Archive for February 10th, 2007

Great Balls of Fire

We just can’t let her go. Molly Ivins, that is — this last week I’ve collected a diverse set of Molly-tributes … they keep popping up, and reminding us of what we’ve lost … and frankly, I still choke up reading them. There are some unusual voices here, celebrating scrappy little Molly — Maya Angelou, Paul Krugman, Amy Goodman, others. It’s a different tone than the first wave of tributes — no less admiring, but a little rougher around the edges … a little more “true.”

Below, the reads including an interview with Democracy NOW! brimming over with her authentic ring — and last, an article she wrote that I hadn’t read [hence, hadn't posted.] It was a joy to read … and seductive in time, like it was yesterday, when she was still here — only yesterday’s gone.

It’s been suggested that there be a day set aside to encourage the spirit of Molly-style journalism. That would be good — yesterday’s gone but we’re still in the fight and we need the voices of truth-tellers and joy-spreaders.

A weekend read — savor it.

Jude

Molly Ivins: America’s Jericho Voice
Maya Angelou
Tuesday, February 6, 2007 by the Miami Herald (Florida)

Up to the walls of Jericho
She marched with a spear in
her hand

Go blow them ram horns she cried
For the battle is in my hand
The walls have not come down,
but they have been given a
serious shaking.

That Jericho voice is stilled now.

Molly Ivins has been quieted.

The writer and journalist, dearly loved and admired by many, hated and feared by many, died of cancer in her Texas home on Jan. 31.

The walls of ignorance and prejudice and cruelty, which she railed against valiantly all her public life, have not fallen, but their truculence to do so does not speak against her determination to make them collapse.

Weeks before she died, she launched what she called ”an old-fashioned newspaper crusade” against President Bush’s announcement that he was going to send more troops to Iraq.

She wrote, ‘We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. Every single day every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. We need people in the streets banging pots and pans and demanding, `Stop it now!’ ”

Years ago there was a fundraising gala for People for the American Way in New York, and Molly Ivins was keynote speaker. I was a loyal collector and serious Ivins reader, but I had not met the author. Another famous journalist, who was to have introduced her, had his flight canceled in a Southern city. Norman Lear, founder of the organization, asked me to introduce her. I did not hesitate. I spoke glowingly about Ms. Ivins for a few minutes, then, suddenly, a six-foot-tall, red-haired woman sprang from the wings. She strode onto the stage and over to the microphone. She gave me an enveloping hug and said, in that languorous Texas accent, “Maya Angelou and I are identical twins, we were separated at birth.”

I am also six feet tall, but I am not white. She was under 50 when she made the statement, and I was in my middle 60s, but our hearts did beat in the same rhythm.

Whoever separated us at birth must know it did not work. We were in the struggle for equal rights for all people since we met on that Waldorf Astoria stage. We laughed together without apology, and we wept when weeping was necessary.

I shall be weeping a little more these days, but I shall never forget the charge. Joshua commanded the people to shout, and the walls came tumbling down.

Molly,

I am shouting,
With two voices,
Walls come down!
Walls come down!
Walls come down!

Poet Maya Angelou is the author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

The ‘toons:

“Molly Ivins 1944 - 2007″
Cagle

Molly Ivins: The Plucking Truth
Molly Ivins’ departure from The New York Times long ago came after the paper acted “chicken” and refused to let her use the phrase “gang pluck” in a story. More than a quarter century later, in its obit this week, the paper still refused to use it.
Greg Mitchell, Raw Story
February 03, 2007

When Molly Ivins passed away this week, many obits and loving tributes recalled one of her most famous lines – not because it was her sharpest or funniest, but because it helped spark her departure from The New York Times. Of course, we refer to her calling a chicken slaughtering festival in New Mexico a “gang pluck” back in 1980. Even though there were no swear words involved, the stodgy Times censored the phrase and subsequently pushed her out the door.

Surely, in swinging 2007, with some of the greyness drained out of the Grey Lady by now, the paper would finally print the phrase in its Ivins obituary? Uh, think again. Didn’t happen. Censored again. The phrase was, still, just too offensive for the Times, which described it this week as “sexually suggestive.”

Not so everywhere else, of course. Even the Daily News-Record in tiny Harrisonburg, Va., put “gang pluck” in its story.

Then the Times had the nerve to include a link to that deeply offensive July 12, 1980, chicken article in its list of nine selected articles written by Ivins that it posted online.

First, here’s how the Los Angeles Times told the story this week – later published by the Times’ sister publication, The Boston Globe: “She chronicled the mistakes and misdeeds of Texas lawmakers for five years until she was hired away by The New York Times in 1976. She covered New York politics, then became the paper’s Rocky Mountain bureau chief, but the match of Ms. Ivins and the Grey Lady of journalism was misbegotten from the get-go. The paper flattened and defoliated her colorful prose….

“The line that ended her New York Times career came in a story about a community chicken-killing festival. Ms. Ivins called the event a ‘gang pluck,’ a choice of words that caused her to be ’sort of abruptly recalled like a defective automobile and replaced,’ she told Salon.com in 2000.”

The aforementioned Harrisonburg, Va. paper put it this way: “Managing editor Abe Rosenthal also questioned her description of a chicken festival somewhere in Texas as a ‘gang pluck.’”

The much larger but still conservative Dallas Morning News related: “The grey lady and the red-headed one parted ways after Ms. Ivins covered a New Mexico community chicken festival and wanted to refer to it as ‘a gang pluck.’” Bloomberg News used the phrase, too; so did Time magazine. And, not so surprisingly, the Austin American-Statesman.

But the phrase was reduced to the following in this week’s Times’ obit: “Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.”

You might say the Times chickened out.

Why did this happen? Times obituary editor Bill McDonald told the Village Voice: “We thought that the standard hadn’t really changed. It was still a gratuitous remark that we didn’t need to repeat, even now.”

The Voice headline was: ‘Plucky Molly Muzzled from the Grave.”

Missing Molly Ivins
Paul Krugman, NYT
Thursday, February 01, 2007

Molly Ivins, the Texas columnist, died of breast cancer on Wednesday. I first met her more than three years ago, when our book tours crossed. She was, as she wrote, “a card-carrying member of The Great Liberal Backlash of 2003, one of the half-dozen or so writers now schlepping around the country promoting books that do not speak kindly of Our Leader’s record.”

I can’t claim to have known her well. But I spent enough time with her, and paid enough attention to her work, to know that obituaries that mostly stressed her satirical gifts missed the main point. Yes, she liked to poke fun at the powerful, and was very good at it. But her satire was only the means to an end: holding the powerful accountable.

She explained her philosophy in a stinging 1995 article in Mother Jones magazine about Rush Limbaugh. “Satire … has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful,” she wrote. “When you use satire against powerless people … it is like kicking a cripple.”

Molly never lost sight of two eternal truths: rulers lie, and the times when people are most afraid to challenge authority are also the times when it’s most important to do just that. And the fact that she remembered these truths explains something I haven’t seen pointed out in any of the tributes: her extraordinary prescience on the central political issue of our time.

I’ve been going through Molly’s columns from 2002 and 2003, the period when most of the wise men of the press cheered as Our Leader took us to war on false pretenses, then dismissed as “Bush haters” anyone who complained about the absence of W.M.D. or warned that the victory celebrations were premature. Here are a few selections:

    Nov. 19, 2002: “The greatest risk for us in invading Iraq is probably not war itself, so much as: What happens after we win? … There is a batty degree of triumphalism loose in this country right now.”

    Jan. 16, 2003: “I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’ ”

    July 14, 2003: “I opposed the war in Iraq because I thought it would lead to the peace from hell, but I’d rather not see my prediction come true and I don’t think we have much time left to avert it. That the occupation is not going well is apparent to everyone but Donald Rumsfeld. … We don’t need people with credentials as right-wing ideologues and corporate privatizers — we need people who know how to fix water and power plants.”

    Oct. 7, 2003: “Good thing we won the war, because the peace sure looks like a quagmire. …

    “I’ve got an even-money bet out that says more Americans will be killed in the peace than in the war, and more Iraqis will be killed by Americans in the peace than in the war. Not the first time I’ve had a bet out that I hoped I’d lose.”

So Molly Ivins — who didn’t mingle with the great and famous, didn’t have sources high in the administration, and never claimed special expertise on national security or the Middle East — got almost everything right. Meanwhile, how did those who did have all those credentials do?

With very few exceptions, they got everything wrong. They bought the obviously cooked case for war — or found their own reasons to endorse the invasion. They didn’t see the folly of the venture, which was almost as obvious in prospect as it is with the benefit of hindsight. And they took years to realize that everything we were being told about progress in Iraq was a lie.

Was Molly smarter than all the experts? No, she was just braver. The administration’s exploitation of 9/11 created an environment in which it took a lot of courage to see and say the obvious.

Molly had that courage; not enough others can say the same.

And it’s not over. Many of those who failed the big test in 2002 and 2003 are now making excuses for the “surge.” Meanwhile, the same techniques of allegation and innuendo that were used to promote war with Iraq are being used to ratchet up tensions with Iran.

Now, more than ever, we need people who will stand up against the follies and lies of the powerful. And Molly Ivins, who devoted her life to questioning authority, will be sorely missed.

AN AUGUST 8TH CALL TO WORDS! A Worthy Tribute to Molly
Steve Young, HuffPo
Feb 3 2007

I beseech writers and websites all over the world to make August 8th, Molly Ivin’s birthday, a day of satire. A day where they drop their on-the-money reflections and replace them with cleverly-worded, insightful - and inciting - columns and blogs that give readers credit for being able to think past the words.

And if I might up the ante just a bit, we can do more.

Molly Ivin’s far too hasty exit left a huge humorless hole in the world of the sharp-as-a-knife, written word. Countless tributes from reader’s and writers’ hearts reminded us of what important, satirical gold she provided during her life, but homage to her demands a far headier task for writer and reader alike. Paying genuine tribute to this wordsmith who courageously challenged authority calls for taking up the fight. And it won’t be easy.

Yesterday, (Warning: Humongous Name Drop Ahead) Penny Marshall told me, “Satire scares me.” It should. Exposing hypocrisy carries with it enormous responsibility. It’s like admitting to someone else that we need to lose weight. We’re on record. Now if we don’t do something about it, we can’t ever see that “someone else” ever again until we actually lose weight, because if we didn’t, it would expose ourselves to be hypocrites.

But also, when you punch holes in the emperor’s facade, you could end up a target yourself, with a prevaricating Vice Emperor taking deadly aim at your credibility. ‘Course his Lords of Loud would carry that message 24/7 across the airwaves until the liberal mainstream town criers would legitimize it, reporting it as the other half of the truth.

