September 2006 Archives

The Daily Kos' SusanG is absolutely correct: Democratic Party leaders need to stop saying there needs to be an agenda for change and actually start talking about the one they have. Forcefully. It is long past time to put the GOP on the defensive.

I like Sen. Barack Obama a great deal. But his potential and acclaim come with higher expectations. He's proven he can do better than this.

Kevin Drum highlights the latest example of our so-called liberal media hard at work playing up conservative charges and then burying the analysis disputing the wild claims.

Hey, it is only about the potential for going to war with Iran. Like that important subject requires any balanced news coverage.

By the way, Mr. President, it has been 1,825 days since you promised to get Osama "Dead or Alive." How's that going?

Answer: not well. Which is undoubtedly why our president had to rely on this "lie bomb" (thanks for that phrase, Jen) during his press conference yesterday. As Tim Grieve writes:

George W. Bush on Osama bin Laden, Sept. 15, 2006: "There's kind of an urban myth here in Washington about how this administration hasn't stayed focused on Osama bin Laden. Forget it. It's convenient throwaway lines when people say that."

George W. Bush on Osama bin Laden, March 13, 2002: "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you ... And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure ... I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

Greg Sargent carries President George W. Bush's press conference statements and actions to their logical, yet pathetic, conclusion:

So that must mean it's only okay to invade sovereign nations where Bin Laden isn't (Iraq) but not okay to invade ones where he may actually be (Pakistan).

Just how incompetent can one man prove to be?

As Josh Marshall explains, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow shows he does not understand history as he tries to defend the president's dangerous plan to gut the Geneva Conventions.

Eric Alterman has been fired by MSNBC.com. Thankfully, Alterman has already found a new home with Media Matters for America.

Alterman's blog is a must-read. If you don't check him out, you are missing some of the best commentary on the internet. His community is extraordinary. Hopefully it will move intact to its new home.

As I tell my father many times a year, real liberals do not have much of a voice in the mainstream media, while right wing radicals pop up on CNN Headline News, among other places.

It's a shame that Alterman is no longer going to be at MSNBC.com after a decade. That'll be one less reason to read that particular web site. Make sure you visit here to see him in action starting next week.

Josh Marshall is correct: the best way to respond to the Republican Party's slanderous claims that the president's detractors support the terrorists is to talk about failure and accountability.

The response to all of this should be really simple. It might go something like this. "I wouldn't mind if the president were politicizing 9/11 so much if he hadn't failed so badly at rounding up the people responsible for it. The president pulled our troops out of Afghanistan for Iraq when they had Osama in their grasp and he's still at large 5 years later. And he's still pretending that Iraq had something to do with 9/11. People need to make a decision on November 7th. Is five years of failure enough? If people think President Bush is on the right course, they should vote Republican. If they think it's time for a change, they should vote Democratic."

How much failure can one nation tolerate?

Thank you, Keith Olbermann, for your latest special comment last night. Click here to read the whole thing.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

So, our Department of Homeland Security is busy protecting us -- from investigative reporters.

Because prosecuting people for taking photos of an installation that can be seen on Google Maps and harassing reporters are activities far more important than inspecting cargo at our ports, putting anti-missile technology on airplanes, or figuring out how to screen for explosives at airport security checkpoints.

Thank you, President Bush!

It's like the president thinks we cannot remember what he's done -- or hasn't done -- over the past five years. That we cannot go back and check the record.

Here's what the president tried to sell the American people in his political speech last night:

Osama bin Laden and other terrorists are still in hiding. Our message to them is clear: No matter how long it takes, America will find you, and we will bring you to justice.

Really, Mr. President? I thought this was your policy, from a March 13, 2002 press conference:

Mr. President, in your speeches now you rarely talk or mention Osama bin Laden. Why is that? Also, can you tell the American people if you have any more information, if you know if he is dead or alive? Final part -- deep in your heart, don't you truly believe that until you find out if he is dead or alive, you won't really eliminate the threat of --

THE PRESIDENT: Deep in my heart I know the man is on the run, if he's alive at all. Who knows if he's hiding in some cave or not; we haven't heard from him in a long time. And the idea of focusing on one person is -- really indicates to me people don't understand the scope of the mission.

Terror is bigger than one person. And he's just -- he's a person who's now been marginalized. His network, his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match. He is -- as I mentioned in my speech, I do mention the fact that this is a fellow who is willing to commit youngsters to their death and he, himself, tries to hide -- if, in fact, he's hiding at all.

