Bush / GOP

Don Siegelman, the former Governor of Arkansas whose politically-motivated prosecution we've discussed here, was thrown in jail this week. This is the shameful conclusion of an investigation that Scott Horton of Harpers calls "a political vendetta, conceived, developed and pursued for a corrupt purpose." And he has the evidence to back that up, in spades; the web of deceit and corruption surrounding this case is much too intricate and tangled to delineate here, but Horton has been doing an excellent job of unearthing and explaining the myriad dirty secrets surrounding the prosecution.

The operation to ruin Siegelman and seize power in Alabama, masterminded by Karl Rove, was so outrageous and underhanded that Dana Jill Simpson, a Republican lawyer who had previously run a campaign against Siegelman, decided she had to speak out about it. When it became known that she was going to blow the whistle, "Simpson’s house was burned to the ground, and her car was driven off the road and totaled."

A powerful editorial in the New York Times a few days ago calls on Congress to immediately investigate Siegelman's case, since Bush's Justice Department is not at all interested in promoting Justice. From the editorial:

"The idea of federal prosecutors putting someone in jail for partisan gain is shocking. But the United States attorneys scandal has made clear that the Bush Justice Department acts in shocking ways."

Can we really be shocked anymore, though? The Greek philosophers believed justice to be the highest and most important political virtue. Yet though words like "freedom" and "liberty" are used profusely (and loosely) by this Administration, the word "justice" almost never enters their rhetoric, unless in the context of bringing the evil-doers to it. And it is easy to see why; they are simply uninterested in the concept. The Administration and its friends have persistently tried (and largely succeeded) to turn every level of the Judicial branch into an arm of the White House.

From Cheney's constant efforts to make the executive branch above the law, to the regressive right-wing activist rulings of the Roberts Supreme Court, to a a study of the "Bush Justice Department’s prosecution of cases involving political figures [that] showed seven prosecutions of Democrats for every one Republican," it is exceedingly clear that these people, who share a strong disdain for justice and the rule of law, have no interest in playing by the rules, and that is a truth which is ultimately bad for Americans of all political pursuasions. In the end, the great damage done to the Judicial branch may be the most harmful and long-lasting legacy of the Bush era.

Lots of stories these last few days on the further weakening of the Bush Presidency.  This morning Peter Baker of the Post publishes the most interesting analysis so far. 

For more on this topic from NDN visit the Meeting the Conservative Challenge section of our web site, www.ndn.org.

While the media is suggesting that we are now seeing swirling around immigration is a debate, what we are really witnessing is the meltdown of one of the two major political parties in America today - the GOP.  

The latest example comes this morning in an article in the Washington Post that reports that the Senate GOP is now embracing a new immigration strategy explicitly opposed by their own Department of Homeland Security.  It is also opposed by the White House, some GOP Senators, the Democrats, and of course is a betrayal of the deal cobbled together by the two sides some weeks ago.  This move is so desperate, so craven, so impractical that it is literally mind-boggling.  Senator Mel Martinez, in particular, should be ashamed of himself. 

With each passing day it is hard to see what's left of the GOP here in Washington as anything but bitter enemies of progress.  They blocked common sense provisions in the Energy bill.  They are undermining their own President on immigration and continue to demonize immigrants themselves.  They've resisted all attempts to improve their catastrophic Iraq strategy.  They've resisted repeated calls to restore the integrity of Justice.   Their leading Presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, has called for the expansion of Guantanamo.  The list goes on....

More soon....

We will be talking about this new Post series on Cheney for a long time.  The 2nd installment runs today.  There is so much in here that it defies a quick am blog post, and is both informative and tragic at the same time.

EJ Dionne has an important look at recent polling data that suggests that while the GOP has fallen, Democrats have yet to take full advantage of the opportunity the moment presents.

This is a theme being explored in depth at the Take Back America Conference this week in Washington, DC.  A selection of our essays on this theme, something we call "the end of the conservative ascendency" can be found here.  I will be speaking at the conference later this morning on media and showing some of the more than $10 m worth of ads produced by NDN and the New Democrat Network in recent years.  Hope to see you there.

As ThinkProgress reported today, a House Oversight investigation found that White House officials used Republican National Committee email accounts for a much greater volume of official federal business than had been previously disclosed.

Use of RNC and Bush-Cheney '04 campaign email accounts for official White House correspondences constitutes a violation of the Presidential Records Act. The investigation found over 140,000 emails sent or received by Karl Rove alone (!) from RNC email accounts, and found that at least 88 White House employees had used RNC email accounts for official business.

The most striking finding of the investigation, however, is that the RNC oversaw “extensive destruction” of these emails, including the deletion of all email records for a whopping 51 White House employees. The report found that "given the heavy reliance by White House officials on RNC e-mail accounts, the high rank of the White House officials involved, and the large quantity of missing e-mails, the potential violation of the Presidential Records Act may be extensive."

These actions would be entirely consistent with this administration's notorious neo-Nixonian penchant for secrecy and willingness to obstruct justice. Still, the new report seems particularly damning; such raw exposure of this Administration's frantic efforts to cover their tracks is a strong indictment of their culture of corruption, obstruction, and disinformation.

