Conversation with a QAnon supporter

 To take his last question first, do I think Qanon is evil? Granted, “Q nevr divulged classified info or spoke abt violence or insurrection” So no, I just think Q and his followers are all completely devoid of any credibility.

Rocco first responded to my takedown of Tom Fitton's continued insistence that the former President Trump had every right to keep all of the documents produced by his administration with

There’s no case It’s just shh itt charges made up by leftist loo sirs in order to interfere in the elections…again The leftists will do whatever they have to in order to ensure Trump doesn’t win his 3rd straight presidential election

Guiterman asked “What if he had just given the documents back?”

To which Zag said

If he had, it would have diminished the executive power of the president to the point it was below NARA. It is the president's job, not NARA's job to determine which records are the president's. We should not elevate our librarian to have more power than the POTUS. POTUS>NARA

To which I responded:

Utterly ridiculous. The president does not have any authority to determine which records are private and personal versus which ones belong to the government. If he did, then the law that was passed after Nixon left office would have no meaning.

Rocco chimed in with

Again, I love it when condescending leftists pretend like they know what they’re talking about regarding the law…like all of a sudden we’re going 2 forget that dems don’t care that the bidens are all serial law breakers Read abt the Clinton Sock Drawer case u giant doo shh bag

I enjoy playing the role of the grown-up in the room, so I responded

I'm quite aware of the Clinton sock drawer case. It established that certain records count as the president's personal and private possession. It does NOT mean that the president can arbitrarily designate any records he pleases as being his. There's a very specific definition.

Later on, I was struck by a comment Rocco made

Don’t b distracted by their flailing They don’t care 1 bit abt the law Pay attention 2 what makes the cabal most desperate They scream the loudest when we expose their assaults on our children It’s always been abt the children

That struck me as something a follower of Qanon might say.

Yes, pedophilia was the favorite accusation of QAnon. Funny how they were completely oblivious to REAL pedos. We respect the law. When Hunter Biden was found guilty, we said "Oh, okay" and carried on. None of us made excuses, the way right-wingers have been doing for Trump.

Rocco asked

Rich, what do you mean Q & the Anons “were completely oblivious to REAL pedos”?

Me

Jeffrey Epstein and Josh Duggar were both discovered to be pedophiles during the time QAnon was well-known for accusing people of pedophilia. Both cases took them completely by surprise.

Then Rocco made it very clear where he was coming from

There’s no such thing as QAnon There’s Q & there r Anons Typical leftist dum bass…arrogant yet ignorant The cabal overlords u worship wud still b abusing, torturing, selling, sacrificing & E ting children on Epstein Island if it weren’t 4 DJT & Q like u care abt pedos

Me

Yeah, I saw a picture of Q after people tracked down who he actually was. Some skinny dweeb with glasses, no one you'd have ever heard of. Problem is, nothing he's "revealed" has ever been backed up by actual facts.

Rocco

            Sure u did Rich

I added

QAnon DID, however, baselessly accuse Wayfair Furniture of having pedos within it. This was not harmless. Real problem with that was that people who believed them clogged up the phone lines where people were trying to report REAL pedophilia.

Rocco

Baselessly? U r so clueless Wayfair was selling items for thousands of $’s that u can get for $20 down the street & the items were named after missing children At the same time secret Twitter accts had catalogs of kids 2 order as sex slaves w/the exact same names

I found a USA Today piece here and reproduced the opening paragraph.

"Last weekend, an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that online furnishings retailer Wayfair is trafficking children through listings of products with inflated prices and human names erupted on social media."

Rocco

U think the CEO of Wayfair gave up millions & resignd in disgrace b/c of these 2 weirdos? I wouldn’t believe anything in the USA Today othr than the date It’s fully ownd/operated by the Clowns In Action Rich U need 2 figure out that almost everything u think u kno is a lie

I figured that the CEO of Wayfair resigning was easy to check and, sure enough, found a Reuters piece.

It takes just a few seconds to check on things like "Did Niraj Shah actually resign?" And the answer of course, is no. Seriously dude, you're deeply embedded in a cult.

“Posts circulated on social media make the claim that Niraj Shah, chief executive officer of Wayfair, resigned from the e-shopping home retailer amid child sex trafficking allegations against the company. This claim, and the trafficking claim, are both false.”

Rocco

Reuters is owned by….wait 4 it….the Rothschilds U hav prolly never seen the adverts in Wayfair, yet u already kno everything abt Q Shah wasn’t only a stooge of the Rothschilds he was a Fed Resrv board member You’re so ignorant & proud I’m sure u r beyond the point of return

Which is interesting, but kinda beside the point. So I went to the Wayfair website, drilled down a bit and within a few minutes

BTW, I checked the Wayfair website and found that the fellow identified as CEO of the company is still the CEO. Meaning your analysis of their motivations may be good, but your conclusion is half-baked. Reuters was correct. He never lost his position.

Rocco

U r a sheep U still believe what u read/see in the cabal controlled media Sad Did u kno Google, FB, twitter & othr soc media platforms were startd by the CIA funded DARPA program? 100’s of thousands of children go missing in the USA each yr Where do u think they go?

So it's pretty clear that a follower of Q can't pass the most basic fact check. They just make up whatever “facts” they think might win the argument.

Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

 

Political quotes that really shouldn’t be made public

awful @MeetThePress premise this morning: we're "divided" over Covid and masks! we're not: 70% have a shot. 70% support masks.

Eric Boehlert

The problem with the crush of COVID-19 patients using up most of the available ICU beds* and crowding out emergency facilities is that it’s all so unnecessary.

*Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Florida and Arkansas are nearly out of ICU beds as Covid-19 cases surge across the US — particularly among unvaccinated Americans.

CNN

Here are the ICU beds that are occupied just by Covid patients in each of 14 states. Now, if you’re vaccinated and catch even the dreaded Delta Variant of the coronavirus, it might still result in some unpleasantness, but you’re unlikely even to have to go to the hospital.

To say that Americans are “divided” is to suggest that both sides have good reason to feel the way they do. That, for instance, taking Ivermectin, a cow de-wormer that yes, people can safely take under some very specific circumstances, but that the FDA says please don’t use it for Covid, is a reasonable and rational choice. It isn’t. It’ completely insane to think that the vaccines that the US went to great length to produce and to safety-test and to test for efficacy is less safe or effective than a quack cure pushed by Fox News and other conservative commenters.

There’s also a problem with a claim that anti-choicers/forced birthers make, that the new Texas “snitch” law “...bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which is usually after about six weeks of pregnancy, before many women are even aware they are pregnant."

As the C&L piece points out, a six week-old embryo (It won’t become a fetus for another month) doesn’t actually have a heart!

