Saturday, July 07, 2007

The Original Passive (Lazy?) Version of Bring It On

Marcy at NextHurrah has a great find here. I'm just home from enjoying a very fine (but lengthy) performance of "Stuff Happens," a great exposition by Brit David Hare about the runup to, and fallout from that Unprovoked War Thing. In this case the production, directed by Victor Pappas, is at ACT Theatre in Seattle. I know not if it is in production anywhere else at this point. I was especially taken by the Bush, Powell, and Blix characters. Fascinating production in the round, with a magic rubic-cube stage that I kept expecting to morph into the Twin Towers.

But I highly recommend it, even for those who are dutiful actual news-gatherers, i.e., blogosphere residents, as compared to news-sufferers, those deluded that they are dealing with "news" by way of the daily paper, the Today show, and a bit of the old six-o'clock. Even it is familiar stuff I believe it is well worth experiencing in an "arts" medium. I have to give the whole bunch credit for a pretty even hand - there were numerous chances for polemicizing (especially with a Seattle audience!) that went unexploited. Thanks to sis- and bro-in-law Karen and Craig for the birthday tix! Decent Shiraz too.

Anyway, back to the esteemed Ms. Wheeler:

James Fallows repeats a fascinating story Gary Hart and Lee Hamilton told him about the Hart-Rudman Commission.

Early in 2001, the commission presented a report to the incoming G.W. Bush administration warning that terrorism would be the nation's greatest national security problem, and saying that unless the United States took proper protective measures a terrorist attack was likely within its borders. Neither the president nor the vice president nor any other senior official from the new administration took time to meet with the commission members or hear about their findings.

The commission had 14 members, split 7-7, Republican and Democrat, as is de rigeur for bodies of this type. Today Hart told me that in the first few meetings, commission members would go around the room and volunteer their ideas about the nation's greatest vulnerabilities, most urgent needs, and so on.

At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.

The same thing happened at the second meeting -- discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.

Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.

"Her name was Lynne Cheney," Hart said. "I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today." Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China's back!) [my emphasis]

The story deserves wide exposure for two reasons. First, Bush and Cheney refused to meet with the Commission because they didn't want a warning that would distract them from their mission: preventing China from ostensibly accruing as much power as the United States. (In other words, remaining the dominant empire in the world.) I never realized, though, that Lynne Cheney was sitting in on the early meetings. How does Bush get to claim plausible deniability about Hart-Rudman when Cheney's wife was part of the Commission? Lynne was in the bunker on 9/11, after all--she's the one who could have alerted the Administration to their myopia, and instead she shirked her duty.

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Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Intense Partisan Tribalism?

I don't think the ripples from the Libby commutation are anywhere near dying out yet, from my newsgathering. And of course rightly so. Maybe this was not the tipping point or the last straw, but it certainly is a suitable cause for outrage that extends well beyond the world of progressives to those with a strong interest in justice and the cause of democracy or even those who know how the American so-called system of justice can grind down Real Folks trying to get by, even in many cases for what are quite arguably victimless crimes while conspicuously letting the Ken Lays, George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, Karl Roves, and, yes Libbys repeatedly skate or scoot by despite repeated far more serious legal violations.

I think it should be a high priority to keep this story alive, and I sense many share that feeling. This is not at all another ho-hum bush pratfall. Stuck anchors - okay, move on. Obstruction of justice - not so fast.

One recent post at Anonymous Liberal starts out with a comparison to the OJ verdict that I find quite intriguing. The author, perhaps a little injudiciously under the circumstances, uses the term "intense partisan tribalism" for the common theme here. As an aside, that reminds me of the time I nearly provoked a brawl by expressing disgust at repeated abuse of the common rules and conventions in a volleyball pickup game by invoking the term "jungle ball."

I'm not sure I really like the analogy between the reaction to the two verdicts all that much. While I am mortified at the joy in OJ's verdict, I can at least appreciate that there is some honest basis for it. In the case of Libby it seems to me an entirely self-indulgent martyrdom complex that is at the heart of this, e.g. the swine in question having said "liberal media" so many times as they knelt and prayed for their criminal, err, unelected president that the hypnosis has taken over in the form of full-on group hallucination. It is the reminder of that strange epoch and the cerebral catalysis I appreciate. I am taking the liberty of reproducing the post in full:

An astute commenter in a previous thread noted the similarities between the reaction by many conservatives to the news that Scooter Libby's sentence had been commuted and the reaction by many African-Americans to O.J. Simpson's acquittal.

I remember back in 1995 being shocked that so many people were ecstatic about the acquittal of someone who seemed so obviously guilty of murder. Watching the jubilant reaction to the verdict really helped me to appreciate just how deeply many in the black community distrusted the police and the criminal justice system generally. The people cheering in this picture no doubt genuinely believed that O.J. had been framed by racist cops.

