Sometimes it's hard to keep it all straight, so just some notes on what happened as the week closed, Friday, July 07, 2006 -

Words

The president had a news conference, which he seems to be doing a bit more now, even if far less often than any president since the days before FDR. One senses he really resents having to explain himself to anyone, when Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice do the work so he can get his four hours of exercise and ten hours of sleep each day. Let them do it. The evening before he and Laura has been interviewed by Larry King on CNN, and that was fine. Larry pitched softballs and it sometimes rose to the level of seriousness of, say, People Magazine. But most of it was fluff. How hard could the news conference be?

This news conference was supposed to be a big deal - it was in Chicago, not Washington, in some sort of attempt to connect with "the people" (not the policy wonks and overeducated thinkers) and escape the White House press corps with their feisty and embarrassing questions. And in a gesture of royal benevolence this time the president would allow the questions to come from the local press, not the big-time, large-newspaper, network and cable correspondents. This would be different.

But it wasn't. The questions were the same. What about North Korea, and what about Iraq, what about Iran and all the rest? No one asked about the Cubs, or farm subsidies. There was nothing about "the real concern of real folks." Or there really was, and his advisors had miscalculated. It seems they had been reading too much Carl Sandburg and that "hog butcher to the world" stuff, and thought that those in Chicago had other concerns. That must have been depressing.

The Associated Press covered the news conference here, but as it was the same questions, just from the wrong people, there's not much new.

The Osama bin Laden question was amusing - the New York Times had reported a few days earlier that the CIA had disbanded their secret unit to find the guy, and they had done that last year. What's up with that?

Tim Grieve puts what the president said in Chicago in perspective -

Sept. 17, 2001: George W. Bush is asked if he wants Osama bin Laden dead. "I want justice," he says. "There's an old poster out west, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"

March 13, 2002: At a press conference, Bush says that he doesn't know if bin Laden is dead or alive. "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him…. And I wouldn't necessarily say he's at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don't know where he is. I - I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him."

Oct. 13, 2004: "Gosh, I just don't think I ever said I'm not worried about Osama bin Laden. It's kind of one of those exaggerations."

Jan. 31, 2006: "Terrorists like bin Laden are serious about mass murder - and all of us must take their declared intentions seriously."

May 25, 2006: "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner - you know, 'Wanted dead or alive,' that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that."

July 4, 2006: The New York Times reports that the CIA last year disbanded a secret unit assigned to track down bin Laden and his top lieutenants in an effort to focus on "regional trends rather than on specific organizations or individuals."

July 7, 2006: At a press conference in Chicago, Bush calls the Times report "just an incorrect story." "I mean, we got a - we're - we got a lot of assets looking for Osama bin Laden. So whatever you want to read in that story, it's just not true, period." Asked if he's still on the hunt for bin Laden, the president says: "Absolutely. No ands, ifs or buts. And in my judgment, it's just a matter of time, unless we stop looking. And we're not going to stop looking so long as I'm the president." Bush said he had announced regret over the "dead or alive" comment only because "my wife got on me for talking that way."

You can see why Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice should be the ones doing the explaining. They're good with words, and people unfairly remember what you say, and these days can call up when and where you said it and to whom (the item above has links to that). And even his wife was on his case for that "dead or alive" comment. It's like words really mean something - or something like that. You can see that idea frustrates him.

But it was a day for frustration - "President Bush expressed frustration Friday with the slow pace of diplomacy in dealing with North Korea and Iran and prodded world leaders to send an unmistakable message condemning Pyongyang's long-range missile test."

Yeah, it's slow, and he hates that, and they use all those words. Drat.
And he is amazed by how odd it is -

"And it's, kind of - you know, it's kind of painful in a way for some to watch, because it takes a while to get people on the same page," Bush said. "Not everybody thinks the exact same way we think. Different words mean different things to different people. And the diplomatic processes can be slow and cumbersome."