The New Yorker just published another great new article by Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter who first broke the Abu Ghraib story. In the article, and his interview about it on CNN, Hersh details how Administration officials scrambled to absolve themselves of all responsibility for the scandal. In a hearing before the Senate and House Armed Services Committee on May 7th of 2004, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said:

"It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, ‘Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something... I wish we had known more, sooner, and been able to tell you more sooner, but we didn’t...I didn't see [the photos] until last night at 7:30."

However, Major General Tabuga, the officer originally assigned to investigate reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib, insists that this is simply not true. Whether or not Rumsfeld and other higher-ups had seen the photos (which they certainly had access to long before the scandal broke), very detailed reports describing the abuses had made their way up the chain of command months before the story was leaked to the press. As Taguba said, "You didn’t need to ‘see’ anything—just take the secure e-mail traffic at face value." These reports, among other things, included "descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees" and "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee" (which was never released).

For obvious reasons, these reports were taken quite seriously, and were relayed quickly through back channel emails. The upshot of all of this is that by March at the latest, Rumsfeld was talking with the President about the incidents at Abu Ghraib, and once again 'The Decider' decided to do nothing. As Hersh writes, "The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command: aggressive prosecution of crimes against detainees was not conducive to a successful career." In fact, General Taguba was asked to resign, without being given any real reason.

Said Taguba, whose only crime was his honesty, “They always shoot the messenger. To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal—that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracized for doing what I was asked to do.” While Taguba's story is sad, it is not very surprising, given that this Administration has always been more concerned with avoiding responsibility than with acting responsibly.

Of all the emerging challenges we face in the new post-Iraq Middle East, there is perhaps no more important one than what to do in and with Iraq itself.  In a Sunday Outlook piece, Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon offer thoughts on what to do with the reality of Iraq today, not the fantasy place invoked from time to time by members of the Administration and their allies.  It begins:

Last week's bloodshed in Iraq and the bombing of what remained of the historic Shiite shrine in Samarra and of two Sunni mosques in Basra were more reminders of a terrible truth: The war in Iraq is lost. The only question that remains -- for our gallant troops and our blinkered policymakers -- is how to manage the inevitable. What the United States needs now is a guide to how to lose -- how to start thinking about minimizing the damage done to American interests, saving lives and ultimately wresting some good from this fiasco.

No longer can we avoid this bitter conclusion. Iraq's winner-take-all politics are increasingly vicious; there will be no open, pluralistic Iraqi state to take over from the United States. Iraq has no credible central government that U.S. forces can assist and no national army for them to fight alongside. U.S. troops can't beat the insurgency on their own; our forces are too few and too isolated to compete with the insurgents for the public's support. Meanwhile, the country's militias have become a law unto themselves, and ethnic cleansing gallops forward.

To read the whole piece, click here.  For more on this series, click on the Middle East tag above.

Yes, back to our favorite policy theme this morning.  Robin Wright of the Post takes a sweeping look through the results of our foreign policy in the Middle East.   It isn't pretty:

The Middle East is in flames. Over the past week, war erupted among the Palestinians and their government collapsed. A Shiite shrine in Iraq was bombed -- again -- as the new U.S. military strategy showed no sign of diminishing violence. Lebanon battled a new al-Qaeda faction in the north as a leading politician was assassinated in Beirut. And Egyptian elections were marred by irregularities, including police obstructing voters, in a serious setback to democracy efforts.

U.S. policy in the region isn't faring much better, say Middle East and U.S. analysts.

"It's close to a nightmare for the administration," Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center and former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said in an interview from Dubai. "They can't catch their breath. . . . It makes Condi Rice's last year as secretary of state very daunting. What are the odds she can get virtually anything back on track?"

Each flash point has its own dynamics, but a common denominator is that leaders in each country -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak -- are each pivotal U.S. allies.

"The people we rely on the most to help are under siege, just as we are," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution fellow and former National Security Council staffer. "Three of the four leaders may either not make it [politically] through the end of the summer or find themselves irrelevant by then."

The broad danger is a breakdown of the traditional states and conflicts that have defined Middle East politics since the 1970s, said Paul Salem of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Beirut office. An increasing number of places -- Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories -- now have rival claimants to power, backed by their own militaries.

Also, once divided by the Arab-Israeli conflict, the region is now the battleground for three other rivalries: the United States and its allies pitted against an Iran-Syria alliance in a proxy war regionwide, secular governments confronted by rising al-Qaeda extremism, and autocratic governments reverting to draconian tactics to quash grass-roots movements vying for democratic change.

Extremists are scoring the most points. "Gaza is the latest evidence that most of the trends are pointed in the wrong direction. It's yet another gain for radical forces. It's another gain for Iran. It's another setback for the U.S., Israel and the Sunni regimes," said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and State Department policy planning chief during President Bush's first term. "The United States has not shown that moderation pays or will accomplish more than violence."

A second danger is that conflicts now overlap. "You can't look at Lebanon or Iraq or the Palestinians or Syria or Iran and try to deal with them separately anymore. You could have 10 years ago. Now they are politically and structurally linked," said Rami Khouri of the American University of Beirut.

Khouri said the United States deserves a good share of the blame for a confluence of disasters spawning pessimism and anger across the region..

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll lends bad news to the current administration who finds itself scrambling to define its legacy: despite its (read: the President's) efforts, Hispanics now identify themselves as Democrats rather than Republicans by 51%-21%. View the poll here.

(FYI - The President recently discussed comprehensive immigration reform with the Associate Builders and Contractors and attended the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast)