January 18, 2006 by lonbud
Battle Lines Being Drawn
The big dawgs of the American political and social frontier are frantically marking their territories now; it shan’t be long before their growling turns to barking in earnest and the fur begins to fly.
So much seems so suddenly in play.
Of course the probable confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court of the unapologetic statist (and unrecollecting bigot) Samuel Alito looms before the Democratic minority in the Senate, whose leadership seems caught once again like so many deer in the headlights.
Right-wing zealots who have long craved for conservative control of the judiciary will find Mr. Alito’s ascendance just in time — though perhaps not quite enough — in the light of Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding the State of Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act.
By a 6 – 3 majority, the court struck down the Bush administration’s attempt to use federal drug laws to invalidate a state law guaranteeing a narrowly defined class of terminally ill patients access to medicine for easing and hastening their certain deaths.
The dissenting minority, composed of Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts, can be reliably depended upon in the coming years to join Mr. Alito in siding with both corporate and government interests over individual rights to privacy and freedom. What remains unclear is who on the court, if anyone, will assume the reliably centrist swing-vote role being presently vacated by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Meanwhile, former vice president and presidential contender Albert Gore, Jr. got into a pissing match with the White House in the last few days over Mr. Gore’s public comments deriding the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance and data mining programs against American citizens.
Mr. Gore called the National Security Agency’s domestic spying “illegal” and “dangerous,” and said that Attorney general Alberto Gonzalez should commission an independent investigation into the leagality of the government’s actions.
White House spokesmen Ken Mehleman and Scott McClellan both dismissed Mr. Gore’s remarks as inconseqential and at odds with what they termed settled presidential authority. Mr. McClellan went so far as to call Mr. Gore a hypocrite, owing to warrantless surveillance undertaken during the Clinton administration in the Aldrich Ames spy case.
Nevermind that the Clinton administration’s surveillance of Mr. Ames was not subject to the law Mr. Bush has been accused of violating. The current occupants of the White House and vast numbers of people on the Right of our present divide understand that Mr. Clinton was a liar and that Mr. Bush is leading a nation at war.
Two law suits filed on Tuesday may soon determine that question more definitively.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed separate lawsuits asserting that President Bush exceeded his authority and violated Fourth Amendment guarantees against unreasonable searches and seizures by ordering the NSA’s surveillance. The suits also allege infringement on the attorney-client privilege of defendants in terrorism-related cases, and unreasonable chilling of the free-speech rights of Americans with legitimate communication interests in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In a time when one finds it easy to be incredulous at the actions and statements of those who’ve been chosen to lead, the words of the great American humorist Garrison Keillor may sum up our present predicament as well as anyone’s. From a Salon essay published today:
But who tells the truth to the man who is driving straight into the setting sun and thinks he’s heading due east? His wife murmurs that, uh, maybe we should look at a map, and he accuses her of being a defeatist who tries to tear him down any way she can in order to conceal her own lack of ideas. The man is heading the wrong way and speeding and the idiot light is flashing — low oil pressure — and the idiot is trying to be manly and authoritative but everyone can see he’s faking it, hoping for God to rearrange the landscape for his convenience. Someone ought to speak up, and yet he is fascinating. As the administration is these days, so resonant and believable. The Arctic icecap melts and the Chinese finance our tax cuts and someday we will have spent six years and trillions of dollars to bring democracy to Iraq, whatever that may mean, and the SUV of state turns toward the setting sun, driven by cocker spaniels. And there is so much intensity there, and they are so much in the moment.
Michael Herdegen - January 18, 2006 @ 9:25 am
Was Keillor high when he wrote that ?
And does Salon have no editors ?
Better than that has been published at I Just Have To Say, in practically every thread. “Great” my spleen.
lonbud - January 18, 2006 @ 5:04 pm
Thank you, Michael, on behalf of myself and the handful of interesting, erudite posters who share their talent and ideas at I Just Have To Say.
We have had some very creative and eloquent things said here, but something about Keillor’s imagery struck me in the wee hours last night as just strange and appropos enough to hit the mark.
To me it does feel much like the country is being driven into the setting sun — if not over a cliff (which seems to be the favored similie of the moment) — and that those with their hands at the wheel (and in the till) are impervious to the suggestion that anything might be wrong or misguided about the route being taken.
Not exactly Slim Pickens riding Fat Boy into the clouds, yet. But we’re getting there.
Michael Herdegen - January 18, 2006 @ 9:18 pm
[T]hose with their hands at the wheel (and [gratuitous ad hominem accusation]) are impervious to the suggestion that anything might be wrong or misguided about the route being taken.
