Here's a clip & save for you, via Sharon Jumper at Kos. The next time righties claim that you can't support the troops without supporting the "mission," shove this in their faces--a blog post by a soldier serving in Iraq:

There are battles which need to be fought and there are battles which serve no good purpose. Afghanistan and Bin Laden lay forgotten as if they were discarded toys left by a spoiled child.

Iraq is the new frontier of poor foreign policy and poor planning. Even the soldiers can see it. Why do you think nobody is re-enlisting? They don't want to keep leaving their families to go fight a loosing battle and to die for an empty promise. The promise that somehow staying in Iraq makes America safer.

We have created a martyr factory here, and we are beginning to wade through the next Vietnam. How wrong do you want to be before you close down shop and send the troops home? 2,000 dead? Is that wrong enough? How about 10,000?

There is a field back home at Ft. Stewart, Georgia. There a tree has been planted for each soldier who has been killed in Iraq. After we returned in 2003 there were only a few trees, now an entire side of the field is full of them. My sister asked where they would plant more now that the row was complete and sadly I replied, "we still have three more sides to fill." Maybe then when we have enough names for a beautiful war memorial we can leave Iraq.

I know as surely as the sun comes up in the mornin' that, if righties get hold of this, they will smear the sergeant ruthlessly. Soldiers exist to gratify rightie desire for vengeance, not to ask questions about what it is they are risking their lives for.

 

(Although vengeance isn't the right word, since the blood lust to kill "ragheads" has spilled way over retribution for 9/11. The 9/11 terrorist attacks are more an excuse than a reason.)

 

We lefties are often accused of hating the military. One does bump into lefties with a knee-jerk antipathy to anyone wearing a uniform, as though the uniform obliterates the humanity of the soldier wearing it. This is a minority of the Left, IMO.

 

But the Right is no better. The Right sees the troops as props in their sociopolitical fantasy, in which omnipotent America assimilates the world, destroying not-American things like so much vermin. Soldiers who question the mission or complain about lack of armor or who harbor progressive political views or otherwise behave like autonomous human beings spoil the picture.

 

The Right's trump card is, of course, that questioning the "mission" amounts to helping the enemy. You know they're all set to blame us lefties if when the "mission" finally turns into a rout--as if the incompetence and blundering of the Bush Administration had nothing to do with it.  It should go beyond saying that, considering the strength and military resources at our disposal in March 2003, it took some serious imbecility to fail. But never sell the Bush White House short ...

 

The old slogan "ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die" might be applicable to soldiers about to enter a battle, but the fact is that citizens are supposed to reason why. That's our duty. In the United States, citizens are not subjects who must be blindly loyal to a sovereign. The government is us; the government is the will of We, the People made manifest. Or, at least, that's what it is supposed to be. When government operates in the dark and makes decisions that citizens are not supposed to question, it is a betrayal of everything America is supposed to be about. 

 

Let me expand that -- someone will argue that some functions of government, especially functions that involve intelligence and security, need to be covert. That's true, and it's acceptable as long as the ends serve the will of the people. What worries me is when government is no longer responding to the will of the people and is following its own ends, and uses "security" as an excuse to hide the evidence. That's a problem. Even a rightie ought to be able to see that.   

 

PRESIDENT BUSH SPOKE FORCEFULLY on Thursday about the threat from within to Islam, and what the United States is doing to protect Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Somalia. Yet the president is strangely reluctant to take even the smallest step to protect Muslim prisoners being held by U.S. forces in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. His rhetoric will be exposed as even emptier than usual if he keeps squandering opportunities to back it up.

Yesterday, the same day New Yorkers were warned there was a "specific threat" of a bombing on their subways, President Bush delivered what the White House promoted as a major address on terrorism. It seemed, on the surface, like a perfect topic for the moment. But his talk was not about the nation's current challenges. He delivered a reprise of his Sept. 11 rhetoric that suggested an avoidance of today's reality that seemed downright frightening.

The period right after 9/11, for all its pain, was the high point of the Bush presidency. Four years ago, we hung on every word when Mr. Bush denounced Al Qaeda and made the emotional - but, as it turned out, empty - vow to track down Osama bin Laden. Yesterday, it seemed as if the president was still trying to live in 2001....

You can still find righties who get all misty-eyed about the "bullhorn moment" but are not at all bothered by the fact that Osama bin Laden was never brought to justice. It's as if the rhetoric itself is all that matters, and reality is just an inconvenient minor detail.

This is from the second editorial:

We've lost track of the number of times President Bush has told Americans to ignore their own eyes and ears and pretend everything is going just fine in Iraq. Yesterday, when Mr. Bush added a ringing endorsement of his own policy to his speech on terrorism, it was that same old formula: the wrong questions, the wrong answers and no new direction.

Mr. Bush suggested that people who doubt that nation-building is going well are just confusing healthy disagreement with dangerous division. "We've heard it suggested that Iraq's democracy must be on shaky ground because Iraqis are arguing with one another," he scoffed. What he failed to acknowledge was that the Iraqi power groups seem prepared to go through the motions of democracy only as long as their side wins. ...

... Given the state of the American adventure in Iraq and the way it has sapped the strength and flexibility of the United States armed forces, it was unnerving to hear Mr. Bush talk so menacingly about Syria and Iran. It was also maddening to listen to him describe the perils that Iraq poses while denying that his policies set them in motion.

Be sure to read both editorials all the way through; they are very good, and right on the money.

Fred Kaplan offers similar commentary in Slate:

President Bush's speech this morning, billed as a major statement about Iraq and the war on terror, was a sad spectacle—so ripe with lofty principles, so bereft of ideas on what to do with them. He approached the podium amid growing disapproval of his performance as a war president, ratcheting chaos and violence in Iraq, continuing terrorist attacks worldwide—and pleaded for nothing more than staying the course, with no turns or shifts, for a long, long time to come.

He crisply outlined the stakes of the larger struggle against Islamofascism: fear vs. freedom, oppression vs. tolerance, the dark ages vs. modern civilization. "The defense of freedom," he declared, "is worth our sacrifice." And he's right. Which is why his failure to articulate a strategy—his evasion of the difficulties and dilemmas that his own aides and commanders are grappling with—is so distressing.

By now it should be pretty clear that, with Bush, rhetoric is all you're going to get. He can't do shit. Given that he is speech impaired, his inability to do anything but regurgitate prepared remarks makes him all the more pathetic.  

Compare and contrast Kaplan's article and the New York Times's editorials with this post by obedient rightie shill John Hinderaker. Hinderaker's take is that the President was trying to warn us of the dangers of terrorism, and the news media won't listen.

I was talking with a liberal the other day, who tried to explain to me that democracy in Iraq is impossible because of that country's religious and ethnic diversity. Only civil war can result from such conditions, he said. Oh, great, now they tell us--multiculturalism is impossible!

Non sequitur. There's a huge difference between a political power struggle among long-warring factions and "multiculturalism."  

As he did before the war began, Bush laid out the most important purpose of the Iraq war: to promote the spread of freedom in the Middle East, as the only long-term solution to the perpetuation of Islamic terrorism:

The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there's no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end. By standing for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure.

Four years after September 11, neither the Democrats nor anyone else has proposed an alternative to Bush's strategy for long-term victory in the war on terror.

Well, actually, several people have proposed such strategies. Here's just one. But the larger point is that Bush may have a grand strategy for "long-term victory," but he has no tactics to achieve that strategy.

Once again: The rightie presents a paragraph from Bush's speech and challenges us lefties to argue with it. But I cannot argue with the paragraph. It's a fine paragraph. I agree with everything Bush says in that paragraph. The problem is not with what he says, but with what he does.

No one denies that it would be just grand if genuine democracy could flower in the Middle East, but it ain't happenin'. And Bush's blundering around isn't making it happen. 

You see the problem. Hinderaker accepts the rhetoric as reality and assumes that people who diss the rhetoric are opposed to the ideas Bush expresses, like "democracy is good" and "let's liberate oppressed Iraqi people." But in fact, we diss the rhetoric because the rhetoric has nothing to do with anything that's actually happening on this planet. Hinderacker continues,   

This was another in a series of great speeches in which President Bush has outlined his strategies and policies in the war.