So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. (emphasis added)

But, hey, Mr. President. It's only been 1,821 days since you promised to get Osama bin Laden dead or alive. I can tell you've taken that promise very seriously over the years.

Update: And how could I forget, Mr. President? How are these tough words consistent with the decision to disband the bin Laden unit?

Atrios is right to be cranky: how in the world could the New York Times (or the Lieberman campaign) think that Ned Lamont's letter in September 1998 was one supporting Sen. Joe Lieberman's (CFL-Conn.) moral outrage against President Bill Clinton in the Lewinsky matter.

It is clear that Lamont is urging Lieberman to express some outrage against Kenneth Starr and "to put an end to this snowballing mess."

Funny, I don't remember Sen. Lieberman taking that advice.

Via Digby, some historians make an important plea to ABC:

Dear Robert Iger:

We write as professional historians, who are deeply concerned by the continuing reports about ABC's scheduled broadcast of "The Path to 9/11." These reports document that this drama contains numerous flagrant falsehoods about critical events in recent American history. The key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence into order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000.

The claim by the show's producers, broadcaster, and defenders, that these falsehoods are permissible because the show is merely a dramatization, is disingenuous and dangerous given their assertions that the show is also based on authoritative historical evidence. Whatever ABC's motivations might be, broadcasting these falsehoods, connected to the most traumatic historical event of our times, would be a gross disservice to the public. A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it. We strongly urge you to halt the show's broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.

Sincerely,
Arthur Schlesinger
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Lizbeth Cohen, Harvard University,
Nicholas Salvatore, Cornell University;
Ted Widmer, Washington College;
Rick Perlstein, Independent Scholar;
David Blight, Yale University;
Eric Alterman, City University of New York.

I found this Daily Kos diary by skids extremely compelling. The author is correct, at some point the trend becomes too great to ignore.

Like, for example, entire beaches getting evacuated because of global-warming-induced neurotoxic blooms.  Not just caustic fumes like the growing red tide problem but actual neurotoxins that could be lethal in the right circumstances (though red tide can kill indirectly.)  Now one or two isolated stories are easy to shrug off, but what if started seeing one such story once a week... here's the news you missed.

There's a bunch of troubling headlines being missed these days. Skids expresses the stakes extremely well:

Melting glaciers and more hurricanes are the least of our worries.  The drastic effects of our impacts on the environment -- of which global warming is only one --  will be changes in the biosphere, as large populations of the types of animals and plants that we are used to living with die, and opportunistic, fast breeding, organisms that are not necessarily compatible with us rush in to fill the gap.  These changes will occur -- are occurring -- way before the first NYC Starbucks slips into the sea.

Get ready for some turbulance.

Kevin Drum highlights another example of horrific thinking and management from the mind of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

...."In his own mind he thought we could go in and fight and take out the regime and come out. But a lot of us planners were having a real hard time with it because we were also thinking we can't do this. Once you tear up a country you have to stay and rebuild it. It was very challenging."

At what point does such disgraceful activity reach the point of a high crime and misdemeanor?

Thanks to Off-Wing Opinion, I found the most useful web site I've seen in some time.

A couple days late, but I want to welcome lovely Sofia to the world. Congratulations to Megan and Brett, who have already posted pictures and stories about Sofia's arrival. Which I find very impressive. :)

Okay, ABC and Disney. Let's get this straight.

Right wing radio hosts and bloggers can have advance screenings of your propaganda 9-11 film, but former President Clinton, former Secretary of State Albright, and former National Security Advisor Berger are denied the same preview opportunity?

Really, doesn't this look like liltle more than a conservative right-wing pro-Bush campaign commercial? One, moreover, being presented to the American people by a national network over the public airwaves just weeks before a pivotal election?

From Behind the Homefront:

The parents of a Wisconsin soldier killed in Iraq have filed a Freedom of Information request for military documents about their son's death. Stephen and Kay Castner are hoping to find evidence backing their claim that Humvees are unsafe for use in Iraqi convoys. Stephen Castner, 27, died in July when the Humvee he was riding in was hit by a roadside bomb.

While the Bush Administration's top officials are going around trying to compare people like me to Nazi appeasers, Sadly No!'s Brad R. has found another historical comparison. :)

(Hat tip to Sadly No! commenter Tulkinghorn for the title of this post.)