But he has had an insight - that different words mean different things to different people. That's growth, even of most fourteen-year-olds figured that out long ago.

But then any sort of diplomacy is new to the administration, as their muscular "forward-leaning" policies have bumped up against reality - sometimes you just cannot bomb, or invade, or intimate, and refuse to talk at all. Sometimes you have to talk, and use words. He seems to hate that. But there you have it.

And things just aren't going well, as noted here - North Korea threatened on Friday to take "stronger physical actions" after Japan imposed sanctions in response to its missile tests this week, while the United States and Japan struggled to set out a unified diplomatic response to the launches.

Great.

And the tale of how we got into this pickle one where "we don't talk" and "words don't matter" really got us in trouble, as Eric Alterman recaps here, starting way back in the days when Colin Powell was Secretary of State, back as the administration settled in -

The tone of Powell's tenure was set early in the administration when he announced that he planned "to pick up where the Clinton administration had left off" in trying to secure the peace between North and South Korea, while negotiating with the North to prevent its acquisition of nuclear weaponry. The president not only repudiated his secretary of state in public, announcing, "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements," he did so during a joint appearance with South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung, thereby humiliating his honored guest as well. A day later, Powell backpedaled. "The president forcefully made the point that we are undertaking a full review of our relationship with North Korea," Powell said. "There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations are about to begin - that is not the case." He later admitted to a group of journalists, "I got a little far forward on my skis." It would not be the last time.

As former ambassadors Morton Abramowitz and James Laney warned at the moment of Bush's carelessly worded "Axis of Evil" address, "Besides putting another knife in the diminishing South Korean president," the speech would likely cause "dangerous escalatory consequences [including] … renewed tensions on the peninsula and continued export of missiles to the Mideast." North Korea called the Bush bluff, and the result, notes columnist Richard Cohen, was "a stumble, a fumble, an error compounded by a blooper. … As appalling a display of diplomacy as anyone has seen since a shooting in Sarajevo turned into World War I."

Bush made a bad situation worse when, in a taped interview with Bob Woodward, he insisted, "I loathe Kim Jong Il!" waving his finger in the air. "I've got a visceral reaction to this guy, because he is starving his people." Bush also said that he wanted to "topple him," and that he considered the leader to be a "pygmy." Woodward wrote that the president had become so emotional while speaking about Kim Jong Il that "I thought he might jump up." Given what a frightful tinderbox the Koreas have become, Bush's ratcheting up of the hostile rhetoric could hardly have come at a worse time. In December 2002 the North Koreans shocked most of the world by ordering the three IAEA inspectors to leave the country, shutting down cameras monitoring the nuclear complex in Yongbyon and removing the IAEA seals in their nuclear facilities. The following month, Pyongyang announced it had withdrawn from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), restarted its small research reactor, and began removing spent nuclear fuel rods for likely reprocessing into weapons-grade plutonium. In October 2003, it announced that it had finished reprocessing spent fuel rods into plutonium and now possesses "nuclear deterrence" - another way of saying it has the bomb. No independent confirmation was available. Even including Iraq and Iran, the Korean peninsula is probably the single most dangerous and possibly unstable situation on Earth. As Jonathan Pollack, chairman of the Strategic Research Department of the Naval War College, observes, "If you wanted a case of imminent threat and danger, according to the principles enunciated in the National Security Strategy document, then North Korea is much more of a threat than Iraq ever was in the last few years."

Bush had already undermined the extremely sensitive negotiations under way to bring the North Korean regime into the international system. When South Korean president (and Nobel laureate) Kim Dae Jung visited Washington six weeks after Bush took office, Bush humiliated both his guest and his own secretary of state by publicly repudiating the negotiations after both had just publicly endorsed them. (Powell had termed their continuation "a no-brainer.") One suspects the president's decision was motivated by a combination of unreflective machismo and a desire to provide military planners with an excuse to build a missile-defense system. But in doing so, he displayed a disturbing lack of familiarity with the details of the negotiations he purposely sabotaged. "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements," he said at the time. But at the time, these "agreements" numbered just one: the 1994 "Agreed Framework," which froze North Korea's enormous plutonium-processing program - one that was bigger, at the time, than those of Israel, India, and Pakistan combined - in exchange for economic aid. Bush aides were later forced to admit they could find no evidence to support the president's accusation. (A White House official tried to clear up the matter by explaining: "That's how the president speaks.")

