Bush / GOP

At least that's what it felt like living next door to the Shoreham Omni Hotel this weekend, where CPAC held its annual conference and Republican Presidential candidate cattle call.  Trust me, when 5,000 conservative activists descend on your quiet corner of Washington, DC, you feel like you're under attack.  My advice to these unwelcome visitors was to be careful about sharing their political views with the wait staff at Open City.  Thankfully, Max Blumenthal from The Nation had more meaningful engagement with the other side in this great short film on the conference.  Beyond providing a look into the house of horrors that is the CPAC conference, it provides a crisp snapshot of the conservative psyche.

It's times like these when I have trouble respecting our political and ideological opponents.  Bad peoples...

More evidence that when you put political hacks in critical positions the American people suffer.  This week we see the impact of a former RNC Chairman, Jim Nicholson, and his tenure at Veteran's Affairs. 

Bush has suggested a commission to look into what happened at Walter Reed.  Congress should reject the Commission idea, and ask the President to put qualified people into the critical positions.  What's needed is a new Secretary of Veteran's Affairs. From a Times piece this morning:

He has been accused by some veterans and the organizations that represent them of being primarily a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and of being slow to respond to increasing strains on his agency as returning soldiers move from facilities like Walter Reed, which is run by the Defense Department, into the veterans affairs system.

Critics say he has under-emphasized his agency’s budget needs to Congress, has not responded to calls for more mental health workers and brain trauma specialists and has failed to overhaul disability claims procedures. Some leaders of veterans groups say Mr. Nicholson is less communicative than his predecessors.

“We’re supposed to be partners, but there is no free flow of information since he took over,” said Bill Bradshaw, director of National Veterans Service for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “We often learn about changes after they are done, and there is little consultation.

Bush, the MBA, should step up and take responsibility.  Assign people to fix the problem not study it. 

It just doesn't stop.  Now we have the Walter Reed scandal.  Has there been an Administration in American history who has failed so utterly at the very basics of governing?

The list is incredible.  2000 days later and Osama is still on the loose, and is now regaining strength.  Iraq continues to cost American lives, money and prestige, without making us safer.  New evidence out this week showed Bush and his team blew it on North Korea, completely misreading what was happening there, and ended up making the confrontation much worse.  The systemic undermining of our civil liberties, including the condoning of torture, the undermining of the Geneva Convention, warentless spying on our citizens and the stripping of habeas corpus from all non-US citizens in the US, even legal immigrants and of course tourists.  Our military has been degraded.  Trillons have been added to our debt.  Our Department of Homeland Security remains badly led, unorganized and unprepared.  This age has seen the greatest systemic corruption of Congress and the federal branch in our history.  The minimum wage has been allowed to erode to its lowest level in 50 years, and now earns a family just $11,000 a year.  Wages have dropped.   More are uninsured, more are in poverty and family debt has hit historic levels.  Tens of millions of dollars spent on ads demonizing Hispanics, comparing them to Middle Eastern terrorists. Our relations with Latin America have eroded terribly.  And, perhaps most perniciously, the serial lying of our leaders about just about everything that has caused many to wonder about the integrity and the values of America itself. 

And of course there are all the big challenges unmet.  Funding the retirement of the baby boom.  Providing health insurance, and good health care, to all Americans. Global climate change.  Modernizing our schools and creating a 21st century strategy to help existing our existing workforce transition into the digital age.  Bringing broadband to all Americans.........

The Bush era, this era of compassionate convervatism, has been a disapointing and shameful period in our history.  The country is oh so ready to go to a new and better place, and is looking, desperately, for leaders to take us there.

Sam Fox wrote a $50,000 check to the 527 organization that created and aired the noxious and patently false "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" ads.  His reward was a cushy appointment to be our next Ambassador to Belgium.  But Ambassadorships are Senate confirmable posts, which means Fox had to face Senator John Kerry and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday.  As this article from the WAPO reveals, he offered wishy-washy excuses for his involvement, clearing lacking confidence in his convictions:

The panel did not vote on Fox yesterday, but committee member Kerry got in his say. He walked in a bit late and explained that he did not intend "to play some sort of 'gotcha' game," but he wanted to know: How does the nominee feel about the level of "personal destruction" in politics these days?

