Matt Stoller, “Debate Train to Crazy Town.” Read it.
Monthly Archives: October 2006
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Righties Can’t Read
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; righties have the reading comprehension skills of a turnip. Today’s example:
There’s a profile of Jim Webb in today’s Washington Post that plays up Webb’s southwest Virginia roots. It begins this way:
About a year ago, before he was running for the Senate, James Webb took a colleague to the mountains of southwest Virginia to do some research for a movie they were working on.
Rob Reiner , meet my cousin Jewel and her husband, Buck. Jewel made a home-cooked meal for Webb and his producer-director friend. She pointed across the way to a nearby hollow and said:
“Ah wuz bawn rat ovah theyah.” That’s Reiner on the phone from Los Angeles, doing a mountain accent.
At night, Webb took Reiner to a rustic auditorium. There was bluegrass and flatfoot dancing.
“Incredible experience,” Reiner says.
Nostalgia kicked in as soon as I read this. I had a Great-Aunt Jewel who lived with Great-Uncle Carl on a little farm in the mountains, and I recall a dance — I’m not sure of the venue, but it might have been a church basement — where there was old-time fiddlin’ and clog dancing. It was explained to me once that the “clog” style common to the Ozarks is more Celtic — think Irish dancing — and the “flatfoot” style of the eastern mountains comes from English country dancing. I’m not going to swear that’s the truth, but it could be.
There may be few places in the country more foreign to Hollywood than Gate City, Va., and much of Webb’s livelihood has been to translate one culture for another. His dad’s family came out of these hollows, though Webb grew up on military bases all over the country. Over the course of his career, in books and more recently in screenplays, Webb, 60, has been writing about the dignity of his people — the gun-loving, country-music-singing, working-class whites of Scotch-Irish descent who fight in wars, staff the nation’s factories and shop its Wal-Marts.
“This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture,” Webb writes in his most recent book.
He knows that some folks might call his people rednecks. We pity those folks if Jim Webb is around when they say that.
The profile, by Libby Copeland, continues to describe Webb’s career in the Marines and in the Reagan Administration, where he was Secretary of the Navy. He is also a prolific writer; among other works he has published six novels and a book of nonfiction about Scotch-Irish culture. He has done some screenwriting as well, which the Allen campaign has tried to exploit by tying Webb to the “culture of Hollywood.” (And Ronald Reagan wasn’t tied to the “culture of Hollywood”?)
The funny thing is, Webb — a Democrat who became a Republican in the ’70s and a Democrat again in recent years — has been a largely conservative force both in movies and on the printed page. At various times he has eviscerated liberals, feminists, elites, academics and those who protested the Vietnam War. He has criticized Hollywood for its treatment of his people.
“His people” being the small-town and rural folk of southwest Virginia, note.
The project that took Webb and Reiner to the hills of southwestern Virginia is a script they’d been working on for a movie about this very subject. “Whiskey River” centers on an Iraq war soldier who hails from a world much like Gate City, Va., and what Reiner calls the “culture of service” this soldier comes from. It is also, Reiner says, about the fundamental unfairness of a war in which “only certain people have to sacrifice.”
The notion of his people’s sacrifice in wartime is a theme Webb has returned to again and again in his writing. In his 2004 book, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” Webb writes that the Scotch-Irish “have fed dedicated soldiers to this nation far beyond their numbers in every war.” In interviews, he recalls starting law school in 1972 and discovering that others were in “ethnocentric retreat.” Everyone else knew who they were and where they came from, everyone else had ethnic pride, but the identity of Webb’s own culture had been lost. He says his peers labeled him a white man of privilege, a WASP.
This is something I relate to, big-time. First, hillbilly culture — I should say “cultures,” because as the dancing styles illustrate there are distinctions — has never been properly recognized as a culture. And now the distinctions are mostly gone, and mountain cultures have dissipated to become nearly indistinguishable from small-town and rural cultures throughout most of America. That didn’t used to be so.
And I hate being mistaken for a WASP, even though I pass for one most of the time. I function in WASP culture (I think) because over the years, by trial and error, I learned to do so. (I had the advantage of being able to speak standard English. Nothing more clearly separates hard-core hillbillies from middle-class white folks than noun-verb agreement.)
In the decades since, Webb has studied the migrations of his people, exulting in their fighting history and puzzling over their entrenched poverty.
Entrenched white poverty is mostly rural and hidden away where most folks don’t see it. There are parts of the Ozarks in which families have been on welfare since they invented welfare, and whose residents can no more function in standard middle-class white culture than they can fly.
Then the profile describes Webb’s novels. I haven’t read his work, but I take it from the description that Webb uses fiction to explore the moral ambiguities and brutality of war. Naturally the Allen campaign is combing through his work, looking for anything he’s written they can twist around to use against him.
We’re getting to the punch line.
In a recent interview in the back of his campaign RV, Webb talks about how Hollywood has lampooned the Scotch-Irish. He says he is sick of this story line. For too long, he says, poor Southern whites have been one of the few groups it’s still safe to make fun of.
We are now more than 30 paragraphs into a story whose theme, restated over and over, is Jim Webb’s quest to bring respect to the lives and culture of “his people,” a group often disparaged as “rednecks.”
“Towel-heads and rednecks — of which I am one. If you write that word, please say that. I mean, I don’t use that pejoratively, I use it defensively. Towel-heads and rednecks became the easy villains in so many movies out there.“
Obviously — obvious if you have standard reading comprehension skills and take in the context of the entire profile — he’s saying that he hates the way filmmakers sterotype Middle Easterners and the subset of white Americans identified as “rednecks,” whatever that is these days. And naturally some rightie bloggers twisted this quote into meaning something else. Here we have Idiot #1:
“Towel-heads?” It’s on Page 3 of this Post story. I think that’s what they call a buried lede. I’m eagerly waiting the 188 Post stories on this slur. You know, the one that doesn’t require knowing a foreign language or finding three anonymous witnesses from 1972 to corroborate it. Yeah, I won’t hold my breath, either. Yeesh, if you’re gonna get your ire up about these things, I demand even-handed ire.
In August, Democrats and even some Republicans called upon Senator Allen to apologize for using the term “macacaâ€, a word with no meaning to the majority of Virginians but one that some took offense to. Senator Allen personally took it upon himself to quickly publicly apologize for the comment and even call the gentleman he directed it towards.
James Webb has now used a well known term that derides an entire ethnic group not just in Virginia or America but the world. I am willing to grant that he mis-spoke. That deserves not excuses but an apology.
I’m the last person who wants to be the PC language police around here, but can anyone imagine the media’s reaction if George Allen said something like this? As Tim Graham points out, the number of Post articles, news stories and editorial features with the word “Macaca” in them is up to 92!
Can we take up a collection and send these people somewhere for remedial reading classes?
Questions
Gloom and Doom
The pundits are brimming with advice and warnings for the Dems today. Let’s start with a warning. At the Los Angeles Times, Greg Grandin cautions Dems to remember Iran-Contra.
It was 20 years ago this Nov. 3 — the day after the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1986 — that a Lebanese magazine revealed that the Reagan administration sold missiles to Iran. The sale (brokered by a National Security Council staffer named Oliver North) violated a U.S. arms embargo against Iran and contradicted President Reagan’s personal pledge never to deal with governments that sponsored terrorism. Soon after, it was revealed that profits from the missile sale went to the Nicaraguan Contras, breaking yet another law, this one banning military aid to the anti-Sandinista guerrillas.
The Democrats rejoiced. They had taken back the Senate after six years in the minority, and Reagan’s poll numbers plummeted as follow-up investigations uncovered that the National Security Council was waging an off-the-books foreign policy using rogue intelligence agents, neoconservative intellectuals, Arab sheiks, drug runners, anticommunist businessmen, even the Moonies.
The Democrats, now with majorities in both congressional chambers, gleefully convened multiple inquiries. From May to August 1987, televised congressional hearings offered a rare glimpse into the cabalistic world of spooks, bagmen and mercenaries. Fawn Hall, North’s secret shredder, told of smuggling evidence out of the Old Executive Office Building in her boots, and she lectured Rep. Thomas Foley that “sometimes you have to go above the written law.”
One year after the hearings, though, Iran-Contra was a dead issue. Reagan’s poll numbers rebounded, and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, won the White House despite being implicated in the scandal.
Grandin says the Dems were tripped up by Oliver North, who somehow came across as heroic and patriotic in spite of, well, the facts. I think there was more going on to squelch the investigation. However it happened, Iran-Contra slipped out of public consciousness without leaving a trace. Grandin continues,
Just last December, Vice President Dick Cheney pointed to the Republican “minority report” on Iran-Contra — written, not coincidentally, by Cheney’s current chief of staff, David Addington — to justify the White House’s insistence on the primacy of the executive branch in matters of national security. At the time, that report, which blamed the scandal on Congress for “legislative hostage-taking,” was considered out of the mainstream. Today, it reads like a run-of-the-mill memo from the Justice Department outlining the legal basis for any of the Bush administration’s wartime power grabs.
Cheney and Addington are not the only veterans of the scandal who have resurfaced to help President Bush fight the war on terror. So have Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Otto Reich, John Negroponte, John Poindexter, neoconservative Michael Ledeen and even Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Iranian arms dealer who brokered one of the first missile sales to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s regime.
Iran-Contra, then, wasn’t just a Watergate-style crime and a coverup. It was, rather, another battle in the neoconservative campaign against Congress and in defense of the imperial presidency. Though Iran-Contra might have been a draw — the 11 convicted conspirators won on appeal or were pardoned by George H.W. Bush — the backlash has become the establishment.
Already there are reports that if the Democrats take over Congress in November, their agenda will have a 1986-ish look: hearings and calls for more congressional oversight of foreign policy.
But if they want to avoid again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, they must do what their counterparts 20 years ago failed to do. They must challenge the crusading ideology that justified the invasion of Iraq and has made war the option of first resort for this administration.
Otherwise, no matter how many probes they convene — or congressional seats they pick up — the Democrats will always be dancing to Ollie’s tune.
Even gloomier are Michael Lind’s projections for a post-Bush America:
But if the US extricates itself from Iraq and Afghanistan and stays out of other Muslim countries, then the already feeble incentive for American politicians to try to balance support for Israel with appeals to Arab and Muslim public opinion will be even weaker. The abandonment of the US attempt to be the hegemon of the middle east, and US withdrawal from Iraq, might actually empower those in the US who make the simple claim that the US and Israel are allies in world war four (Norman Podhoretz’s term; he considers the cold war to be world war three) against the hydra-headed menace of “Islamofascism.”
The strengthening of the anti-Arab, anti-Muslim right in the US following an inglorious retreat from Iraq would strain US-European ties even further. In the second decade of the 21st century, Europeans may be surprised to find themselves denounced by some liberal Democrats as well as by conservative Republicans as “Eurabian” appeasers.
In US domestic politics, the long-term beneficiaries of the Iraq war may be the Republicans who waged and lost it, rather than the Democrats who (mostly) opposed it. This is less paradoxical than it seems. Countries that win wars are relaxed about their security and more open to parties of the left—think of Clinton’s two terms after the cold war and before 9/11, or Britain’s rejection of Churchill after the second world war. Defeated countries tend to seek strong men on the right, as France did after Algeria and the US did after Vietnam, which was followed by a series of Republican presidencies.
I have a bad case of brain mush because of a head cold, and I’m having trouble coming up with pithy commentary today. Silver linings, anyone?
Vulnerability Gap
R.J. Eskow discusses a new book by Clark Kent Ervin:
Ervin’s book, “Open Target,” describes an Administration that’s all but indifferent to protecting the American people from further terrorism. Its sole concerns appear to be to use DHS to dole out political pork, create politically attractive news releases, and spin failure so that it looks like success.
This is not news. But notice who Clark Kent Ervin is:
Ervin is the conservative Texas Republican who came to Washington as a personal friend of the President’s after serving in his gubernatorial administration. He became Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and refused to look the other way at the Administration’s incompetence in fighting terrorism.
Yes, another former Bushie tells all. But what got my interest in Eskrow’s piece was Ervin’s use of the phrase vulnerability gap. Computer network security people have been using this phrase for a while. I think the Dems ought to pick it up and run with it.
Once upon a time, boys and girls, a Democrat named John Kennedy used the phrase “missile gap” to discredit Republicans on national security and win a presidential election. The Dems generously larded speeches with missile gap and drizzled the phrase liberally on the electorate. It reminded voters of an allegation — which was not true — that the Eisenhower Administration (including Vice President Richard Nixon, Kennedy’s opponent) had somehow allowed the Soviets to acquire more nuclear missiles than we had.
The phrase vulnerability gap ought to work nicely, too, and it has the advantage of describing truth. Eskow continues,
Ervin dissects the self-serving and misleading statements made by Bush, Ridge, and Michael Chertoff. He’s especially withering on their boasts that the fact we haven’t been attacked on US soil since 9/11 is proof that DHS is effective. He compares it to French confidence in the Maginot Line, the most foolish defense attempt in history, and points out that terrorists operate on a long line. Five years, as he observes, is not a long time to Al Qaeda.
He describes the TSA as a boondoggle gone awry, and his analysis of our ongoing vulnerability to nuclear attack is chilling. Equally frightening are his descriptions of the government’s drastic underfunding of our anti-terror defenses. (He quotes from Congressional testimony in which a DHS intelligence official admits he can’t hire more staff as required because there is no money to pay for their office space.)
Ervin also details the vulnerability of mass transit, schools, and other “soft targets.” He’s fair enough to admit that you can’t defend every possible target, but thorough enough to describe what could be done (and isn’t) to improve their safety.
Vulnerability gap, vulnerability gap, vulnerability gap. The connotations are all there; vulnerability conjures the sensation of being unprotected and exposed. Gap makes us visualize breach or broken, perhaps also left behind or separated from something. Vulnerability gap. While the Bush Administration sends our National Guard overseas and dumps $2 billion bleeping collars a week into Iraq, vital infrastructure and other soft targets are left unguarded here at home. Vulnerability gap.
If the Dems can’t club the Bushies to death with that, there’s no hope for ’em.
Cowards
The fundamental question is this: Why would any American citizen support the “2006 Military Commission Act” that President Bush signed into law today?
Let’s review:
The Act empowers President Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, “unlawful enemy combatants.” An American citizen who speaks out against Bush’s policies could be designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” by Bush. The Act empowers the President to round up and incarcerate anyone, citizen or non-citizen, who he determines has given “material support” to terrorists. The Act strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. The U.S. will continue to round up innocent and guilty alike and hold them indefinitely without giving them a way to prove their innocence. For more on how the Act strips American citizens and others of basic rights, see Marjorie Cohn, “American Prison Camps Are on the Way.”
Regarding torture: Reasonable people might disagree over the distinction between “cruelty” and “torture.” For example, Stephen Rickard argues in today’s WaPo that the Act authorizes cruelty but not torture. I assume he refers to definitions of torture and cruelty in international law; personally, I don’t see a difference. But he also says,
[The CIA] reportedly was using waterboarding (a terrifying mock execution in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and convinced he is being drowned), dousing naked prisoners with water in 50-degree cold and forcing shackled prisoners to stand for 40 straight hours. …
…The United States has prosecuted every one of these techniques as a war crime. So when Congress passed the McCain amendment last fall banning cruel treatment, CIA interrogators reportedly stopped working. Vice President Cheney had sought an exemption for the CIA — but didn’t get one. The administration apparently pushed the interrogators hard to resume their tactics, saying these techniques were still legal, but the CIA refused.
