Moved to Salon

This blog has moved to Salon. It is now located here (non-subscribers can view the blog for free by clicking through the ad for a Day Pass). The blog can also always be accessed through Salon's front page. I will also be a Contributing Writer there and will write at least one feature article per month.

The blog's archives will remain here at least for the time being (and we will ensure that all previously used links continue to function). Some features at the new blog are still a work in progress, and some features will be modified based on reader feedback. My explanation about the move to Salon is here and here.

Any notations about the move and blogroll adjustments would be appreciated.

The RSS feed for the Salon blog is here.

Giving Democrats a pass on ending the war?

(updated below)

Commissar is a right-wing blogger and long-time Bush supporter. He originally supported the Iraq war but some time last year finally came to the conclusion that the war has been a failure and was a mistake from the start. He acknowledged his own errors in judgment in supporting the war and, in the midterm elections, he supported and voted for Democrats because (like many voters) he wanted them to take over Congress and put a stop to the war. This weekend, he wrote a post in which he asks:

Why are the Netroots NOT constantly hammering the Dem majorities in Congress to de-fund the war? . . . Obviously defunding the war (or at least the surge) could be politically costly. But what is more important? Stopping the war or holding onto political power?

That is a question which is a tough one for the Dem politicians. To some extent, I understand their reluctance to take such a move, which might have political consequences. . . .

Those who disagree with the war in Iraq should be opposing it every day, almost to the exclusion of other topics. . . . Why not pile on the pressure on Congressional leaders to stop funding the war? What would a patriot do? Why did I vote Dem in 2006? Your side has the power, guys.

In this morning's New York Times, John Yoo has an Op-Ed, co-written with attorney Lynn Chu, which makes a similar point:

[B]ehind all the bluster, the one thing all the major Democratic proposals have in common is that they are purely symbolic resolutions, with all the force of a postcard. . . .The fact is, Congress has every power to end the war — if it really wanted to. It has the power of the purse. . . . Not only could Congress cut off money, it could require scheduled troop withdrawals, shrink or eliminate units, or freeze weapons supplies. It could even repeal or amend the authorization to use force it passed in 2002. . . .

The truth is that the Democrats in Congress would rather sit back and let the president take the heat in war than do anything risky. That way they get to prepare for the next election while pointing fingers of blame and spinning conspiracy theories.

It is, I think, very hard to deny that there are some valid points lurking here. Most Bush critics accept these two premises: (1) Congress has the power to compel a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and (2) a withdrawal -- whether immediate or one that is completed within, say, six to nine months -- is vitally important. It is important in its own right and, perhaps even more so, because it is our presence in Iraq which enables all sorts of future disasters, including a looming confrontation with Iran.

Yet the Democratic-controlled Congress is clearly not going to attempt to exercise its power to compel the end of this war -- at least not any time soon. And, with some exceptions, there seems to be very few objections over that failure, very little clamoring that they do more. Why is that? What accounts for the seeming willingness -- even among more vocal war opponents and bloggers -- to give Democrats a pass on actually ending the war (as opposed to enacting symbolic, inconsequential resolutions)?

Over the past month or so, I attributed the muted or even non-existent criticism of Democrats to the very sensible proposition that the new Democratic leadership ought to be given some time, a little breathing room, to figure out what they will do and, more challengingly, how they will accomplish it. It is a complex task to put together a legislative strategy that will attract a coalition of legislators -- Democrats and some anti-war Republicans -- sufficient to command a majority. That is not going to happen overnight, and it would be unreasonable to start demanding that Nancy Pelosi end the war in the first week of her Speakership.

But that explanation really doesn't take us very far any more, because it is clear that Congressional Democrats are not working at all towards the goal of forcing an end to the war. They have expressly repudiated any de-funding intentions, and -- as Chu and Yoo correctly observe -- "two other Democratic Senate proposals that have actual teeth — one by Russell Feingold to cut off money for the war, another by Barack Obama to mandate troop reductions — were ignored by the leadership." Democrats are not going to be any closer to de-funding the war or otherwise compelling its conclusion in March or May or July as they are now, and they themselves have made that clear. For that reason, the "let's-give-them-time" justification lacks coherence.

A more formidable explanation for the lack of criticism of the Democratic leadership is pure pragmatic reality -- a Democratic leadership which can barely scrape up enough votes to pass a weak, non-binding resolution opposing escalation, let alone a non-binding resolution calling for an end to the war, would simply never be able to attract anywhere near enough votes to sustain a de-funding bill or a repeal of the war authorization. That premise is (most likely, though not definitely) accurate, but since when have pragmatic considerations of that sort stifled arguments from war opponents, liberal activists, and bloggers for principled action?

Activists and bloggers routinely demand, based both on principle and political strategy, that their political leaders unapologetically embrace the political position that is Right, and do not generally accept the excuse that doing so is politically unpopular or unlikely to succeed. Bloggers and others demanded support for all sorts of important measures that had little chance of success -- opposition to, even a filibuster of the, Alito nomination, opposition to the Military Commissions Act, opposition to the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. On an issue as crucial as ending the war in Iraq, is likely legislative failure really a justifiable excuse for failing to push that issue, advocate that as a solution, and force a vote?

There are some obvious political considerations that potentially explain the muted objections to Democratic inaction on the war. The most obvious, and the most ignoble, is a desire that the war in Iraq -- as hideously destructive as it is -- still be raging during the 2008 elections, based on the belief that Americans will punish Republicans for the war even more than they did in the 2006 midterm elections. Is that naked political calculation driving some of the unwillingness of some Democratic elected officials to end the war? One would like to think not, but it is growing increasingly more difficult to avoid that suspicion.

Then there is the related, somewhat more reasonable political consideration which is grounded in the fear that if Democrats end the war in Iraq, all of the resulting violence and chaos which rightfully belongs in George Bush's lap will instead be heaped on the Democrats ("we were so close to winning if only the Democrats hadn't forced a withdrawal"). It is certainly true that war supporters, desperate to blame someone other than themselves for the disaster they have wrought, would immediately exploit this dishonest storyline, but does that really matter?

If ending the war is urgently necessary, is that consideration even remotely sufficient to justify a decision by Democrats to allow it to continue? Isn't that the same rationale that was used by Democrats who voted in favor of the 2002 Iraq AUMF -- "if we oppose it, we will be damaged politically for years to come, and since it will pass anyway, why not support it and avoid incurring that political damage"? It is difficult to reconcile criticism of Congressional Democrats who voted on political grounds in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq with a willingness now to allow them to avoid compelling an end to that war.

What does seem clear is that one of the principal factors accounting for the reluctance of Democrats to advocate de-funding is that the standard corruption that infects our political discourse has rendered the de-funding option truly radioactive. Republicans and the media have propagated -- and Democrats have frequently affirmed -- the proposition that to de-fund a war is to endanger the "troops in the field."

This unbelievably irrational, even stupid, concept has arisen and has now taken root -- that to cut off funds for the war means that, one day, our troops are going to be in the middle of a vicious fire-fight and suddenly they will run out of bullets -- or run out of gas or armor -- because Nancy Pelosi refused to pay for the things they need to protect themselves, and so they are going to find themselves in the middle of the Iraq war with no supplies and no money to pay for what they need. That is just one of those grossly distorting, idiotic myths the media allows to become immovably lodged in our political discourse and which infects our political analysis and prevents any sort of rational examination of our options.