In the heat of the moment, when now North Korea promises total war with the United States if we attack their facilities, it is easy to forget the fiasco above, where macho bluster blew away all the fancy-pants diplomacy that we were assured just didn't work - it hadn't worked and it wouldn't work. The evidence ran the other way, but there's the principle of the thing - you don't talk, you just do. And now we're in deep do-do (sorry).

Alterman deals in facts. We do have our thirty-seven thousand troops there. They have eleven thousand artillery guns, some possibly chemically tipped, within fifty miles of Seoul. Oh yeah, they have thirty-seven hundred tanks and seven hundred Soviet-built fighter jets, and all in all a million soldiers and seven million reserves, making them the fourth or fifth largest standing army on planet. This is a problem.

And now turning to words is a problem, ironically -

But choosing not to deal with the problem of North Korea presents the world with two profoundly worrying prospects. The first is that North Korea will make one of its bombs available to a party that would in fact like to use it - perhaps even al Qaeda. (U.S. weapons inspector David Kay claimed to discover a $10 million deal for just such a transfer between North Korea and Iraq, though the former kept the money and did not deliver the material, insisting that U.S. pressure made it impossible.) Second, a spiraling collapse of the regime could lead to a last-ditch attack on Seoul, with both conventional and nuclear weapons. As one U.S. official put it, toleration of a nuclear North Korea sends the same message to Iran that the invasion of Iraq sent to North Korea: "Get your nuclear weapons quickly, before the Americans do to you what they've done to Iraq, because North Korea shows once you get the weapons, you're immune."

We seem to have backed ourselves into a corner - can't act, and never believed in negotiating anything and in using words. And the alternative is? There is none.

Well there is one, as Alterman notes -

The Bush plan seems to be to persuade several key Asian countries that now provide cash and assistance to Pyongyang to turn off the taps and stand by as its people starve and the nation - with its nukes - implodes. But those upon whose cooperation the policy rests appear to have little inclination to support the plan. South Korea's population, like that of most of the world, has grown increasingly distrustful of the Bush administration's behavior and is far less eager to follow the U.S. lead. Its current president, Roh Moo Hyun, won his office by following the German pattern, with a campaign that stressed his independence from the United States and its martial declarations. The Chinese remain by far the North Koreans' most important trading partner, supplying for instance 70 percent of its crude oil needs and much of its foodstuffs. Its leadership has shown no interest in doing Bush's bidding or participating in a strategy that appears designed to create political change through mass starvation. And the last thing Japan wants to see is the collapse of the regime, thereby finding itself facing a nuclear-armed, unified Korea on its borders.

The obvious solution - both to the strategic problem and to the humanitarian crisis - is clearly some sort of negotiated buyout, along the lines that the Clinton administration began, but fumbled. Under the terms of that deal, North Korea was to freeze and eventually eliminate its nuclear program while the United States spearheaded an international effort to provide fuel and light-water (non-weapons-producing) nuclear reactors.

But then that would have been too "Bill Clinton." And the whole idea is you don't reward evil-doers, and you don't talk with them, unless you do, when no alternative is left. But you don't like it. You don't like it at all.

It was a bad day in Chicago.

Getting Voted off the Island

The political buzz as the week ended was all about the debate Thursday night in Connecticut, really. The August Democratic primary to decide who runs for the senate seat in November has people buzzing all over. Will Joe make it that far? And it goes like this -

A combative debate between Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and challenger Ned Lamont has exposed Democratic Party fault lines on the Iraq war and set a harsh tone for next month's primary showdown.