And, of course, he did nothing of the sort. He presents goals. And there's nothing wrong with most of his goals. They are perfectly fine goals. But his policies and strategies, such as they are, are not sufficient to achieve those goals. Iraq is drifting toward either theocracy or chaos. "Homeland security" is going nowhere. Earlier this week I quoted Richard Clarke:

 After opposing the creation of the department [of homeland security], the Bush administration flip-flopped under public pressure and decided that it was a great idea. There were always signs, however, that the administration did not really mean it. ... although many new programs were launched, few were ever brought to fruition. The department has never produced a multi-year plan based on actual requirements—a path to achieve specific, measurable goals. None of our vulnerabilities—on our borders, or in our transportation system, our chemical plants, our energy facilities, our ports—have been significantly diminished. And now we see that our ability to deal with the aftermath of disasters, whatever their cause, has actually regressed since the mid-1990s, when FEMA was an independent agency with cabinet status, run by competent and nonpartisan personnel.

From the Fred Kaplan article linked above:

It was almost exactly two years ago, on Oct. 16, 2003, that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sent his aides a searching memo (soon after leaked to USA Today), in which he noted:

Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

The shocking thing is not so much that it took two years, following 9/11, for Rumsfeld to formulate the right question; it's that two more years have passed, and the administration is only now seeking an answer. Military analyst William Arkin reports in his Washington Post blog, Early Warning, that just last month the Defense Department issued a solicitation for outside contractors to devise "a system of metrics to accurately assess US progress in the War on Terrorism, identify critical issues hindering progress, and develop and track action plans to resolve the issues identified."

Every time a rightie complains that no Democrat has presented a plan for fighting terrorism, I want to ask, why isn't the bleeping President presenting a plan for fighting terrorism? Because there is no plan. There's just intentions, and rhetoric. And bullshit.

Kaplan's article is worth reading all the way through, also, but I want to call attention to this part:

It was an uncharacteristically defensive speech, Bush reciting, then rebutting, the arguments of his critics. But his counterblows were usually unpersuasive. For instance:

Some have argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September 11, 2001, and al-Qaida attacked us anyway.

This is mere playing with words. Notice: First, he cites the claim that the U.S. occupation has "strengthened" the extremists; then he dismisses some straw man's contention that our presence has "caused or triggered" the radicals' rage. The fact that 9/11 preceded the invasion of Iraq is irrelevant to the point that he started to counter—that the occupation "strengthened" the insurgency. This point is incontestable. (On the most basic level, before the invasion, there was no insurgency and no al-Qaida presence in Iraq, except for a training camp run by Zarqawi—and that was in the Kurdish-controlled northern enclave, which Bush could have bombed, and was encouraged by the Joint Chiefs to bomb, at any time.) More important, to evade the point is to misunderstand this phase of the war—and, therefore, to misjudge how to win it.

|

The United States has failed to persuade 15 countries to support an effort to replace International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, effectively stalling the plan, the Washington Post reported Saturday (see GSN, Jan. 10).

“It’s on hold right now,” said one U.S. policy-maker who lobbied against ElBaradei. “Everyone turned us down, even the Brits.”

In addition to the United Kingdom, the United States also unsuccessfully approached Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, South Africa and South Korea, U.S. officials said.

“We can certainly live with another ElBaradei term,” a British official said.

 

(Note that the uranium was still secured by IAEA seals when IAEA inspectors checked it prior to the invasion, meaning Saddam Hussein hadn't done anything with the stuff for many years. It was just there. I mention this because righties tend to get all worked up whenever they learn about the uranium. But it was not only sealed, it was years away from being weapons-ready as it was.)

 

Fred Barbash and Dafna Linzer report in today's Washington Post that "ElBaradei was virtually unknown when the United States engineered his candidacy eight years ago to run the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency." In other words, the Clinton Administration supported him. Another black mark. Further,

In an interview with The Washington Post last fall, ElBaradei said the day the United States invaded Iraq "was the saddest in my life." It was not because he was a fan of Hussein, but because he was so sure Washington's assertions about weapons stockpiles and a secret program would be proved wrong.

Washington responded to ElBaradei's findings on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction by trying to prevent him from taking a third term, despite requests from other board members that he stay on. "I am staying because I was asked, because so many board members made me feel guilty about leaving at such a crucial time," he said in an interview earlier this year.

The Bush administration launched a vigorous but solitary campaign -- including a complete halt of intelligence sharing, recruitment of potential replacements for ElBaradei and eavesdropping on him in search of ammunition against him. But as his popularity diminished in Washington, it soared elsewhere.

Heh.

