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Hersh: J'accuse

Have you heard about Seymour Hersh's interview with Major General Antonio Taguba yet? I heard about it today... but not from reading a newspaper.

"There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff (the explicit images) was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this."

That's the two-star general who was tasked with investigating the program of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, the same man who was forced into retirement this year. Hersh hit the talking-head circuit last night to promote it. On what planet is this not front-page news? Everywhere?

The "Korea model"

Preview: Dubya's long, hot summer

As the Buddhists say, karma is a bitch...

Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right.

"It's just gotten steadily worse," he said. "There was some point during the Iranian hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the sweater, the rabbit" -- Gingrich was referring to Carter's suggestion that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats, and to the "attack" on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as a "killer rabbit" during a fishing trip -- "that there was a morning where the average American went, 'You know, this really worries me.'" He added, "You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don't have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can't avoid thinking about."

-- Jeffrey Goldberg interviews former House Speaker (and current presidential hopeful)  Newt Gingrinch in his "Letter From Washington: PARTY UNFAITHFUL, The Republican implosion," from the June 4th issue of The New Yorker.

[S]ome big money players up from Texas recently paid a visit to their friend in the White House. The story goes that they got out exactly one question, and the rest of the meeting consisted of The President in an extended whine, a rant, actually, about no one understands him, the critics are all messed up, if only people would see what he’s doing things would be OK…etc., etc. This is called a “bunker mentality” and it’s not attractive when a friend does it. When the friend is the President of the United States, it can be downright dangerous. Apparently the Texas friends were suitably appalled, hence the story now in circulation.

-- From the April 30th issue of the subscription-only Nelson Report, a Washington insider newsletter, quoted by Think Progress and the Huffington Post...

Today you disparage us for opposing a massive amnesty program that endangers our economy and national security.  Today you even embrace the religion of global warming, a stunning shift from prior policy (your administration even went to the Supreme Court and argued correctly that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant).

What's a conservative to do?

-- Mark Levin, the National Review Online, May 31, addresses the President.

The other thing that's interesting to me is the degree to which the Right isn't even rational about this anymore. It doesn't even make arguments anymore about this or that part of the bill, it's just "We don't want any kind of immigration reform because it's going to legitimize 12 million people who are here and, oh by the way, aren't leaving. So let's just build a fence, and that's it." That seems to be the essence now of the conservative majority's immigration policy.

-- Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal's famously conservative editorial board, addressing the board on May 22.

We hereby challenge the Journal’s editors to debate the immigration bill in a neutral venue with a moderator of their choosing ...  It shouldn’t be a problem for the Journal’s editors to take up this challenge, since opponents of the bill aren’t “rational” on the question, have no arguments, and are “foaming at the mouth,” as they explained in a videotaped session of one of their editorial meetings last week.

-- The editors of the National Review call out their Wall Street brethren for an East Coast Establishment conservative smack-down, May 31...

Longtime readers of this blog know that the Wall Street Journal is notorious for refusing to acknowledge its factual errors in editorials about immigration policy and for tarring its opponents as anti-immigrant racists. Will they rise to NR's challenge or continue to smear amnesty opponents from the safety of their Manhattan offices?

-- Michelle Malkin, treating the WSJ with a tone of scorn usually reserved for The New York Times. According to a poll on the post, 95 percent of her readers think the National Review editors would win.

Laura Ingraham "takes the gloves off." Doesn't she want to "do what's right for America"? Finally, conservatives get mad at this president - for all the conservative reasons we're now familiar with. It only took six years of betrayal to get there, but, hey guys, welcome aboard. I find myself echoing Glenn Reynolds:

Heck, I'm basically pro-immigration and I find the Administration's arguments for the bill sufficiently unpersuasive and insulting that I'm leaning against it on that basis alone.

It's the arrogance and condescension that finally makes your blood boil.

-- Conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan, blogging for The Atlantic, May 31

Message To The Left:  I'm not saying you should impeach him, I'm just sayin', you know, go with your hearts.

-- Conservative blogger Ace of Spades sums up his feelings about the president, May 31.

