Bush / GOP

So much for the Firewall strategy. On Friday, Time reported how the GOP had decided to hold the line:

In what it is privately calling it's "firewall" strategy, the Republican National Committee has recently spent close to $4 million in three crucial Senate races — Ohio, Missouri and Tennessee — in the hope of holding Democratic gains to a maximum of five seats. No new RNC money has gone to House races during that time.

And now, only 3 days later, this from this morning's NYT.

Senior Republican leaders have concluded that Senator Mike DeWine of Ohio, a pivotal state in this year's fierce midterm election battles, is likely to be heading for defeat and are moving to reduce financial support for his race and divert party money to other embattled Republican senators, party officials said.

We note only that a firewall is defined as "a physical barrier inside a building or vehicle, designed to limit the spread of fire, heat and structural collapse." Fingers crossed.

The Governing Party had a terrible, terrible week. 

Polls showed a dramatic decline in their standing across the whole nation.  The many GOP scandals continued, with a major White House resignation, a Congressional guilty plea, new federal investigations opened into two more Members of Congress, and of course the Foley affair just kept going.  North Korea exploded a nuclear bomb and our initial sanctions proposal was soundly rejected by the Russians and Chinese.  With the violence in Iraq spinning to yet another awful level, we may have now come to the point of no return there. 

Also brewing is a situation a little more complicated, but one that has enormous implications for Bush and his team.  The publication of the Woodward book has brought to light a previously unknown CIA briefing of then National Security Advisor Rice on July 10th, 2001.  At this briefing the CIA Director explicitly warned Rice that Al Qaeda was preparing to attack.  Somehow, this very serious meeting was left out of the 9/11 Commission Report, and has never been mentioned by the Administration.  (See more about this story in a previous post.)

Why does this matter? Because the story of the Administration and 9/11 has changed.  We now know that they failed to respond to the USS Cole bombing; failed to heed repeated warnings from Dick Clarke; failed to heed repeated warnings from the CIA; failed to capture Bin Laden at Tora Bora; and we now know that somehow the 9/11 Commission failed to include this July 10th mtg despite George's Tenet under-oath testimony that it took place. 

Tomorrow Sec. Rice goes on Fox News Sunday tomorrow.  Think Progress has waged a smart campaign to offer up some questions for her.  She of all people has a lot to answer for, for what we now know is that the Administration was amply warned about the Al Qaeda threat; did nothing about it; lied about what they knew for years; and somehow managed to keep some of the most damaging parts of the story from the official inquiry into 9/11 planning. 

This is serious stuff.  The main architect of this big lie about 9/11 is now the Secretary of State.  She has repeatedly lied in public and under oath about the run up to 9/11.  One of her current staffers was the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, was present at Tenet's testimony about the July 10th Meeting, and clearly kept it out of the report and from the Members of the Commission. 

If she can't be trusted to level with the American people about something of this gravity, how can we trust her to continue with her job? It is time for Secretary Rice to come clean.   

The latest Republican scandal just won't go away.  Yesterday, the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) accused the FBI of lying to cover-up its failure to investigate Mark Foley in July 2006, when CREW first sent then Congressman Foley's inappropriate emails to the FBI.  The FBI says that the emails were heavily redacted and that they were unable to contact CREW.  CREW calls both claims untrue saying:

On Monday, October 2, CREW sent a letter to the DOJ I.G.’s office, attaching exact copies of the emails CREW had sent to the FBI on July 21, 2006. Both the former page’s name and the person to whom the page forwarded Rep. Foley’s emails were clearly visible. Moreover, after CREW sent the emails to the FBI, CREW’s only subsequent contact with the Bureau was one telephone call from the special agent to whom CREW had sent the material confirming that the emails were from Rep. Foley. CREW had no further contact with the FBI.

Why is the FBI unable to get its story straight about its apparent decision to not investigate Mark Foley when they first found out about the emails?