Well, it’s true that Those That Be are pretty adamant that they know what they’re doing…
They’ll either end up being completely right, or very, very wrong.
Tam O’Tellico - January 19, 2006 @ 8:09 am
Michael,
You definitely need one of these:
http://www.backwardsbush.com/index.php
lonbud - January 19, 2006 @ 3:25 pm
They’ll either end up being completely right, or very, very wrong.
I’m not sure those are the accurate scenarios.
At this point, they’ve already proven themselves to have been wildly wrong on many counts, and the odds are that history will judge them to have been among the most wrongheaded leaders the United States has ever seen.
I know, I know, GWB is an eminently successful politician and businessman and how could he have been elected Governor of Texas and President of the United States and have become an independently wealthy man if he wasn’t actually a very smart and savvy person whose ideas and policies are obviously popular blah, blah, blah
I think Tam O’s idea on the countdown keychain is great. At this point, I almost don’t even care about impeachment proceedings. GWB should be tagged the lame duck that he is and the entire country ought to focus its money and energy on reforming the culture of corruption at all levels of government and on finding a way to stitch together the social fabric these yahoos have so badly rended.
Oh, and I guess there is the outside chance that democracy will eventually take hold in the Middle East and modern Islamic thinkers will triumph over their fundamentalist bretheren, but that is many, many years down the road.
The investment of American lives and resources GWB has made in that prospect will no doubt show the kind of return investments in his other ventures have yielded over the years: plenty of scratch for him and his, with the commonfolk bankrupt and left holding the bag.
Michael Herdegen - January 20, 2006 @ 1:01 am
[F]inding a way to stitch together the social fabric these yahoos have so badly rended.
As you’ll recall, the nation was ALREADY 50/50 in Nov. of 2000, before Bush, Cheney, et al. had the authority to do more than order lunch.
How can that be laid at Bush’s door ?
The investment of American lives and resources GWB has made in that prospect will [end] with the commonfolk bankrupt and left holding the bag.
If “the commonfolk” were less selfcentered, and behaved more wisely, the U.S. wouldn’t have any NEED to be messing around in the Middle East.
Adults need to take responsibility for their actions, and the American commonfolk had twelve years to get their act together, ’91 – ’03.
If they end up metaphorically “bankrupt”, they’ll simply be reaping the harvest of the seed that they’ve sown.
Tam O’Tellico - January 26, 2006 @ 6:34 am
Michael, now I get it — the American people are responsible for planning, executing and fucking up this war. I guess you mean because we can’t get off the oil teat. And all this time, I thought leaders were supposed to lead. Thanks for straightening me out.
As I’ve said before, the last President to lead on this score was Jimmy Carter. In between, we’ve had Reagan (twice), Bush I, Clinton (twice) and now five years and counting with Junior. Please tell me what any of these leaders have done in 25 years to lead us away from oil dependency?
I say nothing, and I say expecting oil millionaires to lead us out of oil dependency is idiocy. But you probably think plans to drill in Alaska and Yellowstone constitute good leadership, and that the Iraq War is also good oil policy. I say, good luck.
Tam O’Tellico - January 26, 2006 @ 6:46 am
Bushites complain about press coverage and want stories that applaud the hardworking American soldiers who are risking their lives to “reconstruct” Iraq, Well I do applaud the soldiers for their efforts; they are the only light in this long, dark tunnel.
Bushites don’t want any mention of this administration’s outrageously incompetent “misundermanagement”. But the bad news is just beginning for this adminstration. One day, they will reap the bitter harvest of ultimate cronyism by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Halliburton and friends.
For more on our “investment” in Iraq, there’s this from the NY Times.
Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects
By James Glanz
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 January 2006
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.
Agents from the inspector general’s office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general’s office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.
“What’s sad about it is that, considering the destruction in the country, with looting and so on, we needed every dollar for reconstruction,” said Wayne White, a former State Department official whose responsibilities included Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research organization.
Instead, Mr. White said, large amounts of that money may have been wasted or stolen, with strong indications that the chaos in Hilla might have been repeated at other provisional authority outposts.
Others had a similar reaction. “It does not surprise me at all,” said a Defense Department official who worked in Hilla and other parts of the country, who spoke anonymously because he said he feared retribution from the Bush administration. He predicted that similar problems would turn up in the major southern city of Basra and elsewhere in the dangerous desert wasteland of Anbar province. “It’s a disaster,” the official said of problems with contracting in Anbar.
No records were kept as money came and went from the main vault at the Hilla compound, and inside it was often stashed haphazardly in a filing cabinet.