Lieberman, a three-term senator and vice presidential nominee in 2000, emphasized his experience and bluntly dismissed Lamont as a political novice whose call for a timeline on withdrawing troops from Iraq was "dumb."

But Lamont, a millionaire businessman who has gained on Lieberman in the polls by portraying him as too supportive of President George W. Bush, attacked Lieberman as a knee-jerk cheerleader for the war.

Neither candidate delivered a knock-out blow in Thursday's debate, analysts said, but the campaign's focus on Iraq and Lieberman's plan to run as an independent in November's mid-term elections if he loses the August 8 primary have brought national attention to the contest.

… Lamont's criticism of Lieberman for his steadfast support of the war has made him a darling of left-wing Internet bloggers who have poured money and grass-roots muscle into his campaign.

… The debate's sometimes caustic exchanges mirrored the tough negative ads that both candidates are airing in the state, including one from Lamont combining images of Bush with audio from Lieberman that makes it seem like the president is speaking in Lieberman's voice.

… Analysts say Lieberman, who is more popular with Republicans and independents in Connecticut than with Democrats, would likely win the election as an independent even if he loses the primary.

Well he has the endorsement of Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt and, of course, Ann Coulter. Joe has said no one, and certainly no Democrat, should undermine the credibility of the president - we're at war and that would help the enemy or whatever. Don't raise questions. A lot of folks want to just toss him out of the Democratic Party.

The even hit the local Los Angeles Times on July 7 with this editorial -

Democratic voters in Connecticut have the right to nominate the candidate of their choice. But it is more than a little disturbing for the longtime popular senator (and the party's 2000 nominee for vice president) to be targeted for defeat by national fundraisers based on his foreign policy views. There were principled people on both sides of the debate to go to war in Iraq. This page did not support the war, but it cannot cheer on liberal activists who run the risk of being guilty of the same sort of insistence on ideological purity that they deplore in Republicans.

The Democratic Party - the party of Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy - is a big enough tent to include voices on the conservative end of national security policy. Lieberman's views shouldn't trigger a nationwide jihad against him.

And that sets off the famous political cartoonist "Tom Tomorrow" who says this -

Speaking as a Connecticut voter, I'm just awfully sorry to learn that these delicate Angelenos find it disturbing to witness democracy in action. The fact of the matter is, Lieberman is a pisspoor excuse for a Democrat, and that's saying a lot given that the Democrats themselves are mostly a pisspoor excuse for an opposition party. We sure as hell don't need a Democrat who plays kissy-face with the President, supporting everything from the nomination of Torturin' Al Gonzales ("I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt"), to this misbegotten war. A Democrat who suggests that rape victims who can't get proper medical care simply take a "short hike" to another hospital. Etc., etc. Look, I was prematurely anti-Lieberman - I was appalled when Gore chose him as a running mate in 2000, for chrissakes. This is absolutely not about a "single issue" for me - but even if it were, well, the war's a pretty goddamn big issue isn't it? Pretty much the defining issue of the day. And the Democratic voters of Connecticut have every right to say, this man simply does not represent my values - and to work to try to replace him. (Afterthought: if that resonates on a national level, great. But the decision is ultimately up to the voters of Connecticut, "nationwide jihad" notwithstanding.)

Anyway - and I say this with great affection, as a former longtime Californian - I'm not sure Connecticut voters really need to be lectured about appropriate political behavior by residents of a state in which a legitimately-elected governor was recalled and then replaced - out a field of candidates that also included a porn star, a down-on-his-luck former child actor, and Arianna Huffington - with an actor best known for playing a killer robot from the future.

Ouch.