Also, Republican Rep. Jim Kolbe, a former member of the Congressional Page oversight board, confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that he had been told about inappropriate emails from Mark Foley to a Congressional Page "years before" the acknowledged 2005 incident.  At the time, Kolbe says he spoke to Foley's Chief of Staff Kirk Fordham and took no further action.  This latest revelation is yet another layer in the Republican's explanation for why they were so lax in their attention to the welfare of the children working in the Congressional Page program.  Should make Mr. Fordham's upcoming testimony to the House Ethics Committee even more interesting.

In this Republican Congressional leadership the buck never seems to stop anywhere, but it sure gets passed around a lot.  That is unless the background to Speaker Hastert's press conference this morning was some kind of morbid hint about his future as Speaker. 

A scathing review of the Woodward book in this weekend's Post caught my eye. Not least for this paragraph, and especially the zinging final line:

In crisis after crisis, the government simply failed to operate the way it was designed to. Memos failed to circulate or arrived after they became irrelevant. Briefings conveyed only the news that listeners wanted to hear. Controversial information was rarely presented to the president, who rarely asked for it. New proposals were quashed, and policy was stymied by terrible infighting, or worse, indifference. On point after point, the government's performance was over budget, unapologetic and late. In other words, the Bush administration has become the new Amtrak.

And if it needed ramming home quite how obviously the wheels have come off this particular train, this morning's Post poll is quite extraordinary. I was especially struck by the +6 lead on terrorism, and the strong, strong presumption of a Foley cover-up. It seems that this scandal has done what the Democrats themselves haven't quite been able to pull off - portraying the Republicans as the corrupt, out-of-touch embodiment of nasty politics-as-usual. But, as Simon says below, beyond the ferocious spinning, it is clear that people knew Foley was a problem, did nothing about, and have been scrabbling to invent a half plausible explanation as to why. So this judgement - even Amtrak would do a better job than these guys - doesn't seem unfair.

Four new national polls are in the process of being released, and all of them show significant movement for the Democrats.  The CBS/NYTimes poll had a startling statistic: 79% of those polled believe the Republican Leadership put politics over the safety of pages.  The Foley scandal appears to have jelled into a "defining moment," and a very bad one for the GOP. 

All four polls give the Democrats a 15-23 point advantage in the Congressional generic ballot test, a dramatic improvement from other recent polls.  The infamous Gallup poll, the one touted by the R's two weeks ago as a sign of their recovery, has Bush dropping 7 points, from 44 to 37, and reports this:

 "On the question of which party's candidate would receive their vote if the election were held today, Democrats held a 23-point lead over Republicans among every type of person questioned — likely voters, registered voters and adults. That's the largest lead Democrats have held among registered voters since 1978 and a jump from last month's 48%-48% split among likely voters."When the Rs won in 1994 they had a 12 or point so advantage in the generic.  Despite their desperate attempts to blame others, the Republicans are getting what they deserve with the page scandal.  Foley was a well known sexual predator.  He was not only allowed to stay in Congress and keep doing what he was doing, but he was allowed to stay in the Republican Leadership, and was even given the Chairmanship of the Committee on Missing and Exploited Children after the leadership was informed of his problems.  The public has figured out these modern conservative's game - it is all about them, all the time, and seldom about us, the American people, our great country.  The page scandal has seared this sense into the American people, creating for us a "defining moment" that will be remembered for a long time to come. 

No matter what happens this fall, it sure seems like we are coming to the end of a particular era in American history.  From the highest vantage point it may be the end of the great 20th century battle between progressivism and conservatism; a little lower down it may be the end of the Bush era; and a little lower, the end of the Hastert-DeLay-Abramoff reign of corruption, unseriousness and extreme partisanship in the House.  

NDN has been commentating a great deal these last few years about the utter failure of conservative governance.  And certainly the American people have grown weary of these conservatives inability to tackle the important challenges of our time.  But I think we may also be witnessing a growing weariness of the spin, deceit, lying and proproganda that has also been a defining characteristic of this era.  After years of this over-the-top win at all costs proproganda strategy, Americans are beginning to distrust everything that comes from a Republican or conservative mouth.  The world is just not as they describe it, tarnishing their brand in a way so elemental that it will be hard to restore in the years ahead.

