TW3 — and wrong-headed dickery
That Was The Week That Was … frustrating; the public is so witless that they don’t see how FEW people [of the Pub persuasion] are running them around by the nose. I had to chortle, reading the results of a poll that said Rush Limbaugh enjoys less popularity than the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Let me give you the same advice I gave a loved one today, who bewailed a fragile sense of self-esteem:
Hellooooo — you’re listening to the WRONG people!
And speaking of wrong people, the bonus is a voice that is the WRONGEST in the nation — Uncle Dick, who is going to write a book giving us all the poop on his long career of taking matters into his own hands [now that ... and I quote ... the "statute of limitations has expired."] I should also mention that Uncle Dick’s poll numbers are even bleaker than Rush’s. Imagine. Pffffft!
This new dickery is all about Gitmo being closed; the ACLU would like you to write a letter to the editor, getting the facts straight — Move On* would like you to do the same for the stimulus package, which Obama said, today, must be passed quickly if we want to prevent a catastrophe.
Ya know, I don’t think this guy is given to exaggeration — maybe we ought to stop in-fighting and pick up a fire hose, huh?! As well, if the Pubs obstruct the water hydrant, the meltdown they seem so intent on shifting to Obama as his problem, will forever become theirs! At least while I’m alive to write about it!
Oh, yeah — and if your son wants to learn how to play the cello, steer them toward the flute.
Jude
* I included a list of Move On resources at the bottom of this post, for your convenience.
HARPER’S WEEKLY
February 3, 2009
Two days after three candidates and two campaign workers
were kidnapped and murdered, Iraqis voted in the first
national elections since 2005, choosing between 14,000
candidates running for 440 provincial offices. Two men
were shot and wounded at a polling place in Sadr City, and
some voters were turned away when their names could not be
found on voting rolls dating from food ration lists held
over from Saddam Hussein’s reign. “This day is a victory
for all Iraqis,” said an Iraqi general in Kirkuk. “I don’t
know whom to vote for,” said an inmate at Basra’s Ma’qal
prison, “but a sheikh wrote this number on my hand, and I
will vote for this number.” The Republican National
Committee elected its first black chairman, Maryland
Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, after six rounds of
voting. “Obviously the winds of change are blowing,” said
a rival candidate. “For those who wish to obstruct,” said
Steele, “get ready to get knocked over.” One day before
the 360th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, the
Illinois State Senate voted 59 to zero to impeach Governor
Rod Blagojevich. “I thought about Mandela, Dr. King, and
Gandhi,” said Blagojevich prior to the impeachment, “and
tried to put some perspective to all this, and that is
what I am doing now.” Lieutenant Governor Patrick J. Quinn
succeeded Blagojevich as governor of Illinois. “You want
to know my philosophy?” said Quinn. “One day a
peacock. The next day a feather duster.”
A report found that shoddy electrical work by former
Halliburton subsidiary KBR led to the electrocution and
death of at least one soldier, and the State Department
decided not to renew Blackwater’s contract in Iraq after
the Iraqi government refused the security firm, whose
employees shot 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007, a license to
operate. “It would not be a mortal blow,” said company
founder Erik Prince of his firm’s imminent dismissal. “But
it would hurt us.” The Israel Defense Forces deployed
eight antelope to eat vegetation that might be hiding
Hezbollah guerrillas, and army worms stormed villages
across Liberia. A New Zealand man named Chris Ogle bought
a used MP3 player from a thrift shop in Oklahoma that
contained U.S. Army files, including mission details and
the personal information of soldiers stationed in
Afghanistan. “The more I look at it,” said Ogle, “the more
I see.” In cities across Russia, anti-government
protesters rallied, chanting such slogans as “The crisis
is in the heads of the authorities, not in the economy.”
ExxonMobil reported $45 billion in earnings in 2008, the
largest annual profit in U.S. history; Wall Street was
found to have distributed $18.4 billion in bonuses, its
sixth largest payout ever; and international leaders
gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the economic
crisis. “Let’s be careful,” said Stephen Roach of Morgan
Stanley, “that we don’t let this blame game get out of
hand.” The International Monetary Fund predicted that
world economic growth in 2009 would be the worst since
World War II. “We now expect the global economy to come to
a virtual halt,” said the IMF’s chief economist. The
U.S. Postal Service considered cutting back deliveries to
five days a week, and the Navy announced that President
Barack Obama’s new presidential helicopter was $5.1
billion over budget. A disgruntled former Fannie Mae
computer engineer was indicted for allegedly attempting to
plant a “logic bomb” in the corporation’s computer code,
and Coca-Cola announced plans to remove the word “classic”
from its packaging.