It seems the agency had learned an important lesson from the infamous Justice Department “torture memo,” which claimed that to be deemed “torture” a procedure had to be capable of causing major organ failure or death. The administration repudiated the memo when it became public. The lesson? Secret, contorted legal opinions don’t provide any real protection to CIA officers.
So the CIA demanded “clarity” — from Congress. No wonder President Bush practically sprinted to the cameras to begin spinning his “compromise” with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the Military Commissions Act. He needs to convince CIA interrogators that they now have congressional carte blanche.
So did the Act signed today do the trick? Rickard says it doesn’t, and that if the interrogators give in to White House pressure and resume brutal interrogations, they’ll be at greater legal risk than before.
The administration is trying to convince CIA officers that they won’t be indicted — or at least convicted. But the CIA demanded clarity, not more ambiguity and “plausible deniability.”
At the end of the day all the president can honestly tell CIA interrogators is this: “The law has some loose language. We’ll give you another memo. Don’t worry.”
Sure.
And torture doesn’t work, anyway. Bush wants us to believe that the “tough” techniques that may or may not be torture has yielded vital information that has saved American lives, but there is plenty of indication that’s not so.
The new law vaguely bans torture — but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn’t. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture.
Here’s what Bush had to say at his signing ceremony in the East Room: “The bill I sign today helps secure this country, and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair, and we will never back down from the threats to our freedom.”
But that may not be the “clear message” the new law sends most people.
Here’s the clear message the law sends to the world: America makes its own rules. The law would apparently subject terror suspects to some of the same sorts of brutal interrogation tactics that have historically been prosecuted as war crimes when committed against Americans.
Here’s the clear message to the voters: This Congress is willing to rubberstamp pretty much any White House initiative it sees as being in its short-term political interests. (And I don’t just mean the Republicans; 12 Senate Democrats and 32 House Democrats voted for the bill as well.)
Here’s the clear message to the Supreme Court: Review me.
I ask again: why would anyone support Bush’s position? Today righties are snarling and snapping like cornered animals at anyone who criticizes the torture bill. We nay-sayers are “whiny hippies” throwing a “moonbat hissy fit.”
A more temperate rightie declared “This is undeniably a victory for those of us that believe we need to aggressively wage the war against jihadism.” This and other rightie commenters continue to follow the White House in blind faith that the Bush Administration knows what it is doing and will use the unprecedented power it has gained wisely. Given the Bush Administration’s record — that’s insane.
Righties like to talk tough, but peel enough layers off ’em and you’ll find a sniveling little coward crouching and whimpering at their core. Deep down, they want Dear Leader to have dictatorial power so that he can protect them. Like any mob in the grip of hysteria, they have lost reason and inhibition, and they attack anyone who gets in their way.
They’re cowards, they’re out of control, and they must be stopped.
News That Isn’t News
North Korea has plutonium. This is not news. North Korea has had plutonium for many years, enough for at least five or six nuclear weapons, probably more. They had it before Bill Clinton became president. From 1994 to 2003, the plutonium was stored in fuel rods in a concrete-lined pool of water in Yongbyon. In 2003, North Korea un-froze its plutonium weapons program and began working on making plutonium bombs.
The plutonium in the bombs North Korea is testing was processed since 2003. On Bush’s watch.
North Korea also has had uranium, and lots of it, for many years. In 2002 the Bush Administration stirred up an international whoop-dee-doo by claiming North Korea was processing uranium to make nuclear weapons. I do not believe there was ever any firm confirmation that NK was enriching uranium for military use and not industrial use. There is some question whether North Korea is capable of enriching uranium for military use — it takes a lot of time, energy, and technical whizbangs (such as 1,300 high-performance centrifuges) to get sufficient bomb material out of uranium. Worst-case, North Korea eventually might have made one or two uranium bombs.
In contrast to uranium, plutonium is nearly plug-and-play, so to speak. That’s why plutonium is a bigger worry than uranium. That’s why the 1994 Agreed Framework was negotiated — to get North Korea to freeze its plutonium program. And North Korea kept this agreement until the Bush Administration trashed it.