That is why virtually all political figures run away as fast and desperately as possible from the idea of de-funding a war -- it's as though they have to strongly repudiate de-funding options because de-funding has become tantamount to "endangering our troops" (notwithstanding the fact that Congress has de-funded wars in the past and it is obviously done in coordination with the military and over a scheduled time frame so as to avoid "endangering the troops").

As Russ Feingold explained in a Daily Kos diary announcing his opposition to the Warner/Levin "anti-surge" resolution:

We owe it to ourselves to demand action that will bring about change in Iraq, not take us back to a failed status quo.

Democrats in Congress have seemingly forgotten that we were in power when Congress authorized the President to go to war in Iraq. . . . We also have to remember that in November, Americans sent over 30 new Democratic Representatives and eight new Democratic Senators plus a very progressive Independent to fix a failed Iraq policy. The public is craving change in Iraq and a resolution like this one will not cut it. Now is the time for strong action.

Those are the type of arguments which one expects to find among anti-war activists and bloggers, yet one sees relatively little dissatisfaction, and almost no anger, directed at the Democratic leadership for its refusal even to force a vote on genuine war-ending measures. It is unclear why that is -- perhaps there are good reasons for it -- but those reasons are difficult to discern, and these seem like questions worth examining.

UPDATE: As but one example, MoveOn.org has a page devoted to a petition opposing escalation in Iraq, and also has an ad criticizing Republicans for supporting escalation, but they do not -- from what I can tell -- have any petitions, actions, marches, campaigns, etc. to urge Congress to de-fund the war or otherwise compel a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. They even supported the Warner-Levin resolution which, as Sen. Feingold pointed out, "signs off on the President continuing indefinite military operations in Iraq."

Awkward discussions of race and Obama

(updated below - updated again)

The luminous roundtable on Meet the Press yesterday had what appears from the transcript to be a rather awkward discussion of the role of race in Barack Obama's candidacy, with Howard Kurtz raising a question with which people like Mickey Kaus and Glenn Reynolds seem strangely obsessed: "Is [Obama] black enough to get support in the African-American community?" In the middle of that discussion, the Politico's Roger Simon said this:

If America actually nominates him and then votes for him for president and elects him, this will be a sign that we are a good and decent country that has healed its racial wounds. Now, Jesse Jackson had a same subtext, but Barack Obama is a much different politician than Jesse Jackson—much less threatening, much more appealing, and he actually has the ability to carry this off.

One could say, I suppose, that Jesse Jackson was more ideological and further to the left than Obama is -- though I think that is far from clear at this point. But even if one believes that, in what conceivable sense was Jesse Jackson "threatening" in a way that Obama is not? Jackson -- whatever else one might think of him -- is a Christian minister whose speeches almost invariably were grounded in religious concepts of faith, hope, charity, and aiding the impoverished and disadvantaged, and were free of racially inflammatory rhetoric, or any type of notably inflammatory rhetoric. Even for those who disagreed with Jackson politically, in what sense could he be viewed as "threatening"?

Anonymous Liberal wrote a post this weekend confessing that he has become smitten with Obama, and it is clear from his post that he has indeed succumbed to The Obama Spell. A.L. pronounces that he is "more convinced than ever that Obama is the strongest candidate in the field." After I read A.L.'s post, we exchanged a couple of e-mails about the extent to which Obama's race would be an impediment to his electoral prospects. A.L. thinks that the impediment would be slight, and even might have the opposite effect, on balance, of energizing white voters over the prospect of electing a black president (in his post, he cites Deval Patrick's resounding victory as Masschusettes Governor as evidence of this dynamic).

Possibly. But what seems clear, at the very least, is that Obama's candidacy is going to compel very candid discussions of race in venues which typically avoid such discussions desperately, opting instead to pretend that racial issues simply are non-existent. And that, in turn, is going to generate all kinds of revealing and (to put it generously) awkward remarks of the type made by Joe Biden and Roger Simon.

Look at how racially charged the "controversies" over Obama have already been -- not only the fictitious claims about his "madrassa" education, but also Tucker Carlson's insinuations over the past few days that Obama's church is too black to be Christian. And ABC News' Jake Tapper and Katie Hinman took Carlson's innuendo a step further yesterday by claiming that unnamed "critics" want to know if Obama's church "is too militant to be accepted by mainstream America" (h/t rk).

That was an insinuation that seemed to echo the very inflammatory claims in this editorial from Investors Business Daily, which asserted that Obama's "religion has little to do with Islam and everything to do with a militantly Afrocentric movement that's no less troubling." The Editorial added that "Obama embraced more than Christ when he answered the altar call 20 years ago at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Southside Chicago" -- he embraced the "gospel of blackness and black power," a fact which "should give American voters pause." These accusations seem designed to suggest that perhaps Obama is not as "non-threatening" as Simon condescendingly claimed. Maybe he is a black militant.

It is always preferable to have views and sentiments -- even ugly ones -- aired out in the open rather than forcing them into hiding through suppression. And part of the reason people intently run away from discussions of race (just as they stay away from discussions of Middle East political disputes, specifically ones involving Israel) is because it is too easy to unwittingly run afoul of various unwritten speech rules, thereby triggering accusations of bigotry. That practice has the effect of keeping people silent, which in turn has the effect of reinforcing the appearance that nobody thinks about race (which is why nobody discusses it), which in turn prevents a constructive discussions of hidden and unwarranted premises.

For that reason, scouring people's comments about Obama and race, in search of evidence of even minor deviations from speech mores, is not really constructive. But it is notable just how many implicit assumptions about race lurk beneath these observations.

And it is even more notable how freely these patronizing sentiments are being expressed in the context of Obama's candidacy, often -- as in Biden's and Simon's case -- expressed as though they are compliments (he is so clean and articulate, he is so non-threatening, he seems like one of the moderate ones, he isn't really "militant"), because the speakers are not even consciously aware of the implications of those assumptions. It can be unpleasant to watch people struggle with these awkward discussions, but, on balance, anything which forces these issues more out into the open is probably a positive development.

UPDATE: Pam Spaulding has a characteristically nuanced and insightful discussion of some of the difficulties which people -- both white and black -- are encountering when discussing race in the context of Obama's candidacy.

UPDATE II: The Unapologetic Mexican takes issue with some of the claims in this post. I left a comment there in response (to which he then responded).

Terry Moran, Michael Gordon and The Mark Halperin Syndrome

(updated below)

One of the critical issues which that disgraceful Michael Gordon article in yesterday's New York Times raises is the extent to which so many national journalists are so eager to prove to right-wing fanatics that they are sympathetic to their agenda. Years of being attacked by the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and Bill O'Reillys as being part of the dreaded "liberal media" has created an obsequious need among many journalists to curry favor -- through reporting which echoes right-wing narratives and/or by attacking the "liberal bias" of their fellow journalists -- all in order to avoid being criticized by the right-wing noise machine. That is the defining symptom of The Mark Halperin Syndrome.

Within hours of publication of Gordon's article in the Times yesterday, there was (and still is) an item on the Drudge Report in screaming red ink that reads: "Deadliest Bombs in Iraq 'made in Iran,'" with a link to the NYT article. War-on-Iran fanatics immediately -- and very predictably -- seized on Gordon's article as proof of the allegedly grave threat Iran poses. The Times published a transparently one-sided, journalistically irresponsible article with no effect -- and seemingly no purpose -- other than to fuel the pro-Bush right's hunger for war with Iran.