Thirty-four years after first reporting on the medical
condition termed “cello scrotum,” an irritation caused by
playing the cello, the British Medical Journal was forced
to acknowledge that the ailment does not exist. “Anyone
who has ever watched a cello being played would realize
the physical impossibility of our claim,” said Baroness
Elaine Murphy, who, with her husband, created the
hoax. John Updike died, and just after the Arizona
Cardinals scored their last touchdown of Superbowl XLIII
(which they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers), a cable
channel in Tuscon, Arizona, interrupted the broadcast with
pornography. “I just figured it was another commercial
until I looked up,” said one viewer. “Then he did his
little dance with everything hanging out.” A Wisconsin
judge ruled that cheerleading is a contact sport. Weusi
McGowan, who was standing trial for robbery in a San Diego
court, smeared his feces on the face of his lawyer and
threw the rest at the jury box, where it hit the briefcase
of juror No. 9. “That juror didn’t even see it coming,”
said the prosecutor. A homeless Louisiana man, who robbed
a bank of $100 and then voluntarily turned himself in the
next day and apologized, was sentenced to fifteen years in
prison. A man in Somerset, England, spent two days
trapped beneath his sofa, subsisting on whiskey from a
bottle that had rolled within reach. “I thought, Well this
isn’t too bad,” he said. A 93-year-old man in Michigan
died of hypothermia after Bay City Electric Light & Power
restricted service to his home as a result of unpaid
bills, and in an elevator shaft in an abandoned building
in Detroit a man was found frozen in a block of ice, with
only his feet sticking out. “Yeah,” said one homeless man
squatting nearby, “he’s been down there since last month
at least.” The fire department eventually arrived with a
chainsaw, and another homeless man, when asked if he knew
the deceased, said, “I don’t recognize him from his
shoes.”
– Genevieve Smith
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/WeeklyReview2009-02-03
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bonus
Cheney warns of new attacks
John F. Harris and Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, Politico
February 4, 2009
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.
In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.
And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.
“When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry,” Cheney said.
Protecting the country’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business,” he said. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”
Citing intelligence reports, Cheney said at least 61 of the inmates who were released from Guantanamo during the Bush administration — “that’s about 11 or 12 percent” — have “gone back into the business of being terrorists.”
The 200 or so inmates still there, he claimed, are “the hard core” whose “recidivism rate would be much higher.” He called Guantanamo a “first-class program,” and “a necessary facility” that is operated legally and with better food and treatment than the jails in inmates’ native countries.
But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.
The choice, he alleged, reflects a naive mindset among the new team in Washington: “The United States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected. Sometimes, that requires us to take actions that generate controversy. I’m not at all sure that that’s what the Obama administration believes.”
The dire portrait Cheney painted of the country’s security situation was made even grimmer by his comments agreeing with analysts who believe this recession may be a once-in-a-century disaster.
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Cheney said. “The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.”
The interview, less than two weeks after the Bush administration ceded power to Obama, found the man who is arguably the most controversial — and almost surely the most influential — vice president in U.S. history in a self-vindicating mood.
He expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted — over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism — were directly responsible for averting new Sept. 11-style attacks.
Not content to wait for a historical verdict, Cheney said he is set to plunge into his own memoirs, feeling liberated to describe behind-the-scenes roles over several decades in government now that the “statute of limitations has expired” on many of the most sensitive episodes.
His comments made unmistakable that Cheney — likely more than former President Bush, who has not yet given post-White House interviews — is willing and even eager to spar with the new administration and its supporters over the issues he cares most about.
His standing in this public debate is beset by contradictions. Cheney for years has had intimate access to the sort of highly classified national security intelligence that Obama and his teams are only recently seeing.
But many of the top Democratic legal and national security players have long viewed Cheney as a man who became unhinged by his fears, responsible for major misjudgments in Iraq and Afghanistan, willing to bend or break legal precedents and constitutional principles to advance his aims. Polls show he is one of the most unpopular people in national life.
In the interview, Cheney revealed no doubts about his own course — and many about the new administration’s.
“If it hadn’t been for what we did — with respect to the terrorist surveillance program, or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act, and so forth — then we would have been attacked again,” he said. “Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the U.S.”
Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.
“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said.
“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt. Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”
If Cheney’s language was dramatic, the setting for the comments was almost bizarrely pedestrian. His office is in a non-descript suburban office building in McLean, Va., in a suite that could just as easily house a dental clinic. The office is across the hall from a quick-copy store. The door is marked by nothing except a paper sign, held up by tape, saying the unit is occupied by the General Services Administration.
At several points, Cheney resisted singling out Obama personally for criticism, at one point saying he wants to give him a break after just two weeks in office. He said he admires Obama’s choice to keep Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the job.
But if he treated Obama gingerly, Cheney was eager to engage in the broader philosophical debate he was accustomed to with Democrats and even many in his own party about the right way to navigate a dangerous planet. He said he fears the people populating Obama’s ranks put too much faith in negotiation, persuasion, and good intentions.
“I think there are some who probably actually believe that if we just go talk nice to these folks, everything’s going to be okay,” he said.
He said his own experience tempers his belief in diplomacy.
“I think they’re optimistic. All new administrations are optimistic. We were,” he said.
“They may be able, in some cases, to make progress diplomatically that we weren’t,” Cheney said. “But, on the other hand, I think they’re likely to find — just as we did — that lots of times the diplomacy doesn’t work. Or diplomacy doesn’t work without there being an implied threat of something more serious if it fails.”
