Some good quotes in this interview of Robert Scheer at Alternet on why we can’t elect acquire better presidents:

RS: The process itself is so debilitating, so controlling, that it really doesn’t matter who these guys are or what they start out with.

Even with the best of intentions, even when they’re very smart and knowledgeable — as opposed to George W., who is neither — it doesn’t seem to matter. All they are proving is their ability to manipulate, to think superficially, and to exploit national security issues rather than deal with them. …

… The media, because it’s been driven much more by market competition and competition with electronic media. They’re doing this “gotcha” journalism. What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down — literally or otherwise. …

…OR: Do you think American voters care enough about the substance of policy?

RS: At the end of the day they do. When their taxes are wasted and their sons and daughters are killed in a meaningless war, when fanaticism is unleashed around the world because we follow stupid policies, and when we can’t save a city like New Orleans, yeah, I think they care. And when gas prices go up even though they were supposed to have gone down with the conquest of Iraq, I think they care. But the media fails them in not making a connection between the things they care about and the positions that these politicians take. …

…OR: You say in your book that George W. Bush is the first electronically projected president. Can you explain that?

RS: This administration doesn’t feel they need a mindful audience. They don’t care about facts, logic or consequences. They are the most cynical people that I’ve ever encountered in politics. This is the most cynical bunch — just think about that “reality-based community” quote. They create their own reality. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of cynicism before, and I’m the guy who interviewed Richard Nixon.

These guys are, as John Dean keeps pointing out, far worse than the Nixon crowd because they think they can get away with it. Nixon, at the end of the day thought it mattered what the New York Times said. He felt that if there was a big contradiction, a big error, they would catch him and there would be all hell to pay.

There’s no longer that feeling. Over the years, I’m not getting cynical — they’re cynical. If I were truly cynical I wouldn’t be talking to you, and I wouldn’t be writing and teaching. Mark Twain said a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. Well, the fact is the truth does get its pants on, it does catch up, and right now 65 percent of Americans think Bush lied to them.

OR: Between that kind of arrogance seen in your interview with George H.W. Bush, the showsmanship we see with Reagan, who is a better comparison to George W.?

RS: As we say in the subtitle of the book, none of them prepared me for Bush. Reagan had been on the election circuit on issues. I didn’t have to agree with him, but when he was a salesman for G.E. and head of the Actor’s Guild, he was talking about issues of foreign policy and domestic policy. He cared about these things and collected anecdotes and information that supported his views. When he was running, he was aware of the issues and what was at stake.

That was true of all of them. They were adults, and this guy, George W., as far as I can figure, is just a spoiled preppy, as he’s been described. What he’s done is rely on his tutors and he picked, unfortunately for us voters, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

OR: Are Americans capable of recognizing a good president?

RS: I do. I think the problem here was the failure of the democrats. When Kerry was asked by Bush, “Knowing what you know now, would you have gone into Iraq?” he should have said, “No.” He should have said, “You lied to Congress, you lied to the American people, it’s unconscionable.” He would have won the election, but Kerry was not comfortable in his own skin. Here’s the boy-scout war hero who seemed to be faking it, and yet in real life, this guy performed every time. And there’s George W., who has been faking it his whole life and somehow came across as more genuine.

I agree that Kerry screwed up, but I’m not persuaded that Americans are capable of recognizing a real leader from a faux one who just plays the role on TV. What do you think? What if media did a better job making the “connection between the things they care about and the positions that these politicians take”? Would enough Americans get the message? Or would too many of ’em still listen to Limbaugh and O’Reilly? And if we survive the next thousand days with Bush in the White House, will America have learned a lesson?

Update, sorta related: What might have been. And speaking of (maybe) finding somebody with their pants down … See also Billmon.

Thomas DeFrank writes in today’s New York Daily News:

Like his predecessors at moments of political urgency, President Bush can turn on a dime without losing any sleep. Even so, yesterday’s flip-flop was especially breathtaking for a son of the Oil Patch.

Time and again, Bush has spurned demands from critics he do precisely what he did yesterday.

Sometime in the 1980s, I believe, I decided the big difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Dems can identify a problem-in-the-making and maybe come up with a half-assed solution, whereas Republicans refuse to acknowledge a problem until it bites their butts.

Health care is a good example; Michael Dukakis made health care reform a big part of his 1988 platform when he ran against George H.W. Bush. As a state governor he saw the crisis we are enjoying now while it was still a couple of miles away. But when asked about health care Poppy would just look mildly befuddled and say We have the best health care system in the world; there’s no problem.