That casual arrangement led to a dispute when one official for the provisional authority, while clearing his accounts on his way out of Iraq, grabbed $100,000 from another official’s stack of cash, according to the report. Whether unintentional or not, the move might never have been discovered except that the second official “had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash,” the report says.
Outside the vault, money seemed to be stuffed into every nook and cranny in the compound. “One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office,” the report says.
The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein’s government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.
In another connection to Iraq’s Olympic effort, a $108,140 contract to completely refurbish the Hilla Olympic swimming pool, including the replacement of pumps and pipes, came to nothing when the contractor simply polished some of the hardware to make it appear as if new equipment had been installed. Local officials for the provisional authority signed paperwork stating that all the work had been completed properly and paid the contractor in full, the report says.
The pool never reopened, and when agents from the inspector general’s office arrived to try out the equipment, “the water came out a murky brown due to the accumulated dirt and grime in the old pumps,” the report says.
Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.
The report continues, narrating the observation of the inspector general’s agents who visited the hospital on Sept. 18, 2004: “The hospital administrator immediately escorted us to the site of the elevators. The administrator said that just a couple days prior to our arrival the elevator crashed and killed three people.”
Michael Herdegen - January 27, 2006 @ 2:05 pm
And all this time, I thought leaders were supposed to lead.
Yes, you’ve expressed your contempt for the common person many times, particularly when we’ve discussed education policy.
However, although America has an elite class, it’s not run by the elites, as are many other nations and societies.
Further, the American elite are easy enough to join – and to fall out of. It’s neither an exclusive class, nor entirely hereditary.
As for the oil teat, all you have to do is convince 218 Representatives, 51 Senators, and 1 President to enact whatever scheme you have in mind, and Shazam !! – you’ll be a “leader”.
Kind of like President Bush, who asked Congress to appropriate ONE BILLION DOLLARS for research into using hydrogen to replace gasoline and diesel fuel, which they did. Congress has also authorized a $ 1/gal subsidy for biodiesel production.
So, by your definition, Bush is a visionary leader AND an environmentalist.
It’s interesting to see just how much of your opposition to the Bush admin is due to plain ol’ ignorance (and you being such an advocate of advanced education, too – for shame).
In your words:
As I’ve said before, the last President to lead on this score was Jimmy Carter. In between, we’ve had […] five years and counting with Junior. Please tell me what any of these leaders have done in 25 years to lead us away from oil dependency?
I say nothing, and I say expecting oil millionaires to lead us out of oil dependency is idiocy.
Further, are you unaware that Bush is NOT an “oil millionaire” ?
Nor are many members of Congress, which is the branch of government most directly responsible for our continued dependence on foreign crude.
Turns out that expecting non-oil-millionaires to lead us out of oil dependency isn’t too smart, either.
Tam O’Tellico - January 29, 2006 @ 6:22 am
Yes, Michael, I know Bush is just a poor, dusty, brokeback cowpoke from backwoods Texas, whose family never made a nickel in the oil business, and he and his family are not the least beholden to the Saudis. To use your words — NOT.
It amazes me how someone like you, can accuse me of blindness and accuse me of contempt for the common man. Your contempt for the “ignorant masses” oozes through every post. You know perfectly well where my contempt lies. But since you seem to have forgotten, let me once again make it simple enough for you.
I believe the richest country on the face of the earth ought to insure that all its citizens have lifetime basic healthcare — something provided to Congress and the President and promised to the Iraqis by Bush. I believe that forty years of hard labor entitles an American worker to retirement benefits.
I also believe that government of, by and for lawyers and lobbyists will never provide American workers their just due. Therefore, I believe unions and education are the only way out for most people, and that without strong unions of eductated workers, we will witness more and more instances like those of recednt days where miners get treated like so much coal dust. You will also note that even with strong unions and an eductation, pilots and mechanics agree to wage cuts while airline executives vote themselves bonuses for getting them to do so. What do you suppose would happen without those unions?
You don’t want to own up to the truth, but here it is: Without unions, workers in every industry will get screwed out of healthcare and pensions so that fat cat Republican business whores can lead lives of wretched excess, indolence and luxury.
Yeah, I know all that makes me a Commie living in a fairy tale world.
Meanwhile you continue to believe in a “frontier” mentality that holds that any individual can stand against “the military-industrial complex”. I hope I don’t need to remind you where that phrase came from, and that it was one of yorn who half-a-century ago understood and warned about the real threat to democracy.
But I suppose all my words are for naught; you’ll most likely go on deluding yourself and continue to believe that Bush actually cares about the problems of ordinary people, that he has a plan to wean us from the oil teat, and that he will bring peace and democracy to Iraq.
And you think I live in a fairy tale?