Of course, that belief didn't come out of nowhere. It was the product of a long history of very real racism and disparate treatment within the justice system. And that history led a number of otherwise reasonable people to ignore the facts of the case and come to view O.J. as a victim, not a vicious murderer.

In Libby's case, similar dynamics are clearly at work. Many conservatives who have been conditioned to view everything through a hyper-partisan lens have become convinced that Libby is the victim of political persecution. As the reliably unhinged Mark Levin put it:

The way I see it, Lewis Libby was about to become a political prisoner and the president prevented that.

As bizarre a view as that is, I can at least chalk it up to an intense partisan tribalism. Levin and his ilk are partisan to their core and have long since lost the ability to see reality through anything but the most distorted of partisan lenses.

What I don't understand, however, are the people like Marty Peretz and Alan Dershowitz, who clearly don't suffer from the same partisan psychosis as the Mark Levins of the world, but nevertheless share the view that Libby's prosecution was some sort of liberal conspiracy. Today, in the midst of a totally unhinged rant, Peretz wrote:

This case has been a foul one from the beginning, if for no other reason than that the special prosecutor already knew the name of the federal official--Richard Armitage--who had leaked Ms. Plame's name--arguably not a violation of any law--when he set out to trap Libby on perjury counts . . .

That's quite some perjury trap Fitzgerald set given that Libby had already given his false story to investigators months before Fitzgerald was appointed to the case. And as a factual matter, Libby had leaked Plame's identity to Judith Miller well before Armitage leaked the same information to Bob Novak. It's pure happenstance that Novak ran with the information and Miller didn't. But Marty doesn't care about the facts. This is the realm of truthiness.

Remarkably, though, Alan Dershowitz has a post over at the Huffington Post that actually makes Peretz look sane by comparison. In it, Dershowitz accuses not only Fitzgerald and Judge Walton (both Republican appointees) of being partisans out to get Libby, but he levels the same accusation against the panel of Appeals Court judges who affirmed Walton's bail decision. As Orin Kerr points out, that three-judge panel included "Federalist Society favorite David Sentelle and solid conservative Karen LeCraft Henderson." In Dershowitz's alternate reality, however, all of these Republican appointees are somehow engaged in a political battle with the White House and Libby is just some poor schmuck who got caught in the middle.

Now I realize that both Dershowitz and Peretz hold neoconservative views that make them more likely to view Libby sympathetically. But I can't for the life of me understand how anyone who isn't hopelessly blinded by partisanship could think that Libby is the victim of a political prosecution. As Professor Kerr, certainly no liberal himself, recently observed:
The Scooter Libby case has triggered some very weird commentary around the blogosphere; perhaps the weirdest claim is that the case against Libby was "purely political." I find this argument seriously bizarre. As I understand it, Bush political appointee James Comey named Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Fitzgerald filed an indictment and went to trial before Bush political appointee Reggie Walton. A jury convicted Libby, and Bush political appointee Walton sentenced him. At sentencing, Bush political appointee Judge Walton described the evidence against Libby as "overwhelming" and concluded that a 30-month sentence was appropriate. And yet the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.

I find this claim bizarre. I'm open to arguments that parts of the case against Libby were unfair. But for the case to have been purely political, doesn't that require the involvement of someone who was not a Bush political appointee? Who are the
political opponents who brought the case? Is the idea that Fitzgerald is secretly a Democratic party operative? That Judge Walton is a double agent? Or is the idea that Fitzgerald and Walton were hypnotized by "the Mainstream Media" like Raymond Shaw in
the Manchurian Candidate? Seriously, I don't get it.

Yeah, me neither Orin.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Can You Spell "Outrage"?

Well I'm sure glad I did not jump the gun in posting about the first Legal Breaking News today, as I did with small circle of work friends, one of whom not much later was the first to alert me to the second Breaking News. Not that I really crowed about #1, mind you - it was more in the way of sharing, prefaced with words like "well this certainly puts the pressure on." But I remember some Flash I shared in the past that had at least one of you hopping mad when it came to less than a proper humanist would have hoped (I was weepy too).

Anyway, I hope you took in the day's roller-coaster with proper equanimity. It is what it is. We could not have (and rarely have) expected more of the Nickel-store Cowboy. This appears to have been the course that minimized the potential legal exposure for his inner circle. And selfish motives like that we know have of course always been the theme of the Bush administration. Their speechifiers come up with lofty terms like "spreading Democracy," but the reality is that they are not even supportive of Democracy here at home. They have of course done more damage to the former sidewalk-stand, three-ring-circus, poster-child for the Concept of Democracy than all prior attackers, domestic or foreign.

It is obvious that little if anything in the concept of Democracy as it is enshrined in our primary founding documents and the working practice of our country has any relevance or importance to them. Other than, of course, when it might be used as a prop or shill for one of their skits that involve justifying war, torture, and the need to set aside internationally recognized principles of jurisprudence.