Fox replied that he was "very concerned" that politics have become too "mean and destructive," especially with the participation of independent "527" groups such as Swift Boat Veterans. He tried not so subtly to redirect Kerry's line of questioning by saying, "Sir, you're a hero," adding that no 527 group "can take that away from you."

Why then, given Fox's dim views of 527s, did he give such a large chunk of money to help Swift Boat? Kerry asked.

Fox explained that he and his wife donate generously to GOP political causes. "When we're asked, we generally give," he said. He said he could not recall who asked for the Swift Boat donation but explained that he thought it was important to give to a 527 working on behalf of Republicans because a 527 "on the other side" was stooping to such low levels as comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler.

"So two wrongs make a right?" Kerry asked.

Fox said he thought the dirty work of 527 ads was "disgraceful," but "that's the world we live in."

One of the most critical decisions America has to make in the Middle East is how are going to manage perhaps what is now the most important regional dynamic, one created by our occupation of Iraq, the growing Sunni-Shiite tensions in the region.  We installed in Iraq the first Shiite-led Arab government in the history of the Middle East, strenghtening the region's Shiites, including Iran.  Of late our government, worried about the rise of Iran, seems to be leaning back towards the region's Sunni powers, overlooking their own "intervention" in Iraq's domestic politics and tacit support of radical Sunni groups. But in this story to run in tomorrow's Times, Bush apparently has remembered that those who attacked us on 9/11 were Sunni extremists, and that they are regrouping in Pakistan:

By DAVID E. SANGER and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: February 25, 2007

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 — President Bush has decided to send an unusually tough message to one of his most important allies, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, warning him that the newly Democratic Congress could cut aid to his country unless his forces became far more aggressive in hunting down operatives with Al Qaeda, senior administration officials say.

The decision came after the White House concluded that General Musharraf is failing to live up to commitments he made to Mr. Bush during a visit here in September. General Musharraf insisted then, both in private and public, that a peace deal he struck with tribal leaders in one of the country’s most lawless border areas would not diminish the hunt for the leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban or their training camps.

Now, American intelligence officials have concluded that the terrorist infrastructure is being rebuilt, and that while Pakistan has attacked some camps, its overall effort has flagged.

“He’s made a number of assurances over the past few months, but the bottom line is that what they are doing now is not working,” one senior administration official who deals often with Southeast Asia issues said late last week. “The message we’re sending to him now is that the only thing that matters is results.”

Democrats, who took control of Congress last month, have urged the White House to put greater pressure on Pakistan because of statements from American commanders that units based in Pakistan that are linked to the Taliban, Afghanistan’s ousted rulers, are increasing their attacks into Afghanistan....

A STRATEGIC SHIFT

In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”

Read on.

One of the great challenges facing America in the post-Bush era will be whether the credibility loss we've suffered globally will be limited to Bush, or will permanently hamper our efforts aboard.

The LA Times has a front page story today that once again questions the credibility of the American government on a major issue of the day:  

VIENNA — Although international concern is growing about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran.

The officials said the CIA and other Western spy services had provided sensitive information to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency at least since 2002, when Iran's long-secret nuclear program was exposed. But none of the tips about supposed secret weapons sites provided clear evidence that the Islamic Republic was developing illicit weapons.

"Since 2002, pretty much all the intelligence that's come to us has proved to be wrong," a senior diplomat at the IAEA said. Another official here described the agency's intelligence stream as "very cold now" because "so little panned out."

The reliability of U.S. information and assessments on Iran is increasingly at issue as the Bush administration confronts the emerging regional power on several fronts: its expanding nuclear effort, its alleged support for insurgents in Iraq and its backing of Middle East militant groups.

The CIA still faces harsh criticism for its prewar intelligence errors on Iraq. No one here argues that U.S. intelligence officials have fallen this time for crudely forged documents or pushed shoddy analysis. IAEA officials, who openly challenged U.S. assessments that Saddam Hussein was developing a nuclear bomb, say the Americans are much more cautious in assessing Iran.