Why would the powerful take such offense to what their lock-steppers would deem only as, at best, an off-the-mark joke from some wise guy? Because they know that imbedded in the satirist’s assaults are bullets of truth that can injure far worse than a scattershot shotgun in the hands of a Vice Emperor. The powerful will do everything to label naysayers as uninformed buffoons. For if they ever did accept the satirist’s premise, they would be faced with the worst their therapists are paid to reveal…

….everything they believe has been wrong.

But that’s what Molly fearlessly did and we can only give her just due by doing more of the same.

In my upcoming book, “The Power of Satire…The Left’s Secret Weapon And How It Will Affect, And In All Possibility, Win The 2008 Election For The Candidate Who Is Less Of A Joke Than The One He or She Is Running Against,” I make the argument for a call to words.

While I am working feverishly to shorten the title, I’m working just as hard to point out that the Left has a sword that should be used, deftly, honestly, to cut an illuminating hole in the oh-too-carefully-crafted balderdash that candidates on both sides use as justification to be elected.

My suspicion is that by the 2008 election we will be so entirely fed up with the gibberish and deception that we will be ready to admit that our past blind faith in the what we had hoped was the truth, but was never intended to be, needs to be put out to pasture with the rest of the manure.

But it will take a healthy and unremitting effort on the part of writers (and “performers”). Done right it will not only begin a heart and soul cleansing for the public, but it will deliver a pungent warning to those who are determined to continue the masquerade. In 2008, whenever they attempt to pass off blather as truth, satire must raise up on its side-splitting smarts, revealing those who try to makes fools of us as the biggest fools - and on the first Tuesday of November - losers.

Molly wouldn’t accept any less.

Good Golly, Miss Molly
Brian Morton
Feb 8 2007

When this column began its first incarnation in the spring of 1994, it was created in the spirit of the Texas author, columnist, and journalist Molly Ivins. Fiercely liberal, progressive with an eye toward the comic, Ivins was and is my hero. She believed, as do I, in the power of government to work for its people, not just as a device to make life easier and more lucrative for the wealthy and well-off. John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” It was in this spirit, surrounded by the shallowness and meanness that has come to reflect Texas government and has since infected the U.S. government at large, that Ivins tilted at her windmills and cackled at greed, hubris, and stupidity.

If it weren’t for Molly Ivins, how would the rest of the country know that in Texas it’s a felony to own more than six dildos? Ivins, in her first column in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in February 1992, dryly noted, “In their boundless wisdom, our solons decided that five or fewer of the devices make you a mere hobbyist.” That sentence alone makes you want to leap off the couch, fly to Dallas, rent a motel room, and try to break as many commandments as possible, preferably and joyously starting with things like sodomy, adultery, and any other “y’s” that might stick a thumb in the eye of whichever lugubrious Puritans came up with such a law.

We’ve seen the death of quite a few journalistic titans recently. I met Art Buchwald in the lobby of a journalism convention in the late 1980s, chewing on a cigar and holding forth in his barely understandable Queens growl. He’s gone now. I watched Ed Bradley eyeball current Sun fashion layout stylist Pascale Lemaire and the strategically placed holes in her self-designed dress at a reception hosted by the University of Maryland’s chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists back in the late ’80s. Bradley listened to what we had to say, but his eyes never left that dress, and when he took the podium at the start of his address the first words out of his mouth were, “We got some fine lookin’ sistahs here tonight.” Bradley, too, is gone now.

Some high-living, high-spirited people who made the once-humble trade of journalism a little brighter, a little more passionate, have passed from this earthly vale, but there are none I’ll miss more than Molly Ivins.

Ivins on guns: “I am not anti-gun. I am pro-knife. Consider the merits of the knife. In the first place, you have to catch up to someone in order to stab him. A general substitution of knives for guns would promote physical fitness. We’d turn into a whole nation of great runners. Plus, knives don’t ricochet. And people are seldom killed while cleaning their knives.”

Ivins on George W. Bush, whom she’s known since high school: “I, for one, object to being lectured to about responsibility by a man who as far as I can tell has never faced it. He partied until he was 40, repeatedly failed in business and had to be bailed out by his daddy’s friends, got elected on his daddy’s name, and is now ducking responsibility for the parts of the Texas record that are clearly his fault, while claiming credit for what he never did.”

What a perfect antidote to this crazy world: a woman who called the Clinton impeachment “the Late Unpleasantness,” got chewed out by New York Times editor in chief Abe Rosenthal for calling an annual New Mexico chicken slaughter a “gang pluck,” and owned a dog named Shit.

Molly Ivins wrote about the joy of the good fight, even when the mood of the country turned toward selfishness. When The Wall Street Journal mocked the poorest fifth of the country as “lucky duckies” because of their cumulative tax rate of 18 percent back in 2003, she pointed out that the richest fifth had a cumulative rate–that is, the agglomeration of income, excise, sales, property, and payroll taxes paid–of only 19 percent, which, under the Bush tax cuts, would drop more each year. These are the people of the conservative freeloader culture, who believe that work should be taxed but wealth should go free, and that they should reap the benefit of all society’s efforts while contributing as little as possible toward its upkeep. Carry on with passion, but laugh during the struggle, she counseled.

You don’t make a lot of dough working at alt-weeklies, but being able to say what you want makes up for it. I would have loved to meet Molly Ivins, to tell her that the first offer I got to have a column picked up by another paper was when I called the soon-to-be chief justice of the Supreme Court an asshole, or about when I wrote a column about Alan Keyes composed mostly of jokes at his expense. I think we could have drank Negra Modelo beer and talked about the merits of zydeco vs. blues. I think we’d have been friends.

I miss her, and yet I never met her. And for that, I’m crying.

Molly Ivins, Our Magnet
James K. Galbraith, HuffPo
02.07.2007

The Texas Observer has published my tribute to Molly Ivins. I won’t repeat it here, except for a small part. The “final Fridays” were a monthly event, held for years at Molly’s house until her health made it impossible to go on.

    “I used to go to the final Fridays late, after the slam poets were done, after the party had quieted down some and mainly the bitter-enders were left, just so I could sit among the butts and bottles like a bad child, and listen to the rowdy tales and feel part of our group - the hard-core liberals in Texas. And just so I could watch her flash that smile, and hear her call me sweetheart now and then.

    “Molly was our magnet, our long memory and our cutting edge. She had a fine, sharp pen, but she was at her best, I think, at home, in company, spinning tales, honing her perfect comic pitch, that fine mix of the telling and tawdry that so captured the spirit of Texas.”

Sunday morning after this appeared, I received an email, from a retired professor of English in the very deep South. I paraphrase:

    “Galbraith, what do you mean by that phrase, ’spirit of Texas?’ I stopped reading Ivins when she started to use obscenity. Is that a reflection of the spirit of Texas?”

So I wrote back, a two-line email, quoting the immortal lyrics of Tom Lehrer:

    “As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense, To be smut, it must be utterly without redeeming social importance.”

An email came back: “Truthfully, I do not understand.”

My reply was roughly this:

    “Molly Ivins did not use obscenity. Obscenity is committed by the strong against the weak. Gentility is how the weak are obliged to submit. When you talk back, in whatever language is effective, that’s not obscenity, but courage.

    “And by the way, this business of dirty words is culturally specific. Around here, there are no dirty words. And that, of course, is what I meant by ’spirit of Texas.’ “

We sent Molly off Sunday afternoon, at the First United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas, to the strains of Marcia Ball singing “Great Balls of Fire.” Indeed.

Goodbye, Dear Molly — Pots And Pans, Play On!
Molly has died, but the fight goes on

Amy Goodman, AlterNet
February 7, 2007

Molly, I hardly knew ye.

The untimely death of Molly Ivins last week, after a long battle with breast cancer, has provoked a surge of impassioned eulogies — yes, that would be the appropriate use of the term “surge.”

Ivins was first and foremost a journalist, in the highest and best sense of the word. She spent the time, did the digging. She had a remarkable gift for words, a command of English coupled with her flamboyant Texas wit. She directed her reportorial skill at the powerful, holding to account the elected and the self-appointed. She first questioned authority, then skewered it.

I had the good fortune to meet Molly, but on too few occasions. I went to Austin, Texas, for the 50th anniversary celebration of The Texas Observer, the plucky, progressive news magazine that was Molly’s journalistic home for so long. Texas’ former governor, Ann Richards, was there. Richards, a Democrat, was not immune to Molly’s practiced barbs. The governor said of the writer:

“I know it’s been a shock to all of us, but over the last 10 or 15 years our girl Molly Ivins has learned to dress, run a comb through her hair now and then and give a fairly decent speech. A truly remarkable woman who goes around America making speeches and telling lies about me. And I welcome her attentions any time. May God bless this woman who has more survivor blood in her veins than anyone I have ever known.”

Richards preceded Molly in death by cancer by just a few months.

Molly’s legacy rings out, clarion calls to action from the beyond. After she was diagnosed with cancer in 1999, she implored her readers: “Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Now.” The American Cancer Society predicts that there will be more than 40,000 breast-cancer deaths in the U.S. in 2007. Death rates are declining, although detection and survival rates are lower for women of color. Improvements can be attributed in part to women following Molly’s advice: “Get. The. Damn. Mammogram. Now.”

In her final column, titled “Stand Up Against the Surge,” Molly wrote:

“We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. … We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’”

Her hallmark was to call it as she saw it, and on Iraq she was clear: “It is not a matter of whether we will lose or we are losing. We have lost.” She took Sen. John McCain to task for supporting the “surge.” The coordinated acts of civil disobedience at his Senate offices in Washington, D.C., and in Arizona on Feb. 5 were a fitting tribute to Molly.

Meanwhile, houston.indymedia.org announced the formation of The Molly Ivins Brigade, to protest the war with pots and pans.

I asked Molly about The Texas Observer. “As we watch the concentration of ownership of mass media,” she said, “it’s more and more important to keep these little independent voices alive. I think that’s where the hope of journalism lies.”

Fighting cancer. Fighting to stop the war. Fighting fiercely to protect independent media institutions like The Texas Observer. Molly, while I hardly knew ye, we know you by your good works. Molly has died, but the fight goes on. She asked that donations be made to the nonprofit Texas Observer, texasobserver.org. In this time of the Clear Channeling of America, it is pennies well spent.

The final performer at The Texas Observer anniversary event was the venerable Willie Nelson, whose sonorous voice and trenchant lyrics have become synonymous with Texas. He sang:

“Fly on, fly on past the speed of sound …
Leave me if you need to
I will still remember
Angel flying too close to the ground.”

Molly has made her sound in the world. Now it’s up to us to bang those pots and pans.