The rhythmic sound that can be heard is "a group of cells with electrical activity. That's what the heartbeat is at that stage of gestation … We are in no way talking about any kind of cardiovascular system." That's all from Jennifer Kerns, an ob-gyn at University of California, San Francisco and director of research in obstetrics and gynecology

There’s absolutely no question that the people who came up with the term did so consciously and deliberately, with malice and forethought. But why mainstream news reporters keep mindlessly repeating that “fetuses” have a heartbeat after six weeks is a real puzzle. This is a claim that fails a very simple true/false test.

Another recent problem is that the Texas “snitch” law didn’t just suddenly pop up out of the blue. The law was passed back in May. The course it took to the Supreme Court was publicly documented. Yet, the Supreme Court decision landed like a bombshell because, apparently, the press was so wholly and completely absorbed in the withdrawal from Afghanistan (a legitimate and worthwhile story) that it just didn’t have any time or attention to spare for the gutting of a Supreme Court ruling that’s been in effect since 1973. The press played catch-up with a number of pieces after the ruling was made, but there was absolutely no need for it to have been such a surprise.

Why does this happen? Why does the press constantly use right-wing talking points that are completely bonkers or ignore a clearly important issue that will obviously have a great impact? My own personal theory is that media people like to run stories through people they feel are outside experts, who are always free to chat and who provide authoritative-sounding quotes. In other words, reporters have right-wing “friends” who have cultivated close relationships with them and who assure them that a fetal heartbeat at six weeks is a real thing and who discourage putting out pieces on something like the Texas “snitch” law that will make right-wingers look bad (Fox News apparently realized how unpopular the new law was as they didn’t mention it for quite awhile). Reporters don’t need to stop talking with right-wing “friends.” What reporters need to do is to get friends on the “other side of the aisle” who can provide corrections and equally authoritative-sounding quotes.

I read a Fox News article

Disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich looks back at the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 and remarks on the differences between then and now.

Some observations about that:

1. Both the President and Congress were highly productive in 1998. This is true. According to the Clerk of the House, there were 547 roll call votes in 1998, but there were 701 roll call votes in 2019. So yes, the Congress of 1998 was busy, but the Congress of 2019 was busier.

2. Many Democrats voted to impeach Clinton. Again, this is true. The Republican Party is much more cohesive and united today then Democrats  were back then. As a blogger has pointed out though, the case that Republicans have made that the President is innocent of the charges against him is awfully threadbare. "And at that point, the president and his party said the impeachment process was unfair because … well, just because."

3.

Now, we are watching the culmination of Pelosi’s two-and-a-half-year impeachment effort – in which the Democrats failed to find anything close to a crime.

Couple of quibbles: Pelosi herself has not been conducting all of the various investigations of the President and Congress did find specific statutes that he violated. There's a reason the Constitution includes the vague term "high Crimes and Misdemeanors." But certainly the President has been investigated for pretty much his entire term.  Gee, I wonder why that is:

Democrats have also charged Trump with obstruction of Congress based on his stonewalling of the House’s impeachment inquiry. The White House has refused to provide documents to congressional investigators and has instructed top advisers and government officials to defy subpoenas and refuse to testify.

It's not like people have examined the evidence and have decided that the President is innocent, it's that We The People have been spending this whole time trying to uncover the evidence.

Response to President's accusations

[Copied and pasted from President's Twitter feed today, 13Nov2019]

“Nancy Pelosi cares more about power than she does about principle. She did not want to go down this road. She realizes this is a huge loser for Democrats.(1) The Founders envisioned the worst people being in politics, yet they couldn’t envision this. You have these people taking... 

...the most powerful tool the legislative branch has, Impeachment, & they’ve turned it into a political cudgel, which is not at all what the Founders intended.(3) When you hear Schiff use all these words like quid pro quo, it is because they can’t specify that Donald Trump broke.. 

....any laws or did anything wrong, and they have to move away from quid pro quo because there was no quid, and there was no quo. Ukraine got it’s money(4) (3 weeks early),(5) and there was no investigation.” (6)

(1) The first sentence contradicts the next two. If Speaker Pelosi cared abut power and if she realizes that impeachment "is a huge loser for Democrats" then that makes zero sense.

(2) Turning impeachment "into a political cudgel" means Democrats are trying to use the threat of impeachment to push the President into doing something he otherwise wouldn't do. Nothing of the kind is happening. As near as I can tell, at worst, Democrats simply want the President out of office, which is precisely what impeachment was for!

(3) Democrats use terms like quid pro quo because that term describes precisely what the President did. Congress had allocated money for Ukraine's defense against Russia. Trump was holding up the aid and he suggested that the money could be released if Ukraine did him a "favor" and provided his re-election campaign with something he could portray as dirt on Joe Biden. It is illegal for the president to interfere with a properly-allocated grant like that. Yes, Trump did do something wrong!

(4) "Ukraine got it’s money"
Yes, they got their money without having first delivered on the bribery that the President extorted out of them, but that had nothing to do with anything the President wanted or planned for or desired.

(5) "(3 weeks early)"? More like several months late! Nothing happened to free up the money until after the whistleblower pointed out that the President was withholding the money that Congress had appropriated.

(6) "there was no investigation.” Eh? Not sure what the President could possibly mean by that as the investigation started with the whistleblower putting out an urgent complaint.

If your only source on information on the impeachment is the President, you're going to end up badly misinformed and confused.

Anger and division in America

So, after I put a comment onto Facebook, I will then, weeks or months later, take select comments and put them onto prawnworks, where they'll be permanently archived. Having been a history major back in college, I use that second draft to correct spellings, flesh out or clarify comments a bit more and sometimes do a bit of research to answer questions the comment may raise. I did that last thing with the following.

Vice President "Pence laments 'a time of too much division and too much anger in America'"

I thought "Hmm. Okay." It took me about half a minute on the search engine to locate conservatives being angry and divisive.

Here's a link to NRA Spokesperson Dana Loesch claiming that "There were people rushing the stage and screaming 'burn her.'"

That didn't sound like any protest group that I've ever been part of and I've been to quite a few liberal protests. I put another half-minute into another search and sure enough, Loesch was lying:

That's another easily provable lie, at least according to multiple videos and eyewitness testimony from Wednesday's event. The clearest video, above, shows Loesch calmly leaving the stage while the crowd chants, "Shame on you!"

After a New Times photographer put out a call on Facebook, five attendees sent footage they shot of the aftermath of the town hall. One video begins immediately after the town hall ends and shows Loesch walking off the stage surrounded by other participants and security. She then walks away and out of the arena. At no time does anyone in the audience approach her, and there's certainly no evidence that anyone ever "rushed the stage."

"She walked right in front of me and people yelled at her and chanted, 'Shame on you!' Nobody rushed the stage," says Ryan Yousefi, the New Times reporter who covered the event.