 

Update: See Meteor Blades--

 Naturally, the Bush administration wants the IAEA and its director to perform as its agent in all things, just as it did in the case of weapons inspector Hans Blix. Acting contrariwise risks having one's competence and impartiality called into question. In the case of El Baradei, these methods were combined with attempts to smear and humiliate the man. Par for the course in this administration, as anybody who's watching knows too well. White House slimeballs even bugged El Baradei's  phones in hopes they would find something to incriminate him of over-friendliness toward the Iranians so they could use this evidence to replace him.

|

Fitzgerald does not have to send Rove or anyone else a target letter before indicting him. The only reason to send target letters now is that Fitzgerald believes one or more of his targets will flip and become a prosecution witness at the pre-indictment stage. A veteran prosecutor told me, "If Fitzgerald is sending target letters at the end of his investigation, those are just invitations to come in and work out a deal."

Prosecutors prefer pre-indictment plea bargaining to post-indictment because they have more to offer you, like not being indicted at all or downgrading your status to unindicted co-conspirator. And pre-indictment plea bargaining can greatly enrich the indictments that the prosecutor then obtains. If, for example, Fitzgerald has a weak case against, say, Scooter Libby, imagine how much Rove's cooperation might strengthen that case.

The Aspens Sleep With the Fishes: Is it just me or is this sentence in Cheney aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby's letter to reporter Judith Miller regarding the Plame-leak case just a little too suggestive of how she might want to testify:

Because, as I am sure will not be news to you, the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me, or knew about her before our call.

(The suggestion, of course, would be that this is how Miller might also testify--e.g. no discussion of "Plame's name or identity"--unless she wants to stand out from the pack as someone who contradicts Libby's defense.) ... P.S.: Libby's letter ends, somewhat mysteriously, with this sentence:

Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them.

And you know what happens to the aspens that sever their deep connections and fail to turn with all the others, don't you, my little pretty? ... 

While we're all just speculating, do you think Karl would flip somebody higher up than Scooter to save his own skin? Or will Karl fall on his sword to protect his boy? 

|

The conservative uprising against President Bush escalated yesterday as Republican activists angry over his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court confronted the president's envoys during a pair of tense closed-door meetings.

A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin résumé and that her selection -- Bush called her "the best person I could find" -- was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers "has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back.

 Many expressed feelings of anger and betrayal to Gillespie, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, and others sent to the gathering by the White House.

"Trust has been broken," said one attendee who asked to not be named. The meeting participant told Gillespie that efforts to reassure conservatives "won't work," adding, "You can't unbreak an egg."

The crowd applauded as one speaker after another peppered Gillespie with questions regarding Miers' past political contributions to Democrats, her votes as a member of the Dallas City Council and whether her nomination smacked of cronyism, according to meeting participants.

"With this nomination, we have ratified the strategy of the left and they have won," said Richard Lessner, former executive director of the American Conservative Union. "With this pick, the White House has ratified what the left did to Bork."

He was referring to Robert H. Bork, President Reagan's conservative nominee for the court who was rejected by the Senate after liberals challenged his well-documented views. ...

 ... Lessner said in an interview later that Bush should have picked from the long list of qualified "conservative heroes."

 He added that Miers' nomination sent a message from Bush "that a jurist with established conservative credentials cannot be confirmed for the Supreme Court. He has capitulated to that view, and that's why this is a major loss for the conservative movement."

Translation: We want an activist judge who will "activate" our agenda. And we will hold our breath until we get one.

The males of the pack are snarling over who gets to be next alpha dog:

On Wednesday, skepticism about Miers' nomination came from some GOP senators who normally are party loyalists.

"There are a lot more people — men, women and minorities — that are more qualified in my opinion by their experience than she is," Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) said in a television interview. "I don't just automatically salute or take a deep bow anytime a nominee is sent [to the Senate]…. I have to find out who these people are, and right now, I'm not satisfied with what I know."

Lott's sentiments echoed those of a number of fellow conservative Republican senators, including John Thune of South Dakota, George Allen of Virginia and Sam Brownback of Kansas — all of whom are thought to harbor presidential aspirations.

Another signal the Bush Era is over--the Republican contenders are already starting to run against the Bush legacy.

Regarding Ms. Pig in a Poke, Thomas Oliphant presents one of her "legal opinions" in today's Boston Globe. It seems Miers had a hand in the White House argument that it was perfectly legal to pay Armstrong Williams to promote No Child Left Behind.