Molly Ivins, 1944-2007: Legendary Texas Journalist Dies After Long Bout With Breast Cancer
Democracy NOW!
Thursday, February 1st, 2007

The syndicated columnist and best-selling author Molly Ivins has died at the age of 62. She passed away last night in her home in Austin, Texas following a long bout with breast cancer. Her weekly column appeared in over 400 newspapers making her the most widely read progressive columnist in the country. The writer Harvey Wasserman wrote this about Molly Ivins: “If Mark Twain has a female counterpart on today’s political and journalistic scene, it is Molly Ivins. She has that miraculous ability to slice and dice an entire raft of political horse-dung with a single simple sentence, laced with wry, seeded with sweetness, and so often utterly cleansing and clarifying.’

[...]

TRANSCRIPT

JUAN GONZALEZ: The syndicated columnist and bestselling author Molly Ivins has died at the age of 62. She passed away last night in her home in Austin, Texas, following a long bout with breast cancer. Her weekly column appeared in over 400 newspapers, making her the most widely read progressive columnist in the country.

AMY GOODMAN: The writer Harvey Wasserman wrote this about Molly Ivins: “If Mark Twain has a female counterpart on today’s political and journalistic scene, it is Molly Ivins. She has that miraculous ability to slice and dice an entire raft of political horse-dung with a single simple sentence, laced with wry, seeded with sweetness, and so often utterly cleansing and clarifying.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: Molly Ivins began her career in journalism at the complaint department of the Houston Chronicle. In 1970, she became co-editor of the Texas Observer. In 1976, she joined the New York Times, and six years later she returned to Texas to write. In recent years, her work focused on fellow Texan, President Bush. With Lou Dubose, she co-authored the books Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America. Both became national bestsellers. Her most recent book was titled Who Let the Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I Have Known.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly Ivins was first diagnosed with cancer in 1999. She continued to write, despite her failing health. In a moment, we’ll hear Molly in her own words. But first, we turn to the late Ann Richards, yes, the former governor of Texas, who also died of cancer. I recorded Governor Richards after she was introduced by Molly Ivins at the celebration to mark the 50th anniversary of the Texas Observer.

    ANN RICHARDS: I know it’s been a shock to all of us, but over the last ten or fifteen years our girl Molly Ivins has learned to dress, run a comb through her hair now and then, and give a fairly decent speech. The Observer was never better than when Molly and Kay were writing it. But then, we were all easier to please back then. A truly remarkable woman who goes around America making speeches and telling lies about me. And I welcome her attentions any time. May God bless this woman who has more survivor blood in her veins than anyone I have ever known.

AMY GOODMAN: That is the late Governor Richards. Now we turn to Molly Ivins in her own words. In July 2004, she visited our firehouse studios. I asked her about President Bush and how she has known him since high school.

    MOLLY IVINS: We have been slightly acquainted that long, and I must say — I’ve said a million times — I don’t think he’s mean, and I don’t think he’s stupid. He’s sure not the brightest porch light on the block. He’s pretty limited. But he’s very Texan. Unlike his daddy, who clearly is an upper-class elite Eastern WASP, almost a parody of that pattern. W is very Texas-identified. And you see — I see, when I look at him, some very distinct strengths of Texan culture. One is the religiosity, the public display of piety. Anti-intellectualism, very common in Texas. And it’s anti-intellectualism sort of based on the premise that intellectuals are a bunch of people who use long polysyllabic words and double-dome things to make other people feel inferior. In other words, it’s a form of anti-snobism. And machismo, very Texan. You know, macho man stuff. And the other thing, of course, that’s quite remarkable in Texas is provincialism. Provincialism, I think, is a universal characteristic. New Yorkers are just as provincial as anyone else. But in Texas, it tends to be particularly aggravated, and I think that all of that is true of Bush.

    AMY GOODMAN: Your new book is called Who Let the Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I Have Known. Can you just start by talking about the cover?

    MOLLY IVINS: Isn’t it wonderful? A wonderful artist named Steve Brodner drew all — a whole bunch of politicians as various kinds of dogs, and of course they lend themselves to this with just wonderful elan. There’s John Kerry, this long, droopy hound. I mean it’s really quite wonderful.

    AMY GOODMAN: Well, the book is a series of your commentaries, columns over the years.

    MOLLY IVINS: Right.

    AMY GOODMAN: And going back to the beginning, the reign of Ronald Reagan and big George, you take us also back and remind us who George W. Bush’s father is. I think we have a very different perspective on him right now than when he was actually vice president and then president. Can you talk about the difference between the two, father and son presidents?

    MOLLY IVINS: Sure. Well, Poppy and W, of course, both suffer from different forms of the same affliction, which is that they can’t speak English. And Poppy was actually, I have to say, much more fun to take notes on than W. Poppy was just courageous. He would launch himself into a sentence. He would go swim through clause after clause, still no subject, still no predicate. At last, he would come to a period in complete exhaustion. And then we would all sit there trying to figure out what he had said. And we couldn’t figure it out, and neither could he.

    Now, the thing about W is, when he misspeaks himself, you usually know what he’s trying to say. Unless he’s having a real bad day, you can tell what he meant to say even if he got some of the words a little bit wrong. They’re very, very funny as a father/son pair. The old man is clearly more at home in the world, a man of wider perspective and vision. W, again, is the little more narrow, little more — the Texas provincialism keeps showing. Always reminds me of every guy I’ve ever had dinner with at the Midland Petroleum Club. You know, you come away saying, “Gosh, what a swell bunch of fellows! Thank God they’re not running the world.”

    AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Molly Ivins. George W. Bush, you write, has always had a mentor in his different worlds and spheres.

    MOLLY IVINS: Yeah. He had a couple in the oil business. He had Richard Rainwater in finance and baseball, a big money guy out of Fort Worth. The late Bob Bullock, our lieutenant governor, was his mentor in Texas government. And it’s clear that Dick Cheney plays that role in Washington for W, the sort of mentor father figure.

    AMY GOODMAN: More important than his father?

    MOLLY IVINS: Oh, very definitely. I think so. Yeah.

    AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about his relationship with Cheney, his relationship, and who is Karl Rove?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, now, I’m not a Washington reporter. I intensely covered Bush when he was governor of Texas, but I am not one to give you the inside, the White House poop, because I don’t have any. The relationship to Rove, I can speak to. I think there’s a mistaken idea that it’s like puppet and puppetmaster. Actually, I think they’re more like twins. I think it’s a really good team. Rove, of course, is an exceptionally good, exceptionally skillful campaign guy, and Bush, himself, W Bush, is really gifted at the political end of politics. He’s always being, as he says, “misunderestimated.” He really is interested in and good at the political end of politics.

    Where you run into problems with W is that policy just bores the heck out of him. He’s just not interested. He doesn’t like to read about it. He doesn’t like to hear about it. He doesn’t like to go to long meetings. He doesn’t like to read memos. It bores him. And I’m not quite sure why you would go into government if you weren’t interested in it, but there it is. Politics, however, is — and that’s not that unusual, by the way. I want to point out, there are a lot of politicians who enjoy the political end of politics, but they’re not interested in governance. And then, there are some that are really interested in governance and are just terrible at politics.

    AMY GOODMAN: George W. Bush, what is his talent, do you think?

    MOLLY IVINS: Politics. He’s good at the political end of politics.

    AMY GOODMAN: And what did he do for his father before he, himself, became president?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, he was his daddy’s campaign enforcer. In the ‘88 and ‘92 campaigns, he was the guy who, you know, kept everybody in line. It’s a little — I mean, you get different takes on Bush at different points in his life. There’s always been a little bit of an extent to which he struck people as a jerk. I mean, you know, he would come through the White House when his daddy was president and stab at people, “Work harder! Work harder!” And, I mean, these were people who were already working fourteen hours a day.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Molly Ivins. Her latest book is called Who Let the Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I Have Known. Well, what do you think has driven George W. Bush, once he became president, drove him to invade Iraq? What does he gain from that?

    MOLLY IVINS: I think very early on, this was not — I mean, look, no matter whether you like George W. or not, the last thing in the world you would have wished on this poor guy was a major foreign policy crisis in his first year. To say foreign policy was not his forte is to put it mildly. And consequently, he was, to an unusual degree for president, simply dependent on others. And I think what happened very early on, possibly even before he took the oath, is that he was sort of captured by the neoconservative group: Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz — that is, a whole sort of noticeable group there in Washington. And they have wanted to invade Iraq for a long time. It was just real high on their list, and all this was well before September 11th.

    AMY GOODMAN: And why did they have more his ear than his own father, who, while he bombed Iraq, led the Persian Gulf War, when there was the opportunity to take out Saddam Hussein, he sided with Saddam Hussein and he pulled the troops out?

    MOLLY IVINS: If you read Poppy Bush’s memoir, the passage where he explains why he did not go into Baghdad after Saddam Hussein is just eerily prescient. It’s just amazing to read now. It’s exactly why we shouldn’t have done this. And Poppy had it back then.
    AMY GOODMAN: What did he say?

    MOLLY IVINS: Oh, for all the reasons you can see. I mean, short easy war, followed by the peace from hell. You’re going to wind up with a hideous waste of a war, and you’re going to leave the American military there like stake posts in the deserts for every terrorist in the Middle East to come after.

    AMY GOODMAN: What about this comment that you made, that if anything is going to be resolved in the Middle East, it has to be — you have to begin by resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, I’m no expert on the Middle East. Good Lord, I’m a Texas political reporter, but how bright do you have to be to see that? That is the origin of the entire — not the entire mess — the entire resentment over there is the Israeli-Palestinian situation. And I am convinced that it’s solvable. It is doable. Bill Clinton came within half an inch of getting them drug to a solution.

    [...] [break]

    AMY GOODMAN: We return to Molly Ivins, in her own words. In July 2004, she visited our firehouse studios. I asked her to talk about her bestselling book, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush.

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, Shrub was pretty much a straight political account of George W’s record as governor of Texas. When I started as a political reporter, you were told that there were three rules. One was to look at the record. Two was to look at the record. And three was to look at the record. And then you would see how the fellow would do in the next stage of public life. And I must say, I think it’s a dandy rule. Lou Dubose and I are probably the only people in America who weren’t surprised by George W. Bush as president. Now, the one area, of course, in which there was no track record was foreign policy.

    AMY GOODMAN: It’s interesting, because Bush just made the comment about John Edwards, about his inexperience.

    MOLLY IVINS: Oh, well, of course, Bush had no experience at all, when he started as president, in foreign policy. And the amusing contention, even that he was fluent in Spanish, always sent Lou and I into convulsions. We’d go down in the valley, every time he speaks the same two sentences, and then they cue the mariachis. I was a little surprised that he started governing so hard from the right, given the controversy over the election, given that there was still some question about the legitimacy of his presidency. But it is very clear that they just decided to go for broke from the beginning. And September 11th, a terrible tragedy, and I certainly don’t hold him responsible, but it does seem to me that they used that for their own purposes in invading Iraq, which they wanted to do anyway.

