Our Kiwi correspondent has sent a link to a piece from the Weekly Standard’s website that presents serious criticism of the Bush administration – but from a conservative writer in a flagship magazine of conservative thought. Irwin Seltzer’s piece, “Guns and Butter: How the Bush administration’s fiscal policy has narrowed its options in the realm of foreign policy†is worth a read, but raises some questions. These led to an email to Kiwi that is in the Comments below….
Archives for October 2006
Another Reason to Vote Democratic
Senator McCain, on a visit to Iowa to campaign for Republican congressional candidates, was asked his reaction to a potential Democratic takeover of the Senate in the November 7 elections.
“I think I’d just commit suicide,” McCain told reporters.
The Coming Vote To Impeach
All votes are important. All elections are important. But in the general election fast approaching this November we have a chance to dump enough Republicans from Congress and elect enough [angry] Democrats to produce an impeachment team in the House and a majority vote to convict in the Senate. The target of course is George W. Bush. This man will go down in history as one of our worst Presidents – he is guilty of deception and incompetence on a grand scale. Those two qualities are a tough combination, almost an oxymoron, but Bush has managed both. It is a combination that equates to “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitutional requirement for impeachment. We can use other terms, such as abuse of power and gross misconduct, to justify Bush’s impeachment, but deception and incompetence seem to capture the man. His grand deception is Iraq, which is also his greatest failure. But that is not to say that there are no contenders. The failure to deal with Katrina would stand out in any other presidency and forever brand such a president for that failure alone. But Bush has so much more. His domestic spying. His “off-site” prisons. His abandonment of Afghanistan. His ignorance of all things environmental. His perverted tax policies. But it is his deception, which he used to convince too many Americans and far too many Congressman, that we must invade Iraq and his incompetence in dealing with Iraq post-invasion that are the foundation of his impeachment. He followed the neo-cons’ grand strategy of empire. Publicly, he argued the need to separate Hussein from non-existent WMD. He represented to Congress only those facts that supported the invasion. His administration ignored, and even attacked, those who presented contrary facts. This rush to war, this deception has resulted in, according to one very recent estimate, over 600,000 Iraqi dead. Bush’s startling incompetence in the aftermath of the invasion has torn that country apart – the infrastructure is gone, the rule of law [such as it was] is gone, civil and social life is gone. The Iraqi people are dying. US and British soldiers are dying. The world is tired of it all. We, the people are tired of Bush and his deception, his incompetence. We need a new Congress – a Congress that will act to rid us and the world of this man. Vote this November and let the games begin.
Murder, the Press and Putin
The Moscow Times comments on the recent death of the Russian investigative journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, in its October 19 issue. The piece places her murder in the context of a country run by former KGB officials with a love of authority and personal presidential power. It describes a country that offers little in the way of hope for a permanent thaw of Cold War realities.
From the Moscow Times:
“The 12 journalists who have been killed in Russia since President Vladimir Putin came to power were probably killed to avenge something already written or to prevent the publication of something else. But an atmosphere in which individuals and free institutions are held in open contempt also facilitated these murders.
This contempt was evident in the remarks Putin made after two days of silence about the slaying of Anna Politkovskaya. ‘I think that journalists should be aware that her influence on political life was extremely insignificant in scale.’ The woman is two days dead and the president of her country pronounces her life’s work “extremely insignificant.” But Putin takes her death almost as an affront, at the very least, a smudge on his regime: ‘This murder inflicts more harm and damage to the governments of Russia and Chechnya than did her publications.’
Kerry Healey’s Lee Atwater Imitation
Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor and candidate for governor Kerry Healey has connected to Lee Atwater. He gained notoriety managing Bush Senior’s media campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988 when he promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate.” Horton was a black man who raped a white woman while on a weekend furlough from prison. The mugshot of Horton, who is African-American, gave what Atwater described as “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”
Healey is channeling Atwater by running essentially the same campaign. She is buying a lot of TV time to scare the bejeesus out of those suburban mothers by attacking her opponent, Deval Patrick, for having provided competent legal counsel to defendants in court. Patrick defended a man convicted in Florida, now serving a life sentence, of shooting a policeman. Healey, who had no professional involvement with that or any other case, simply wants the defendant dead, and apparently does not believe in defendants having competent defense counsel. Other ads focus on a case in which her opponent supported a convicted rapist receiving a DNA test to prove his guilt or innocence. The DNA test did not prove his innocence and he remains in jail. End of story.
But not for Healey, whose ads are exactly what Atwater would have done back in the day.