American officials privately acknowledge that much of their evidence on Iran's nuclear plans and programs remains ambiguous, fragmented and difficult to prove.

For the last several years, with the economy growing more than 3 percent a year, job creation has been slow and most people’s wages and incomes have hardly gained at all.  So, what can we expect now, with the overall economy slowing down?  Industrial production is falling, so business investment is likely to lag; retail sales are flat, so consumer demand and spending will also slow; and home construction has plummeted.  It looks like we’re in for a spell of much slower overall growth -- 1.5 to 2 percent growth is a good guess. And that will mean even slower job gains and, in all likelihood, lower real incomes for average families.  What does the administration propose to do about it?  In a word, nothing.

A second shoe is also dropping: Inflation is up, even with energy prices generally behaving themselves.  A lot of it is fast-rising health-care costs, which again this administration has ignored for six years.  Some of it is the impact of last year’s higher energy prices now making their way through the economy – for which, again, this administration has no answer.  Some of it is food prices, driven up by bad weather and the unintended effect of government-directed demand for ethanol, which drives up the price of corn that goes into animal feeds and sweeteners, as well as the price of other gains as farm businesses shift from them to corn.  And some of it is higher import prices from last year’s weakening dollar.

The upshot of this inflation that even as growth slows, the Fed can’t cut interest rates – which means no relief from the slowing growth.

If the administration won’t take this seriously, Congress can do so.  Let’s not wait for the next election to see those who would be president submit real plans to contain rising health care costs, reduce our economy’s fossil-fuel dependence, and increase opportunities for average workers to improve their IT skills. 

At the end of the last Congress Senator John McCain successfully led the fight to pass something called the Military Tribunal Bill.  Among other things, it stripped anyone in the US who is not a current citizen of their habeas corpus rights. 

Practically what this means is the President can now detain non-US citizens indefinitely, even those here legally, without judicial review.  If this sounds extraordinary, it is. 

The Times weighs in with a strong editorial, American Liberty at the Precipice, calling for these fundamental rights to be restored.  Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel, also weighs in on this issue and other issues related to Military Tribunals, torture and rendition.   Both should be read to gain a better understanding of this important legislative opportunity this year. 

I strongly believe that the coalitions working to improve our immigration system need to take up this effort too.  There should be little doubt that unless this remarkable legislative overreach is fixed, it will deter future immigration to the US, and may even cause current, legal immigrants to leave. 

I've been a little suprized that those businesses heavily dependent on foreign workers have not been more vocal in their opposition to what Senator McCain and the President have done.  It not only is a betrayal of America's historic commitment to liberty and the rule of law, but in the modern global economy, it will undermine the business model of many of our fastest growing and most important companies.

Additional note - As a friend just wrote in, there is a deep irony behind this.  While Senator McCain may be working to grant legal status to 11 milliion undocument workers in the US today through is strong leadership on comprehensive immigration reform, his Military Tribunal Bill ensures that when they become legal they will still lack one of the most fundamental rights guarenteed to previous immigrants since the founding of our country.   

Distressing news from the Justice Department today.  Apparantly Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and co. are too busy stripping Habeas Corpus rights, defending torture, and firing highly qualified federal prosecutors to find time to effectively fight terrorism.

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that only two of the 26 sets of important statistics on domestic counterterrorism efforts compiled by Justice and the FBI from 2001 to 2005 were accurate, according to a 140-page report. The numbers were both inflated and understated, depending on the data cited and which part of the Justice Department was doing the counting, the report said...

The analysis is the latest to find serious faults with the Justice Department's terrorism statistics, some of which have been featured prominently in statements by President Bush or the attorney general as evidence of the terrorist threat and the department's successful efforts to combat it.

The data are used to justify expenditures and explain to Congress and to the public how the Justice Department is using its resources to protect the country against terrorist attacks, officials said.

And what are they doing to fix the problem?  Papering it over it appears:

The Justice Department said in a statement that it has already made most of the improvements suggested by Fine's office and that the U.S. attorneys' office would rename its "anti-terrorism" category to remove the implication that every case involves terrorism.