    AMY GOODMAN: In one of your most recent columns, you write, “Recently on PBS’s NOW with Bill Moyers, there was a long interview with Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and message-meister. Luntz recently advised Republicans to explain ‘the policy of pre-emption and the war in Iraq’ by recommending that ‘no speech about…Iraq should begin without a reference to 9-11.’”

    MOLLY IVINS: Well that’s it. You keep making that connection, and that’s why something like 70% of the American people thought, when we went into Iraq, that Saddam Hussein was directly linked to 9/11. And the Bush people just made that connection over and over and over and over and over. And it’s phony. I mean, it’s just not there. The interesting thing to me about politics these days — and that Luntz piece reminds me of it — he was explaining how, for example, a Republican candidate would deal with working women. Now, you’re going to be amazed, Amy. But by dint of a shrewd professional questioning in focus groups, Frank Luntz determined that what working mothers need most is more time in their lives. We were all so astonished to hear this. And so, what he suggests is the Republican candidates say to a group, you know, when he’s campaigning, “Now, I’ll bet I know what it is you ladies need most. I bet — I think you need more free time.” And the ladies will nod, and they’ll raise their hands and agree, and you’ve bonded with them, and you’ve shown empathy toward their major problem in life.

    Well, yeah, you’ve shown empathy toward their major problem in life, but look at the record. The record is, you cut programs to early childhood education, you cut Head Start, you cut after school, you cut K-12, you cut housing vouchers. You’re going to change your overtime. They have done everything they can to make this poor woman’s life more harried and frantic than ever. That’s the record. But what we call politics now and what most political writers write about is the empathy and the bonding and the word choice and the horse rights, and it has nothing to do with what’s really happening to people’s lives.

    AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of the record, we have just heard about the records of George W. Bush, when it comes to his military service, were mistakenly destroyed.

    MOLLY IVINS: Oh, I feel so bad for George W. Bush about that. You know, he could have conclusively proved to everybody’s satisfaction that he had finished out his time in the Air National Guard without any question at all. And darn if the records haven’t been destroyed. I know he’s upset. I know he’s upset.

    AMY GOODMAN: How does that happen in Texas?

    MOLLY IVINS: Darn, I just don’t know. Actually, they were Pentagon records. And I want to point out in concerning the unit of the Texas Air National Guard in which our president served during the war in Vietnam: first of all, Texas was not attacked by the Viet Cong during the entire time; second of all, there’s some, you know, by legend, OK, they called it the “Champagne Unit,” and it was full of the sons of rich and important guys, and all that. There were black members of that unit. Now, they all happened to play football for the Dallas Cowboys, but there you are.

    AMY GOODMAN: In your book, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, you talk about Harken, where he really made his mark, whichever way, in the oil world, as being a mini-Enron.

    MOLLY IVINS: Yeah. Little tiny Enron. All the same deals. All the same insider selling on information, all the same insider trading, where they’d flip — you know, they would loan money to themselves to buy an asset to make it look better on the books. It was cute.

    AMY GOODMAN: As we travel around the country in this Exception to the Rulers tour, honoring media — radio, television, independent bookstores, newspapers that are independent — you hail from the Texas Observer.

    MOLLY IVINS: Indeed, I do. And so does Lou Dubose, and so do a number of other fairly distinguished journalists, actually. We’re not, by any means, the best of the bunch. The Texas Observer is a small progressive magazine that is fifty years old this year, and for fifty years, on practically no money at all, it has been raising hell and kicking butt down in Texas. And it is living proof that you don’t need a lot of money and you don’t need a lot of horses. What journalists mostly need to do is get up off their butts and go out and do it. And I am so proud to be associated with the Observer, and I am more and more convinced, as you all are, in the organizations you honor, that as we watch the concentration of ownership of mass media, it’s more and more important to keep these little independent voices alive. I think that’s where the hope of journalism lies.

    AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of the major corporate news corps these days, whether the networks or the print papers?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, as always, I am optimistic to the point of idiocy. And I think the internet, the technology of the internet, may yet break up this entire pattern of concentration.

    AMY GOODMAN: How?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, the internet is really interesting in terms of — and I’m not an expert in this field, so these are ideas I’ve borrowed from other people — if you have, for example, the New York Times, there’s New York Times up here. It’s a source of authority. It goes down to reader, reader, reader. CBS goes down to viewer, viewer, viewer. The internet goes doot-doot-doot — it goes sideways. There’s nothing hierarchical about it. And the best thing about it is also the worst thing about it, which is there are no gatekeepers on the internet. Consequently, there’s a whole lot of bad information on the internet. But I think that sorts itself out over time.

    AMY GOODMAN: Molly Ivins, you wrote in a posting on June 10th, “When, in the future, you find yourself wondering, ‘Whatever happened to the Constitution?’ you will want to go back and look at June 8, 2004. That was the day the attorney general of the United States — a.k.a. ‘the nation’s top law enforcement officer’ — refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with his department’s memos concerning torture.” Take it from there.

    MOLLY IVINS: He not only refused to produce his department’s memos concerning torture — what a great moment in our country’s history this is — but refused to give them any reason why he should or shouldn’t. It was the old middle-finger explanation. And the whole question of people high in government, sitting there solemn — and many of them lawyers — solemnly discussing whether or not torture is justified, strikes me as surreal to the point of being almost insane. You know, there’s been a lot of experience with torture in history, Amy. It doesn’t work.

    AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Molly Ivins. She has written many books and many more columns, hundreds and hundreds of them. Her latest book is called Who Let the Dogs In?: Incredible Political Animals I have Known. As you do your writing, as you observe Texas politics gone national — actually, gone global — you had some pretty good predictions a year ago, before the invasion, about what would happen. What about today?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, you can’t win any popularity contests by sitting around saying, “I told you so!”

    AMY GOODMAN: But what about today, looking forward?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, I am much too smart to call a political race this far out, and I think anybody who does is a nincompoop. You see all these people on television, these pundits who make big money confidently predicting the outcome of a close race that’s months way. I think they’re fools. Always optimistic to point of idiocy, I think Bush is beatable. I’m not saying he will be beaten, but I think he’s beatable. And I also think it’s — boy, do you talk about a safe position — it’s an event-driven election. It’s going to — the outcome will depend on events, on whether or not Iraq continues to unwind, on whether the economy gets better or worse, if, God forbid, there’s a terrorist attack. I think all of that is the outcome.

    AMY GOODMAN: John Kerry, John Edwards, your thoughts?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, of course, John Kerry is a boring stiff. He’s a boring stiff with intelligence. He’s a boring stiff with gravitas. He’s a boring stiff with experience. But he’s still a boring stiff. And adding Edwards to the campaign might have actually made him look stiffer. But I think it’s had the opposite effect. In fact, it’s kind of loosened him up. I’d like to point out that John Kerry has made two jokes in the last week. Now, they were little jokes, but they were still jokes.

    AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said, you know, Hillary Clinton’s comment that there’s a vast rightwing conspiracy out there, that you actually disagree.

    MOLLY IVINS: Totally disagree. There is no conspiracy about it. There’s nothing hidden. It’s all right out there in the open. It always has been. For thirty years now, a bunch of rightwing money has funded think tanks and subsidized publications and intellectuals to sit around and tell us how bad government is. These are the kind of people who always hated taxes, always hated government — same old same-old. And, you know, you look again and again, and you find those same foundations behind one effort after another. And, of course, it has a cumulative effect. I mean, most people think government could screw up a two-car funeral.

    AMY GOODMAN: Molly Ivins, on the issue of the media, I wanted to play a clip for you of a news conference yesterday that took place, which is now introducing a film that is coming out this week around the country, a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Greenwald called Outfoxed, which criticizes Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News Channel. They held a news conference, and this is a former CIA operative named Larry Johnson, former FOX News contributor, talking about FOX’s access to the Pentagon. And then I’d like to get your comment.

    LARRY JOHNSON: To this day, the Department of Defense — Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz — hold regular meetings with the military talking heads, the guys you see that go on FOX, on MSNBC, on CNN. At these meetings, a significant percentage — the most represented network at those meetings is FOX News: the military analysts like Paul Vallely, Tom Mclnerney, and others. And what happens at those meetings is talking points are passed out, recommended points that the military talking heads should make. And if you go back and look at the buildup to war, particularly the messages that Generals Mclerney and General Vallely were presenting, it was consistent with the talking points that they were getting over at Department of Defense. Folks, that’s manipulation of the news.

    AMY GOODMAN: That is Larry Johnson, former CIA operative and former FOX News contributor, talking about FOX’s access to the Pentagon. Molly Ivins?

    MOLLY IVINS: Well, of course, it is manipulation of the news. And I must say, Amy, and I hate to sound like a Texan, but the first newspaper Murdoch ever bought in this country was the San Antonio Express, and he took it into the gutter, and, interestingly enough, he took its competition into the gutter with him.

    Newspaper competition, which practically doesn’t exist at all anywhere anymore, is kind of like poker. You can both go high, you can both go low, or you can split the pot. And I think what Murdoch brought to this country was a British sensibility of, there’s the quality press and then there’s the tabloids, and it’s the, you know, tabloid trash. And we didn’t — that’s really not much of a native American tradition.

    Our tradition of the popular press actually comes from the two-penny papers of the turn of the century, and if you go back and look at them, there’s an extraordinary tradition underneath the masthead — you know, “the daily jump up and hallelujah” — there’ll be some slogan like, “with the people, against the bosses,” “with the masses, against the tyrants.” I mean, you know, there’s these sort of fighting word kind of stuff. And you’ll go, “This was a major daily newspaper, taking sides like that?” Well, the whole idea of the popular press in this country was that it stood for the average Joe, Joe Sixpack.

    And what Murdoch introduced into this country was the always-effective British combination, which is where you marry T&A — sex, page-three girls or whatever they’re called in Britain, a lot of bosomy bathing beauties — with patriotism, jingoism, flag waving. And it’s a very effective combination. And he’s introduced it here beautifully, and it’s taken hold particularly on television.

    AMY GOODMAN: We only have a few seconds left. What advice would you give to young reporters or people who are thinking about going into journalism? Should they bother?

    MOLLY IVINS: Oh, absolutely. Get in there and raise hell, people.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly Ivins, speaking on Democracy Now! in July of 2004. She died last night at the age of 62.

JUAN GONZALEZ: President Bush said in a statement, “Molly Ivins was a Texas original. I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. She fought her illness with that same passion. Her quick wit and commitment to her beliefs will be missed. Laura and I send our condolences to Molly Ivins’s family and friends.”