Speaking of David Corn's story about Valerie Plame Wilson's work as operations chief of the Joint Task Force on Iraq, Firedoglake's Christy Hardin Smith picks up an important note that I had not fully considered:

But that summer–before 9/11–word came down from the brass: We’re ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group. (emphasis Hardin Smith's)

Yeah, that seems like an important little tidbit worth additional discussion.

Why was the JTFI ramped up before 9/11 -- at a time when counterterrorism operations were being reduced in status in the White House, Vice President Cheney was refusing to convene a counterterrorism task force, and Attorney General John Ashcroft "didn't want to hear of al Qaeda".

Oh, by the way, I wonder just how much of that previous paragraph is going to make it into ABC's little right-wing 9/11 propaganda film?

ThinkProgress outlines another lie in ABC's upcoming right-wing propoganda presentation on the September 11 terrorist attacks.

If ABC does not stop claiming this upcoming program is "based on the 9-11 Commission report" and instead runs regular disclaimers noting that it is a work of historical fiction, boycotts should begin.

After all, changing something the Washington Times did and instead pinning the blame on the Washington Post in the movie must have been intentional. The people behind this movie certainly know the difference. They also know the propoganda advantage of blaming the Post instead of the arch-conservative Times.

Keith Olbermann offered another important special comment on tonight's Countdown. Olbermann tonight responds to President George W. Bush's latest rhetorical attack on dissent and a free and independent media.

It is to our deep national shame—and ultimately it will be to the President’s deep personal regret—that he has followed his Secretary of Defense down the path of trying to tie those loyal Americans who disagree with his policies—or even question their effectiveness or execution—to the Nazis of the past, and the al Qaeda of the present.

Today, in the same subtle terms in which Mr. Bush and his colleagues muddied the clear line separating Iraq and 9/11 -- without ever actually saying so—the President quoted a purported Osama Bin Laden letter that spoke of launching, “a media campaign to create a wedge between the American people and their government.”

Make no mistake here—the intent of that is to get us to confuse the psychotic scheming of an international terrorist, with that familiar bogeyman of the right, the “media.”

The President and the Vice President and others have often attacked freedom of speech, and freedom of dissent, and freedom of the press.

Now, Mr. Bush has signaled that his unparalleled and unprincipled attack on reporting has a new and venomous side angle...

Near the end, Olbermann reaches back into our nation's history and asks an important question of our president:

Have you no sense of decency, sir?

The six years of his presidency, and many of his actions as Governor of Texas, indicate that the answer to this question is an emphatic no.

David Corn and Michael Isikoff's new exclusive report about Valerie Plame Wilson's CIA assignment should open a huge new series of questions for the Bush Administration. Corn writes:

In the spring of 2002 Dick Cheney made one of his periodic trips to CIA headquarters. Officers and analysts were summoned to brief him on Iraq. Paramilitary specialists updated the Vice President on an extensive covert action program in motion that was designed to pave the way to a US invasion. Cheney questioned analysts about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. How could they be used against US troops? Which Iraqi units had chemical and biological weapons? He was not seeking information on whether Saddam posed a threat because he possessed such weapons. His queries, according to a CIA officer at the briefing, were pegged to the assumptions that Iraq had these weapons and would be invaded--as if a decision had been made.

Though Cheney was already looking toward war, the officers of the agency's Joint Task Force on Iraq--part of the Counterproliferation Division of the agency's clandestine Directorate of Operations--were frantically toiling away in the basement, mounting espionage operations to gather information on the WMD programs Iraq might have. The JTFI was trying to find evidence that would back up the White House's assertion that Iraq was a WMD danger. Its chief of operations was a career undercover officer named Valerie Wilson.

So, Wilson was a leader in the CIA unit that correctly found no weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq, despite Vice President Cheney's urging? That, to me, seems like an explosive story.

Moreover, I find myself in complete agreement with Digby's analysis of this story, as it appears to provide the first rational (if horrific) explanation for why Wilson's name was being dragged through the beltway mud:

Now I realize that it would be imprudent of me to suggest that her group's failure to adequately provide the vice president with the information he needed might have prompted him to tell his henchman Libby to burn her, but, you know I'm like that.