The most illustrative case of the Mark Halperin Syndrome -- whereby journalists seek to please the most radical extremists on the right -- is, of course, Halperin's own pleas on Hugh Hewitt's radio show for Hewitt to recognize that Halperin shares most of the Right's views. But Halperin's ABC News colleague, Terry Moran -- former White House correspondent and current Nightline host -- is a virtual carbon copy of Halperin.

Moran revealed himself this week to be all but an appendage of the right-wing blogosphere by mindlessly echoing their efforts to fuel the frivolous Edwards "controversy." But none of that is new. In May, 2005, Moran was also interviewed by Hewitt, and just as desperately as Halperin did, Moran sought Hewitt's approval by lending credence to the most baseless and extreme right-wing smears against journalists. This was one exchange they had:

HH: My brother called me a journalist once during a conversation about this blog. I was offended. That is a general impression among the American military about the media, Terry. Where does that come from?

TM: It comes from, I think, a huge gulf of misunderstanding, for which I lay plenty of blame on the media itself. There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous.

Moran's depiction of his own profession as "deep[ly] anti-military" and reflexively opposed to American military force is so persuasive. After all, if there is one lesson that we learned in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is that the American media is so very, very hostile to the military and reflexively opposed to all assertions of U.S. military force.

That was why they unquestioningly printed on their front pages and recited on their news broadcasts every single claim that emanated from the Pentagon, and it is also why they cheered on as loudly and enthusiastically as anyone else the President's glorious march to war. How eager must Moran be to win the Right's approval if -- in 2005 -- he could make the transparently ludicrous claim that his fellow journalists hate the military and hate the use of U.S. military force?

Manifestly, Moran -- just like Halperin -- is eager to show that he is pro-military and was desperate to convince Hewitt that he is not one of those dirty anti-American subversive liberals. To achieve that goal, Moran paraded in front of Hewitt and smeared his fellow journalists as being "deep[ly] anti-military" and claimed that they have a "dangerous" hostility to "American projection of power around the world." Identically, Halperin begged Hewitt not to"lump [him] in with people in [his] business who are liberally biased and don’t seem to care about it."

It stands to reason that this glaring need of Moran's to please the Hugh Hewitts of the world and to distinguish himself from the leftist, military-hating radicals who dominate the American media will affect the news coverage choices he makes. Echoing the most strident and biased scandal-mongering of the right-wing blogosphere -- as Moran did this week -- is consistent with that personal agenda. By joining in the right-wing lynch mob this week (Does John Edwards Condone Hate Speech?), Moran got what he obviously craves -- a pat on the head from Michelle Malkin and universal praise from the right-wing fanatics driving that story.

In the same interview, Hewitt also asked Moran if he reads blogs, and Moran immediately declared: "I always start out at Instapundit." I bet he does. Next came: "I take a look at LGF." He then tacked on Daily Kos and Josh Marshall as blogs he "looks at," and then proudly added: "My brother has a blog, Right Wing Nut House." Most revealing of all was this exchange:

HH: What's your guess about the percentage of the White House Press Corps that voted for Kerry?

TM: Oh, very high. Very, very high. . . .

HH: Who'd you vote for?

TM: Well, that's a secret ballot, isn't it?

HH: Well, it is. I'm just asking, though.

TM: I'd prefer not to answer that.

HH: I know you would, but...

TM: It might surprise you, but I'd prefer not to.

So, after first assuring Hewitt that the vast majority of White House journalists were voting for Kerry, Moran coyly slips in that while he won't expressly say for whom he voted, "it might surprise you." Gee, I really wonder what he was trying to convey to Hewitt with that answer? (The Hewitt interview was nothing new; Ron Brynaert previously examined why Moran was long the Bush administration's most favored White House correspondent, with a history of questions that made Jeff Gannon look like a tough White House interrogator).

What Moran did with Hewitt is exactly the same thing Halperin did -- Halperin also refused to expressly say whether he was a conservative or not, but kept sending transparent signals that, by design, left no doubt (Halperin: "Acknowledging the liberal bias that exists in the Old Media -- as John Harris and I do in The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 doesn't necessarily prove that I am not liberal, but I would think you would be open to giving me the benefit of the doubt" and "As for your repeated insistence that you could reach no other conclusion but one that says that I am 'very liberal,' I'm sure if you think it over, you will reconsider").

The influence of The Mark Halperin Syndrome on our media cannot be overstated. There is a pervasive desire on the part of many national journalists to prove to the right-wing noise machine that they are not like their horrible, leftist, America-hating, anti-military journalistic colleagues which the Right has so successfully demonized.

That syndrome was unquestionably a significant factor influencing the pre-Iraq-war parade of "liberal" pundits and journalists putting on such a public display of how serious and thoughtful and patriotic and pro-military they were by lending support to the President's war claims, or -- as in the case of the Joe Kleins -- suppressing their reservations due to a fear of being depicted as one of the anti-military subversives in the press (and, of course, some of them simply subscribe to the neoconservative ideological agenda).

Most troublingly, one sees this same dynamic over and over -- not quite as universally but still pervasively -- when it comes to Iran. The Michael Gordon article from yesterday is so alarming because it stems from this same dangerous and sickly dynamic -- journalists eager to prove to Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt and Bill Kristol that they are on the Right Side by mindlessly accepting any claims from the military and refusing to examine the urgent questions raised by our increasingly war-seeking posture towards Iran -- such as who are the people pushing for this war, how long have they advocated it, what are their motives, and why are war-preventing measures, such as diplomacy, being so vigilantly avoided?

Those are questions which would be asked only by those journalists plagued by -- to use Terry Moran's words -- "a deep anti-military bias" and the "dangerous" belief "that American projection of power around the world must be wrong." By contrast, The Mark Halperins and Terry Morans and Michael Gordons show what good, patriotic boys and girls they are by dutifully passing along what they are told by the Military and the President and the Government without questioning any of it.

UPDATE: The Associated Press reports today: "The U.S. military has detected a significant increase in the number of sophisticated roadside bombs in Iraq and believes that orders to send components for them came from the 'highest levels' of the Iranian government, a senior intelligence officer said Sunday."

I don't understand the basis for the somewhat widespread doubt about the fact that the administration is seeking military confrontation with Iran. That seems beyond dispute at this point, and a significant factor determining the outcome of those efforts will be how the American press reports on the claims about Iran coming from the administration and its war-hungry allies.

UPDATE II: Cernig documents the fundamental deficiencies in the "case" made by an anonymous military official today that the Iranian government, "at the highest levels," is ordering that Shiite militias be supplied with sophisticated weaponry for use against U.S. forces.

Also, what possible justification is there for according anonymity to the Bush officials who are making these claims? The Associated Press report says that the official "brief[ed] reporters on condition (sic) that he not be further identified." That is a "condition" that the media ought not accept. These claims are not from whistle blowers or ones which otherwise require anonymity. They are nothing more than the official assertions of the Bush administration to justify its antagonistic posture towards Iran.

There is no simply justification for printing articles like this (a) that grant anonymity to the officials disseminating official government claims and (b) without including the ample evidence undermining those claims. Have the media learned absolutely nothing from Iraq? It really seems that way.