AMY GOODMAN: But we will end with Molly’s own words. In her final column, Molly Ivins wrote, “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell… We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, ‘Stop it, now!’” Molly Ivins, she died last night in Austin, Texas. She was 62 years old.

Cow Whisperers Against the War
Molly Ivins, TruthDig
Aug 28, 2006

AUSTIN, Texas—I know it’s bad form to brag, but I am now a graduate of Texas A&M University, and you can’t stop Aggie pride. I became a diplomee of the great institution in College Station after successfully completing the three-day short course in beef cattle this summer. I specialized in forage management and graduated “Quel fromage!,” meaning “avec distinction.” It is also true that I was banned from the campus of Texas A&M many years ago after some students invited me to make a political speech. Also Quel fromage! So you see how far we all have come.

The most amazing part of cow college was meeting the cow whisperer. Think of everything you know about moving cattle from one place to another—for shots, roundup or loading into trucks for market—just physically moving a lot of cattle. GEE, GIT ON, GO DOGIE, whistle, whip crack, move ‘em out, chase ‘em down. Turns out all these years we’ve been doing it wrong.

What happens when you scare a cow by making a lot of noise and chasing it down and forcing it to move where it doesn’t want to go is the cow responds by relieving itself.

And since a cow has three stomachs, it can unload up to 20% of its total weight at one go, the last thing you want just before you take it to market to sell.

So the latest thing in cattle handling is cow whispering (I’m not making this up—this is straight from A&M). Either on foot or horseback, you just kind of sidle around your herd without upsetting them, talk to them gently and suggest they might like to go that way for a while, and then perhaps a tour along the pen line, and then perhaps some consideration of the gate and another little tour of the pen line. But all of this is done without loud noise, sudden movements or eruptions of testosterone. It’s such a revolutionary development of an American macho tradition it’s a little like watching NFL teams come onto the field in tutus. But it also works a lot better on the cows.

I bring this up because I recently attended a women’s peace movement meeting, sponsored by the Code Pink group, founded by Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and Diane Wilson. (Ha, now you think you see where I am going.) The women peacemakers also included Cindy Sheehan, writer Anne Lamott and Col. Ann Wright, who served 29 years in the Army and more than 15 years in the Foreign Service, before resigning in protest over Bush’s drive to war in Iraq.

I must say, they were a lot more emphatic than the cow whisperer. In fact, as I left, they were saddling up to ride down to President Bush at his ranch with a people’s posse peace warrant. Lots of whooping about it.

Women peace activists, as rule, have totally solved the gnarly old dilemma: What do you do about hating the haters? If you’re a woman peace activist, this is Step 101—you spill love and calm and reassurance and, well, peace all over them. (Which is why it’s especially funny that George Bush is so afraid of Cindy Sheehan.)

For those of us who have not mastered this advanced technique, a Revolution in Favor of Kindness and Libraries seems like a nice idea. Anne Lamott, one of the funniest people in America, has developed a scenario for a Revolution With Good Manners, in which we are all extremely nice to one another. Good manners never hurt anything. “Our Revolution decrees that we will fight tooth and nail for these things, politely.”

I am still lamentably stuck in the middle—not that I hold with hating the haters … we can all see where that leads—but I am always tempted to shout them down. “One, Two Three, Four: We Don’t Want Your F-ing War.” Now does that repel more potential supporters or attract more people who really need to sound off?

What I learned from Code Pink is that this is not an either-or question. The peace movement is a matter of And and And and And. You just keep adding more people, from those like Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in the stupid debacle, to the Iraqi Veterans Against the War, easily the strongest, most moving group of young people in America.

They have learned in the hardest way what politics is.

War is about rounding up people with Shock and Awe and really loud noises, and about thinking you can herd them by hurting and killing them. Politics is what you do if you’re not so stupid you walk into an unnecessary and unprovoked war. I’m founding Cow Whisperers Against the War.

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

(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.)

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Add comment February 10th, 2007

What’s up, Doc?

Shhhhhh — I’m huntin’ wascally Wahabbi’s.

Buzz has it that tomorrow’s Sunday TV will bring us “news” on Iran’s arming insurgents … that will be the “official” beginning of the war drums … if they’re gonna get that Spring strike in, they’re gonna have to overwork the smoke machine on a wary public. And — in the hope that the people of this nation are teachable [she said optimistically] — we should ALL KNOW HOW THIS WORKS by now.

Cheney and the White House goons have a message they want spread and they crank up their machine [... exemplified by Uncle Dick's reportedly directing his little pal, Scooter to "Get the full story out."] Then, eager reporters and editors run to hear the latest “insider secrets” so they can beat everybody else and get that super-scoop … and we know what’s on the shovel, don’t we?! Up to this point, the Cabal has been Bugs Bunny and the press Elmer Fudd … and we’re worse than both because we think either sets of “truthiness” are gospel. WE’re the cartoon and the whole world is laughing and pointing … except the ones who are crying and dying.

Virtually useless Condi Rice has denied snubbing Iran’s diplomatic overtures — I found a good AP piece published in the Canadian press on that; here’s the original FAX from TPMmuckraker that should jog her memory. While I was digging around there, I grabbed a good op/ed on our current “hype deficit” — I hope they’re right.

You’ll find a good collection here — how the NY Times is working against full disclosure, redux [boo's and jeer's] — a piece by the Washington Post that does not beat the drums of war with Iran but gives us reason to pause [atta-boy's and gratitude, and to LA Times as well;] then Raw Story reports on a National Journal piece that indicates how nervous the Cabal is on their talking points, and a Guardian article telling the world the US is ready to strike. [I fret that rather than go debit in their busted "political capital" department, the administration will prompt Israel to a first strike ... McGovern has a good article on that, you'll find it last.] First, though, more illustration about how the Spin Machine works, thanks to the method in Fitzgerald’s plodding, tedious and point-by-point madness.

Obama, by the way, just declared his presidential intention with a dynamite speech that couldn’t help but stir the heart — if he can prove that he can accomplish the many points he touched on, he’ll have the populists … he and Edwards would be an amazing, forward-thinking team. I’ll post on him at a later date.

Jude

Trial exposes White House crisis machine
Pete Yost, AP
Friday, February 9, 2007

WASHINGTON — David Addington, chief legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, says he was taken aback when the White House started making public pronouncements about the CIA leak investigation.

In the fall of 2003, President Bush’s press secretary was categorically denying that either Karl Rove or I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby was involved in exposing the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA employee married to a critic of the war in Iraq.

“Why are you making these statements?” Addington asked White House communications director Dan Bartlett.

“Your boss is the one who wanted” them, Bartlett replied, referring to Cheney.

With that, “I shut up,” Addington recalled recently for jurors in Libby’s CIA leak trial, which begins its fourth week on Monday with Libby’s lawyers calling their first witnesses.

So far, the testimony of Addington and other administration aides, along with documents and Libby’s audiotaped grand jury testimony, have provided a rare glimpse of how the Bush White House scrambled to respond to a political crisis as it intersected a criminal investigation.

At the intersection was Cheney, along with Rove and Libby, who were working in the summer of 2003 to rebut claims by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that Bush had misled the nation about prewar intelligence on Iraq.

The White House denials on behalf of Rove and Libby came just before Rove secretly began acknowledging to the FBI that he had confirmed Plame’s identity for conservative columnist Bob Novak, who first published her name and relationship to Wilson.

About the same time, Libby came under suspicion because NBC News Washington bureau chief Tim Russert had talked to the FBI, contradicting Libby’s version of a conversation between the two men that would become the heart of the perjury and obstruction charges against Libby.

Bush and Cheney made a common mistake in their public handling of the Plame affair, says presidential scholar and University of Texas government professor Bruce Buchanan, who has watched Bush’s career since his days as Texas governor.

“They’re in a high-stakes game of poker, the immediate pressure is political and the people in charge are political people,” Buchanan said. “If there is a legal issue it will dawn, but by then someone is out on a limb.”

Testimony and documents in the trial show Rove joining Cheney in trying to undercut Wilson’s claim that the administration had twisted prewar intelligence to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.

“We’re a day late in getting responses to the story,” Rove told a staff meeting, according to Libby’s notes.

“Get the full story out,” Cheney told aides, according to Libby’s grand jury testimony.

There were glitches in the leak campaign against Wilson.

New York Times reporter Judith Miller never wrote a story about it, even after Cheney persuaded Bush to declassify prewar intelligence so it could be shared with Miller. The intelligence report said Iraq was vigorously trying to acquire uranium from the African nation of Niger.

“It was a totally failed effort,” Libby told the grand jury of his meetings with Miller.

But there were successes too.

Libby recalled asking Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz to reach out to The Wall Street Journal.

“I don’t have as good a relationship with The Wall Street Journal as Secretary Wolfowitz did,” Libby told the grand jury. “I talked to Secretary Wolfowitz about trying to get that point across, and he undertook to do so.”

The Journal ran an editorial focusing on the theme Libby wanted. The editorial stated that the prewar intelligence the newspaper was describing had not come from the White House, “which to our mind has handled this story in a hamhanded fashion.”

In the Libby trial, Bush comes across mostly as an interested observer.

According to Libby’s notes, some of which surfaced at the trial, Bush expressed interest in a May 6, 2003 New York Times column critical of the administration and referencing an unnamed former ambassador, who turned out to be Wilson.

In questioning Libby before the grand jury, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald juxtaposed Bush’s public statements condemning leakers and Libby’s contacts with reporters, some of whom have testified against him.

“Were you at all concerned that while the president was stating that there’s no White House involvement in any leaks whatsoever, that you were one of the people who may have been referred to” in press reports about possible White House leakers? asked Fitzgerald.

In the grand jury recordings, the prosecutor also asked Libby about his interaction with Rove a few days before Novak exposed Plame’s CIA identity. Libby said Rove “was animated that Novak was animated about this.” Libby added that Rove “thought it was a good thing that somebody was writing about” Wilson and his wife.

Cheney told Libby early in the effort to deal with Wilson that his wife worked at the CIA. And while the Cheney-Libby team worked in lockstep attacking Wilson in July 2003, Libby said he faced a somewhat distant vice president when the affair came under investigation, first by the Justice Department, then by Fitzgerald.

Regarding his discussions with reporters about Wilson’s wife, “I would have been happy to unburden myself” to Cheney, Libby told the grand jury, but “he didn’t want to hear it.” ++

Losing their hype firepower
Joey Slinger, Toronto Star
Feb 08, 2007 04:30 AM

Those of you looking forward to an American attack on Iran shouldn’t count your chickens.

Those of you expecting it might happen any day now could be in for a disappointment.
There is a big problem.

It’s not that the U.S. doesn’t have enough troops to spare to fight Iran. It doesn’t have enough troops to spare to fight Prince Edward Island.

