“It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources,” Tenet said, in statements and intelligence that would later be proven false.

Rumsfeld’s attitude toward Iraq also changed. Rumsfeld testified before the House Armed Services Committee on September 18, 2002 - 19 months after he said Iraq was not a nuclear threat - that Iraq was close to acquiring the materials needed to build a nuclear bomb.

“Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent - that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons,” Rumsfeld testified before the committee.

“I would not be so certain,” Rumsfeld said. “He has, at this moment, stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and is pursuing nuclear weapons.”

Rumsfeld never offered any evidence to support his claims, but his dire warning of a looming nuclear catastrophe was enough to convince most lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, to take swift action against Iraq. Shortly after his remarks before the House Armed Services Committee, Congress passed a resolution authorizing President Bush to use “all appropriate means” to remove Saddam from power. ++

Book and e-mails hit Republican nerves
Caroline Daniel and Guy Dinmore, MSNBC
13 minutes ago
http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=tnaszybab.0.l9kszybab.ruvvpabab.4911&ts=S0206&p=http%3A%2F%2Fmsnbc.msn.com%2Fid%2F15106645%2F

US Republicans are facing challenges to their credibility this week on two of their strongest themes – family values and national security – with questions on whether the leadership had covered up a scandal involving a congressman sending explicit e-mails to teenage boys, and whether the White House has covered up rising problems in Iraq.

The FBI said it would look into e-mails sent to under-age congressional pages by Mark Foley, a 52-year-old Republican congressman from Florida who resigned on Friday. The real political damage could arise from concern that the Republican leadership, including Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, had been slow to investigate the allegations fully and had failed to remove Mr Foley as chairman of the House caucus on missing and exploited children.

In an effort to contain the fall-out, and with Democratic critics asking, “Why did GOP leaders sit on Foley e-mails?” Mr Hastert called for an internal review and a Justice Department inquiry into who had seen the messages that Mr Foley had sent. An initial review by the leadership – which did not include the most explicit e-mails disclosed last week – had concluded that his messages were simply “over-friendly”.

“Initially I just thought that this would cost thema seat and the publicwould just chalk it up to yet another sleazebag politician,” said Charlie Cook, publisher of the Cook Political Report. “As articles turned toward cover-up/inaction, it’s just one more nail in the coffin for this majority.”

Republicans had hoped to make national security the dominant election issue and had been poised to exploit last week’s victory on Capitol Hill – approval of new rules on interrogations and military tribunals – to paint Democrats as weak on national security.

That plan for this week has been thrown off course by the publication of Bob Woodward’s book State of Denial, which revealed an administration divided and disorganised over Iraq, and a new biography of Colin Powell, which says the former secretary of state warned the president of the growing insurgency.

One of the most damaging allegations from Mr Woodward is that Condoleezza Rice, the present secretary of state, brushed off warnings of a possible al-Qaeda attack on the US delivered by George Tenet, then chief of the CIA, and Cofer Black, head of counter-terrorism, at an emergency meeting on July 10 2001.

On her way to the Middle East, Ms Rice told reporters that she could not specifically recall a meeting, and flatly denied being warned by Mr Tenet of an attack on the US. “What I am quite certain of, however, is that I would remember if I was told – as this account apparently says – that there was about to be an attack in the United States. The idea that I would somehow have ignored that I find incomprehensible.”

Ms Rice said that Philip Zelikow, her senior policy adviser on the region and the former executive director of the 9/11 commission, had stayed in Washington “to help reconstruct from the commission side what happened”.

Mr Zelikow was quoted by the New York Times as saying no witness before the 9/11 commission had drawn attention to such a meeting as described by Mr Woodward.

Mr Cook said the events of the last few days marked an inflection point. “The spotlight is shifting away from terrorism, 9/11, national security and falling gasoline prices back on to Iraq, how we got there and mistakes made by the Bush administration on how we have waged the war.

“The Foley scandal exacerbates a situation that had already turned bad. Had the spotlight remained on terrorism, the GOP would have held majority, though with some losses. This new shift may well force a different result.” ++

Things Fall Apart
October 2, 2006
PAUL KRUGMAN
http://tinyurl.com/rss8k

Right after the 2004 election, it seemed as if Thomas Frank had been completely vindicated. In his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” Mr. Frank argued that America’s right wing had developed a permanent winning strategy based on the use of “values” issues to mobilize white working-class voters against a largely mythical cultural elite, while actually pursuing policies designed to benefit a small economic elite.

It was and is a brilliant analysis. But the political strategy Mr. Frank described may have less staying power than he feared. In fact, the right-wing coalition that has spent 40 years climbing to its current position of political dominance may be cracking up.

At its core, the political axis that currently controls Congress and the White House is an alliance between the preachers and the plutocrats — between the religious right, which hates gays, abortion and the theory of evolution, and the economic right, which hates Social Security, Medicare and taxes on rich people. Surrounding this core is a large periphery of politicians and lobbyists who joined the movement not out of conviction, but to share in the spoils.

Together, these groups formed a seemingly invincible political coalition, in which the religious right supplied the passion and the economic right supplied the money.

The coalition has, however, always been more vulnerable than it seemed, because it was an alliance based not on shared goals, but on each group’s belief that it could use the other to get what it wants. Bring that belief into question, and the whole thing falls apart.

Future historians may date the beginning of the right-wing crackup to the days immediately following the 2004 election, when President Bush tried to convert a victory won by portraying John Kerry as weak on defense into a mandate for Social Security privatization. The attempted bait-and-switch failed in the face of overwhelming public opposition. If anything, the Bush plan was even less popular in deep-red states like Montana than in states that voted for Mr. Kerry.

And the religious and cultural right, which boasted of having supplied the Bush campaign with its “shock troops” and expected a right-wing cultural agenda in return — starting with a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage — was dismayed when the administration put its energy into attacking the welfare state instead.

James Dobson, the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, accused Republicans of “just ignoring those that put them in office.”

It will be interesting, by the way, to see how Dr. Dobson, who declared of Bill Clinton that “no man has ever done more to debase the presidency,” responds to the Foley scandal. Does the failure of Republican leaders to do anything about a sexual predator in their midst outrage him as much as a Democratic president’s consensual affair?

In any case, just as the religious right was feeling betrayed by Mr. Bush’s focus on the goals of the economic right, the economic right suddenly seemed to become aware of the nature of its political allies. “Where in the hell did this Terri Schiavo thing come from?” asked Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, in an interview with Ryan Sager, the author of “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party.” The answer, he said, was “blatant pandering to James Dobson.” He went on, “Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies.”

Some Republicans are switching parties. James Webb, who may pull off a macaca-fueled upset against Senator George Allen of Virginia, was secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Charles Barkley, a former N.B.A. star who used to be mentioned as a possible future Republican candidate, recently declared, “I was a Republican until they lost their minds.”

So the right-wing coalition is showing signs of coming apart. It seems that we’re not in Kansas anymore. In fact, Kansas itself doesn’t seem to be in Kansas anymore.

Kathleen Sebelius, the state’s Democratic governor, has achieved a sky-high favorability rating by focusing on good governance rather than culture wars, and her party believes it will win big this year.

And nine former Kansas Republicans, including Mark Parkinson, the former state G.O.P. chairman, are now running for state office as Democrats. Why did Mr. Parkinson change parties? Because he “got tired of the theological debate over whether Charles Darwin was right.” ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Entry Filed under: Political Waves