The NY Times returns to pre-Iraq-war "journalism"

Over the past few weeks, The Los Angeles Times has published several detailed and well-documented articles casting serious doubt on the administration's claims that Iran is fueling the Iraqi insurgency with weapons. A couple of months ago, The Washington Post published a very well-researched article reporting that extensive searches by British military brigades in Southern Iraq -- specifically in the areas where such weapons would almost certainly be transported and maintained -- have turned up nothing. It seemed as though the media was treating the war-inflaming claims of Bush officials against Iran much more skeptically, refusing to simply pass along accusations without first conducting an investigation to determine if those claims were true.

But today, The New York Times does precisely the opposite -- it has published a lengthy, prominent front-page article by Michael Gordon that does nothing, literally, but mindlessly recite administration claims about Iran's weapons-supplying activities without the slightest questioning, investigation, or presentation of ample counter-evidence. The entire article is nothing more than one accusatory claim about Iran after the next, all emanating from the mouths of anonymous military and "intelligence officials" without the slightest verified evidence, and Gordon just mindlessly repeats what he has been told in one provocative paragraph after the next.

Start with the headline: Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, U.S. Says. That is a proposition that is extremely inflammatory -- it suggests that Iranians bear responsibility for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, even though that is a claim for which almost no evidence has been presented and which is very much in dispute. Why should that be the basis for a prominent headline when Gordon's sole basis for it are the uncorroborated assertions of the Bush administration? The very first paragraph following that headline is the most inflammatory:

The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

Is that extremely provocative claim even true? Gordon never says, and he does not really appear to care. He is in Pravda Spokesman mode throughout the entire article -- offering himself up as a megaphone for administration assertions without the slightest amount of scrutiny, investigation or opposing views.

What is the basis for the entire article? Gordon summarizes it this way:

The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.

In interviews, civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details to support what until now has been a more generally worded claim, in a new National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran is providing “lethal support” to Shiite militants in Iraq.

Every one of Gordon's sources are officials in the Bush administration, and all of them are completely anonymous, so one has no way to assess their interest, perspective, bias, or independence. And Gordon himself does not offer the slightest information to enable the reader to make such determinations, and he himself appears blissfully uninterested in any of that.

This is completely irresponsible journalism. The latest indications, including new revelations over the last few days, lend strong support to the suspicion that the Bush administration is intensifying its preparations for a military confrontation with Iran. The emotional and psychological impact of Gordon's story is glaringly obvious -- if Iranians are purposely supplying Shiite militias with the "most lethal weapon directed against American troops," that obviously will have the effect of heightening anger towards Iranians among Americans and leading them to believe that war against Iran is necessary because they are killing our troops.

Gordon recognizes the high stakes of his story, but naively passes this along:

Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile. The officials said they were willing to discuss the issue to respond to what they described as an increasingly worrisome threat to American forces in Iraq, and were not trying to lay the basis for an American attack on Iran.

No, perish the thought. But why are these sources granted anonymity? All they are doing is passing along the standard, official line of the Bush administration, supposedly revealing the most inflammatory conclusions that the administration will "unveil" in just a few days. What possible purpose is served by shrouding these sources in anonymity in order to enable them to pass along these controversial claims with the appearance that Gordon has scored some sort of "scoop" by provoking candid "officials" to speak off the record? This is just Bush administration propaganda dressed up as a "leak" to induce Gordon and the NYT to excitedly publish this on their front page. Judy Miller anyone?

Speaking of Judy Miller, the NYT today gives us one paragraph after the next like this one:

The link that American intelligence has drawn to Iran is based on a number of factors, including an analysis of captured devices, examination of debris after attacks, and intelligence on training of Shiite militants in Iran and in Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and by Hezbollah militants believed to be working at the behest of Tehran. . . .

The information includes interrogation reports from the raids indicating that money and weapons components are being brought into Iraq from across the Iranian border in vehicles that travel at night. One of the detainees has identified an Iranian operative as having supplied two of the bombs. The border crossing at Mehran is identified as a major crossing point for the smuggling of money and weapons for Shiite militants, according to the intelligence.

Has Gordon reviewed any of those devices, seen any of the debris or the reports describing them, spoken to independent experts about the accuracy of the administration's claims, or evaluated the credibility of the original sources for all of this alleged "intelligence"? If he has done any of that, he does not share any of those assessments in his article. He is simply echoing what he has been told, without regard to its persuasive qualities.

In fact, with the exception of one cursory note buried in the middle that the Iranian Government denies supplying Shiite militias with weapons, every paragraph in the article -- every one -- simply echoes accusations by military and other Bush officials that Iran is behind the attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. If the White House were to prepare one of its famous Position Papers setting forth its case against Iran, it would look exactly like the article Gordon and the NYT just published on behalf of the administration. What is the point of this sort of article? Why would the New York Times just offer itself up again as a mindless vessel for what are clearly war-seeking accusations by the administration? Have they learned nothing?

And all of this is particularly inexcusable in light of the ample analysis and evidence -- already published by the LA Times and Washington Post, among others -- which raise serious questions about the reliability of the administration's accusations against Iran. There is no excuse whatsoever for writing a long, prominent article summarizing the administration's claims without even alluding to that evidence, let alone failing to conduct any investigation to determine the accuracy of the government's statements.

UPDATE: As I noted the other day, The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin published a list of basic journalistic rules for avoiding the media's government-enabling mistakes in Vietnam and Iraq. If the NYT set out to create a textbook article which violates as many of these principles as possible, it would not have been able to surpass the article published today by Gordon. Here are just a few of Froomkin's rules:

You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority

• Don’t assume anything administration officials tell you is true. In fact, you are probably better off assuming anything they tell you is a lie.

• Demand proof for their every assertion. Assume the proof is a lie. Demand that they prove that their proof is accurate.

• Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it should be make the headlines. The absence of supporting evidence for their assertion -- or a preponderance of evidence that contradicts the assertion -- may be more newsworthy than the assertion itself.

• Don’t print anonymous assertions. Demand that sources make themselves accountable for what they insist is true.

Provocation Alone Does Not Justify War

• War is so serious that even proving the existence of a casus belli isn’t enough. Make officials prove to the public that going to war will make things better.

Be Particularly Skeptical of Secrecy

• Don’t assume that these officials, with their access to secret intelligence, know more than you do.

• Alternately, assume that they do indeed know more than you do – and are trying to keep intelligence that would undermine their arguments secret.

Don’t Just Give Voice to the Administration Officials

• Give voice to the skeptics; don’t marginalize and mock them.

• Listen to and quote the people who got it right last time: The intelligence officials, state department officials, war-college instructors and many others who predicted the problem we are now facing, but who were largely ignored.

Is there a single journalistic principle which this article did not violate?

UPDATE II: As Greg Mitchell recalls in an article in Editor & Publisher, it was Michael Gordon "who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion," and Gordon himself "wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized -- even by the Times itself -- WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, 'aluminum tubes' story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows" (h/t Zack).

The fundamental flaws in this article are as glaring as they are grotesque. Given the very ignominious history of Gordon and the NYT concerning the administration's war-seeking claims, how can this article possibly have been published?

Calls to investigate the media's pre-war behavior

(updated below)

A new report by the Pentagon's Inspector General documents what everyone other than the hardest core Bush followers already knows: namely, that "Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included 'reporting of dubious quality or reliability' that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community" (see update below). It is vitally important to ensure that those who were responsible for the deceit that led us into Iraq are identified and held accountable.