Armitage may have just been a gossipy little busybody from way back, but that doesn't explain LIbby and Judy and Rove and Cooper or the "two senior administration officials" who tried to get the Washington Post to print that Wilson's CIA "wife" had sent Wilson on a "boondoggle." Rove said she was "fair game." You simply cannot persuade me that every last person involved in this did not know that the head of the Joint Task Force on Iraq's WMD at the CIA in 2003 was the person they were busy making sure was publicly outed.

Guess what? The right-wing writer of the mini-series is just making things up in this supposedly "objective" look back at the events leading up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Think Progress gets a response to a plot element from Richard Clarke:

Rush Limbaugh, who refers to Nowrasteh as “a friend of mine,” reviews the action:

So the CIA, the Northern Alliance, surrounding a house where bin Laden is in Afghanistan, they’re on the verge of capturing, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to proceed.

So they phoned Washington. They phoned the White House. Clinton and his senior staff refused to give authorization for the capture of bin Laden because they’re afraid of political fallout if the mission should go wrong, and if civilians were harmed…Now, the CIA agent in this is portrayed as being astonished. “Are you kidding?” He asked Berger over and over, “Is this really what you guys want?”

Berger then doesn’t answer after giving his first admonition, “You guys go in on your own. If you go in we’re not sanctioning this, we’re not approving this,” and Berger just hangs up on the agent after not answering any of his questions.

ThinkProgress has obtained a response to this scene from Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism czar for Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and now counterterrorism advisor to ABC:

1. Contrary to the movie, no US military or CIA personnel were on the ground in Afghanistan and saw bin Laden.

2. Contrary to the movie, the head of the Northern Alliance, Masood, was no where near the alleged bin Ladin camp and did not see UBL.

3. Contrary to the movie, the CIA Director actually said that he could not recommend a strike on the camp because the information was single sourced and we would have no way to know if bin Laden was in the target area by the time a cruise missile hit it.

In short, this scene — which makes the incendiary claim that the Clinton administration passed on a surefire chance to kill or catch bin Laden — never happened. It was completely made up by Nowrasteh.

Will ABC admit its error and tell the truth? Or will it be a willing accomplice to a historical fraud designed to help the radical right-wing's agenda?

Our Secretary of State thinks people like me would tolerate slavery just because we have the gall to dissent from this administration's disasterous Iraq War policy.

Really, there is no rhetorical depth to which this administration will not plunge.

Climate Modeler Gavin Schmidt writes about the recent leak of a draft Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report:

That occasional stories will come out that get basic things wrong is unfortunate but not surprising. What is more troubling is that they subsequently get picked up by Reuters and UPI, and republished in places (such as Scientific American, though in their defence, it is simply a posting of the wire report) where the editors should know better. Worse still, the wire service stories are too brief to make the source of the error obvious, and thus the error gets propagated in an ever more confused state. As usual the blogsphere is playing a key role in amplifying and further muddying the story. The advantage of blogs is that errors can be corrected quickly, and the comments on Prometheus for instance, quickly revealed the confusion and the potential agenda of the original story.

There will be plenty of time to discuss the new IPCC report when it comes out and where everyone can read for themselves what has and what hasn't changed since 2001. Until then, we would counsel against journalists and editors jumping at supposed 'exclusives' and - more dangerously - going ahead with them without even a basic sanity check of the details.

Geoffrey Nunberg is happy to have an error named after him, since "errors tend to have much longer half-lives than theorems, laws, and conjectures."

The Nunberg error describes something that often happens when people try to project current trends far into the future. Alex Pang describes the Nunberg error as:

the commercial makes the classic mistake of positing vast technological changes, with no accompanying social changes. When you watch, notice that the pilots are all men, and the cabin crew is all female. This is something you see in lots of "home of the future" exhibits. Geoffrey Nunberg wrote about this so eloquently, it should be called the Nunberg Error.

Both links include a 1950 Popular Mechanics cartoon providing an excellent example of the error.

Why does the ABC network want to be a right-wing propogranda organ? The upcoming 6-hour docudrama, "The Path to 9/11" is conservative political porn--rewriting history to place the blame for September 11 on President Bill Clinton.

Conservative bloggers and writers who have seen advance screenings of the movie love it. They've described some of their favorite scenes. Alas, for a docudrama that claims to be based on the 9-11 Commission report, the scenes so beloved by conservatives turn out to be works of fiction designed to blame Clinton rather than tell the truth.