So yeah, the Vice President is correct. There's a lot of anger and division in America right now. It was obvious that he intended to have his listeners think, of course, that it was all the fault of liberals and not of his own side.

The torture report

The torture report, well, the redacted summary of the 6,000 page full report anyway, makes clear that the second, subsidiary, justification for torture made during the G.W. Bush Administration is complete poppycock. The first justification concerns morality and is premised on the “ticking time bomb” scenario where a single person can suffer torture now or a lot of people can suffer an exploded bomb within a short time period.

The second justification is one of effectiveness, that torture can quickly and effectively elicit truthful answers in time to prevent terrible things from happening. It's the second justification that's squashed utterly by the report. Even people in the CIA, at the time, could see that the US wasn't obtaining any worthwhile information that couldn't have been obtained just as quickly by using a gentler approach. The Intelligence Committee reviewed 20 claims of torture having prevented a “ticking time bomb” scenario and found them all to be without foundation.

The report demonstrates that the CIA's torture program was out of control and that the CIA frequently lied to superiors and failed to even conduct any sort of internal assessment of whether torture was effective or not. Claims that the program was effective rested on lies and wishful thinking, not on any sort of factual basis.

What does it all mean? A society that tries to become a better society has no use for torture. Torture has a corrupting effect on its practitioners as the report documents. Torture has no benefits to balance or to justify its evil effects, not even if we agree that war in general is justified.

How seriously should we take Politifact?

So, a sort-of, kind-of liberalish columnist publishes this. Gets lots and LOTS of comments. A liberal commenter (Comments are deleted after a few days, so these won't be up for the long term) stated the following:

Almost two and a half years ago, John Boehner and the flood of new Tea Party winners in the 2010 election promised that House Republicans would be the ‘jobs creators’, since President Obama and the Democrats were doing such a slow job at it.
So where are the jobs? Since then:

• Number of Republican-introduced jobs-creation bills in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives – ZERO.

• Number of Democrat-introduced jobs-creation bills allowed to come to a vote in the GOP controlled House of Representatives - ZERO.

And of course, not one of those GOP members mentions that they blocked an increase in funds for embassy security. But you'd never know if this if you watch Fox religiously.

A conservative commenter responded that Politifact had “ruled” that Republicans had indeed created lots of “jobs bills.” They get this assertion by counting up the number of bills that are labeled as having something to do with creating jobs. Politifact makes an extremely important observation near the end, though:

"Job creation" means different things to different parties.

Most conservatives today are dead-set against traditional forms of government-based economic stimulus known as Keynesian economics, primarily spending initiatives. So if "job creation" is defined to primarily include Keynesian initiatives, then Republicans aren’t going to be sponsoring any "job creation" bills. Instead, Republicans argue that tax cuts and budget cutting will help the economy prosper.

Frankly, if I were the editor of Politifact, I would have started with this undisputed fact (That the parties disagree on what constitutes “job creation”) and would have then explored just what Republicans mean by labeling bills as “jobs bills.” In 100% of the cases where I've seen the term “jobs bill,” it's referred to a bill that's specifically about Keynesian stimulus. I've never seen a bill referred to as a “jobs bill” when the creation of jobs is merely a by-product. Sure enough, the liberal digs into the data and spells out just what these alleged Republican “jobs bills” are all about:

18 of these so-called "jobs bills" reduce or eliminate government regulations in nearly every business sector, especially of energy and pollution


6 give more tax breaks to the same big businesses that are sitting on record profits and not hiring people right now.

One is an anti-union bill.

Another makes it even easier to bring foreign high tech workers into the country to replace American workers at lower wages.

One eliminates imaginary regulations against "farm dust".

And one is the Paul Ryan budget that lays out a 'Path to Prosperity' that includes massive layoffs and gutting social programs.

In other words - not a single job created, but plenty of reduced wages and lost jobs. 

In other words, Politifact's research doesn't go anywhere near deep enough to be meaningful. Labels are affixed to bills by political parties for all sorts of reasons, not merely to be factually descriptive. As a body that “rules” on the truth of political rhetoric, they don't put enough research into the questions they look at to have any serious credibility.

I “rule” that Politifact is a moderately useful source, to be cited when they agree with you, but otherwise to be ignored.

The CIA “Hollowed Out”

Bill Keller writes about the CIA and covert ops people versus intel people and the following passage jumped out at me:

"The C.I.A., having been hollowed out in the ’90s after the end of the cold war, failed to see the signs of what would be 9/11. Then the C.I.A. got the ostensible Iraqi weapons threat terribly wrong, drowning out more skeptical voices..."

There are three charges here: 1. That Bill Clinton permitted the CIA to be so underfunded and understaffed that it couldn't do its job while under George W. Bush, 2. that the CIA missed the signs that 9/11 was about to occur and 3. that the CIA thought there were WMD in Iraq when there weren't. The first charge is proven or disproven by the second and third charges. If those other two charges stand up, then we may presume that the first charge is true and vice-versa, if the two charges are not true, then the first is not true, either.

So how do the two charges stack up against the evidence? Not very well. Ron Suskind relates in his book “The One Percent Doctrine” that “Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: 'All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.'” And from The National Interest:

Kurt Eichenwald, former New York Times reporter and Vanity Fair contributing editor...”the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed.”

As to the third charge, that the CIA failed to see that there were no WMD in Iraq, the movie “Fair Game” tells the story of Joe and Valerie Plame Wilson, drawing heavily on the book by Valerie Wilson and shows that, yes indeed, the CIA did do its assigned job by presenting the President with all of the information that was available to them and that, in fact, there was significant doubt that Iraq had WMDs. The CIA and their buddies across the pond, MI6, were both informed that Tahir Habbush al-Tikriti, who was Iraq's head of intelligence, told them that Iraq had no WMD. Naji Sabri, Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, is also said to have claimed this, although Sabri has denied saying so.

Now these claims of Bill Keller's really bother me as Keller joined the NY Times in 1984 and was the Executive Editor from 2003 to 2011, so this is no amateur, wet-behind-the-ears, fresh-outta-J-school, eager beaver cub reporter. This guy's been around and knows full well what he's saying.

To be fair, there were indeed people in both MI6 and the CIA who credited claims of WMD “even after they were exposed as fabricated including claims, notably about alleged mobile biological warfare containers, made by Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German source codenamed Curveball,” so it's incorrect to say that the CIA was united in casting doubt upon the Bush Administration's justifications for going to war, but there's certainly no justification for claiming that the CIA as an agency failed either before 9/11 or before the Iraq War.

By the way, neither former President George W. Bush nor former Vice President Dick Cheney have any regrets or second thoughts about having plunged the nation into an unnecessary war.

[Bush] reflected on the “realities of the situation 10 years ago”: that the Iraq invasion had bipartisan support and that seeking regime change in Iraq had also been the policy under Clinton.