But that responsibility extends beyond Bush officials into most of the nation's most influential media outlets. Gilbert Cranberg, former Editorial Page Editor of The Des Moines Register and Tribune and Professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa, has published a superb article at the excellent Nieman Watchdog site (affiliated with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard), in which he calls for a serious and independent investigation into the profound pre-war failures of our media:

As the war in Iraq nears its fourth anniversary, and with no end in sight, Americans are owed explanations. . . An explanation is due also for how the U.S. press helped pave the way for war. An independent and thorough inquiry of pre-war press coverage would be a public service. Not least of the beneficiaries would be the press itself, which could be helped to understand its behavior and avoid a replay.

Cranberg urges an independent investigation rather than "self-policing":

Better a study by outsiders than by insiders. Besides, journalism groups show no appetite for self-examination. Nor would a study by the press about the press have credibility. Now and then a news organization has published a mea culpa about its Iraq coverage, but isolated admissions of error are no substitute for comprehensive study.

Cranberg identifies twelve highly relevant, unresolved questions to illustrate the type of areas in need of meaningful inquiry, including:

* Why did the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau’s “against-the grain reporting” during the build-up to war receive such “disappointing play,” in the words of its former bureau chief?

* Why, on the eve of war, did the Washington Post’s executive editor reject a story by Walter Pincus, its experienced and knowledgeable national security reporter, that questioned administration claims of hidden Iraqi weapons and why, when the editor reconsidered, the story ran on Page 17?

* Why did the Post, to the “dismay” of the paper’s ombudsman, bury in the back pages or miss stories that challenged the administration’s version of events? Or, as Pincus complained, why did Post editors go “through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference” while, from August 2002 to the start of the war in March 2003, did the Post, according to its press critic, Howard Kurtz, publish “more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq”?

* Why did Michael Massing’s critique of Iraq-war coverage, in the New York Review of Books, conclude that “The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were…tucked well out of sight.”

* Why did the Times’s Thomas E. Friedman and other foreign affairs specialists, who should have known better, join the “let’s-go-to-war” chorus?

* Why did Colin Powell’s pivotal presentation to the United Nations receive immediate and overwhelming press approval despite its evident weaknesses and even fabrications?

* Why did the British press, unlike its American counterpart, critically dissect the speech and regard it with scorn?

* Why did the Associated Press wait six months, when the body count began to rise, to distribute a major piece by AP’s Charles Hanley challenging Powell’s evidence and why did Hanley say how frustrating it had been until then to break through the self-censorship imposed by his editors on negative news about Iraq?

These are all excellent questions, as are the others which Cranberg includes, as are many that are not on his list. And as he notes, none of this is particularly new, particularly when it comes to matters of war and the identification of an "enemy" by the government:

The shortcomings of Iraq coverage were not an aberration. Similar failure is a recurrent problem in times of national stress. The press was shamefully silent, for instance, when American citizens were removed from their homes and incarcerated solely because of their ancestry during World War II. Many in the press were cowed during McCarthyism’s heyday in the 1950s. Nor did the press dispute the case for the fact-challenged Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to a greatly enlarged Vietnam war.

The press response to the build-up to the Iraq war simply is the latest manifestation of an underlying and ongoing reluctance to dissent from authority and prevailing opinion when emotions run high, especially on matters of war and peace, when the country most needs a questioning, vigorous press.

Much of this is just basic fear of challenging the prevailing wisdom and assertions of authority, as Elisabeth Bumiller infamously admitted and as almost certainly accounts for Joe Klein's willingness to express his allegedly anti-war views only in private. But the problems are also clearly institutional and have become ingrained in the national media outlets themselves. A truly probing examination of the media's extremely culpable pre-war behavior is, as Cranberg said, urgently needed -- both to prevent future debacles and to shine light on the true causes of our media's dysfunction.

UPDATE: The Post apparently made the embarrassingly sloppy mistake in its article on the Inspector General's Report of quoting from a previously report issued by Sen. Carl Levin, and not the Report issued by the Inspector General. They have appended a correction to the top of the article linked to in the first paragraph.

The significance of the Edwards story

(updated below)

With the merciful (and generally positive) conclusion of the Edwards "controversy," it is worth examining the story's significance and the reasons it merited as much attention as it was given. On several levels, what happened here illustrates some very important developments.

For the last 15 years or so -- since the early years of the Clinton administration -- our public political discourse has been centrally driven by an ever-growing network of scandal-mongers and filth-peddling purveyors of baseless, petty innuendo churned out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, various right-wing operatives and, more recently, the right-wing press led by Fox News. Every issue of significance is either shaped and wildly distorted by that process, or the public is distracted from important issues by contrived and unbelievably vapid, petty scandals. Our political discourse has long been infected by this potent toxin, one which has grown in strength and degraded most of our political and media institutions.

For anyone who thinks that that is overstated, the definitive refutation is provided by ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin and The Washington Post's former National Politics Editor John Harris, who provided this description in their recent book about how their national media world operates:

Matt Drudge is the gatekeeper... he is the Walter Cronkite of his era.

In the fragmented, remote-control, click-on-this, did you hear? political media world in which we live, revered Uncle Walter has been replaced by odd nephew Matt. . . .

Matt Drudge rules our world . . . With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.

So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.

This is why our political process has been so broken and corrupt. The worst elements of what has become the pro-Bush right wing have been shaping and driving how national journalists view events, the stories they cover, and the narratives they disseminate.

What kind of government and political system -- what kind of country -- is going to arise from a political landscape shaped by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Fox News, Michelle Malkin, and their similar right-wing appendages in talk radio, print and the blogosphere? Allowing those elements to dominate our political debates and drive media coverage guarantees a decrepit, rotted, and deeply corrupt country. That is just a basic matter of cause and effect.

Peter Daou wrote what I think is one of the definitive articles detailing the mechanics of that process (Tom Tomorrow provided the illustration), but whatever the details, its dominance simply cannot be reasonably doubted. The last two presidential elections were overwhelmed by the pettiest and most fictitious "controversies" (things like Al Gore's invention of the Internet and Love Story claims, John Kerry's windsurfing and war wounds, John Edwards' hair brushing and Howard Dean's scream), and our discussions of the most critical issues are continuously clouded by distortive sideshows concocted by this filth-peddling network. Their endless lynch mob crusades supplant rational and substantive political debates, and the most wild fictions are passively conveyed by a lazy and co-opted national media.

In a typically excellent article, Dan Froomkin in The Washington Post this morning explains what Tim Russert's testimony in the Libby trial reveals about how our nation's media stars operate (emphasis in original):

And get this: According to Russert's testimony yesterday at Libby's trial, when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record.

That's not reporting, that's enabling. That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable.

With rare exception, our national press has completely abdicated the function of scrutinizing any of the cheap "scandals" churned out by the right-wing machine because they have merged seamlessly into the political power structures they are supposed to be scrutinizing, or, worse still, they eagerly become an appendage of that machine -- as illustrated, in the Edwards case, by ABC News' Terry Moran's mindless, one-sided echoing of the right-wing blogosphere's chatter on this story ("Does John Edwards Condone Hate Speech?") .

There are few, if any, more important priorities than creating a counterweight to that network, a method for diluting its influence and exposing and discrediting the people who drive it. And the Edwards story illustrates why that is so and how the blogosphere is beginning to achieve that.