Over at FireDogLake, Sheldon Rampton takes us through several examples of this conservative revisionism. Here's one:

So what is it that conservatives love so much about this film? According to Barone, one "gripping scene" shows "CIA agents surrounding bin Laden’s encampments and then being called back when National Security Adviser Sandy Berger refuses to give a go-ahead for the operation." Conservative filmmaker Govindini Murty was also impressed by the same scene, writing a glowing review that was published both on her own blog and on Human Events, the "national conservative weekly." She writes:

One astonishing sequence in "The Path to 9/11" shows the CIA and the Northern Alliance surrounding Bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan. They’re on the verge of capturing Bin Laden, but they need final approval from the Clinton administration in order to go ahead. They phone Clinton, but he and his senior staff refuse to give authorization for the capture of Bin Laden, for fear of political fall-out if the mission should go wrong and civilians are harmed. National Security Adviser Sandy Berger in essence tells the team in Afghanistan that if they want to capture Bin Laden, they’ll have to go ahead and do it on their own without any official authorization. … The episode is a perfect example of Clinton-era irresponsibility and incompetence.

The only problem with this "perfect example", which Murty praises because it "honestly depicts how the Clinton administration repeatedly bungled the capture of Osama Bin Laden," is that it didn’t happen. In reality, it was CIA director George Tenet, not Berger, who called off the operation — which never got anywhere near "surrounding Bin Laden’s house in Afghanistan." According to the 9/11 commision report on which the movie is supposedly based,

Tenet told us that given the recommendation of his chief operations officers, he alone had decided to "turn off" the operation. He had simply informed Berger, who had not pushed back. Berger’s recollection was similar. He said the plan was never presented to the White House for a decision.

The CIA’s senior management clearly did not think the plan would work. Tenet’s deputy director of operations wrote to Berger a few weeks later that the CIA assessed the tribals’ ability to capture Bin Ladin and deliver him to U.S. officials as low.

Only in a conservative's mind would the miniseries be considered a factual and unpolitical representation of what happened, or what the 9-11 Commission reported.

Americablog's John in DC links to a 1996 CNN report about the GOP Congress blocking proposed anti-terrorism legislation proposed by President Bill Clinton in the wake of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing and TWA 800 crash.

Given one of the major controversial stories of the past year, I found this paragraph especially ironic.

Hatch called Clinton's proposed study of taggants -- chemical markers in explosives that could help track terrorists -- "a phony issue."

"If they want to, they can study the thing" already, Hatch asserted. He also said he had some problems with the president's proposals to expand wiretapping.

Greg Palast takes a look at our nation's economic outlook this Labor Day and remarks:

The trick of class war is not to let the victims know they’re under attack. That’s how, little by little, the owners of the planet take away what little we have.

Malcolm Gladwell wonders if we shouldn't just get rid of the NCAA. After reading about how the NCAA's rules impact Ramon McElrathbey, and being reminded that the NCAA has failed in its original mission, this is a question well worth answering. Gladwell writes:

McElrathbey is a cornerback for the Clemson University football team. He is one of seven children. His mother is a crack addict, and his father has a gambling problem and is no where to be found. He grew up bouncing around foster homes. This summer, he decided--with his mother's consent--to take custody of his 11 year old brother. They now live in a cramped off campus apartment, as McElrathbey tries to be a student, athlete, brother and father simultaneously. When a story was published about McElrathbey in alocal paper, he was deluged with donations and gifts and offers to help. But of course Clemson had to step in and say no. Why? Because receiving any kind of outside financial assistance, if you are an amateur college athlete, is against the NCAA's rules.

This is, of course, ridiculous. In fact, it is more than ridiculous: it is inhumane. At a certain point, aren't we better off without the NCAA altogether?

If the NCAA cannot find a way to fix this situation, it should not exist.

John Dean participated in a FireDogLake book salon about his latest book today. In the middle of the discussion about the book, Dean dropped the following observations about Keith Olbermann and Donald Rumsfeld, his former Nixon White House colleague.

Keith Olberman is the most intelligent anchor in America, and he actually uses his God given talents to inform Americans. (Jon Stewart also plays in this league, even though he does comedy.) Slowly, steadily, people are discovering Olberman’s not only smart and savvy, but he can have fun as well. He knows what to take serious, however, and he was the first news person to recognize the seriousness of Rumsfeld’s insidious comments.