Well, maybe the Democrats are falling into a "negativity trap" as John Dickerson suggests here, or maybe the man from the Greenwich Town Council might be a better choice than the darling of Fox News who tells Democrats to stop ragging on the president, and that things are getting better every day in Iraq, and that rock lyrics should be censored, and we may yet find those weapons of mass destruction. Yeah, he marched with the Civil Rights folks in the sixties and opposed the Vietnam War. That was then. This is now. "Remember what I was like" only goes so far.

The debate itself was full of local issues, but this captures the anger -

Still, for those of us outside The Land of Steady Habits, there was a little too much about the Greenwich Town Council and submarine bases and who said what when and to whom. But there was one quote that didn't come up, and it's the only quote that should matter to those of us outside Connecticut. It's this one:

"It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years," the senator said. "We undermine the President's credibility at our nation's peril."

You may recognize that final sentence as the soft outer frontier of the rhetoric that ends up in a place where newspeople are accused of treason and where roam free the eliminationist fantasies of the lunatic right. It's where we find "reasonable" people treating John Yoo's authoritarian delusions as though they had something to do with America. I couldn't care less if Ned Lamont once took a Republican stand on water rates. I saw enough last night to know he'd never say anything like that.

If Joe loses the primary he will run as an independent. He may get buried. The new opposition campaign slogan really is "Had enough?" The results are coming in.

But to be fair and balanced, there is a parallel to all this on the right. The conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan was denounced this week by all the major commentators on that side of things. Sullivan is a lifelong Republican and on board with it all, against abortion, affirmative action, in favor of massive tax cuts and the smallest possible government. But this week all said he was not a conservative at all. The problem is he thinks torture is wrong and we shouldn't do it, and he's troubled by the president claiming no rules apply to the executive branch at all, and all this Christianization of the government. He's a bad boy (and he's gay). He's been voted off the island.

And at his website he posts this letter he received from one of his readers -

Actually, I don't consider you a conservative anymore either, for the same reasons I don't consider myself one anymore. In this day, in this country, to be a conservative is to buy into a program of relativism and deconstructionism (scientific knowledge in evolution and climate science is just one "perspective" or is totally unreliable because scientists are a bunch of liberals and science is just a political agenda). To be a conservative is to believe that good government rests on the personal character and godliness of an unshackled executive, not on the time-tested processes and institutions of democracy. To be a conservative is to let your worst enemies dictate your moral values. To be a conservative is to believe that insufficiently conservative judges are enemies of America and should be eliminated or marginalized as illegitimate.

Above all, to be a conservative is to use the power of the government to Christianize Americans and the US government to the greatest extent possible.

Andrew, today liberals are the better defenders of the Enlightenment. Conservatives are the enemies of the enlightenment. So you want to cut entitlements? Pardon my French, but big fucking deal. You want to cut entitlements because you have weighed the evidence of their effectiveness and found it lacking. You're still part of the democratic machine and you still respect democratic reasoning.

Conservatives aren't as quaintly obsessed with evidence and balancing costs and benefits as you are. They want to cut benefits on principle, no matter what. They want to slash taxes as a first principle, expensive wars and basic human decency be damned. They are not rational decision makers in the sense that they distinguish between effective and ineffective programs. The slash taxes, period - no thinking required.

And - this isn't a minor point - they don't actually cut entitlements. They expand them. So there goes that argument.

My choice - and yours - is to join up with a reality-based community that trusts expertise, democratic processes, and established institutions and makes fact-based decisions (these days called liberals), or to join up with a community of relativistic mystics who are not open to reason or persuasion, distrust democracy, reject standards of behavior because they believe themselves to be inherently godly, and have no use for traditional democratic institutions. These tradition-despising relativistic mystics we call conservatives.

Andrew, you and I have much more in common with the liberals. Because they're more conservative.

Cool, and amusing. Everything is moving around.

What?

There is no category for this.

It seems General George Patton was very fond of something called "Country Captain Chicken" and someone suggested that might make a good MRE (meals-ready-to-eat) thing for our troops in combat. Field rations can be dismal, and Patton might be onto something.