This is utterly unsurprising; the parallel uranium program that North Korea had developed in the 1990s was never capable of producing much in the way of bomb material. This reinforces the conclusion that the key diplomatic moments came in 1994, when the North Koreans agreed to substantially scale back their nuclear ambitions in return for aid, and in 2002 when they gave up on this agreement. … [T]he Bush administration in 2002 faced two unfortunate but clearly distinguishable realities; one in which North Korea had the material required to make one or two bombs, and one in which [North Korea] had the capacity to make nearly a dozen. Because of its diplomatic ineptitude, ideological commitment, and obsession with Iraq, the administration had neither the interest in dealing with North Korea nor the capacity to carry out any threats.
For reasons explained very well and clearly in the articles linked below, North Korea’s decision to un-freeze plutonium production is entirely the fault of the Bush Administration.
The North Korea link archive:
Eric Alterman, “Blaming Success, Upholding Failure”
Rachel Weise, “North Korea Nuclear Timeline”
Hilzoy, “Do You Feel Safer Now?”
Joe Conason, “Wagging the Big Dog”
Fred Kaplan, “The Slime Talk Express”
Rosa Brooks, “A Good Week for the Axis of Evil”
Tom Teepen, “Bush’s newest N. Korea policy: Blame Clinton”
Fred Kaplan, “Rolling Blunder”
The Mahablog North Korea posts (most recent first):
“Bombing”
“Bolton Lies; Righties Confused”
And finally,
The JabberDick
I haven’t found it outside the subscription firewall yet, but I want to mention Paul Krugman’s column in today’s New York Times. It begins,
In a recent interview with The Hartford Courant, Senator Joseph Lieberman said something that wasn’t credible. When the newspaper asked him whether America would be better off if the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives next month, he replied, “Uh, I haven’t thought about that enough to give an answer.â€
And the Democratic Party leadership in Washington wonders why we bloggers don’t like him. But this column isn’t about Lieberman. It’s about why America would be better off if the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives next month.
The really important reason may be summed up in two words: subpoena power.
Even if the Democrats take both houses, they won’t be able to accomplish much in the way of new legislation. They won’t have the votes to stop Republican filibusters in the Senate, let alone to override presidential vetoes.
The only types of legislation the Democrats might be able to push through are overwhelmingly popular measures, such as an increase in the minimum wage, that Republicans don’t want but probably wouldn’t dare oppose in an open vote.
But while the Democrats won’t gain the ability to pass laws, if they win they will gain the ability to carry out investigations, and the legal right to compel testimony.
The current Congress has shown no inclination to investigate the Bush administration. Last year The Boston Globe offered an illuminating comparison: when Bill Clinton was president, the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony into whether Mr. Clinton had used the White House Christmas list to identify possible Democratic donors. But in 2004 and 2005, a House committee took only 12 hours of testimony on the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The Bush White House, and in particular Dick the Dick, has some history with subpoenas. Let us revisit the tale of “Dick the Dick and the GAO Subpoena,” as told by John Dean in August, 2003.
In a sense, this story begins during the close 2000 Presidential election, when energy industry special interests were big-dollar contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. (In 2004’s re-election campaign, they will doubtless be called upon once again.)
After he was elected – and very much beholden to those contributors – Bush put Cheney in charge of developing the National Energy Policy. To do so, Cheney convened an Energy Task Force. (Details about the Task Force can be found in my prior column.)
Cheney’s selection alone was ominous: He had headed Halliburton, just the kind of big-dollar Republican energy industry contributor that had helped Bush-Cheney win the election in the first place.
The Energy Task Force might have operated in absolute secrecy, were it not for GAO. GAO is a nonpartisan agency with statutory authority to investigate “all matters related to the receipt, disbursement, and use of public money,” so that it can judge the expenditures and effectiveness of public programs, and report to Congress on what it finds.
To fulfill its statutory responsibility, GAO sought documents from Vice-President Cheney relating to Energy Task Force expenditures. But in a literally unprecedented move, the White House said no.