It’s not that the American people don’t have the will to fight Iran. They don’t have the will to fight Iraq, but what difference has that made?

Things like not having popular support or sufficient military muscle don’t mean anything when a nation’s commander in chief is a dingbat. (I use “dingbat” in the clinical sense, meaning dingbat.)

The problem is far bigger than those would be even if they were problems. This problem is so big it could be a real problem. It might even be insurmountable.

It has to do with the limits on global resources. On one resource in particular. And to put it in perspective, take a look at the following headline:

“Is The World Running Out Of Hype?”

Scary, isn’t it? A worldwide hype shortage.

That’s a hypothetical headline of course – the media aren’t up to speed on the situation yet. But don’t get the idea that it’s a hypothetical crisis. It’s a hype crisis.

Here’s a perfect illustration of it: “President George W. Bush says the U.S. has to attack Iran because he really, really, really wants to.”

Not very persuasive, is it? Historically, governments, even Bush’s government, have tried for something slightly more electrifying.

It’s not as if he doesn’t have his ducks in a row.

The ground has been carefully prepared. From the start, Iran was an Axle of Evil.

There have been gross provocations. This week, it showed off the centrifuges it started spinning to make what could be atom-bomb components.

There are incredible pressures.

Pressure 1: Israel, along with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – among the most influential lobbies and biggest political contributors in the U.S. – doesn’t like the extremely bad attitude the Iranian president has about Israel and the Holocaust and wants the U.S. to get seriously belligerent.

Pressure 2: Vice-president Dick Cheney isn’t going to ease up strategically until the last drop of oil has been pumped out of the Middle East. Never mind that his brain is full of spiders; oil made his fortune, oil made Bush’s fortune, Iran is a threat to their oil supply.

Pressure 3: Bush desperately needs to change the subject, and Iran would be a breath of fresh air. James Fallows phrases it differently in the Atlantic when he says war with Iran “would make us look back fondly on the minor inconvenience of being bogged down in Iraq,” but it amounts to the same thing. (See “he really, really, really wants to,” above.)

But do they have the wherewithal? Can they “sex up the dossier” as their wavering British friends might have said in the good old days? Have they got enough hype?

Remember how it was in those good old days?

There were the WMDs.

There were Saddam’s secret agents consulting with Al Qaeda’s agents.

There was Iraq trying to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.

There were all those trucks driving around Iraq that were mobile chemical- and biological-weapons factories. When he showed the UN pictures of them, Colin Powell called it “evidence, not conjecture.” He didn’t need to pussyfoot. “These are the facts.”

There were the aluminum tubes. Could they be used to make a nuclear bomb?

Condoleezza Rice: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” George W.: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

Hot damn! That was Grade A, No. 1 hype.

Not one word was true. There wasn’t one actual fact on the whole list.

It didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was the best hype ever seen. All the experts agreed. And nobody had ever laid it on thicker.

But maybe they overdid it. The well appears to be dry. The cupboard bare. There may not be enough hype left for the most powerful dingbat in the freedom-loving world to even justify ordering lunch.

“I’m so hungry I could eat the hind end off a grizzly bear.”

When everybody replies, “Oh, relax George. Give it a rest,” it doesn’t look too hopeful, does it? ++

SHADES OF JUDITH MILLER: NY TIMES GOES SLAM DUNK ON IRAN
by spread the word IRAQ NAM, Daily Kos
Fri Feb 09, 2007

REMEMBER HOW THE NY TIMES helped lie us into war in Iraq…

    Monday, September 9, 2002.

    U.S.: Iraq Is Hunting for Nukes
    By Michael Gordon and Judith Miller

    WASHINGTON — More than a decade after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has intensified its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, U.S. officials said Saturday.

    In the past 14 months, Iraq has tried to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium…

    Well, they’re at it again… only this time the anonymously-sourced, un-substantiated, un-rebutted reporting is on Iran providing the ‘deadliest bomb in Iraq’.

From tonight’s headline story:

    Deadliest Bomb in Iraq Is Made by Iran, U.S. Says

    WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

    The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.

    In interviews, civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details to support what until now has been a more generally worded claim, in a new National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran is providing “lethal support” to Shiite militants in Iraq.

Notice the lack of any named source, other than ‘US Says’. You won’t find one in all three pages of the story. Hell, you won’t even find a ‘requested anonymity’ reference. And if the ‘US’ is saying it, shouldn’t it be on the record?

And if the evidence is so conclusive, why the anonymity? Could it be because of accusations of manipulation of intelligence…

    U.S. delays report on Iranian role in Iraq over issue of manipulation of intelligence

    WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has postponed plans to offer public details of its charges of Iranian meddling inside Iraq amid internal divisions over the strength of the evidence, U.S. officials said.

    U.S. officials promised last week to provide evidence of Iranian activities that led President Bush to announce Jan. 10 that U.S. forces would begin taking the offensive against Iranian agents who threatened Americans.

    But some officials in Washington are concerned that some of the material may be inconclusive and that other data cannot be released without jeopardizing intelligence sources and methods.

They want to avoid repeating the embarrassment that followed the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when it became clear that information the administration cited to justify the war was incorrect, said the officials, who described the internal discussions on condition of anonymity.

Or could it just be that, as the LA Times reported: scant evidence found of Iran-Iraq arms link, and the administration knows how to play the NY Times like a harp?

But according the NY Times ‘report’…

    The officials said they were willing to discuss the issue to respond to what they described as an increasingly worrisome threat to American forces in Iraq, and were not trying to lay the basis for an American attack on Iran.

It must be quite an increase, since the administration and its British ally has been pushing this story since at least October, 2005.

But this isn’t about a drumbeat leading to war with Iran. After all, the anonymously-sourced, un-substantiated, un-rebutted report tells us so. And those aircraft carriers and strike forces ordered to the Persian Gulf? Well, that’s not part of this NY Times report.

And it’s probably just an eery coincidence that the ‘deadliest bomb’ story is written by the same Michael Gordon who, along with Judith Miller, told the world about the slam dunk intelligence on the aluminum tubes, part of Saddam’s ‘worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb’. ++

Al-Qaeda Suspects Color White House Debate Over Iran
Dafna Linzer, Washington Post
Saturday, February 10, 2007; Front Page

Last week, the CIA sent an urgent report to President Bush’s National Security Council: Iranian authorities had arrested two al-Qaeda operatives traveling through Iran on their way from Pakistan to Iraq. The suspects were caught along a well-worn, if little-noticed, route for militants determined to fight U.S. troops on Iraqi soil, according to a senior intelligence official.

The arrests were presented to Bush’s senior policy advisers as evidence that Iran appears committed to stopping al-Qaeda foot traffic across its borders, the intelligence official said. That assessment comes at a time when the Bush administration, in an effort to push for further U.N. sanctions on the Islamic republic, is preparing to publicly accuse Tehran of cooperating with and harboring al-Qaeda suspects.

The strategy has sparked a growing debate within the administration and the intelligence community, according to U.S. intelligence and government officials. One faction is pressing for more economic embargoes against Iran, including asset freezes and travel bans for the country’s top leaders. But several senior intelligence and counterterrorism officials worry that a public push regarding the al-Qaeda suspects held in Iran could jeopardize U.S. intelligence-gathering and prompt the Iranians to free some of the most wanted individuals.

“There was real debate about all this,” said one counterterrorism official. “If we go public, the Iranians could turn them loose.” The official added: “At this point, we know where these guys are and at least they are off the streets. We could lose them for years if we go down this path.”

The administration’s planned diplomatic offensive is part of an effort to pressure Tehran from multiple directions. Bush has given the U.S. military the authority to kill or capture Iranian government agents working with Shiite militias inside Iraq. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said serial numbers and markings on some explosives used in Iraq indicate that the material came from Iran, but he offered no evidence.

With the aim of shaking Tehran’s commitment to its nuclear program, Bush also approved last fall secret operations to target Iranian influence in southern Lebanon, in western Afghanistan, in the Palestinian territories and inside Iran. The new strategy, a senior administration official said, aims to portray Iran as a “terror-producing country, instead of an oil-producing country,” with links to al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and death squads in Iraq.

U.S. officials have asserted for years that several dozen al-Qaeda fighters, including Osama bin Laden’s son, slipped across the Afghan border into Iran as U.S. troops hunted for the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. U.S. and allied intelligence services, which have monitored the men’s presence inside Iran, reported that Tehran was holding them under house arrest as bargaining chips for potential deals with Washington.

Last fall, Bush administration officials asked the CIA to compile a list of those suspects so the White House could publicize their presence. For years, the administration has not revealed their names, in part because it sought to protect its intelligence sources but also because at the time the U.S. government was concealing the identities of suspects it was holding in secret CIA custody.

But the names of some of the men in Iran have become public, including “high-value” targets such as al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith of Kuwait and Saif al-Adel of Egypt. U.S. intelligence officials said they are members of the “al-Qaeda operational management committee.”

U.S. intelligence officials said there are suspicions, but no proof, that one of them may have been involved from afar in planning an attack in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May 2003. Intelligence officials said bin Laden’s son Saad is also being held with the other men in Iran.

Five administration officials were made available for interviews for this story on the condition that they not be identified. Other officials who spoke without permission — including senior officials, career analysts and policymakers — said their standing with the White House would be at risk if they were quoted by name.

The State Department, Pentagon and CIA referred all questions about the story to the National Security Council. In a written response to questions, NSC spokesman Gordon Johndroe said: “Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism is one of the reasons for the sanctions now against it. We note that U.N. Security Council resolutions already oblige all states to ensure that members of terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, are brought to justice.”

Since al-Qaeda fighters began streaming into Iran from Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, Tehran had turned over hundreds of people to U.S. allies and provided U.S. intelligence with the names, photographs and fingerprints of those it held in custody, according to senior U.S. intelligence and administration officials. In early 2003, it offered to hand over the remaining high-value targets directly to the United States if Washington would turn over a group of exiled Iranian militants hiding in Iraq.

Some of Bush’s top advisers pushed for the trade, arguing that taking custody of bin Laden’s son and the others would produce new leads on al-Qaeda. They were also willing to trade away the exiles — members of a group on the State Department’s terrorist list — who had aligned with Saddam Hussein in an effort to overthrow the Iranian government.

Officials have said Bush ultimately rejected the exchange on the advice of Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who argued that any engagement would legitimize Iran and other state sponsors of terrorism. Bush’s National Security Council agreed to accept information from Iran on al-Qaeda but offer nothing in return, officials said.

But no information has been forthcoming, intelligence officials said. One official said the CIA and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency have disagreed over how effectively the Iranians are controlling al-Qaeda members and whether the Tehran government is aware of the extent of al-Qaeda movements through the country.