The Edwards "controversy" was a story that was concocted at the lowest depths of the right-wing blogosphere, and it then bubbled up through the standard channels until it arrived in the national press. When the story was first reported by The New York Times and the Associated Press, those outlets mindlessly tracked the right-wing storyline without deviation, and that storyline was designed to convey these familiar themes:

(1) Liberals hate Christianity and religion generally and are so radical that they actually border on mental illness;

(2) The Democratic Party is captive to the hateful, vulgar extremists in the liberal blogosphere;

(3) Bill Donohue and Michelle Malkin are vigilant truth-seekers and objective watchdogs, exposing bigotry and radicalism and forcing a reluctant mainstream media to talk about the evil that lurks within the "Left";

(4) John Edwards is going to be forced by the all-powerful right-wing crusaders to fire his own staffers and appear weak and bullied.

That is a storyline that has played out time and again in different contexts, and it was well on its way to being cemented here. It is exactly what would have happened had it not been for the blogosphere, which forced into the public discussion critical facts that were being omitted and which exposed the absurdity of this story, thereby providing a counterweight to the joint right-wing/media pressure on Edwards to capitulate to these forces.

As a result, look at the New York Times story this morning on the conclusion of this matter. The story which ended up being told is significantly different than the one which was being originally peddled. The article includes, for instance, a lengthy passage about the ethically suspect and extremist, offensive writings of John McCain's blogger:

Last summer, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, hired Patrick J. Hynes, a conservative blogger and political consultant, to be his campaign’s blog liaison. Mr. Hynes quickly ran afoul of fellow bloggers by initially concealing his relationship to the McCain campaign while he was writing critically about other Republicans.

He then came under fire for declaring that the United States was a “Christian nation” in a book and television appearances that predated his work for Mr. McCain. Last November, while employed by Mr. McCain’s campaign, Mr. Hynes posted on his personal blog a picture of Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, and invited readers to submit nicknames, some of which were anti-Semitic.

In an interview, Mr. Hynes said the Internet was a place where overheated language and vicious personal attacks were often tolerated, even encouraged. But, he said, “I would caution against holding candidates responsible for what their bloggers and blog consultants have said in the past.”

“The blogosphere is a conversation; it’s not reportage,” Mr. Hynes said. “We’re all trying to figure out, what does this mean for the convergence of all these media? It’s a Pandora’s box and no one knows where it’s going to end up.”

Mr. Hynes remained on the McCain campaign staff and maintained his personal blog.

A story invented and driven by the right-wing blogosphere resulted in a prominent discussion in The New York Times of the serious ethical lapses and extremist views of John McCain's personal blogger, and even the presence of anti-semitic slurs against Henry Waxman by that blogger's readers in the right-wing blogosphere. McCain's own blogger was thus forced defensively to contradict the central premise of the right-wing scandal: "I would caution against holding candidates responsible for what their bloggers and blog consultants have said in the past."

Earlier versions of that Times story (I believe) -- as well as other press accounts by reporters who originally echoed the right-wing narrative -- also ended up featuring excerpts of statements made in the past by Bill Donohue which reveal what a profoundly inappropriate and discredited source he is on any topic, let alone for sitting as arbiter over which viewpoints are too offensive for the mainstream. And multiple stories credited the liberal blogosphere -- citing MyDD and Chris Bowers -- as the effective shield against demands that Edwards sacrifice these bloggers at the altar of Michelle Malkin, Bill Donohue and Fox News.

The blogosphere fundamentally altered the arc of this story. All of the balancing information which made its way into the national press within a very short period of time was found by bloggers, amplified by other bloggers and by groups such as Media Matters, and that shaped the story -- both how it was discussed and its ultimate outcome -- in numerous ways. And it re-inforced the idea that the rotted network composed of the Michelle Malkins and Bill O'Reillys and Bill Donohues cannot drive media stories unilaterally anymore and cannot force major presidential candidates to capitulate to their demands.

It is still the case that the political impressions of most Americans are shaped by how our dominant media outlets discuss political issues. That is true for every issue from the seemingly inconsequential (staffing decisions of the Edwards campaign) to whatever issue you want to say is the "most important" -- Iraq, Iran, presidential power, debates over domestic policy, and everything in between. How the national media reports on all of these matters, which sources they depict as credible, and the factions that influence and shape that reporting is still the single most influential factor in the outcome of all political disputes.

We are in the position we are in as a country because there has been really no effective counterweight to the lowly, deceitful and filth-peddling right-wing network which has dominated our political discourse and the media's coverage of it. That is clearly changing -- slowly perhaps, though still meaningfully (which is why the Edwards campaign felt sufficiently comfortable in defying these pressures, and it is also why -- as Time's Ana Marie Cox surprisingly acknowledges (while linking to FDL) -- the most astute and insightful reporting on the Libby trial (and so many other news items) is coming from the blogosphere, not the national press).

As long as Matt Drudge -- and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, etc. -- rule the world of national journalists, little can be accomplished on any front. Diluting their influence and forcing actual facts into these public discussions is of the utmost urgency, and the growing (though admittedly still incomplete) ability of the blogosphere to achieve that objective is the true significance of the Edwards story.

UPDATE: For a highly representative sampling of the bulging corruption that drives our national media, see this "debate" on MSNBC today concerning the Edwards controversy. MSNBC had an extremely balanced panel of one Republican strategist and one "Democratic" strategist -- Lieberman crony Dan Gerstein -- who, needless to say, agreed on everything (the right-wing protesters were completely right and Edwards made a horrible choice that will doom him). There was not a peep in dissent from anyone.

Pay particular attention to the morbidly hilarious last line of the exchange. This brings back memories of all of those pre-war "debates" between all sorts of experts and pundits whose only source of disagreement was whether we should invade Iraq in March or in April.

Statement of the Edwards campaign

(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

Subject: EDWARDS STATEMENT ON CAMPAIGN BLOGGERS AMANDA MARCOTTE AND MELISSA McEWEN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 8, 2007

EDWARDS STATEMENT ON CAMPAIGN BLOGGERS AMANDA MARCOTTE AND MELISSA McEWEN

Chapel Hill, North Carolina -- The statements of Senator John Edwards, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen in reference to their work as independent bloggers before joining the Edwards campaign are below.

Senator John Edwards:

"The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word. We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in."

Amanda Marcotte:

"My writings on my personal blog, Pandagon on the issue of religion are generally satirical in nature and always intended strictly as a criticism of public policies and politics. My intention is never to offend anyone for his or her personal beliefs, and I am sorry if anyone was personally offended by writings meant only as criticisms of public politics. Freedom of religion and freedom of expression are central rights, and the sum of my personal writings is a testament to this fact."

Melissa McEwen:

"Shakespeare's Sister is my personal blog, and I certainly don't expect Senator Edwards to agree with everything I've posted. We do, however, share many views - including an unwavering support of religious freedom and a deep respect for diverse beliefs. It has never been my intention to disparage people's individual faith, and I'm sorry if my words were taken in that way."

_______________________________________________

This was a smart and potentially significant move by the Edwards campaign on several levels, the most significant of which is that it signals that Democratic campaigns aren't going to capitulate to contrived controversies manufactured by the lowest and basest precincts in our political culture. There is more Edwards could have done with this, but still, he stood resolute in the face of an intense and ugly coordinated media/right-wing swarm and rendered it impotent.