Take Armstrong Williams -- please. A friend from the left alerted me to this example of Bush administration antiethics, and it could be a representative indication of Miers's devotion to her boss at the expense of independent, sound judgment.

When the conservative commentator's receipt of money, via the Education Department for activities in support of its flawed and underfunded No Child Left Behind program, was exposed, the Bushies went into full damage control. From Bush himself down to department officials, shock and horror were expressed, as was a vow not to pay for praise anymore.

Much less noticed was the administration's careful legal argument that although the activities of Williams and others on the take were politically dumb, they were not illegal -- a judgment in which the White House counsel's office was not a disinterested observer. Two Democratic senators -- Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Edward Kennedy -- asked Congress's investigative agency, the Government Accountability Office, to probe further.

The GAO not only confirmed the six-figure payments to Williams via subcontract from a public relations firm, it also uncovered some previously undisclosed actions -- notably the commissioning of a newspaper column from a press syndicate that was distributed nationally as if it had been independent opinion. And it also probed the use of public money at the Education Department to monitor and rate the coverage by individual outlets and commentators for fealty to the administration line.

For all its spin about stupid ideas, the administration took the odd position that the activity was perfectly legal. These opinions came not only from the Education Department itself but, more important, from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, whose ties to the White House counsel's office are famously intimate.

Both entities opined that because what was being disseminated was information, there was no requirement that the government disclose that it was the source of the information.

This did not pass the GAO's laugh test, and it termed all the expenditures improper precisely because the public was being fed government positions in the guise of actual journalism. The law that was violated is designed to avoid what this stuff really was -- covert propaganda.

I hope somebody grills Miers about that in the hearings.

|

The Bush administration's former chief procurement official was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury on charges of making false statements and obstructing investigations into high-powered Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The five felony counts in the indictment charge David H. Safavian with obstructing Senate and executive branch investigations into whether he aided Abramoff in efforts to acquire property controlled by the General Services Administration around the nation's capital.

The charges have to do with Abramoff and Ralph Reed and playing golf in Scotland. These alleged criminal plots are getting too complicated for an old lady like me to keep straight.

The indictment covers May 16, 2002, until January 2004, when Safavian was chief of staff at the General Services Administration, the government housekeeping agency. From November 2004 until late last month when he resigned three days before his arrest, he was the government's top procurement officer, in the Office of Management and Budget.

The indictment said Safavian falsely told a GSA ethics officer, a GSA inspector general's agent and the Senate Indian Affairs Committee that Abramoff had no business with GSA at the time the Scotland trip was being planned. It said Safavian concealed that Abramoff did have business with GSA before the trip and that Safavian was aiding him in dealing with GSA.

Safavian is expected to plead not guilty.

But, ladies and gentlemen, in other lawnorder news we've got a guilty plea from a former top Pentagon analyst!  

A top Pentagon analyst pleaded guilty Wednesday to giving classified information to an Israeli diplomat and members of a pro-Israel lobbying group, saying he did it because he was frustrated with U.S. government policy.

Lawrence A. Franklin, 58, a policy analyst whose expertise included Iran and Iraq, pleaded guilty to three felony counts as part of a plea bargain. In exchange, federal prosecutors dropped three other felony charges....

... Franklin said during the plea hearing that he was frustrated with a government policy that he did not specify, so he leaked classified information to two members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He said he hoped the two would provide the information to contacts of theirs on the National Security Council and possibly get the policy changed.

The council comprises top government officials who advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policies.

Here's some background from Juan Cole.

At the Pentagon, Franklin used to work for Douglas Feith on issues involving Iran and the Middle East. He also sometimes worked directly with Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Update: Another alleged spy!

Officials tell ABC News the alleged spy worked undetected at the White House for almost three years. Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, was a U.S. Marine most recently assigned to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney. ...

Note that this guy got a White House job in 1999 and worked for Al Gore when he was veep, ABC says.

... Federal investigators say Aragoncillo, a naturalized citizen from the Philippines, used his top secret clearance to steal classified intelligence documents from White House computers. ...

...Last year, after leaving the Marines, Aragoncillo was caught by the FBI while he worked for the Bureau at an intelligence center at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

According to a criminal complaint, Aragoncillo was arrested last month and accused of downloading more than 100 classified documents from FBI computers.

|

...To some on the right, Mr Bush's second term is revealing him not to be the true believer they expected.