“It’s easy to forget what life was like when the decision was made,” Bush said.

Yes, the invasion had bipartisan support, but that was because Bush was manipulating the intel. And as I pointed out here, Clinton did indeed send Madelaine Albright to get a read on how motivated Americans were to fight a war against Iraq, but found that there simply wasn't anywhere near enough enthusiasm to even attempt to launch such a war.

As to Cheney, his old company Halliburton made $39.5 billion from the war, so he obviously has no regrets.

As to Keller's larger thesis, that the “cowboys” of the CIA were an undue influence on the “eggheads” (i.e., that the covert ops people had too much influence on the gathering-of-intel people), I doubt that. I read a few books on the CIA during the 1980s and got the impression that, despite the CIA being a single agency with a single Director, that the intel and ops people perform different tasks in different places and don't interact much.

Ten years ago. The Iraq War in retrospect.

From WHYY Public Media.

One of Philadelphia's Gold Star Mothers, Celeste Zappala, was interviewed by WHYY on Tuesday, the 19^th of March and the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Zappala lost her son Sherwood Baker in 2004. He was the first National Guard member to lose his life in Iraq. During the Vietnam War, the National Guard was so safe a place to be that the future president George W. Bush signed up for a six-year tour (Notthat he even served the full six years), but in Iraq, the National Guard was a vital supplement to the regular armed forces. Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) charged in 2004 that by keeping National Guard troops in their billets longer than they had planned and by using them as regular forces, the Bush Administration didn't have to impose a draft or to increase the size of the regular armed forces, and thus that using the National Guard in that way amounted to a “back-door draft.” Recruitment for the military to keep enough troops fighting in Iraq was a problem. In 2007, the Army had to spend $1 billion in bonuses to recruit and retain the soldiers it had. The economic collapse at the end of 2007 made it a good deal easier to do keep the military fully staffed.

Why did the Bush Administration depend so heavily on the National Guard during the occupation of Iraq?

Much of the planning for the occupation of Iraq was improvised, last-minute and inadequate. The Bush Administration didn't appear to think that many forces or much money would be needed after Baghdad had fallen. The problem then was very ably sketched out by Colonel Harry G. Summers, who built upon the theories of Carl von Clausewitz concerning war and national determination. Colonel Summers' book was entitled “On Strategy: The Vietnam War in context” and it was written in response to the failure of the US to win over the Vietnamese people to the cause of America. The military in both Iraq and Vietnam did everything that was asked of it and it carried out its assigned task with enthusiasm and professionalism. In neither case can America assign any significant blame to the military for the inability of the US to win hearts and minds in the occupied country. The Iraqi insurgents certainly deserve a great deal of credit for making an American victory after the fall of Baghdad impossible. Had all gone according to the plans made by the Bush Administration and had Iraqis quietly accepted the American occupation, there would have been no need for Bush and his people to whip up American enthusiasm and support for the war.

As it was, the left wing was proven correct by the failure to find any WMDs and was thus completely uninterested in supporting the war and the right wing was perfectly happy to keep their activities in support of the war very sharply limited. The right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg was asked why he didn't join up and go to Iraq in uniform (Goldberg was at the very upper age limit for joining the military). He later apologized for this response, but it's worthwhile to remember what he said:

As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.

The point here is that Goldberg's attitude was quite typical for right-wingers. People who supported the war didn't feel the need to actually go over to Iraq and spend years in a foreign land actually getting themselves involved in learning a foreign language and dealing with a very different culture. Patriotism only demanded so much.

According to Summers, yes, any military or any country's political leadership can carry out short, brief military actions without getting broad-based buy-in from the country's civilian population, but any war that costs significant time and resources must get the civilian population emotionally involved. People must be absolutely convinced that the war is of immense significance and that it's worth great sacrifice to win it. Bush failed to get civilians from the right wing to go to Iraq as civilian reconstruction personnel, which explains why $8 billion of the money allocated to Iraqi reconstruction was lost. Without on-the-ground personnel overseeing projects and with Americans attempting to supervise projects from desks inside the “Green Zone” in Baghdad or from the US, it wasn't at all surprising that the US reconstruction effort was a complete flop.

Getting Americans motivated

The first step to getting Americans enthusiastically involved in the conquest/occupation of Iraq wassupervised by Madeleine Albright in February 1998. Albright brought several fellow war hawks to a town meeting in Ohio. It was a PR disaster as citizens vigorously questioned why Iraq was considered to be a threat and why that threat had to be neutralized via a war. Albright and her people were unable to answer these objections and the Clinton Administration didn't make any further attempts to whip up the public to supporting a war against Saddam Hussein and his country.

It's generally accepted among many former skeptics that no, President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney didn't arrange for 9-11 to happen, but the belief was based on solid facts. Bush and Cheney both had oil industry roots, there was good reason to believe that the US oil industry would profit enormously via an American occupation of Iraq and 9-11 occurred just a few years after Albright's failed attempt to get American citizen buy-in for a war against Iraq. Al Jazeera points out that safeguarding civilians was certainly not on the agenda of the invading Americans:

The Iraq invasion cannot be reasonably described as a case of "humanitarian intervention" for three reasons. The means used in the war - a "shock and awe" bombing campaign, including the use of cluster munitions in populated areas - were clearly not designed with the objective of safeguarding Iraqi civilians. Secondly, there was no evidence of the triggering mechanism for a humanitarian intervention, such as mass slaughter or crimes that shock humanity. Saddam had a terrible track record but, during the run-up to war, no such crimes were ongoing or imminent. Third, humanitarian motives were clearly not dominant, as the war would probably not have occurred in the absence of the issues of WMD and/or the al-Qaeda connection. During his February 2003 presentation to the UN, even Colin Powell's slides related to Saddam's human rights violations were labelled, "Iraq: Failing to Disarm". 

Even if regular people didn't buy that Iraq had something to do with 9-11, the Washington DC press corps certainly did. What we do know for certain is that Bush & Cheney manipulated the information suppled by America's intelligence agencies to make it appear that Hussein had something to do with 9-11. 

The deleted paragraphs in the summary called "Key Judgements" read:

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.

Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."

Many on the right wing have made their defense of the Bush Administration center around the allegation that Democratic Senators had access to the same intel that Bush had and that they reached the same conclusion. No, Democrats had access to the intel that Bush edited to make it look as though Iraq was a threat.

The consequences?  

As documented below, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL [Operation Iraqi Liberation], saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in

World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses.