Atwater contracted brain cancer in 1990 and died in 1991. His words as he approached death contain a lesson for Kerry Healey: “In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said I would ‘strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not,’ he declared….The eighties were about acquiring wealth, power and prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. It took a deadly illness to bring me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.’
So far, Kerry Healey has not learned that lesson. She will likely end this campaign a loser in more ways than one.
Former State Department official leaves Bush Ranch
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations previews in the Financial Times an essay on the troubled future of the Middle East, which will be published in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs. The Op Ed in the Financial Times indicates a switch for Haass who was something of an administration cheerleader for the effort to bring democracy in Iraq. (see W. Post editorial, Dec. 29, 2002) who left the State Department in mid -2003.
Haass’s movement away from the Bush Administration on its Middle East policies seems to be peaking as he writes in the FT: “It is just more than two centuries since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of a modern Middle East; but now – some 80 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism and less than 20 years after the end of the cold war – the American era in the region has ended. Visions of a new Europe-like Middle East that is peaceful, prosperous and democratic will not be realised….No one should count on the emergence of democracy to pacify the region….â€
Iraq and Iran: Bush’s Axis of Evil??
According to Agence France-Presse
“October 15, 2006 — Iraq and Iran have agreed to form a working group to forge closer security and intelligence ties.
Iraq’s cabinet said in a statement today that an agreement had been reached by Iraqi National Security Advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubay’i and Iranian Intelligence and Security Minister Gholam Hussein Mohseni-Ejei.
The United States has expressed concern over what it describes as Iran’s role in fuelling violence in Iraq.”
No comment.
Secrecy, the Press and the People
Francis Kukuyama raised an important issue in an Op Ed piece in the October 8 issue of the NY Times. For some time now the administration has been back backfiring on information by reclassifying previously open information to secret information. There is of course no good reason for this. There is much in our history as a country that we would regret later; that is not terribly surprising given everyone’s ability to make mistakes. But this is an administration obsessed with admitting no mistakes – not only by them, but also of any American administration (well- except perhaps the Clinton administration). Some of this back=fired reclassification is simply ludicrous: it makes secret information that has been widely published here and abroad for years. Fukuyama makes the salient point that the better informed we are the better decision we can make as an informed population.  Maybe that’s the point…
Iraqi Death Count and the Press
The editor of Editor and Publisher, Greg Mitchell, considers the recently reported estimate of 600,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion in 2003 in the magazine’s current issue. He is particularly interested in the issue of the press’s failure to adequately look at and do the hard work to adequately account for Iraq’s civilian deaths.
He considers the credibility of the estimate of 600,000 that came from work carried out by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, compares it to the credibility of President Bush’s response, looks at the different ways the press dealt with the report, from the AP’s immediate “can’t be right†response to the Washington Post’s more thoughtful consideration, provides some data speculating on what would be comparable numbers in the U.S. and leaves the reader numbed with the reality of what we have created in Iraq. President Bush’s response in a press conference was:
“I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.”
Read the article at the Editor and Publisher website.
Christopher Hitchens on I.F. Stone
I.F. Stone was one of the truly great American journalists of the 20th century. He was resolutely independent, admitted his biases, but went where the documents, his instincts for the truth and the interviews took him. He refused to spend time at press conferences where people would lie to him, and did not read press releases so he could lazily reprint them. He did what few working journalists do today – he dug into the research and thought about things. Then he wrote about them. Over the years he embarrassed leaders, politicians and other journalists and got labeled a fellow-traveler for his efforts. He was fearless, honest, sometimes wrong, but mostly right.
Christopher Hitchens may be the perfect reviewer of Stones’ work and biography and he does a wonderful job of it in the current Vanity Fair. I have to believe that the good “fit†here of reviewer and subject is not accidental. Both are independent thinkers, wonderful writers, ideologically committed, and Hitchens could be talking about himself when he writes that “Izzy could be as interesting when he was ‘wrong’ as when he was ‘right'”. Which is to say that it is possible to read Hitchens when disagreeing with him and still feel to have been forced to think.
But more important is the value of the independent voice, the willingness to take on the establishment, the absolute commitment to personal integrity, and the unwillingness to suck up to power that Stone personified. Stone is often vilified by what Hitchens refers to as the “crackpot Ann Coulterish right, of his having been on the K.B. G. payrollâ€.
Hitchens’ response to that kind of crackpot, on-the-sleeve stupidity is that he “…once had the honor of being the I.F. Stone fellow at Berkeley (where [Stone’s] old typewriter is enclosed in a glass case: probably the most hagiography he could have stood), and [he]
told [his] students to read him and reread him to get an idea of the relationship between clean and muscular prose and moral and intellectual honesty.â€
Hitchens’ piece is available on the Vanity Fair website.