This is his legacy. Even his own supporters now despise him, even his own samurai are deserting him, even the people who could aid him are pushed aside. And we've got 19 months to go before January 2009.

Scotty writes his memoirs

News item:

NEW YORK (AP) - A memoir by former White House press secretary Scott McClellan will be published next spring by PublicAffairs.

The book will run 416 pages, but the publisher acknowledged on Tuesday that McClellan actually wrote only one 334-word passage, which the former Bush spokesman merely repeats over and over and over.

Marshall on US attorneys

Joshua Micah Marshall, the guy out ahead of the mainstream media on reporting the US attorneys firing story:

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they're not even really denying the wrongdoing. They're ignoring the point or at least pleading 'no contest' and saying it's okay.

Walter Reed: It gets worse

Why is it everything our executive branch does smells like the moldy cesspools left behind by Hurricane Katrina?

Found via Francis X. Archibald: this piece from today's WaPo on the Army's decision to replace Maj. Gen. Weightman with Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley (commander of Walter Reed from 2002-2004):

Here's where the story stops making sense. Much of The Post's article detailed the abuse by omission that Gen. Kiley, not Gen. Weightman, committed, first as head of Walter Reed, then in his current post as Army surgeon general. Gen. Weightman, who very well might deserve his disgrace, has commanded Walter Reed for only half a year, while Gen. Kiley, now back in charge of Walter Reed, headed the hospital and its outpatient facilities for two years and has led the Army's medical command since...

(T)he evidence compiled so far suggests that Gen. Kiley has been more complicit in the scandalous neglect of Walter Reed's outpatient facilities for longer than Gen. Weightman has been. It also indicates that the Army's reshuffle is really about projecting the appearance of accountability, not punishing those most responsible.

So, to recap. First they punished sergeants and said there wasn't a problem besides, you know, the liberal media. Then they fired the facility's commander and replaced him with someone who was apparently an even bigger asshole. And when that didn't placate the people (damn those upstart journalists!), they forced their political appointee (Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey) to resign.

A visibly angry Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced the resignation in a brief statement this afternoon, saying he was "disappointed" by the Army's response to disclosures of inadequate outpatient care at Walter Reed and bureaucratic inertia in dealing with wounded soldiers.

Well, it's nice to know that Gates has a pulse on this one. But how does getting rid of Harvey deal with the Kiley problem? Apparently Kiley was Harvey's choice, which alone should have been a firing offense, but Kiley's still there. And are we to believe that Harvey didn't discuss the Kiley option with Gates before he made the appointment?

At least Gates isn't happy with Kiley as a replacement:

Appearing before reporters at the Pentagon, Gates indicated that he was dissatisfied with Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the Army surgeon general, who was named by Harvey as a temporary replacement for Weightman.

"I am disappointed that some in the Army have not adequately appreciated the seriousness of the situation pertaining to outpatient care at Walter Reed," Gates said. "Some have shown too much defensiveness and have not shown enough focus on digging into and addressing the problems."

Does that mean he'll be replaced? Here's the WaPo, again:

Shortly after Gates spoke today, the Army announced that Maj. Gen. Eric R. Schoomaker, currently the commanding general of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Fort Detrick, Md., would become the new commander of Walter Reed and of the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command.

Sounds like it, in an indirect way. Which is the only way anything good every happens with this administration. This bunch is provisionally adequate only when cornered like a rat in a trap.

Bush, by the way, has called for a "comprehensive review" of care for our war wounded. Well rah-rah. Way to get out in front, Mr. President. It only took him a week. Thank God he's so principled, eh?

The 101st Fightin' Chickenhawks
By the way, I just went to check Harvey's military experience. Anybody want to guess?

His official biography (which includes this line: "Secretary Harvey's number one priority is the well being of Soldiers and their families") makes no mention of him ever serving in uniform.   So what background inspired President Bush to appoint this man in 2004, in the middle of a ground war in the Middle East?

Prior to becoming the Secretary, Dr. Harvey spent much of his career with corporations that provided products and services to the federal government, particularly the Department of Defense. He has been involved in over 20 major defense programs and was a member of the Army Science Board in the late 1990s.

Which corporations?