The course so carefully charted for the cowboy-bully by his handlers (remember those 20+ lawyers suddenly bunkered-up with Laura a few weeks back?) apparently leaves Libby with access to the Fifth Amendment (full pardon no doubt already penciled in for Jan. '09). Hence there seems little leverage to get actual truthful testimony out of him (i.e., the sort we have not yet had, which a system like ours depended on up until the time we approved torture).

I gather there is potential for either Congress or a Special Prosecutor (e.g., Our Man Fitz, my candidate for Man of the Year) to grant immunity and "invite" testimony. But what do either of those parties have in the way of leverage? Subpoenas, I suppose, with contempt for anyone in defiance - but we are learning about that process in more or less real time right now with the WH. But that just drags me back to the sleazy details of all of this.

Why have I learned more about our legal system in the last two years than in my prior lifetime? And what does it tell that I have had to learn all of this now?

Actually that is not entirely fair. By the time Watergate was playing out I was pretty burned out on the whole political schtick. I had been captured I suspect by cynicism, that deadly foe of activism and optimism, after the experience of the late '60's and early '70's. From Hubert to Daley to Cambodia to Kent State it was an incredible era of government lying and citizen dis-empowerment.

I can't help but think many could feel the same way now, and for good reason. If anything, the extent of dishonesty that seems to be tolerated in our elected officials, and the erosion of the rights of actual citizens is actually far more extreme than it was "way back then."

Potentially significant changes include the rampant culture of talk-radio/O'Reilly/Limbaugh/Coulter (and tolerance of those slimeballs!) and hence hyper-right fright-speech, the mainstream media more or less having flushed themselves down the nearest receptacle, and the InterNet (oh, hello there!).

And I want to close on that last note. There was nothing like this medium I am exploiting right now Back Then. Admittedly it has its Coulters - I always thought Werewolves were an abstract concept until I encountered her - but it also has its Greenwalds, and Hamshers, and Marshalls, and Digbys, and so on. Rumor has it that there are tens of thousands of bloggers out there, and I bet a solid majority are right there with us on most issues.

And most of their blogs, like mine, are probably rarely even visited, hence invisible to the mainstream pollers and self-important pundits.

As the classic Starship tune has it "we should be together." (For the record, I believe that tune also included the memorable words "tear down the walls, MF-er"!) In that spirit, one suggestion is that you consider contacting your elected representatives and demanding an aggressive investigation of the obvious conflict of interest of the president absolving a convicted criminal with knowledge of potential criminal activity by the president and vice-president. And by all means agitate, fulminate, and make yourself otherwise totally troublesome to those around you by keeping the Scooter case alive.


And please do "Be Together," with all that entails. Comaradery rather that sniping at details is essential right now, in my opinion.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

And a Simple Molecule at That


I'm holding myself back here, deferring to Mr. Gore, who has a great Op-Ed at NYT today. You will not be surprised to hear it has to do with the state of the planet, and topics like carbon dioxide.

Sorry if you find the CO2 topic sleep-inducing. Theoretically the gas itself it is supposed to be key to stimulating intake of air (hence O2!). Now N2O might be a different story! But CO2 and other greenhouse gases are clearly contributing to unprecedented climate change here on the only planet our species has successfully inhabited. The reality of course is that climate change largely due to our exuberant exploitation of oil and coal (and of course zeal for doing so in the least-fettered, i.e. unregulated, way possible) has undoubtedly been whacking numerous critters less-adaptable than we are for quite some time now.

Anyway, this is mandatory reading - this is only the first half:


WE — the human species — have arrived at a moment of decision. It is unprecedented and even laughable for us to imagine that we could actually make a conscious choice as a species, but that is nevertheless the challenge that is before us.

Our home — Earth — is in danger. What is at risk of being destroyed is not the planet itself, but the conditions that have made it hospitable for human beings.

Without realizing the consequences of our actions, we have begun to put so much carbon dioxide into the thin shell of air surrounding our world that we have literally changed the heat balance between Earth and the Sun. If we don’t stop doing this pretty quickly, the average temperature will increase to levels humans have never known and put an end to the favorable climate balance on which our civilization depends.

In the last 150 years, in an accelerating frenzy, we have been removing increasing quantities of carbon from the ground — mainly in the form of coal and oil — and burning it in ways that dump 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours into the Earth’s atmosphere.

The concentrations of CO2 — having never risen above 300 parts per million for at least a million years — have been driven from 280 parts per million at the beginning of the coal boom to 383 parts per million this year.

As a direct result, many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several “tipping points” that could — within 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.

Just in the last few months, new studies have shown that the north polar ice cap — which helps the planet cool itself — is melting nearly three times faster than the most pessimistic computer models predicted. Unless we take action, summer ice could be completely gone in as little as 35 years. Similarly, at the other end of the planet, near the South Pole, scientists have found new evidence of snow melting in West Antarctica across an area as large as California.

This is not a political issue. This is a moral issue, one that affects the survival of human civilization. It is not a question of left versus right; it is a question of right versus wrong. Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours.

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