But then it gets odd -

So MRE-makers cooked up a prototype of the dish and tested it with soldiers. The Joes liked it. At first. "Our war-fighters gave it a thumbs up; it scored very high," Gerald Darsch, the Defense Department's director of combat feeding, told me. "But, within several years, it began to rate on the low end."

What happened? Country Captain Chicken got a reputation... "Country Captain Chicken," a young specialist told me, "will make you gay."

... For the record, the Army says the soldiers of the 101st were mistaken. "I don't think the currants we put in Country Captain Chicken have any metabolic effect that would change your preference, sexually," Darsch claims.

Oh. But it's gone now.

What?

There is a category for this - trouble. The item hit the press Friday, July 7, and goes like this - "A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed 'large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists' to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization."

The Army is on this, as they know this is trouble, and the Aryan Nation and Nazi graffiti in Baghdad are starting to cause a bit of trouble. This is not what they want, and they're taking it seriously. They'll get these guys out. But when you need all the bodies you can get, it did happen that these guys seemed good enough, and weren't.

One reaction was this from Digby at Hullabaloo -

Well now, this certainly does explain a few things, doesn't it?

I'm not sure there's anything more stupid than hiring a bunch of neo-Nazi's to occupy a foreign country. But it is par for the course with the Bush administration.

The thing is that it doesn't take much to push people over the line in these stressful situations anyway. Racism is clearly rampant among the Americans already. It's obvious in this sophomoric Ali Baba/Hadji bullshit they talk all the time. I'm not even sure that it isn't part of every war to a certain extent. It's primitive stuff.

I definitely believe that racism lies at the heart of why many people supported a war against a country that had not committed any crime against ours - and why they don't care if there were any WMD or any other justification. One dead Arab's as good as another dead Arab. It didn't matter which Arab country we invaded as long as we invaded one and fucked some of "those people" up.

But regardless of the strain of racism that already exists in that war zone, putting white supremacists in their midst and allowing them to spew their Nazi propaganda among those frustrated, frightened, bored soldiers is a recipe for disaster. Instead of the sort of common tribal hatred you might see in any dangerous warlike environment, you suddenly have someone providing a whole philosophy and intellectual structure for it. It's the perfect recruiting ground for white supremacy and gives certain types permission to act out their violent fantasies against those they already consider racially inferior. And they are also training them to think of it in ways that are very dangerous when they come back to the US.

I don't know if these any of these atrocities we've recently heard about are related, but I wouldn't be surprised. And frankly, the way this administration has conducted their war so far, I also wouldn't be surprised if they haven't loosened the rules on this on purpose. I'm sure they think skinheads are tough guys. And we know how the chickenhawks love the tough guys.

Well, maybe. The rules may have been loosened on purpose in Washington for this, or it may be something no one thought about until too late. But the Army will have none of it. You need discipline and loyalty and fairness in the ranks, and the officer in my family, the Lieutenant Colonel who has been there and back, who I saw graduate from West Point, would put and end to this real fast, no matter who set it up. Any good officer would. On the other hand, the minority soldiers themselves might just make it real hard for the Aryan tough guys in the unit. You fight together, and for each other. Calling your buddy in the field ghetto trash or wetback crap might be counterproductive. You might find yourself alone at a bad time and place. This is self-correcting.

The Usual

The big news Friday, July 7, was this -

A terrorist plot to flood lower Manhattan by attacking train tunnels under the Hudson River used by tens of thousands of commuters was thwarted before the conspirators could travel to the United States, authorities said Friday.

Eight suspects - including an al-Qaida loyalist arrested in Lebanon and two others in custody elsewhere - had hoped to pull off the attack in October or November, federal officials said. But federal investigators working with their counterparts in six other countries intervened. The other five suspects remained at large.

"It was never a concern that this would actually be executed," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in Boston. "We were, as I say, all over this."

Caught it early, or really, before there was an "it." Why now? Just a reminder. It was the main news all day. It served its purpose.