On August 2, 2001, Vice President Cheney sent a letter – personally signed by him – to Congress demanding, in essence, that it get the Comptroller off his back. In the letter, he claimed that his staff had already provided “documents responsive to the Comptroller General’s inquiry concerning the costs associated with the [Energy task force’s] work.” As I will explain later, this turned out to be a lie.
In the end, GAO had to go to court to try to get the documents to which it plainly was entitled. On December 9, 2002, GAO lost in court – though, as I argued in a prior column, the decision was incorrect.
Then, on February 9, 2003, the Comptroller General announced GAO’s decision not to appeal. He said he feared that another adverse decision would cause the agency to lose even more power, more permanently. Several news accounts suggest that it was the Republican leadership of Congress that stopped the appeal.
About the lie — At one point the Dickster released 77 pages of documents to the GAO with a signed letter saying these were, substantially, the “responsive” documents the GAO sought. The documents included “unexplained phone bills, columns of unidentified figures, and a pizza receipt,” says Dean, but not the information the GAO had requested.
The story continued. Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club had filed suit to obtain energy task force records, also. This case eventually made it to the Supreme Court after district courts refused to dismiss the suit, and in June 2004 the SCOTUS bounced the case back to the district courts. A whiff of impropriety surrounded the decision, as the Dick’s duck-hunting buddy Antonin Scalia refused to recuse himself. John Dean explained,
On June 24, in Cheney v. U.S. District Court, the Supreme Court gave Vice President Dick Cheney only a partial victory in the suit that seeks to learn how his National Energy Policy Development Group developed its recommendations. …
… This case received a great deal of press attention because Justice Antonin Scalia refused to recuse himself from it, despite his duck hunting trip with Cheney. And unsurprisingly, Scalia did indeed side with Cheney in the case.
But rather that write an opinion, Scalia joined a brief dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas that would have resolved the matter in Cheney’s favor – and resolved it on the merits, going into the constitutional issues involved.
But that did not happen. Five other Justices — Kennedy, Rehnquist, Stevens, O’Connor and Breyer – preferred to send the case back to the Court of Appeals, as noted above. They based their ruling on a number of fairly esoteric procedural grounds.
Finally, the remaining two Justices, Ginsburg and Souter, wanted to send the case all the way back to the trial judge – and allow it to proceed.
And in May 2005, the case was dismissed. Steve Soto reported,
Yes, Dick Cheney won his case on the Enron/Energy Task Force disclosure lawsuit in front of the District of Columbia District Court of Appeals yesterday. In an unusual unanimous 8-0 ruling that included Carter, Reagan, Bush I-II, and Clinton-appointed judges, the DC court of appeals found that the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch failed to show that nongovernmental officials and lobbyists were involved in the writing the Bush energy policy. As a result, the court dismissed the lawsuit for failing to show why the Executive Branch didn’t act within its authority to seek confidential input while it itself drafted the policy.
Both the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch are evaluating whether or not they will appeal to the Bush-Reagan Supreme Court. Observers have noted that the one startling assertion that all 8 bipartisan judges made in their decision is that they accepted on faith what the Bush Administration said about the non-involvement of industry in the drafting of the policy, without giving plaintiffs the opportunity to cross-examine or challenge the Bush Administration’s claims.
The imperial presidency has been fully established in the DC Court of Appeal and of course in the Bush/Reagan Supreme Court. Too bad they didn’t feel this way in the 1990s.
I am no lawyer, but it seems to me the legal issues surrounding subpoenas of the White House are pretty muddy these days. And what would happen if the White House were to run out of appeals and still refuse to honor a subpoena?
Fill in the Punch Line
How many Neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to hold the bulb and nine to rotate the ladder, plus 300,000 ground troops to invade Iran.
If you can think of other answers, add ’em.
How about these:
You may have heard Neocons are complete idiots, but that’s not true. Some parts are missing.
You can tell which kids will grow up to be Neocons. They’re the ones outsmarted by Silly Putty.
I started to create a Photoshop pic of Kristol and Hume wearing “I’m with stupid” T-shirts, but decided that would be redundant.