The US absolutely must prevent anything like the Iraq War from ever occurring again. How are we doing on that? Unfortunately, not very well. The US leadership appears to greatly overestimate the effectiveness of sanctions, underestimates the usefulness of diplomacy and has far too much faith in our intelligence agencies. Also, people in Washington DC, both government officials and the press corps, appear to be talking about the deficit in much the same manner that they discussed Iraq in late 2002-early 2003. The good news is that US troops are very highly unlikely to go back into Iraq, no matter how badly the situation there deteriorates. The US couldn't do much there the first time and it seems our leadership knows that it couldn't do much on a return engagement. Could the US invade Iran? Certainly, elements want very badly to do so, but I think the public would be very highly likely to resist.

Review of "Hubris"

Showed on 9:00pm on Monday 18 February. Rachel Maddow previewed it a few days beforehand. Real Clear Politics presents all of the ten-minute segments of it. I agree with David Swanson, the show has some flaws, but I'm very happy that it was shown. As I've related to many people, I had read appeals before President George W. Bush's UN speech (Made just after the first anniversary of 9-11) to give Bush a chance to make his case for war against Iraq and to not dismiss his case out of hand, so I got the NY Times the day after and read his case from beginning to end. I immediately concluded that Bush was lying and that he had already made up his mind to go to war. I made it to what I believe was the first demonstration opposing the Iraq War.

At the demonstration, it was clear that everyone had reached the same conclusion that I had, that there was no point in even trying to persuade Bush to not go to war. Our protest was instead aimed squarely at the general public. One item that Hubris mentioned, that I remember well, was that President Bill Clinton had, in 1998, decided to bomb Iraq to make a point and to force compliance with American edicts. Not wanting American weapons inspectors to get hurt, he ordered the inspectors to be withdrawn. The annoyance and aggravation came on the American side when the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had refused to let the inspectors back into Iraq after the bombing.

In August of 2002, Bush declared that Hussein had kicked out the inspectors. I knew immediately that this wasn't true as I had been following the story in 1998, but also because back then, Clinton was undergoing all sorts of trouble from Republicans with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and for Hussein to have treated Americans with such contempt would have driven Clinton to declare war right off the bat. Sure enough, Fair.org published a piece in October showing the media headlines in 1998 and how the same publications discussed the same event in 2002 with very different headlines. So yes, when Bush made his speech at the UN to gin up enthusiasm for a war with Iraq, the press treatment of Bush's inspectors claim really sealed the deal to convince me that the traditional media was hopelessly in Bush's pocket.

Maddow does a good job in allowing the Colin Powell spokesperson Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson and Douglas Feith to get plenty of screen time to make their cases, but the Powell case is fatally undermined by the demonstration earlier in the show that all of Powell's major points were debunked many months before he made his speech at the UN. He made his speech shortly before the February 15th march. It was the largest protest in history and was especially important as it was scattered all over the world. I didn't watch Powell's speech myself, but asked my brother-in-law about it later. He said "Yeah, it was convincing to people who didn't know anything about the issue beforehand. As someone who was pretty informed on the issue, it wasn't convincing to me at all."

It was clear to me, though I admit things may look different from inside the Washington DC bubble than it does to ordinary citizens out in the country, that Bush's evidence for the need to go to war with Iraq was all quite vague and very heavily dependent on taking the word of government officials for it all. We common citizens were asked to simply trust that what those government officials were saying was true. Valerie Plame Wilson was shown in Hubris, speaking about how she and another CIA person were reacting to Colin Powell's "revelations" that had been obtained from the highly unreliable "Curveball." A scene in Fair Game, a movie based in part on Wilson's book "Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House," made it clear that there were quite a few people in the CIA who felt that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were very eager to go to war and quite willing to say whatever it took to convince Americans to support that effort.

Update: Colonel Wilkerson takes exception to David Swanson's accusation of knowingly lying. Swanson explains his conclusion and adds that the honorable thing for Wilkerson to have done was to have resigned rather than to participate in a lie. 

Parsing the questions - Politifact and Jeep

The Weekly Standard is outraged, outraged, I tell you!, the Poltifact apparently stretched the truth when it said that Mitt Romney lied during the closing days of the 2012 campaign. They give us a general description, based on Politifact's statements, of what Romney allegedly said:

"It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign -- that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China."

Now, to me, the word "moving" is extremely critical. That doesn't just suggest that Jeep was planning on opening up factories in China, it suggests that Jeep is letting Americans go and re-locating American jobs there. Here's Romney's statement as quoted by The Plum Line:

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, home to a General Motors powertrain plant. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair America will win.”

Sounds to me as though that's exactly what Romney is saying. The Weekly Standard goes on to show that Jeep is indeed opening up factories in China to serve the Chinese market and flourishes this fact as though it proves their point that Politifact is being dishonest. But the WS quotes a Jeep executive who says:

"Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China," Ranieri wrote..."

Again, the question for me is not whether Jeep was opening up a factory in China, it was, but whether it was doing so at the expense of American jobs. Could Americans have been producing Jeeps in the US and then shipped those cars to China? As WS says:

To recap, Jeep Patriots—oh irony, you capricious sprite!—that were heretofore exclusively produced in America and sold overseas are now going to be made and sold overseas. [emphases in original]

Probably, but let's keep in mind that Japan makes Japanese cars in the US for the US market, so it would be hypocritical for Americans to complain of Jeep producing cars in China for the Chinese market. From a Forbes piece that makes it sound as though the US is fast becoming the Mexico to Japan's US (A country that is assembling products for the wealthier market), Forbes states that:

The Japanese carmaker [Honda] has invested more than $2.2 billion in its North American operations over the past two years, enabling it to increase production capacity in North America from the current 1.63 million to 1.92 million units per year in 2014.

Now, what precisely did Politifact condemn Romney for?

PolitiFact has selected Romney's claim that Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs as the 2012 Lie of the Year.

WS correctly points out that, yes indeed, Jeep is indeed producing Jeep models in China for the Chinese market, just as Japan is producing Japanese cars in America for the American market. So yes, Politifact goofed up and accused Romney of the wrong thing. Why did Romney's statement draw so much fire at the time? My own "ruling" is that Romney suggested that Americans would lose their jobs and that those jobs would be moved overseas. So yes, Romney's statement that "Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” [emphasis added] is very clearly false and Romney very clearly had good reason to know that it was false and that his statement richly deserved condemnation.

So, when it comes to fact-checking, an endeavor that's worthy and something all reporters should do, Politifact demonstrates that it's far from an exact science or...well, that they're really not very good at doing it. I feel that Romney was rightly condemned for making an inflammatory statement that he knew full well was false, or at the very least highly misleading, but that Politifact deserves condemnation for making a statement that they, in turn, also had reason to know was false. Yes, Jeep was indeed planning to set up factories in China and yes, they condemn Romney for saying just that, but Romney deserves condemnation for suggesting that Jeep would do so at the expense of American jobs.