Think about it.  Rice just lying again and again about the run up to 9/11.  Hastert's unbelievable lies these past few days, and desperate attempts to paint the Foley scandal as a Democratic one.  Fox News's repeated and purposeful identification of Foley as a Democrat on the air.  Progress in Iraq.  Wages are rising.  No one knew the levees could break.  No one in the Administration sanctioned the torture of people in Iraq.  It is all bullsh-t. 

As progressives who have a proud history of making government work for the common good, we will have to spend time better understanding and changing this culture of untruth.  Democracy requires an informed citizenry.  But in this era, it would be more accurate to say we have a "misinformed" people, as the government itself, backed by fierce partisan like Fox News, Limbaugh, Hannity and Drudge spew purposeful lies and falsehoods each day. 

A great deal of the energy of the early 21st century progressive era has been to counter this culture of deceit.  It has been effective so far, unearthing the strategic nature of this proproganda machine.   And you can see it in the most effective political ads of this cycle, many of which have the candidate, unadorned, speaking directly to camera, trying desperately to reconnect voters to an actual person, a true event, a real set of beliefs, reality. 

I'm not sure how our movement and our nation should approach all this going forward.  But it is clear that the American people have an inkling of all this themselves, and like a TV show whose characters no longer speak with the same authority as at the beginning of its run, people are reaching for the remote and are looking for a politics that better speaks to them and the challenges, culture and values of our time.   We call it "a new politics," and I believe what we will see in the next few years is a fierce battle between the two great ideological movements to identify and claim it for their very own. 

Disappointing job creation figures out today. The rule of thumb is that the economy needs something in the region of 150,000 to keep pace with the rate of population growth. So this morning's 51,000 is unusually slow, even for an economy which has been adding only in the region of 100-180k jobs monthly of late. Although it is unwise to divine anything in particular from only one month's figures, the cumulative result is clear, as this analysis today from CBPP shows. Check out especially the second graph. 

A good round-up of "hastert must go" calls from the excellent Democratic Strategist.

First there was the Washington Times, not exactly the intellectual vanguard organ of the conservative movement. Now, however, the higher-browed conservative opinion leaders have begun to weigh in. Bloomberg.com quotes Tom Winter, editor-in-chief of the conservative weekly magazine Human Events :"We think the Republicans need new leaders, and I don't think Hastert will be there much longer...I think he has to do this for the team, he has to step down."

Maggie Gallagher can’t resist getting in a few licks against the Democrats en passant, but she gets to the point in her National Review Column “Hastert Must Resign,” as does NRO National Economics Editor Larry Kudlow in “Step Aside, Speaker Hastert: This goes way beyond Foley.”

Denny Hastert should resign out of embarrassment for what he has presided over as Speaker.  His team has been without question one of the most corrupt, irresponsible bunch that have ever run Washington.  For respect for our government, and for the American people, he should take responsibility for the anything goes culture he has fostered and resign.  Lets review what's happened with senior members of his team in just the past year:

Majority Leader Tom DeLay - indicted, resigned.  General corruption, fixing elections. 

Duke Cunningham - indicted, resigned, now serving the longest jail term in Congressional history.  Bribery, corruption, prostitutes, gambling.

Rules Committee Chairman Bob Ney - indicted, resigned.  Intervened against an Abramoff business rival - in Florida of course - who was then murdered by a mafia hit man. 

Committee on Missing and Exploited Children Chairman Mark Foley -  resigned, rehab, etc. 

NRCC Chairman Tom Reynolds - Hires Foley's chief of staff, participates in the Foley cover up. 

Add to that the extraordinary corruption of the Iraqi occupation contracting process, the Katrina contracting process, the selling off of "earmarks", the arrest and jailing of a series of top Congressional staffers turned "lobbyists," the creation of a K street secret police reporting in, shaking down and terrifying American business interests, the systemic buying off of journalists, the degradation of the Committee and budgeting process, the now apparent corruption of the 9/11 Commission, the acceptance of warrentless spying on American citizens, and it all ends being a terrible, shameful period in our history. 

Speaker Hastert should take responsibility for all this - with Mark Foley being simply a mild manifestation of the underlying anything goes culture - and resign.