Nevertheless, administration officials said they are determined to press Iran on the matter.

“We are not convinced that the Iranians have been honest or open about the level or degree of al-Qaeda presence in their midst,” said one Bush adviser who was instrumental in coming up with a more confrontational U.S. approach to Iran. “They have not made proper accounting with respect to U.N. resolutions, have not been clear about who is in detention and have not been clear as to what is happening to individuals who might be in custody.”

Bush administration officials pointed to U.N. Security Council Resolutions 1267 and 1373, which state that harboring al-Qaeda members constitutes a threat to international peace and security, and authorize force to combat that threat. The resolutions compel nations to share any information on al-Qaeda suspects and give the United Nations authority to freeze the assets of suspects and those who provide them with safe haven.

Two U.S. officials said the administration plans to argue that Iran is violating those resolutions. A team of senior U.S. officials has been holding briefings for visiting European diplomats on the issue while administration lawyers prepare options for holding Iran in violation of U.N. resolutions.

“We’ve started a more aggressive and major attempt to try to convince other countries to use their influence on this issue,” a senior U.S. diplomat said. “Until now, the Europeans have been focused on the nuclear issue and we want this high up on the agenda.”

But another government official predicted that no European country would support a call on Iran to turn the al-Qaeda group over to U.S. military detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a facility widely condemned by Washington’s closest allies. In the past year, U.S. officials said they successfully pushed Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to seek extradition of their citizens held in Iran, but Tehran rebuffed the requests.

Administration officials said they interpreted the refusal as evidence of cooperation between the Iranian government and the group.

“We’d be happy to see them face trial anywhere,” a senior administration official said. ++

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Bush administration delays rollout of intel showing Iran’s help to Iraqi militias Michael Roston
Raw Story
Friday February 9, 2007

After the damage to its reputation caused by using faulty intelligence to justify the invasion in Iraq, the Bush administration has been more cautious about publicly presenting evidence of Iran’s assistance to Iraqi militias, according to a report in the National Journal today.

Reporter and blogger Laura Rozen reported today that twice in the past month, the Bush administration has delayed presentation of PowerPoint slides making the case that Iran is assisting Shi’a militias in Iraq’s simmering sectarian conflict. While US officials in Baghdad are ready to present the slides, the White House is wary that “the press will scrutinize the information intensely, that the intelligence “dots” that the administration has assembled about Iran in Iraq can be connected multiple ways.”

Rozen explains that while the White House sees ‘damning’ evidence of Iran’s engagement with the Shi’a side of Iraq’s hostilities, “the intelligence community is quietly indicating that the case purporting to prove Iran’s involvement in Iraq is murkier and less decisive than the thrust of recent administration statements suggests.”

The National Journal also indicates that there is more oversight coming on the part of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with regard to the intelligence community’s Iran analysis. But an anonymous administration official still insisted to Rozen that the White House has good evidence of its claims about Iran’s activities in Iraq.

“The physical evidence we have — weapons, ammunition, explosives — have packaging material. When you look at it, it will be obvious … that the stuff came from Iran,” he tells her.

However, Rozen adds, “But that evidence, the official conceded, doesn’t tell exactly why it was sent, or who sent it.” The administration is therefore likely to try to prove that the materiel is the same as what has been used by Iran-supplied Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But it may not matter according to one former intelligence officer that Rozen quotes.

“None of this hinges [on the Iran dossier]. We are not going to call this off if we can’t prove that Iran is furnishing munitions to Iraqi groups,” he says… ++

Target Iran: US able to strike in the spring
Despite denials, Pentagon plans for possible attack on nuclear sites are well advanced

Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian
Saturday February 10, 2007

A second battle group has been ordered to the Gulf and extra missiles have already been sent out. Meanwhile oil is being stockpiled. Photograph: Reuters

US preparations for an air strike against Iran are at an advanced stage, in spite of repeated public denials by the Bush administration, according to informed sources in Washington.

The present military build-up in the Gulf would allow the US to mount an attack by the spring. But the sources said that if there was an attack, it was more likely next year, just before Mr Bush leaves office.

Neo-conservatives, particularly at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, are urging Mr Bush to open a new front against Iran. So too is the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The state department and the Pentagon are opposed, as are Democratic congressmen and the overwhelming majority of Republicans. The sources said Mr Bush had not yet made a decision.

The Bush administration insists the military build-up is not offensive but aimed at containing Iran and forcing it to make diplomatic concessions. The aim is to persuade Tehran to curb its suspect nuclear weapons programme and abandon ambitions for regional expansion.

Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, said yesterday: “I don’t know how many times the president, secretary [of state Condoleezza] Rice and I have had to repeat that we have no intention of attacking Iran.”

But Vincent Cannistraro, a Washington-based intelligence analyst, shared the sources’ assessment that Pentagon planning was well under way. “Planning is going on, in spite of public disavowals by Gates. Targets have been selected. For a bombing campaign against nuclear sites, it is quite advanced. The military assets to carry this out are being put in place.”

He added: “We are planning for war. It is incredibly dangerous.”

Deployment

Mr Cannistraro, who worked for the CIA and the National Security Council, stressed that no decision had been made.

Last month Mr Bush ordered a second battle group led by the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Gulf in support of the USS Eisenhower. The USS Stennis is due to arrive within the next 10 days. Extra US Patriot missiles have been sent to the region, as well as more minesweepers, in anticipation of Iranian retaliatory action.

In another sign that preparations are under way, Mr Bush has ordered oil reserves to be stockpiled.

The danger is that the build-up could spark an accidental war. Iranian officials said on Thursday that they had tested missiles capable of hitting warships in the Gulf.

Colonel Sam Gardiner, a former air force officer who has carried out war games with Iran as the target, supported the view that planning for an air strike was under way: “Gates said there is no planning for war. We know this is not true. He possibly meant there is no plan for an immediate strike. It was sloppy wording.

“All the moves being made over the last few weeks are consistent with what you would do if you were going to do an air strike. We have to throw away the notion the US could not do it because it is too tied up in Iraq. It is an air operation.”

One of the main driving forces behind war, apart from the vice-president’s office, is the AEI, headquarters of the neo-conservatives. A member of the AEI coined the slogan “axis of evil” that originally lumped Iran in with Iraq and North Korea. Its influence on the White House appeared to be in decline last year amid endless bad news from Iraq, for which it had been a cheerleader.

But in the face of opposition from Congress, the Pentagon and state department, Mr Bush opted last month for an AEI plan to send more troops to Iraq. Will he support calls from within the AEI for a strike on Iran?

Josh Muravchik, a Middle East specialist at the AEI, is among its most vocal supporters of such a strike.

“I do not think anyone in the US is talking about invasion. We have been chastened by the experience of Iraq, even a hawk like myself.” But an air strike was another matter. The danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon “is not just that it might use it out of the blue but as a shield to do all sorts of mischief. I do not believe there will be any way to stop this happening other than physical force.”

Mr Bush is part of the American generation that refuses to forgive Iran for the 1979-81 hostage crisis. He leaves office in January 2009 and has said repeatedly that he does not want a legacy in which Iran has achieved superpower status in the region and come close to acquiring a nuclear weapon capability. The logic of this is that if diplomatic efforts fail to persuade Iran to stop uranium enrichment then the only alternative left is to turn to the military.

Mr Muravchik is intent on holding Mr Bush to his word: “The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. That is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air.”

Other neo-cons elsewhere in Washington are opposed to an air strike but advocate a different form of military action, supporting Iranian armed groups, in particular the Mujahideen-e Khalq (MEK), even though the state department has branded it a terrorist organisation.

Raymond Tanter, founder of the Iran Policy Committee, which includes former officials from the White House, state department and intelligence services, is a leading advocate of support for the MEK. If it comes to an air strike, he favours bunker-busting bombs. “I believe the only way to get at the deeply buried sites at Natanz and Arak is probably to use bunker-buster bombs, some of which are nuclear tipped. I do not believe the US would do that but it has sold them to Israel.”

Opposition support

Another neo-conservative, Meyrav Wurmser, director of the centre for Middle East policy at the Hudson Institute, also favours supporting Iranian opposition groups. She is disappointed with the response of the Bush administration so far to Iran and said that if the aim of US policy after 9/11 was to make the Middle East safer for the US, it was not working because the administration had stopped at Iraq. “There is not enough political will for a strike. There seems to be various notions of what the policy should be.”

In spite of the president’s veto on negotiation with Tehran, the state department has been involved since 2003 in back-channel approaches and meetings involving Iranian officials and members of the Bush administration or individuals close to it. But when last year the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sent a letter as an overture, the state department dismissed it within hours of its arrival.

Support for negotiations comes from centrist and liberal thinktanks. Afshin Molavi, a fellow of the New America Foundation, said: “To argue diplomacy has not worked is false because it has not been tried. Post-90s and through to today, when Iran has been ready to dance, the US refused, and when the US has been ready to dance, Iran has refused. We are at a stage where Iran is ready to walk across the dance floor and the US is looking away.”

He is worried about “a miscalculation that leads to an accidental war”.

The catalyst could be Iraq. The Pentagon said yesterday that it had evidence - serial numbers of projectiles as well as explosives - of Iraqi militants’ weapons that had come from Iran. In a further sign of the increased tension, Iran’s main nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, cancelled a visit to Munich for what would have been the first formal meeting with his western counterparts since last year.

If it does come to war, Mr Muravchik said Iran would retaliate, but that on balance it would be worth it to stop a country that he said had “Death to America” as its official slogan.

“We have to gird our loins and prepare to absorb the counter-shock,” he said.

War of words

    “If Iran escalates its military action in Iraq to the detriment of our troops and/or innocent Iraqi people, we will respond firmly”

    ~ George Bush, in an interview with National Public Radio

    “The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways. They are doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point”

    ~ Robert Gates

    “I think it’s been pretty well-known that Iran is fishing in troubled waters”

    ~ Dick Cheney

    “It is absolutely parallel. They’re using the same dance steps - demonise the bad guys, the pretext of diplomacy, keep out of negotiations, use proxies. It is Iraq redux”

    ~ Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counter- terrorism specialist, in Vanity Fair, on echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq

    “US policymakers and analysts know that the Iranian nation would not let an invasion go without a response. Enemies of the Islamic system fabricated various rumours about death and health to demoralise the Iranian nation, but they did not know that they are not dealing with only one person in Iran. They are facing a nation”

    ~ Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Rice denies bungling response to broad Iranian diplomatic overture
Anne Gearan, AP
Friday, February 09, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice disputed claims Wednesday that President George W. Bush’s administration bungled a diplomatic overture from Iran that offered a broad dialogue with the United States after nearly a quarter-century of enmity.