Update: These two posts were on PhillyIMC.org:

Notice how Romney said that

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 7:07pm 

 

Notice how Romney said that Jeep was "thinking of moving" Jeep manufacturing to China. The fact is they were and the story in Reuters proves it. Romney said nothing about moving manufacturing to China "at the expense of American jobs." You and Politifact tried to put words into Romney's mouth that he did not say and you are getting smacked for it. This is probably the most clear example of left-wing "journalists" using the Logical Fallacy of the Straw Man in their analysis. Had Romney said the words that you and politifact tried to insert into his mouth, he might be culpable of lying but he did not. He might not have stated other pieces of the story but there is a big difference between withholding information and lying.

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Are you saying that The Plum Line quotes him inaccurately?

Submitted by Rich Gardner on Mon, 01/21/2013 - 8:49pm 

 

Romney's words, as quoted:

“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, home to a General Motors powertrain plant. “I will fight for every good job in America. I’m going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it’s fair America will win.”

If you can show me that Romney didn't actually say these words, and he's quoted very specifically as saying "Jeep...is thinking of moving all production to China," [emphasis added] then please feel free to supply me with the correct quote (With source, please) where Romney doesn't lie. My reading of that quote is that Jeep was planning to move production to China. That means to fire American auto workers and to replace what they were producing with a factory in China.

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Anonymous never responded.

Today, I saw a piece on Daily Kos on the issue and it says that a fellow asked on behalf of Romney for the Washington Post factchecker to please reconsider the "Four Pinnochios" (The worst ruling possible) that he awarded for Romney's lie. The WaPo fatchecker responds:

With all due respect to Stevens, the claim that Romney turned out to be right is simply not accurate. [...]
We reaffirm our earlier ruling of Four Pinocchios.

Factcheckers just need to retire

*Sigh!* Again, the factcheckers disgrace themselves by making an utterly ridiculous awarding of truthfulness scores. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), has made the charge that presidential candidate Mitt Romney didn't pay any taxes for the last 10 years. Was Reid absolutely, positively certain about that? No.

"He didn't pay taxes for 10 years! Now, do I know that that's true? Well, I'm not certain," said Reid. "But obviously he can't release those tax returns. How would it look?"

Reid went on to allege that Romney's wealth must be much greater than he has ever specified. The original source, Politico, then made clear that "Reid did not identify his alleged source." The best the Romney camp could muster was a non-denial denial. They alleged that their guy had

"gone above and beyond the disclosure requirements by releasing two years of personal tax returns in addition to the hundreds of pages of personal financial disclosure documents he has provided to the FEC and made public."

No one is saying that for presidential candidate to release their tax returns is a legal requirement, merely that it is a firmly established tradition that they do so (That particular tradition doesn't apply to House or Senate candidates, so to claim that Reid hasn't released his tax returns either is a false equivalence).

Various Republican spokespeople have gotten very heated and excitable about Reid's charge and have made wild charges about Reid being a "dirty liar," but the issue is where it was when Reid first charged Romney with hiding his tax returns because Romney could very quickly and easily clear up the whole issue by following tradition and releasing his returns.

So now Politifact jumps into the fray by charging Reid with making a "pant on fire" lie with his charge. First off, I'm not sure that someone has actually told a lie when they have admitted up front that they're simply passing on what someone else told them. Reid candidly admitted that he didn't have any independent evidence to corroborate what the anonymous source said. Obviously, Romney feels very hurt and insulted, but that's no reason to call Reid a liar.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) backs Reid up and confirms that "a Bain Capital investor" told Reid that Romney hasn't paid taxes for a lengthy period. Can Pelosi prove the underlying charge, that Romney hasn't paid such taxes? No, but she stands behind the story that Reid got this information from a fellow that he found to be credible.

Politifact has absolutely no business whatsoever calling Reid a liar. Reid's charge can't be proven to be true by any evidence in Reid's possession (Romney could very easily disprove the charge by releasing his tax returns), but Reid has not said anything that can be fairly characterized as being untrue. Politifact should STFU and toss their evaluation of Reid's truthfulness into the trash can, where it belongs.

Update:

As the blog Balloon Juice puts it: "Glenn Kessler has following the other fact-checking lemmings off the cliff by assigning 4 Pinnochios to Reid’s claim".

As the post makes clear: 1. It's incredibly, moronically stupid to use the word of tax experts to claim that Reid's claim "might" not be true. Romney has somehow gotten his IRA to hold something in excess of $20 million, meaning he's enormously clever about money matters. So what the average citizen is able to do is beside the point.

2. The McCain campaign remember, DID look at Romney's tax returns and gee, somehow, we're not hearing much from them. Hmm, wonder why that could be? Keep in mind, the original story was that McCain and his people looked at Romney's tax returns and decided that Sarah Palin would be a safer bet. Their story since then has changed to "No, no, no, Sarah was obviously the superior candidate."

Missile Defense and NAFTA, Old issues revisited

This has to be the least surprising news I've seen in awhile. Star Wars/ABM/Missile Defense is worthless! Na-a-awwww! Re-e-eally?!?!? Gee, who'd a thunk it? I did a paper on this back in college during the late 1980s, concluding that, yes, "shooting down a bullet with a bullet" can be done, but missile warheads are very small, move very quickly and devices used to detect them are not difficult to fool. Any system for stopping missiles is very easily overwhelmed with lots of real warheads, chaff (clouds of small bits of metal) and decoys. To take just one of the more obvious examples, a multi-stage ballistic missile takes about 30 minutes to get from Russia to the United States. Over 20 of those minutes are spent in space where there's no air friction, where a decoy can be as simple as a balloon coated with metal-based paint. Such a decoy can't be deployed until the real warhead is in space and will quickly burn up on re-entry, but it's pretty much impossible to separate such a decoy from a real warhead when your detection devices are hundreds to thousands of miles away. A single warhead could pop out 20 to 30 decoys, and with small air-sprays, they can all follow different, widely divergent paths. If you want to stop them mid-course, all of the warheads, both the real ones and the fake ones, have to be stopped, or at least a good 80-90% of them. An ABM system will have very little time between the time all the balloons burn away and the warheads impact their targets. A system would have to be extraordinarily fast and capable to deal with the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of remaining warheads. And:

The GMD system, however, is widely considered to be ineffective. Despite the billions of dollars spent, the system has not had a successful intercept test since 2008, with two failures in 2010. A recent report by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences found that, “The current GMD system has serious shortcomings, and provides at best a limited, initial defense against a relatively primitive threat.”

In other words, the US spent from the Eisenhower era to the 1972 ABM treaty developing anti-missile defenses, private entrepreneurs continued researching means and methods from 1972, with the government again picking up the tab for research in 1983, whereupon the government has continued to fund research and development ever since. What has the US accomplished in all that time? Doesn't sound like six decades of research has accomplished very much.