As examples of the dangerous world he sees — and one he predicted Obama and aides would find “sobering” — were Russia’s backsliding into authoritarianism and away from democracy, and the ongoing showdowns over the nuclear intentions of Iran and North Korea.
But it was the choice over Guantanamo that most dominated Cheney’s comments.
“If you release the hard-core Al Qaeda terrorists that are held at Guantanamo, I think they go back into the business of trying to kill more Americans and mount further mass-casualty attacks,” he said. “If you turn ‘em loose and they go kill more Americans, who’s responsible for that?”
Of one alternative — moving prisoners to the U.S. prisons — Cheney said he has heard from few members of Congress eager for Guantanamo transfers to their home-state prisons, and asked: “Is that really a good idea to take hardened Al Qaeda terrorists who’ve already killed thousands of Americans and put ‘em in San Quentin or some other prison facility where they can spread their venom even more widely than it already is?”
While Cheney’s words were dire, his own mood was relaxed, even loquacious. He was not on crutches — much less the wheelchair he rode to Obama’s Inauguration — from an injury while moving a box of books into his new home.
Suddenly a man of leisure, Cheney has a Kindle, Amazon’s wireless reading device, and said he used it recently to read James M. McPherson’s new “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief.”
About a week ago, he had a phone conversation with former President George W. Bush, the first time the two had talked since they appeared together at a rally at Andrews Air Force Base just after Obama’s swearing-in.
“He’s fine,” Cheney said. “We had a pleasant chat on the phone. It was a private, personal conversation – not about policy. We’re both citizens – civilians.”
Other highlights of the 90-minute interview:
* What Cheney called “the trillion-dollar so-called stimulus bill”: “It looks to me like there’s a lot of stuff in there that has nothing to do with stimulus – it’s a sort of a wish list of a lot of my congressional Democratic friends,” he said.
* The potential consequences of $1 trillion in deficit stimulus spending: “It’s huge, obviously – potentially huge. You worry about what ultimately happens to inflation. You worry about what’s going to happen to the ability of the government to borrow money. … I’m nervous.”
* Whether the Bush administration should have done more about the economy: “We did worry about it, to some extent. … I don’t think anybody actually foresaw something of this size and dimension occurring. It’s also global. We only control part of the world economy – a very important part.”
* On the chance of progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the foreseeable future: “I think it’s unlikely.”
After leaving office, Cheney and his wife, Lynne, went first to his home in Wyoming, then returned to Washington to enjoy their grandchildren. He’s working on a book about his career, which has included stints as a House member, White House chief of staff and secretary of Defense.
His daughter, Liz Cheney, the former principal deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, supervised the interview and at one point was looking for a tape recorder.
“I’m not a very good press aide,” she joshed.
Cheney found one on his own. “See, you don’t need staff,” she said. ++
Citizen Cheney: Unbowed — and Unhinged?
Dan Froomkin, White House Watch, WaPo
02/ 4/2009
Two weeks as a private citizen doesn’t appear to have mellowed Dick Cheney one bit.
Far from going quietly, Cheney is lashing out with some pretty low blows against the new administration — saying that President Obama is the putting the nation at increased risk of a devastating attack because some members of his team are “more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans.”
John F. Harris, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei write in Politico this morning: “Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a ‘high probability’ that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.
[...]
The Politicos write that Cheney “expressed confidence that files will some day be publicly accessible offering specific evidence that waterboarding and other policies he promoted—over sharp internal dissent from colleagues and harsh public criticism—were directly responsible for averting new September 11-style attacks.”
As I’ve written many times, most recently in this post, that position appears to be mostly fantasy.
Readers looking for a little context in Politico’s story will have to satisfy themselves with one paragraph in which the three writers note that “many of the top Democratic legal and national security players have long viewed Cheney as a man who became unhinged by his fears, responsible for major misjudgments in Iraq and Afghanistan, willing to bend or break legal precedents and constitutional principles to advance his aims. Polls show he is one of the most unpopular people in national life.” ++
Resources from Move On:
1. “The Right is Winning Today,” The Nation, February 3, 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51138&id=15490-1297879-_JC0T.x&t=5
2. “Senate OKs tax break for new-car buyers,” Boston Globe, February 4, 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51139&id=15490-1297879-_JC0T.x&t=6
3. “Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education,” New York Times, January 27, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/education/28educ.html
4. “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi, January 28, 2009
http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/legislation?id=0273
5. “Relief Seen for Jobless and State in Health Care Plan,” New York Times, January 27, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/28health.html
6. “What GOP Leaders deem wasteful in Senate stimulus bill,” CNN, February 3, 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51140&id=15490-1297879-_JC0T.x&t=7
7. “The Economic Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” Economy.com, January 21, 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51141&id=15490-1297879-_JC0T.x&t=8
8. “Job cuts exceed 100,000 for the week,” CNN, February 2, 2009
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51142&id=15490-1297879-_JC0T.x&t=9
9. “Letter to Congress: Economist Across the Spectrum Endorse Stimulus Package”, Center for American Progress Action Fund, January 27, 2009http://www.moveon.org/r?r=51130&id=15490-1297879-_JC0T.x&t=10
“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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