Rumsfeld came to the Nixon White House in 1970 some five months after I arrived. At the time, I asked White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman what Rummy was going to be doing. “Nothing,” Haldeman told me, explaining that they were placing him on the White House staff (giving him a sinecure) to bolster his chances to win a Senate race in IL.

In time, Haldeman — not to mention — Nixon came to distrust Rumsfeld. Many thought Nixon appointed him Ambassador to NATO as a promotion. In fact, they wanted to get him out of the White House. Haldeman called Rumsfeld “slimmy” [later corrected to slimy] in his contemporaneous diaries, and Nixon is heard on his tapes discussing Rumsfeld in less than flattering terms.

Most ironic, given Rumsfeld’s current position on Iraq, Rumsfeld argued that Nixon should get the hell out of Vietnam. Rummy was a cut and run guy back then.

Keith Olberman should be given a Pulitzer for his commentary on Rumsfeld’s remarkable behavior. It is because Keith is such an intelligent and stand-up person that I enjoy doing his show.

Glenn Greenwald is correct: those conservatives condemning the kidnapped FOX News journalists for "converting" to Islam in order to save their lives are actually engaged in the same kind of activity, on a larger scale, with less justification, and much greater consequences. As Greenwald writes:

The ironies of this disturbed war dance are virtually infinite, the most obvious one being that the Steyn Warriors can never point to any sacrifices they make or risks they incur. But the most striking irony is this. So much of the neoconservative warrior cries are built on an ethos of deep fear, of exactly the desperate desire to be protected and saved which Steyn and company claim is the hallmark of the girlish, soul-less West. As they strike the warrior pose, they are desperately willing, even eager, to fundamentally change the character and principles of our republic and to sacrifice the core liberties which define it because they are scared and want, more than anything else, to be protected.

Catching up on my blog reading, I see that Kevin Drum has found an example of a reporter not letting the Bush Administration get away without comment with creating straw men arguments. Drum quotes from a Washington Post story by the Washington Post's Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei:

Bush suggested last week that Democrats are promising voters to block additional money for continuing the war. Vice President Cheney this week said critics "claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone." And Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, citing passivity toward Nazi Germany before World War II, said that "many have still not learned history's lessons" and "believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased."

Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq. (emphasis Drum's)

As this blogger has noted before, the Bush Administration has shown remarkable courage in one area: bravely attacking the strawman false arguments it creates for political purposes.

Our media should stop enabling such idiocy. As Drum writes:

This ought to be standard procedure when quoting any of the absurd "some say" or "many believe" lines coming out of the White House. It's about time the straw men started fighting back.

Over at TPM Cafe, Greg Sargent links to a Wall Street Journal story that examines the plummeting GOP ratings on national security issues. In the story is a quote from former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta which could indicate that some Democratic insiders are at long last getting it:

In both 2002 and 2004, Democrats, in league with top party consultants, made a strategic decision -- "a terrible mistake" -- not to engage Mr. Bush on national security, says former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta. "You just cannot concede the question; he is vulnerable on it," Mr. Podesta says. "Our D.C. leaders get it now, and the candidates in the states aren't shrinking from it." (emphasis Sargent's)

I hope this is the case. I have been begging Democratic Party leaders for years to embrace national security and foreign policy as an issue.

The Bush Administration record on these issues is horrible. Iraq has not turned out to be the roses and chocolates paradise promised. It has been 1,812 days since President Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden "Dead or Alive." The Taliban is resurgent, funded by the largest opium crop in Afghanistan's history. Our servicemen and women and Veterans are not being treated well.

It is long past time for Democrats to start fighting the GOP and the Bush Administration on these issues. I hope Podesta is right and my party will not again make the mistake it made in 2002 and 2004.

Frank Rich is correct: any Defense Secretary who wants to throw around appeasement charges really should not have such a photo in their past:

Here’s how brazen Mr. Rumsfeld was when he invoked Hitler’s appeasers to score his cheap points: Since Hitler was photographed warmly shaking Neville Chamberlain’s hand at Munich in 1938, the only image that comes close to matching it in epochal obsequiousness is the December 1983 photograph of Mr. Rumsfeld himself in Baghdad, warmly shaking the hand of Saddam Hussein in full fascist regalia. Is the defense secretary so self-deluded that he thought no one would remember a picture so easily Googled on the Web? Or worse, is he just too shameless to care?

Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t go to Baghdad in 1983 to tour the museum. Then a private citizen, he had been dispatched as an emissary by the Reagan administration, which sought to align itself with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam was already a notorious thug. Well before Mr. Rumsfeld’s trip, Amnesty International had reported the dictator’s use of torture — "beating, burning, sexual abuse and the infliction of electric shocks" — on hundreds of political prisoners. Dozens more had been summarily executed or had "disappeared." American intelligence agencies knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons to gas both Iraqi Kurds and Iranians.

(Hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

Nearly five years after our nation correctly set out to depose the Taliban in Afghanistan, it appears that this is another job left undone by the unserious Bush Administration. The New York Times' Carlotta Gall reports:

Afghanistan’s opium harvest this year has reached the highest levels ever recorded, showing an increase of almost 50 percent from last year, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said Saturday in Kabul.

He described the figures as “alarming” and “very bad news” for the Afghan government and international donors who have poured millions of dollars into programs to reduce the poppy crop since 2001.

He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations.

By the way, Mr. President, blaming Hamid Karzai is not a policy.

How much longer are we really going to tolerate these practices? William Welch writes in USA Today:

As many as one in five members of the armed services are being preyed on by loan centers set up near military bases that can charge cash-strapped military families interest of 400% or more, a new Pentagon report has found.

Steep lending charges have long plagued servicemembers, but the problem has become a more urgent concern to the military as it has struggled to fill its ranks during the Iraq war. That's because debt troubles can keep troops from going overseas.

"We're seeing a growing trend of folks who are not eligible to deploy because of financial problems," says Capt. Mark Patton, commander of Naval Base Point Loma in California. Patton says debt problems can cost some servicemembers their security clearances.

David Sirota is also absolutely correct to remind all of us that our Congress and President did not even see fit to protect our military servicepeople when they debated their credit-card-industry sponsored rewrite of the bankruptcy law last year:

You may recall that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) offered an amendment to the bill to preserve existing protections for troops serving in Iraq. National guardsmen, for instance, sometimes are forced to take a pay cut from their regular jobs when they are called into service and deployed overseas. Lord knows our soldiers serving in Iraq have enough to worry about - and gutting their bankruptcy protections while they were deployed was something Durbin thought was unacceptable. So did U.S. military experts. As retired Navy captain Chalker W. Brown told the New York Times months before the vote: "The last thing you want is a young sailor programming a Tomahawk missile in the Persian Gulf who is worrying about whether his car is being repossessed back home."

Unfortunately, only 38 of Durbin's Senate colleagues agreed with him, and his amendment was defeated.

Instead of rhetoric about supporting our troops, how about we actually, um, provide some support for our troops?

And Democratic political strategists: this is low-hanging fruit. And (ta-da!) the right thing to do. How about making it an issue and promising to fix the situation, okay?

Finger. Meet wind.

Atrios catches former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich making dramatic changes in his rhetoric about how the United States should respond to Iran. Someone is rather suddenly poo-poohing the idea of a military attack.

I may not have been blogging this past week, but I cannot pass up the opportunity to celebrate Keith Olbermann's masterful editorial comment attacking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's outrageous remarks earlier this week.

Every person who cares about the promise of the United States of America should read Olbermann's remarks and let their import sink in. The Bush Administration may try to govern through fear and stifling questions about their actions. It is unacceptable. And more people should stand up and say so. Here's Olbermann:

Mr. Rumsfeld is also personally confused, morally or intellectually, about his own standing in this matter. From Iraq to Katrina, to the entire “Fog of Fear” which continues to envelop this nation, he, Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and their cronies have — inadvertently or intentionally — profited and benefited, both personally, and politically.

And yet he can stand up, in public, and question the morality and the intellect of those of us who dare ask just for the receipt for the Emporer’s New Clothes?

In what country was Mr. Rumsfeld raised? As a child, of whose heroism did he read? On what side of the battle for freedom did he dream one day to fight? With what country has he confused the United States of America?

The confusion we -- as its citizens— must now address, is stark and forbidding.

But variations of it have faced our forefathers, when men like Nixon and McCarthy and Curtis LeMay have darkened our skies and obscured our flag. Note -- with hope in your heart — that those earlier Americans always found their way to the light, and we can, too.

The confusion is about whether this Secretary of Defense, and this administration, are in fact now accomplishing what they claim the terrorists seek: The destruction of our freedoms, the very ones for which the same veterans Mr. Rumsfeld addressed yesterday in Salt Lake City, so valiantly fought.