What has the impact been on US-Russian relations?

In past years, Russia has opposed the missile shield program. It considers the program to be a serious threat to its national security and disapproves of NATO forces continuing to build military bases in Europe. The US government called Russia’s reaction “unjustified” and defended the program by citing increased threats to Europe from the Caucasus and the Middle East. An important political figure, Alexander Vershbow – NATO’s Deputy Secretary General and former Ambassador to the Russian Federation – stressed at the Moscow Conference that the missile shield program is not meant to be hostile to Russia. He also added the US and NATO respect and take seriously the Russian government’s concerns.

If you have to assure the other party that your weapons system is "not meant to be hostile," your diplomacy has pretty much completely and utterly failed. And sorry, but when the US took Georgia's side against Russia during their 2008 conflict, any thought on Russia's part that the US wasn't hostile was dashed to the ground.

And speaking of old issues, one of the major issues that progressives had with NAFTA and the World Trade Organization back during the Clinton Administration was that the system that they set up was designed to override national sovereignty in favor of corporate interests. Well, a leaked document from the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations demonstrates that, yes indeed, the newest "free" trade negotiations are again, designed to do precisely that.

Under the agreement currently being advocated by the Obama administration, American corporations would continue to be subject to domestic laws and regulations on the environment, banking and other issues. But foreign corporations operating within the U.S. would be permitted to appeal key American legal or regulatory rulings to an international tribunal. That international tribunal would be granted the power to overrule American law and impose trade sanctions on the United States for failing to abide by its rulings.

The terms run contrary to campaign promises issued by Obama and the Democratic Party during the 2008 campaign.

So, even though Americans have opposed turning over decisions best made by national governments to a body that will privilege corporations over people and even though President Obama promised that he wouldn't take part in any such thing, we're seeing our government again planning to do precisely that. As the blogger says:

This is really important stuff. We’re talking about restricting access to life-saving drugs, and giving up sovereignty over key domestic laws and regulations to foreign multinationals. That would be true for foreign companies in the US and domestic companies in the eight Pacific nations engaged in the trade pact. This is completely in line with the NAFTA consensus, which also allowed corporations the right to sue nations party to certain trade treaties. Private sector lawyers would be the judges on the international tribunals, with clear conflicts of interest, as they advocate for and serve the clients who would be suing the government in this case.

The march of folly continues and decisions that were awful the first time around are no better years later, but they continue to be pursued.

Update: Leaked documents from the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreements show that the agreements are even worse than we thought. The agreements blatantly and explicitly favor corporations over national governments. BTW, the piece also documents that the US has paid $300 million to settle similar anti-sovereignty claims that arose from NAFTA.

Department of unsurprising news

Item number one - The warrantless wiretapping program that was the cause of about 30 top Justice Department officials (Pretty much the entire upper level of the Justice Department) very nearly resigning in protest and then first revealed to the country at large by the NY Times (An NY Times reporter was about to publish a book on the matter, so the Times had to hurry and beat him to the punch) and was then defended as a very limited program:

[President Bush] "We use FISA still. But FISA is for long-term monitoring. What is needed in order to protect the American people is the ability to move quickly to detect." Then later "There is a difference between detecting, so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to note the distinction between the two."

and:

[CIA-director nominee Gen. Michael V. ] HAYDEN [video clip]: "This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America, involving someone we believe is associated with Al Qaeda."

Well, it turns out that no such distinctions were actually being made. It was a data-mining program where massive amounts of phone calls, emails, faxes and other communications were swept up in huge dragnets and then analyzed using computer software that was looking for keywords and then broken down and analyzed further. Government officials were busy lying to, not just the American people at large, but to any Congresspeople, Senators or any other government personnel who "threatened" to discover just what was going on.

Item number two: The war on the people of Gaza did indeed kill "223 Hamas guerrillas," but also:

the World Health Organization released a report estimating that 1,300 Palestinians were killed during the fighting, including 410 children and 104 women. About 5,300 Palestinians were injured, half of them women and children, the report said.

and some 50,000 Palestinians are now homeless, 400,000 have no access to running water and 21,000 buildings were destroyed.

And what was the world reaction to this?

In addition to allegations of indiscriminate violence, critics accuse Israel of violating international law restricting the use of phosphorus weapons, which can inflict horrific burns. Phosphorus artillery shells and similar weapons are not illegal, but the law bars their use in densely populated areas such as Gaza City, one of the most crowded urban areas in the world.
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Chanting "war criminal," hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated against [Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi] Livni's visit in Brussels.

and:

European attorneys have reportedly petitioned a Belgian court to arrest Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni upon her arrival in Brussels later Wednesday, according to the Jawalan.com Web Site.

Three were killed and eight wounded in a car bomb attack in Baghdad. There is absolutely no question that this attack constituted collateral damage from the war in Gaza.

And for what?

Uniformed Hamas security teams emerged on Gaza City's streets Monday as leaders of the Islamic militant group vowed to restore order...

No, Hamas has not suffered any sort of knock-out blow. Hamas is weakened physically, but that can be fixed quickly and easily. Hamas is now more popular and more legitimate than it was and that won't be fixed anytime soon, if ever.

Item number three: Well, actually, this wasn't obvious at all. It's just clear in retrospect that our new President Obama is an extremely smart fellow. What Obama did in his inaugural address was to copy the strategy of Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondent's Association dinner. He started off, with Bush sitting right there, sounding as though he agreed with Bush, then it slowly dawned on Bush that "Hey, I'm being dissed!" Obama made it absolutely positively clear beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that he was on the "other side of the aisle" and made a speech that only a Democrat could possibly have made.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.
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Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.

And yes, President Obama did keep his promise to start reversing some of the most repugnant Bush policies right away.

Item number four: Rush Limbaugh couldn't care less about his fellow Americans. He wants President Obama to "fail." The fact that that means he wants Americans to live in misery and poverty, hated by the world, is of no consequence to him. Thankfully though, Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will not "turn up as a talking head on television."

Trustworthiness

Digby reprints Peggy Noonan's November 2000 evaluation of G.W. Bush and what an allegedly wonderful, rugged, he-man of an honest and sincere guy he was. Noonan got a lot right, but ho-o-o-o-boy! Did she get a lot wrong! These paragraphs were especially off-base:

Mr. Bush is at odds with the spirit of the past eight years in another way. He appears to be wholly uninterested in lying, has no gift for it, thinks it's wrong.
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...half the foreign and defense policy establishment fears, legitimately, that the Big Terrible Thing is coming, whether in India-Pakistan, or in Asia or in lower Manhattan.

When it comes, if it comes, the credibility--the trustworthiness--of the American president will be key to our national survival.

Well fortunately, Bush's utter lack of trustworthiness did not cost America its "national survival," but it certainly made it necessary for the President-elect to pledge a sharp break with the "past eight years" that came after Bill Clinton's two terms. From President-elect Obama's interview with Time Magazine on December 17th:

(When asked how the American people would know by the mid-term election of 2010 that he had been successful in restoring American credibility) "On foreign policy, have we closed down Guantánamo in a responsible way, put a clear end to torture and restored a balance between the demands of our security and our Constitution? Have we rebuilt alliances around the world effectively?"

The total lack of honesty, fundamental human decency and reliability is now coming around to bite various "Bushies" in the rear end. It seems that in January 2004, the then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales defended the pre-war statements of the then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice concerning uranium from Niger and:

The information the Oversight Committee has received casts serious doubt on the veracity of the representations that Mr. Gonzales made on behalf of Dr. Rice.

D'oh! What was very clear from the fabled "16 words" that Ambassador Joseph Wilson discredited was that, at the very minimum, the Bush Administration had failed to perform "due diligence." From a Free Republic summary of the evidence concerning Niger uranium:

A White House spokesman said yesterday, "We have acknowledged that some documents detailing a transaction between Iraq and Niger were forged and we no longer give them credence."

Problem: Had there been a "transaction between Iraq and Niger" to move 400 tons of uranium ore (It takes about 100 tons of ore to get enough refined uranium to make a bomb) from Niger, proper due diligence would have required that the Bush Administration should have detailed how Niger intended to move the uranium ore to Iraq.

Niger has no railroad lines from their uranium mines to the sea, so it would have had to have moved the ore via trucks. Driving from the border of Niger through Nigeria to the city of Lagos or through Benin to Porto-Novo is about 400 miles. Let's say each truck could carry two tons of ore each. That means they'd have to assemble a convoy of 200 trucks. They'd have to add in vehicles to act as advance scouts and a dozen or so light, armed vehicles to provide security. Presuming good roads, the convoy could make the journey in a day, moving the uranium onto a ship would probably take longer, depending on how ships there are loaded.

Chances are zilch that this could have been done secretly. Nigeria or Benin would have had an opinion on the matter and would have demanded to know exactly what the convoy was carrying. Every intel agency in the area would be aware of such a large convoy and every naval power in the world would be aware of the movement of the ore onto a ship, which would have been tracked all the way to its destination. It's simply not credible to say that such a movement could have been made in such a way that the US would not have been aware of it.

Can President Bush credibly claim that due diligence was performed? Did Peggy Noonan judge Bush's honesty correctly? I think we can safely say that Noonan's character-judging abilities are completely worthless.

Number of Sarah Palin items

"...a local Wasilla woman's view of Palin the politician"

•"Hockey mom": true for a few years
•"PTA mom": true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since
•"NRA supporter": absolutely true
•social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconsitutional).
•pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to promote it.
•"Pro-life": mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down's syndrome baby BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation
•"Experienced": Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
•political maverick: not at all
•gutsy: absolutely!
•open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
•has a developed philosophy of public policy: no
•"a Greenie": no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
•fiscal conservative: not by my definition!
•pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
•pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents
•pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla's history.
•pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union doesn't make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.

Membership in an heretical church.

Palin's dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as "One Lord Sunday."
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The Wasilla Assembly of God church is deeply involved with both Third Wave activities and theology.
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The Third Wave is a revival of the theology of the Latter Rain tent revivals of the 1950s and 1960s led by William Branham and others. It is based on the idea that in the end times there will be an outpouring of supernatural powers on a group of Christians that will take authority over the existing church and the world. The believing Christians of the world will be reorganized under the Fivefold Ministry and the church restructured under the authority of Prophets and Apostles and others anointed by God. The young generation will form "Joel's Army" to rise up and battle evil and retake the earth for God. While segments of this belief system have been a part of Pentecostalism and charismatic beliefs for decades, the excesses of this movement were declared a heresy in 1949 by the General Council of the Assemblies of God, and again condemned through Resolution 16 in 2000.

A close look at Palin's pregnant daughter Bristol and what exactly the liberal objections to her pregnancy are.

Of course, there is no shame attached to choosing to have a baby when you're young. Nor is there any shame for choosing not to.

McCain, like Bush, wants to eliminate our opportunity to have that choice. But that's not all. Despite all evidence that it doesn't work, McCain, in lockstep with Bush and Palin, wants to continue the ludicrous notion of funding sex education that doesn't educate, but only preaches [i.e., "abstinence only"]. [emphasis in original]

Obama gets in a good one:

Keith Olbermann: “He fights pork barrel spending,” said this new McCain/Palin ad, “she stopped the ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’” ...

Barack Obama: They’re not telling the truth. You know, I mean, it’s — I think we’ve all gotten accustomed to being able to spin things in politics. But when you’ve got somebody who was for a project being presented as being against it, then that, you know, stretches the bounds of spin into new areas.

And do we REALLY want someone of McCain's temperament to be our Commander-in-Chief, with his finger next to "The Red Button"? Sounds like an awfully dangerous proposition! But even given McCain's explosive personality, do we REALLY want the 2008 presidential election to be about personalities? Does that truly serve the interests of the American people?

IEDs and "real reporters" vs pundits

Mark Bowden brings up some very good points about good and bad journalism, but I bristled a bit when he spoke of "real journalists" and then began the next sentence with "We." Judith Miller of the New York Times was considered a "real journalist" and the Times later admitted (In a short piece back in May 2004 buried in the back pages) that her stories "...relied too heavily on now-suspect sources with insufficient corroboration." Yes, the Knight-Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay were much better and much more accurate, but they were often featured on page A17 while Ms Miller got front-page, above-the-fold treatment with a picture to boot.

In February of this year, the Washington Post featured a story suggesting that IEDs in Iraq were imported from Iran. The story was filled with anonymous sources and blamed Iran's Quds Force. American officials charged outright that a certain brand of improvised explosive devices were arriving from Iran.

Problem: The LA Times reported that Iraqi machine shops were found turning out components for precisely these IEDs. Not only that, the devices simply aren't difficult to manufacture and Iraq has the capability to manufacture them. No credible evidence has been produced saying the IEDs originate in Iran, let alone that a particular group in Iran is to blame.

Bigger problem: We now have a legislative proposal, the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment, that calls upon the US to "...combat, contain, and roll back the violent activities and destabilizing influence inside Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran." What are some of those activities? Well, the National Review identifies "...agents of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards [who] fund and arm the Shiite extremists whose IEDs pierce the armor of U.S. soldiers..." and that "Explosively formed penetrator (EFP) attacks have risen dramatically.”

A truly qualified set of "real journalists" would be calling attention to how shaky the case against Iran really is as opposed to the same old set of mindless stenographers we have now. Silence, allowing the current accusations to stand, is just as deadly as lies and could lead to yet another unnecessary war.