Nobody is going to be casting their votes a year from now based on the pre-campaign postings of Amanda Marcotte or Melissa McEwan, and the only ones who will ever speak of this again would never have voted for Edwards in the first place, and only raised these issues in the first place with the intent to harm Edwards specifically and Democrats generally. That faction is the last one to which Edwards and other Democrats ought to pay any attention. John McCain will have to spend the next year pandering to the Bill Donahues and Michelle Malkins of the world. There is no reason John Edwards should, and it is good to see that he will not.

UPDATE: The Associated Press' Nedra Pickler writes a much more balanced article on this matter than the one which made its way yesterday into The Washington Post. In today's story, Pickler conveys the important point made by McEwan on her blog that McEwan enthusiastically voted for a Catholic (John Kerry) for President in 2004, which suggests that she is hardly an "anti-Catholic bigot."

It is true that McEwan opposes specific Catholic doctrine applied by some right-wing Catholics to political questions, which -- despite Bill Donohue's best efforts -- is not the same as being "anti-Catholic" (just as opposing Pat Robertson's political agenda does not make one "anti-Christian," nor does opposing the policies of specific right-wing Israelis or American Jews make one "anti-semitic," nor does opposing specific views of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton make one "racist"). The language they used was inflammatory -- almost certainly deliberately so -- but that hardly makes it "bigoted."

Pickler also includes -- as she and The New York Times should have done originally -- a small though illustrative excerpt from that Civility Crusader, Bill Donohue: "Donohue also doesn't shy away from blunt language sometimes in his criticism of gays, Hollywood's control by 'secular Jews who hate Christianity' and even the Edwards bloggers, whom he referred to as 'brats' in an interview Wednesday on MSNBC." That (along with Michelle Malkin and the likes of Jonah Goldberg) is who was masquerading as the Guardians of Elevated Political Discourse, and that is why it was so important not to indulge this charade.

UPDATE II: In Comments, Zack says:

This is all a big game to the right, and they were prepared to declare victory no matter what Edwards did. Edward’s careful response seems to have taken away the “anti-Catholic bigotry” from most of them (Donahue excepted, I’m sure), but they’ve now found a new tact.

Sister Toldjah loves this comment:

This is just a great endorsement for Edwards for President. If he doesn’t have the stones to stand up to the nutroots, I’m sure he’ll really be just the perfect man to stand up to Islamic Terrorists and Iran and North Korea. He’ll need a pair of knee pads pronto if he becomes President.

Did you notice how fast they switched gears? They’ve already nearly forgotten about the religious angle that they began with. ….. Yeah, well, okay, maybe he’s not an anti-Christian bigot, but by gosh he sure is a girly-man.

This wasn’t ever about “God-cum” - it was about intimidating those who disagree with them. If one smear doesn’t stick, they’ll just keep throwing them until one does. It’s a game they play to divert attention from the real issues and provide amusement for each other with their insults.

Other than screeching that the Terrorists are coming to get us all and that anyone who disagrees is themselves a Terrorist, the pro-Bush right has no ideas, no policies, no substance. They thrive on deeply personal lynch mob behavior -- waving purple hearts with band-aids, prattling on about John Kerry's joke and Nancy Pelosi's plane, searching for new scalps to satisfy their mob cravings, and depicting their political opponents as weak, girly, traitorous losers. That is the extent of them, and that is all this Edwards hysteria was ever about. And by brushing it aside, Edwards treated it as the petty nuisance it is, rather than endowing it and them with unwarranted credibility.

The idea that the right wing political movement in this country -- led by the filth-spewing likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, the Clinton impeachment obsessives, and all sorts of Daily Treason Accusers -- is committed to high levels of civility in our political discourse and sensitivity to the beliefs of others, and therefore was very, very offended by the commentary of these bloggers, is an absurd and transparent joke.

There is a reason that two of the most bigoted and offensive public figures in our political landscape -- Bill Donohue and Michelle Malkin -- led their crusade. That Donohue and Malkin were holding themselves out as the arbiter of proper political discourse and anti-bigotry standards reveals all one needs to know about the corrupt roots of this "controversy."

UPDATE III: Over at National Review's Media Blog, Steve Spruiell speculates (accurately, I believe):

This [Edwards announcement today] contradicts a report on Salon.com yesterday that the Edwards campaign had fired the bloggers.

I've previously been interviewed by Alex Koppelman (one of the Salon reporters who wrote the story), and from my experience with him he seems like a diligent and professional reporter — indicating that Salon's report was probably well-founded. So at one point, it's likely that the Edwards campaign had decided to fire the bloggers, only to reconsider in the face of pressure from left-wing netroots activists.

I also believe (without knowing for certain, though based on numerous facts) that this is, more or less, what happened. In the age where candidates listened only to their Beltway consultants, and national journalists were the exclusive gatekeeper and megaphone for all political opinion, I believe virtually every campaign would have fired these bloggers immediately. Why risk the controversy over low-level staffers, the super-smart consultant-rationale would have suggested.

But now there are multiple and disparate constituencies, and I don't think there is much question that the blogosphere enabled Edwards to keep these bloggers. I do not believe bloggers forced him to do something he did not want to do. I think it's more likely that the blogosphere created the option of keeping them and enabled Edwards to choose that option, though certainly the prospect of alienating all of the liberal blogosphere -- bloggers, readers and donors alike -- was a factor in Edwards' decision, and it should have been. Candidates should listen more to the people supporting their campaign and less to the national journalists and consultant class which previously dictated all of their decisions.

UPDATE IV: Salon's Koppelman and Traister just posted a new article essentially confirming the above theory:

After personal phone calls to the bloggers from the candidate, the Edwards campaign has rehired the bloggers who were fired yesterday, according to sources inside and close to the campaign.

Salon reported yesterday that on Wednesday morning the Edwards camp fired Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, the two bloggers whose hiring had sparked an uproar by conservatives. That information was confirmed by sources in and close to the campaign. But almost as soon as the decision had been communicated to the bloggers, a struggle arose within the campaign about possibly reversing it, the sources said, as the liberal blogosphere exploded.

As I said, I think that reflects well on both the Edwards campaign and, even more so, on the emerging ability of the blogosphere to positively influence the outcome of matters such as this one.

Gen. Pace: they "don't have a clue how democracy works"

(updated below)

That this is even notable at all, or that it has to be said, is by itself significant:

A top Pentagon leader weighed in yesterday on the war debate and appeared to undercut the argument advanced by the White House and many GOP lawmakers that a congressional debate challenging the Bush plan would hurt troop morale.

"There's no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the House Armed Services Committee. He added that potential enemies may take some comfort from the rancor but said they "don't have a clue how democracy works."

It is not, of course, only "potential enemies" who "don't have a clue how democracy works." The same can be said for Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman and their most extremist war supporters who spent the last month insisting that debates over the Leader's decisions must be stifled and that those who express opposition are helping the Enemy. The spectacle of watching American political leaders and their loyal pundit-allies instruct Americans of their duties to "be quiet for six or nine months" with regard to the Leader's actions is almost too extreme for words.

One of the more egregious examples of not "having a clue of how democracy works" -- independent through related -- is documented here by Isaac Chotiner, who highlights remarks by former federal prosecutor and current National Review commentator Andrew McCarthy, in which McCarthy accuses pro bono lawyers for Guantanamo detainees of "volunteering to help the enemy use [] our courts as a weapon of war against us" (and, just incidentally, someone should ask former prosecutor Rudy Giluiani his view of that particular controversy). That was preceded by The Corner's Clifford May's dissemination of absolutely reckless and fact-free innuendo that these lawyers are receiving secret payments from Saudi Arabia and other Terrorists helpers.