I’ve been predicting since then that some day, when enough middle-class people were really hurting, the Republicans would suddenly “discover” a health care problem and complain that Democrats let it happen. We’re just about there, finally.

I don’t believe this obstinant refusal to change course before we hit the iceberg was always true of Republicans. This article from 2004 reminds us that the first President to suggest we need to wean ourselves from dependence on foreign oil was Richard Nixon. I well remember at the time there was widespread and bipartisan realization that someday we’d have to find a way to generate power that didn’t involve fossil fuel. It’s a shame more wasn’t done then, but Vietnam and Watergate sucked the air out of just about every other issue at the time.

I also remember the Jimmy Carter energy crisis, which IMO was more annoying than today’s because there was a shortage of supply and finding an open gas station was a crapshoot. It got so that people would stop at any open gas station to “top off” their tank even when it was nearly full, because you never knew how long it would be before you could buy gas again. “This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation,” Carter said. One of the causes of that crisis was instability in the Middle East, notably the Iranian revolution. It’s almost 30 years later, and here we are again.

Ronald Reagan was critical of Carter’s emphasis on conservation and developing alternative fuel sources. Reagan said in his 1980 presidential nomination acceptance speech:

Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.

This became the standard excuse for not preparing for an oil-scarce future — We have plenty of oil and gas already. We just have to dig it up. The problem was that those “large amounts” were already dug up, or were in places prohibitively difficult to reach, and once pumped the oil would need to be transported through environmentally sensitive regions like Prudhoe Bay or Prince Williams Sound. Or, like ANWR, the oil in them amounts to less than what the U.S. burns in a couple of years.

And the earth ain’t makin’ more oil. So even if every little scrap of oil and gas in the United States and its territories, including offshore, were tapped and shipped to the refineries, the Day of Oil Reckoning will still come, eventually.

So why didn’t President Clinton fix the problem? you ask. As I wrote in this post, Gov. Bush made Clinton’s “failed” energy policy a campaign issue in 2000. Could Clinton have done more? Could he have worked at it harder? Yeah, probably. But the Clinton-Gore Administration wanted to pursue sissy tree-hugger policies like development of renewable energy resources and building more energy-efficient cars and appliances. Republicans in Congress wanted to drill.

In this document from 2000 the Clinton Administration claimed Congress had approved only 12 percent of the funding requested for Clinton energy programs. At the same time, Congress cut funding for existing programs the Clintonistas considered vital to meeting future energy requirements. Republicans in Congress had become fixated on drilling in ANWR as The Only Energy Crisis Solution We’ll Ever Need.

And then came the Oil Guys.

This Greg Palast BBC story from 2001 reminds us of what changed after the Bushies assumed power.

The state of California has accused the El Paso Corporation and Dynegy of deliberately restricting the flow of natural gas through the pipeline from Texas creating an artificial shortage which caused prices to go up ten-fold.

President Clinton ordered an end to speculation in energy prices in California, which bit into the profits of El Paso, Reliant, Enron and Dynegy.

Between them the four companies gave $3.5m to Mr Bush and the Republicans. Three days after his inauguration Mr Bush swept away Mr Clinton’s anti-speculation orders.

Profits for these four power traders are now up $220m in the first quarter.

And protection against pollution is set to weaken further, the BBC’s Newsnight programme has discovered that deep in Mr Bush’s new budget, the million-dollar fund for civil enforcement to deter pollution will be axed.

In the future law enforcement will be left to locals.

The operative word for oil companies was bonanza. It was the lawless Wild West all over again. And I’m not so sure they’re ready to settle down and behave even now.

Today Frank O’Donnell wrote for TomPaine.com —

You know President George W. Bush’s ratings are in the toilet when he starts bashing oil companies in the name of protecting what he repeatedly called “our consumers,” as he did yesterday.

And you know the Party in Power—just back from getting an earful from angry constituents about rising gasoline prices—is shaking in its shoes at the prospect of tomorrow’s (April 27) profit announcement by ExxonMobil.

So the president did what a floundering politician does: he tried to change the subject.

O’Donnell goes on to document that the energy industry helped create the fix we’re in now. For example,

In declaring that part of the problem is that we haven’t built new refineries in the U.S. in decades, the president is being simply disingenuous. As he well knows from his days in the business, the big oil companies decided for economic reasons that it was more cost-effective to expand existing refineries than build new ones. In fact, they have managed those expansions to avoid a gasoline glut that could lead to lower prices.