Hurricane Katrina, and the huge federal response pledged by Mr Bush, had already alarmed some fiscal conservatives. The president, they worry, is instinctively a "big government" Republican....

...But the nomination of Harriet Miers as Mr Bush's second Supreme Court nominee has had far greater impact, triggering outrage among a different wing of the conservative coalition.

You know something's up when bleeping Richard Viguerie accuses a fellow Republican of deceptive politics. Daniel quotes Viguerie:

"He is his father's son. George never was a movement conservative. He was always suspect, but he learned from his father's mistakes.

"He developed an election strategy based on bribery. He put tariffs on steel. Florida was awash in federal spending in the run-up to the election."

He was always suspect. We thought he was one of us, but we were wrong. Even the "social" conservatives are finally catching on, Daniel says:

The idea that Mr Bush's conservatism was a campaign feint, designed to motivate the "base" and avoid the electoral consequences that felled his father's re-election, is gaining some currency among some religious conservatives, who wonder whether they were hood-winked by his evangelical rhetoric.

"I have increasingly over time become dubious about Mr Bush's desire to materially alter the impact of Roe v Wade", said one leading religious conservative. "He has offered good rhetoric about every child to be welcomed as an abstract principle, but he has never come out and said it should be reversed.

"He has played the social conservatives like a violin. It is a faux pas by social conservatives that they have aligned themselves with the party and a personality in a way that was unhelpful. They have accepted rhetoric in lieu of results. The movement has a measure of accountability."

Meanwhile, another old lion of the Right, Robert Bork, says Bush is signaling conservatives to be cautious about expressing their views. Ron Brownstein writes in the Los Angeles Times:

"I don't know that there is a deliberate message — I think he is just trying to avoid trouble — but the message comes through: Do not be controversial, do not express strong opinions that arouse opposition," said Robert H. Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge. ...

... During almost five years of bruising partisan warfare on issues from taxes to Iraq, few people have ever accused Bush of dodging a fight. But that's exactly the charge he is now facing from disgruntled conservatives.

They contend that Bush has chosen Miers, and even Roberts, largely because he fears Democratic resistance to conservatives with more concrete public records, such as appellate court Judges J. Michael Luttig and Edith H. Jones.

"Is the president sending a message that these distinguished conservatives are too controversial to be nominated for the high court, even with a Senate containing 55 Republicans?" a Wall Street Journal editorial asked Tuesday.

Fact is, an anti-Roe nominee with a distinguished legal background could probably get confirmed by today's Senate fairly easily, even if that nominee has an extensive paper trail. Sure a lot of Dems would oppose that nominee and might even filibuster, but in the end the Republican majority would probably prevail. And this would be true in spite of Bush's lack of political capital, because the fight wouldn't be about Bush, but about abortion, and about longstanding rightie disdain for judges who actually take civil liberties seriously (i.e., "activist judges").

Come to think of it, a messy ideological fight might be just the distraction Bush needs to hold on to his rightie base. Bush's "cautious" choice is lookin' like a huge mistake. Of course, Bush no doubt has his own reasons for wanting Miers on the SCOTUS.

At the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson revisits the phrase "compassionate conservatism" and wonders if Bush's entire political career has been a hustle (ya think?).

... There was always an ambiguity about this brilliant phrase. Is compassionate conservatism (a) a genuine governing philosophy or (b) merely a clever sound bite?

Five years later, we know that the answer is (b). There is no obvious agenda that a successor could claim to follow as, for example, Lyndon Johnson claimed the Great Society followed the New Deal. In practice, Bush has taken the most self-serving aspect of modern liberalism (its instinct to buy public support with massive government handouts) and fused it with the most self-serving aspect of modern conservatism (its instinct to buy support with massive tax cuts).

Amassing power by trading campaign contributions for government largesse is, of course, the purpose of Tom DeLay's K Street Project. How independent from the White House are DeLay's schemes, really? Heh.

... "Compassion" for Bush has consisted mostly of distributing new benefits to large constituencies in the hope of purchasing their gratitude and support. He persuaded the Republican Congress (albeit with vigorous arm-twisting) to enact a Medicare drug benefit, the biggest new social program since the Great Society. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost at $851 billion from 2005 to 2015. Bush proposed not a penny of taxes to cover these