Prior to his appointment as the Secretary of the Army, Harvey held various professional, management and executive positions within the Westinghouse Corporation from 1969 to 1997, including President of the Electronics Systems Group, President of the Government and Environmental Services Company, and Chief Operating Officer of the multi billion dollar Industries and Technology Group. Most recently Harvey was a Director and Vice Chairman of Duratek, a company specializing in treating radioactive, hazardous, and other wastes, as well as a member of the board of several other corporations.

Yeah, I'll just bet that a career technocrat from the defense industry made improving the lives of soldiers his top priority.

One last thing: The emerging storyline appears to be about privatization. Expect Democrats in the House to explore with subpoenas the Army's aggressive campaign to privatize care at Reed by farming the job out to big private contractors... such as IAP World Wide Services ("one of the companies that experienced problems delivering ice during the response to Hurricane Katrina"), which received a $120 million contract for facilities management.

It's the same story, over and over. Only the names and the scandals change. We are being led by lying incompetents whose first instinct is always something underhanded, whose true allegiance isn't to the country, or to the field officers who sacrifice for honor, or for the enlisted men and women who form the backbone of the force.  There is a name for such people:

Carpetbaggers.

I say again: FILE CRIMINAL CHARGES AGAINST THESE PEOPLE.

"This Pres?"

More.

Bush the innovator

Jay Rosen has been largely absent from PressThink this fall because he's had his hands full with NewAssignment.Net, but he returned yesterday with one of those signature essays that makes PressThink required reading. His Monday post ("Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop") returns to one of Rosen's best subjects: the Bush White House's innovative approach to dealing with the national media.

Among the various insights it delivers, I was particularly taken by this one, which deals with the tyranny of the conventional. Journalists, Rosen contends, are happy to pigeon-hole new information in hackneyed categories, even if it means ignoring what they're actually witnessing...

...because they don’t have to introduce an unfamiliar language to describe what they are seeing.

Whereas if they tried to narrate the expansion of executive power (led by the vice president) through a revolt against empiricism (led by the chief executive) their story would be more accurate (to what happened) but less credible to more people. Because it sounds so extreme.

This is in fact a way to discredit the press that the press has not fully appreciated. Take extreme action and a press that mistrusts “the extremes” will mistrust initial reports of that action— like Suskind’s. This gives you time to re-make the scene and overawe people. There are all kinds of costs to changing a master narrative that has been built up by beat reporters and career pundits. When the press can hang on to an old and proven one it will. The Bush people understood that. They knew they could change the game on the press because the press finds it hard to act in reply. Therefore it tends to behave.

Bingo.

Conan the Grammarian

My original reaction to the now famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Jim Webb-George Bush tiff was mixed: I figured that Webb should have been more graceful and the President could have been less overly familiar. Bottom line: Two dogs sniffing each other to see which one was going to be the Alpha male, and not worth much more outside the bounds of political symbolism.

But then George Will had to open his big, hypocritical mouth and turn this into a fight.

"Civil war" in Iraq?

Monday morning on The Today Show, Matt Lauer announced a decision by NBC and MSNBC to reject administration pressure and begin referring to the situation in Iraq by the term "civil war." The decision put great pressure on other media -- including bloggers -- to either follow suit or be labeled as water-carrying shills for the White House.

In the ensuing days, we have resisted adopting the mainstream media's new description of the war. However, after careful consideration, Xark News has decided that a change in terminology is warranted -- that the situation in Iraq, with multiple armed militarized factions fighting for their own political agendas, and 2,000 civilians dead in the past month, and repeated policy blunders by U.S. political leaders, and neighboring countries acting out their geopolitical ambitions via insurgent proxies, and American troops caught daily in an endless crossfire in which their best efforts may be making things worse, and thousands of years of religious and cultural grievances that we have practically no hope of fully understanding -- can now be characterized as what it truly is: a massive cluster f**k (or, for the sake of brevity, MCF, as in "the MCF in Iraq" or "the Iraq MCF").

Calling the situation what it is represents an important step in helping Americans properly frame the decisions we face.  Sorry, NBC. "Civil war" doesn't even begin to describe the complexity of the issues that confront us.