Can’t have lower prices, can we? My gracious.

And then there’s the problem of Mr. Bush’s “do” deficit. From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

During his State of the Union speech last January, President Bush correctly diagnosed America’s oil consumption as an addiction. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush is balking at taking the steps to cure the abuse. …

…The alternative energy technologies Mr. Bush emphasized — biofuels, hybrids, hydrogen power — are important and promising. What’s missing is a plan to get us from here to there. That means oil and gas prices will continue to rise, as America leads the world in draining the planet’s petroleum resources.

If Bush remains true to form, he’ll trot around for a while making speeches about an energy policy that will, somehow, never come to pass. If he can get prices down in the short term (and surely his oil industry buddies can arrange that) the “crisis” will be over and he can continue to do nothing.

Of course, linked to the energy crisis is the global warming crisis that conservatives refuse to acknowledge even as the polar ice caps are melting. At least this time there won’t be an iceberg to hit. Although it might be understandable to provide a short-term relaxing of environmental law to meet a short-term crisis — might, I say — paying the greenhouse gas piper must be part of whatever long-term policies we eventually adopt. Righties are still at the “you loony liberals are so loony” stage on that issue, however, so I’m not expecting bipartisan consensus anytime soon.

Oh, and since the great Northeast Power Blackout of 2003, has anyone heard that the Bushies have come up with a plan for maintaining the aging electricity grid? I haven’t, but maybe it got by me.

One other thing — remember the “know thy enemy” T-shirt discussed in the previous post? One of the bullet points is “If you see a fuel-efficient car, it’s probably being driven by a liberal. Run it off the road with your SUV.” Make of that what you will.

Billmon writes,

It’s a little disconcerting to think that gas prices — not Iraq, not Katrina, not the extra-constitutional power grabs — could decide whether Shrub’s presidency recovers or collapses into complete irrelevancy for the next three years. But the good Dr. Pollkatz has already plotted the relationship, and it’s statistically suggestive, to say the least.

It’s especially disconcerting when you consider that in 2000 the Bush campaign criticized the Clinton-Gore administration for its inability to lower gas prices.

Mr. Bush was critical of Al Gore in the 2000 campaign for being part of “the administration that’s been in charge” while the “price of gasoline has gone steadily upward.” In December 1999, in the first Republican primary debate, Mr. Bush said President Clinton “must jawbone OPEC members to lower prices.”

Katharine Q. Seelye wrote in the June 22, 2000 New York Times — “Price of Gasoline Emerges as Issue in Bush-Gore Race” —

Mr. Bush and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame the gas-price increase on the Clinton administration, saying the administration has had no coherent domestic energy policy and, in imposing regulations to meet clean air standards, had allowed prices to drift as high as $2.39 a gallon in the Midwest. Mr. Bush also said the administration had failed to persuade the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to ”open the spigots” to increase the supply.

After an announcement that the Federal Trade Commission would be investigating possible price gouging, Vice President Gore’s campaign made a point of connecting Governor Bush to Big Oil.

Senator Harkin, speaking on behalf of the Gore campaign on a conference call with reporters, accused the oil companies of ”outright thievery.” He went on to castigate Mr. Bush for his ”silence” on the matter, saying, ”What can you expect of someone who once claimed, and I quote, ‘There’s no such thing as being too closely aligned to the oil business in West Texas’?”

The quotation from Mr. Bush was made in a 1978 Congressional campaign. Acknowledging that the quotation was more than 20 years old, Mr. Harkin said: ”The point is, the test of character and leadership is when you’re willing to take on your friends when it’s in the nation’s best interest.”

Mr. Bush signed an emergency tax bill in 1999 that gave state tax breaks to oil and gas companies. The Dallas Morning News reported that the bill saved Richard Rainwater, a former Bush business partner, $1 million. At least 14 of Mr. Bush’s ”Pioneers,” his largest financial contributors, have ties to the oil industry.

Mr. Bush’s campaign has received $1.5 million from energy interests as of April 30, while Mr. Gore had received less than $125,000 as of the same date.

It seems some voters made the connection but believed Bush’s connections to Big Oil would help him pull prices down. From a blogger’s election 2000 notes —

I got a big piece of this analysis from thinking about a comment from an AR relative, who said she voted for Bush because she thought that Bush would keep gas prices lower, and that mattered a lot. This was counterintuitive to me: the US oil industry (Bush’s home turf) lives and dies on gas prices, and the higher the better. One could even argue that Bush pere conspired with the Saudis to keep Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq in order to keep Iraq’s oil off the market, to keep Iraq from depressing the market.

If it’s Tuesday, it’s time for new record low Bush approval ratings. Georgia10 writes,

So President Bush woke up today and suddenly gave a damn about gas prices. Mr. 32% spent this morning calling for a investigation into possible cheating, price gouging or illegal manipulation in the gasoline markets. He also will asked the EPA to ease clean air restrictions, and he temporarily stopped deposits into the strategic petroleum reserve, a move that will have only a “negligible” impact on gas prices. The media are lapping it up, but they refuse to mention that Bush is forced to face the consequences of his own failed energy policy.

Taylor Marsh:

This is the most preposterous story I’ve read recently. Bush is going after his own people, the ones who helped get him elected. He’s going after the very men and companies that have led to this situation. First, Bush allows private meetings with oil companies and others, including people representing nuclear, so they can help craft our energy policy. Republicans give subsidies to companies that don’t need it. All the while President Bush doesn’t do a thing to help mitigate our independence, believing only ANWAR is the answer. If it isn’t drilling it doesn’t have a place in Bush’s world. We’ve also got Frist and Hastert planning to look into the oil companies. There’s only one reason they’re doing this and it’s because there’s an election. They’re trying to save themselves. The don’t want solutions or they would have been working on one long before now. Bush has been in office for years. What, he’s now just discovering we have an energy problem? This is a charade.

Besides, if Bush wants to know if price gouging is going on why doesn’t he just pick up the phone? Republicans know these guys, the oil men. They are one of their own. Don’t go through this political dance. Just go to the men who brought you to Washington and ask them. It’s not like they wouldn’t take Bush’s call.

I ‘spect it’s the same reason he didn’t try real hard to look into the Valerie Plame leak — he doesn’t really want to know.

Back to Georgia10:

Where has the President been for the last three years or so, as we’ve seen gas prices skyrocket? First, he promised the Iraq War would lower gas prices. As his senior economic adviser stated in 2002:

“The key issue is oil, and a regime change in Iraq would facilitate an increase in world oil,” which would drive down oil prices, giving the U.S. economy an added boost.

It turns out that the Iraq War didn’t increase world oil, only oil profits. So, then, President Bush promised that his energy policy (which included massive tax breaks for the oil industry) would help our energy crisis. Well, it did not help, but that result is to be expected when our nation’s energy policy is drafted by the oil industry.

So where has the President been? Obviously, his administration does not shoulder all of the blame for high gas prices. But his deliberate absence and incompetence on this issue have only made the situation worse.

Now that the issue finally has his attention, he realized this would be a great time to suspend environmental rules for oil refiners. Typical. And he’s making more noise about our “addiction to oil,” although I haven’t noticed he’s come up with any concrete program to ween us of our addiction.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has proposed that federal gas taxes be eliminated for 60 days. This would reduce the price of gas by more than 18 cents a gallon. Democrats propose cutting six billion dollars in tax breaks to oil firms to make up the lost revenue. Currently, the money from the federal gas tax goes to the Highway Trust fund.

Of course, what we really need to do is get serious about alternate energy sources and put more money into mass transit — the sort of thing Al Gore was talking about many years ago. But you know how it is — conservation and solar energy are for sissies. Real men drill.

Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff report for Newsweek that Mary McCarthy “has denied she was the source of a controversial Washington Post story about alleged CIA secret detention operations in Eastern Europe.” Further,

McCarthy’s lawyer, Ty Cobb, told NEWSWEEK this afternoon that contrary to public statements by the CIA late last week, McCarthy never confessed to agency interrogators that she had divulged classified information and “didn’t even have access to the information” in The Washington Post story in question.

Larry Johnson had said as much on his blog a couple of days ago:

In fact, there are some things about the case that puzzle me. For starters, Mary never worked on the Operations side of the house. In other words, she never worked a job where she would have had first hand operational knowledge about secret prisons. She worked the analytical side of the CIA and served with the National Intelligence Council. According to press reports, she subsequently worked at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) from 2001 thru 2005. That is a type of academic/policy wonk position and, again, would not put her in a position to know anything first hand about secret prisons.