Rice told Congress she does not remember seeing the 2003 Iranian proposal, which suggested Iran was ready to discuss its disputed nuclear program, support for militant groups the United States labels terrorists and the acceptance of Israel.

“We had people who said the Iranians went to talk to you, lots of people who said the Iranians want to talk to you,” Rice said during an exchange with U.S. Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat.

“But I think I would have noticed if the Iranians had said: `We’re ready to recognize Israel,”‘ Rice said.
“I just don’t remember ever seeing any such thing.”

The document, faxed to the U.S. State Department in the early days of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, proposed direct talks, perhaps in Paris. Iraq was at the top of the proposed agenda, with Iran proposing “active Iranian support for Iraqi stabilization.”

The text of the document has been provided to news organizations.

“You did not see that supposed fax?” Wexler asked Rice.

“I just have to tell you that perhaps somebody saw something of the like but I can tell you I would have noticed if the Iranians had offered to recognize Israel,” she replied.

The administration dismissed the proposal, which has since become a touchstone for criticism that the Bush administration muffed a chance to avert Iran’s rush toward nuclear proficiency that could produce a bomb.

Rice was asked about such criticism from a former U.S. National Security Council aide, Flynt Leverett.

“I don’t know what Flynt Leverett’s talking about, quite frankly,” Rice said.

“Maybe I should ask him when he came to me and said: `We have a proposal from Iran and we really ought to take it.”‘

Leverett had left the NSC by the time the fax arrived but he said in an interview he knows the document was sent to the NSC. It also went to Rice’s predecessor as secretary of state, Colin Powell, former officials have said.

Leverett said he has never discussed with Rice whether she saw it.

“This administration, out of some combination of ideological blindness and incompetence, couldn’t be bothered to explore whether this opportunity was as serious as it looked on paper,” Leverett said Wednesday.

Critics also said engagement in 2003 might have blunted Iranian influence in Iraq. Shiite Muslim militias and death squads, some with ties to Iran, are blamed for much of the sectarian violence in Iraq.

In June 2006, Rice had indicated she was familiar with the proposal. She was asked about the offer during an interview with National Public Radio, and she appeared to provide the first official confirmation it existed.

“What the Iranians wanted earlier was to be one-on-one with the United States so that this could be about the United States and Iran,” Rice said then.

She contrasted that with the current U.S. stance, in which the United States has offered to join European-led talks with Iran over its nuclear program if Iran meets preconditions. Iran has refused.

The Bush administration has resisted suggestions, including from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, that it should engage Iran to try and improve security in next-door Iraq. Legislators challenged that position Wednesday and the administration’s current stepped-up rhetoric and seeming provocation of Iraq.

Rice repeated Bush’s assurance that “we’re not planning or intending an attack on Iran.”

“What we are doing is we’re responding to a number of Iranian policies both in Iraq and around the world that are actually quite dangerous for our national security,” she said. ++

Helping Israel Die
Ray McGovern
Friday, February 9, 2007 by TomPaine.com

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are unwittingly playing Dr. Jack Kevorkian in helping the state of Israel commit suicide. For this is the inevitable consequence of the planned air and missile attack on Iran. The pockmarked, littered landscape in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan and the endless applicant queues at al-Qaeda and other terrorist recruiting stations testify eloquently to the unintended consequences of myopic policymakers in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Mesmerized. Sadly, this is the best word to describe those of us awake to the inexorable march of folly to war with Iran and the growing danger to Israel’s security, especially over the medium and long term. An American and/or Israeli attack on Iran will let slip the dogs of war. Those dogs never went to obedience school. They will not be denied their chance to bite, and Israel’s arsenal of nuclear weapons will be powerless to muzzle them.

In my view, not since 1948 has the very existence of Israel hung so much in the balance. Can Bush/Cheney and the Israeli leaders not see it? Pity that no one seems to have read our first president’s warning on the noxious effects of entangling alliances. The supreme irony is that in their fervor to help, as well as use, Israel, Bush and Cheney seem blissfully unaware that they are leading it down a garden path and off a cliff.

Provoke and Pre-empt

Whether it is putting the kibosh on direct talks with Iran or between Israel and Syria, the influence and motives of the vice president are more transparent than those of Bush. Sure, Cheney told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer recently that the administration’s Iraq policy would be “an enormous success story,” but do not believe those who dismiss Cheney as “delusional.” He and his neoconservative friends are crazy like a fox. They have been pushing for confrontation with Iran for many years, and saw the invasion of Iraq in that context. Alluding to recent U.S. military moves, Robert Dreyfuss rightly describes the neocons as “crossing their fingers in the hope that Iran will respond provocatively, making what is now a low-grade cold war inexorably heat up.”

But what about the president? How to explain his fixation with fixing Iran’s wagon? Cheney’s influence over Bush has been shown to be considerable ever since the one-man search committee for the 2000 vice presidential candidate picked Cheney. The vice president can play Bush like a violin. But what strings is he using here? Where is the resonance?

Experience has shown the president to be an impressionable sort with a roulette penchant for putting great premium on initial impressions and latching onto people believed to be kindred souls—be it Russian President Vladimir Putin (trust at first sight), hail-fellow-well-met CIA director George Tenet or oozing-testosterone-from-every-pore former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Of particular concern was his relationship with Sharon. Retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, a master of discretion with the media, saw fit to tell London’s Financial Times two and a half years ago that Sharon had Bush “mesmerized” and “wrapped around his little finger.”

As chair of the prestigious President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under George W. Bush and national security adviser to his father, Scowcroft was uniquely positioned to know—and to draw comparisons. He was summarily fired after making the comments about Sharon and is now persona non grata at the White House.

Compassion Deficit Disorder

George W. Bush first met Sharon in 1998, when the Texas governor was taken on a tour of the Middle East by Matthew Brooks, then executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Sharon was foreign minister and took Bush on a helicopter tour over the Israeli occupied territories. An Aug. 3, 2006 McClatchy wire story by Ron Hutcheson quotes Matthew Brooks:

    If there’s a starting point for George W. Bush’s attachment to Israel, it’s the day in late 1998, when he stood on a hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, with eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’ He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience. He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved.

Bush made gratuitous but revealing reference to that trip at the first meeting of his National Security Council (NSC) on Jan. 30, 2001. After announcing he would abandon the decades-long role of honest broker between Israelis and Palestinians and would tilt pronouncedly toward Israel, Bush said he would let Sharon resolve the dispute however he saw fit. At that point he brought up his trip to Israel with the Republican Jewish Coalition and the flight over Palestinian camps, but there was no sense of concern for the lot of the Palestinians. In A Pretext for War James Bamford quotes Bush: “Looked real bad down there,” he said with a frown. Then he said it was time to end America’s efforts in the region. “I don’t see much we can do over there at this point,” he said.
So much for the Sermon on the Mount. The version I read puts a premium on actively working for justice. There is no suggestion that tears suffice.

Then-Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill, who was at the NSC meeting, reported that Colin Powell, the newly-minted but nominal secretary of state, was taken completely by surprise at this nonchalant jettisoning of longstanding policy. Powell demurred, warning that this would unleash Sharon and “the consequences could be dire, especially for the Palestinians.” But according to O’Neill, Bush just shrugged, saying, “Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things.” O’Neill says that Powell seemed “startled.” It is a safe bet that the vice president was in no way startled.

A similar account reflecting Bush’s compassion deficit disorder leaps from the pages of Ron Susskind’s The One Percent Doctrine . Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader was in high dudgeon in April 2002 when he arrived in Crawford to take issue with Bush’s decision to tilt toward Israel and scrap the American role of honest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

With Bush’s freshly bestowed “man-of-peace” epithet for Sharon still ringing in his ear, Abdullah began by insisting that the president and his aides watch a 15-minute video. It showed the mayhem on the West Bank, American-made tanks, bloodied and dead children, screaming mothers. Then, still wordless, they all filed into another room where the Saudis proceeded to make specific demands, but Bush appeared distracted and was non-responsive. After a few minutes, the president turned to Abdullah and said, “Let’s go for a drive. Just you and me. I’ll show you the ranch.”

Bush was so obviously unprepared to discuss substance with his Saudi guests that some of the president’s aides checked into what had happened. The briefing packet for the president had been diverted to Cheney’s office. Bush never got it, so he was totally unaware of what the Saudis hoped to accomplish in making the trip to Crawford. (There is little doubt that this has been a common experience over the past six years and that there are, in effect, two “deciders” in the White House, one of them controlling the paper flow.)

Not that Bush was starved for background briefings. Indeed, he showed a preference to get them from Prime Minister Sharon who, with his senior military aide, Gen. Yoav Galant, briefed the president both in Crawford (in 2005) and the Oval Office (in 2003) on Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” Sorry if I find that odd. That used to be our job at the CIA. I’ll bet Sharon and Galant packed a bigger punch.

There is, no doubt, more at play in Bush’s attitude and behavior regarding Israel and Palestine. One need not be a psychologist to see ample evidence of oedipal tendencies. It is no secret that the president has been privately critical of what he perceives to be his father’s mistakes. Susskind notes, for example, that Bush defended his tilt toward Israel by telling an old foreign policy hand, “I’m not going to be supportive of my father and all his Arab buddies!” And it seems certain that Ariel Sharon gave the young Bush an earful about the efforts of James Baker, his father’s secretary of state, to do the unthinkable; i.e., crank Arab grievances into deals he tried to broker between Israel and the Palestinians. It seems clear that this is one reason the Baker-Hamilton report was dead on arrival.

With Friends Like This…

George W. Bush may have the best of intentions in his zeal to defend Israel, but he and Cheney have the most myopic of policies. Israeli leaders risk much if they take reassurance from the president’s rhetoric, particularly vis-à-vis Iran. I am constantly amazed to find, as I speak around the country, that the vast majority of educated Americans believe we have a defense treaty with Israel. We don’t, but one can readily see how it is they are misled. Listen to the president exactly two years ago:

    Clearly, if I was the leader of Israel and I’d listened to some of the statements b y the Iranian ayatollahs that regarded the security of my country, I’d be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon as well. And, in that Israel is our ally [sic]—and in that we’ve made a very strong commitment to support Israel—we will support Israel if her security is threatened.

We do no favors for Israeli leaders in giving them the impression they have carte blanche in their neighborhood—especially as regards Iran—and that we will bail them out, no matter what. Have they learned nothing from the recent past? Far from enhancing Israel’s security, the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Washington’s encouragement of Israel’s feckless attack on Lebanon last summer resulted in more breeding ground for terrorist activity against Israel. This will seem child’s play compared to what would be in store, should the US and/or Israel bomb Iran.

Bottom line: there is a growing threat to Israel from suicide bombers. The most dangerous two work in the White House. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

(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.)

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