According to Hosenball and Isikoff, “McCarthy did acknowledge that she had failed to report contacts with Washington Post reporter Dana Priest and at least one other reporter. … McCarthy has known Priest for some time. … the CIA was not necessarily accusing her of being the principal, original, or sole leaker of any particular story.” (Emphasis added.)

It is possible, then, that McCarthy had absolutely nothing to do with the secret prison story. In fact, Hosenball and Isikoff report, other journalists reporting on this story say they got most of their information from unclassified sources.

Glenn Greenwald: “Priest’s original story itself made clear said that her reporting was based upon ‘current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources.'”

When she was fired, McCarthy was told her identity would be protected. The next day it was all over the news.

Keeping in mind that everything we say is speculative … Steve M. writes,

I find myself thinking about this recent Molly Ivins column:

…[Karl] Rove, as all the world knows, has been a longtime Republican political operative in Texas prior to heading to Washington with Bush. During that time, Texas Democrats noticed a pattern that they eventually became somewhat paranoid about: In election years, there always seemed to be an FBI investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press.

After the election was over, the allegations often vanished….

Ivins goes on to note that one particular FBI agent seemed to be Rove’s go-to guy back in Texas. Now, though, Rove has the whole federal government to play with — he doesn’t need just one pal.

If the accusations against McCarthy turn out to be one of Karl’s red herrings, this could come back to bite him, big time.

Naturally, righties are still howling for McCarthy’s blood. The rightie blog Hot Air provides a handy-dandy roundup of rightie groupthink regarding McCarthy and why the revelation proves that just about every Democrat on the planet must be guilty of something. This paragraph in particular caught my attention:

And man, did she [McCarthy] ever get caught. WaPo says she failed multiple polygraphs before confessing. AJ Strata cites reports describing a “pattern of behavior”. But what’s really got right-wing bloggers exercised is the discovery that McCarthy and her husband have donated upwards of $10,000 to Democratic political campaigns and organizations since 2004. Curiously enough, certain mainstream media outlets have had trouble nailing down the exact figure despite the fact that Ace and Tom Maguire were able to find it on OpenSecrets.org in about thirty seconds. And that’s not the only convenient omission from their predictably sympathetic coverage. Sweetness & Light looks at two of the press’s go-to guys on this story – former CIA analysts Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson – and reveals a few salient facts about their views on intelligence that somehow have managed to fly under the media’s radar.

I doubt the “certain media outlets” weren’t able to find the amount of money McCarthy and her husband donated to Democrats. Rather, to someone who’s not a blazing-hot partisan the information is not particularly significant, especially before McCarthy has actually been convicted of anything. No rational person would jump to the conclusion that someone in McCarthy’s position would risk arrest and tarnish a many-years-long career over mere party politics. And, of course, the “salient facts” about Johnson and McGovern are that they’ve spoken out against the Bush Administration’s deceitful manipulation of intelligence. In RightieWorld only other righties are allowed to be “go-to guys.”

Speaking of Larry Johnson, he writes in “Between Conscience and Unconscionable“:

And what have we learned this week? If you have contributed any money to Democrats you are a traitor if you criticize the President. Rand Beers, a senior national security advisor who served in the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations was labeled a turncoat. Joe and Valerie Wilson? Guilty because they had the temerity to participate in politics and contribute to Al Gore (although they also contributed to George Bush senior). Mary McCarthy? Guilty as well for contributing to John Kerry. Of course, we can conveniently forget that she stood up to the Clinton Administration for its unjustified bombing of a factory in Sudan. Why worry about facts? Bush finds them convenient to ignore.

What we are witnessing is a political purge of the CIA. The Bush Administration is working to expel and isolate any intelligence officer who does not toe the line and profess allegiance to George. It is no longer about protecting and defending the Constitution. No. It is about protecting the indefensible reputation of George Bush.

The firing of Mary McCarthy and her trial in the media is a travesty. Particularly when George Bush continues to harbor leakers who put selfish political motives above the welfare of this nation. It remains to be seen if Mary McCarthy had anything to do with the leak of secret prisons. There is no doubt, however, that Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Stephen Hadley, Dick Cheney, and George Bush directly participated in a campaign to leak misleading intelligence information to the American people. Patrick Fitzgerald’s court filings make that point abundantly clear. Under George Bush, America is being asked to tolerate Gulag Politics. That is something I find intolerable and unconscionable.

See also:

Glenn Greenwald: “A Political Movement Built on Rage”

Digby: “Agitating for a Crackdown”

Taylor Marsh: “McCarthy as CIA Scapegoat“