It is only those who are losing a debate who have a desire to suppress it. And it is only those who are acting illegally who are desperate to avoid judicial scrutiny of their behavior. In 2002, attempts to equate scrutiny and criticism of the Bush movement with pro-Terrorism and anti-Americanism was a potent and effective tool of intimidation. But now, it just seems desperate, the last gasps of a political movement which is dying and which knows it is, and whose only hope is to forcibly coerce acceptance of their views -- and foreclose examination of them -- by insisting that open debates are themselves improper and therefore must cease at once.

That rationale is the hallmark of every petty tyrant, and (as surging anti-war sentiment and the last election demonstrate) most Americans, when freed from exploitive fear-mongering, instinctively recoil from it. When even the Bush administration's top General publicly repudiates their principal weapon of coercion, it is a clear sign of how weakened and discredited they have become.

UPDATE: I'm reminded in comments that Anonymous Liberal has written the definitive post on the matter of the Guantanamo lawyers, the threats directed at them by Bush Pentagon official Cully Stimson, and the smearing of them by National Review Cornerites, including (needless to say) Mark Steyn.

Blog news

(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)

In order to finalize a few remaining design and functionality issues, this blog's move to Salon, originally scheduled for today, will instead take place this Monday, February 12.

UPDATE: In the meantime, Steve Benen provides some suggestions for stories for intrepid reporters who are interested in exploring the connection between political figures and hate-spewing pundits.

And in one paragraph, TBogg illustrates the true and obvious absurdity at the core of the "Edwards controversy":

Rick "The Lesser" Moran writes about Amanda:

Her writing is full of so many half truths, manufactured criticisms, dead-wrong assumptions, and a child like ignorance of the emotional universe inhabited by normal men and women that trying to decipher her scribblings – once you can get by the obscenities and work your way through the incoherence – is a task best left to a psychiatrist.

...and then he invites his readers to go see the ever-sensible Michelle Malkin and Dan Riehl.

I could have stayed up all night and not come up with anything near that funny...

It would be as if The New York Times published a story about how the Edwards campaign found itself "in hot water" over offensive comments -- all based on complaints from Bill Donohue -- or if a political movement whose leading pundit was Rush Limbaugh was able to spark controversy by pretending to be upset by vulgar and offensive remarks from bloggers.

UPDATE II: An earnest, pious Jonah Goldberg, today, on how his political voice "as a writer" has "grown up":

You know, Jim [Geraghty] does make a good case [that this controversy will make online political debates more civil] and I hope he's right. I think about this a lot. I get a lot of grief from longtime readers about how I've "matured" or "grown up." And the truth is I have. Though I still think there's a lot of room left for humor (and once the book's done and put to bed, I'll bring back some pull-my-finger G-Filing), I'm basically burnt out on the smash-mouth stuff. When I criticize younger lefty bloggers for their excesses, I get a lot of "Hello Mr. Kettle, pot's calling on line one" grief. That's all fair to a point. But the basic fact is I don't do that stuff very much any more because it's cliched and boring to me . . .

Simply as a writer, when I see the nasty stuff now, on both the left and the right, my first reaction is to think how easy — and therefore uninteresting — it is. The Edwards bloggers' anti-Catholic diatribes bore me more than they offend me because they are precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from a living cliche who can't imagine the other side might be worth listening too.

Jonah Goldberg's Regnery book, to be released at some point, presumably:



From the publisher's description of Jonah's book (the subtitle is The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton):

LIBERAL FASCISM offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg shows that the original fascists were really on the Left and that liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton, have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism. . . . he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.

I know this point has been made before, but this Edwards "controversy" and the accompanying lectures are really just too much to bear. We should absolutely not be hearing sermons about civility in our political discourse and how much one has "grown up" from someone who is about to release a book "documenting" how his political opponents "advocate[] policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism."

The tiniest amount of shame and self-awareness would prevent a lecture like that. But that is what this whole "Edwards controversy" is -- protests over incivility from a political movement that spent several years talking about the spots on Bill Clinton's penis and which, as its principal debating weapon, routinely labels their political opponents traitors, lunatics, cockroaches, and Nazis -- or "the C word." That the press falls for it without pointing out the practices of those who are complaining is, quite candidly, just maddening.

UPDATE III: More of Jonah's civil, substantive, adversary-respecting form of argumentation is here. As you read that, keep in mind that this is the same person who wrote today about how much he hopes Marcotte and McEwan are fired because they drag down the elevated political discourse in our "Republic."

UPDATE IV: Leon Wolf of the Bush-loving blog RedState has been hired as the "e-campaign coordiantor" by the Sam Brownback campaign. Please forward by email, or leave in comments, any worthwhile material from Leon's past writings.

UPDATE V: A small but amusing start: From Leon Wolf, upon Brownback's announcement two short months ago (emphasis added): "I'm an unabashed Brownback supporter - I just donated to his PAC, but when (not if) he loses, I'll get on board with the winner, unless the winner is Rudy. Romney and McCain are not my first choices, but they're 'good enough,' I suppose" (h/t Crust). As Crust notes: "Doing a Google site search of redstate.com for "Leon H Wolf" gets 42,500 hits, so there's a lot of source material out there. His list of stories runs to 39 pages, but the juiciest stuff is likely in his comments."

A new Beltway term -- "Oversight"

It has been six long, dysfunctional years since it made an appearance in Washington, so one can be forgiven if one has forgotten what it looks like, but this thing called Congressional "oversight" over administration conduct is now returning to Washington. Henry Waxman convened a hearing today, with former Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer as the featured witness, to begin looking into war profiteering in Iraq, and specifically, how much money was squandered through corruption and cronyism on Iraq's "reconstruction".

This was just the first day, and there is nothing cataclysmic, but several excerpts from the hearing illustrate the importance and potential potency of oversight in uncovering wrongdoing by the Executive branch. The first clip entails an examination of the shoddy accounting supervision and cronyism which ensured that there was no meaningful supervision over the expenditure of funds.



The second clip entails what Chairman Waxman has made clear is but the start of what will be their aggressive investigation into this report by The Washington Post that the politically appointed Pentagon official in charge of CPA hiring, Jim O'Beirne (husband of National Review's Kate O'Beirne) used a litmus test of political loyalty, rather than competence, to fill those positions:

Applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration. . . . To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.

Smith said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000."

As Steve Gilliard noted: "People like [National Review's] Michael Ledeen's daughter, Simone, were given the task of rebuilding Iraq's economy."




This last clip illustrates the empty promises made by the administration to provide better supervision and coordination for the reconstruction expenditures:



Again, this was just the first day. And this is one topic. But aggressive oversight -- relentless pursuit of information, compelled disclosure and testimony via subpoena, confrontation between the branches regarding oversight powers of Congress - - can be a very potent weapon for shining light on what this administration has been doing for the last six years while its obscenely loyal, duty-abdicating Congressional servants purposely looked the other way. When conducted the right way, these hearings can be dramatic, publicity-generating, and leave a lasting impression in the public mind. There are many worthy and necessary areas awaiting meaningful inquiry.

Rudy Giuliani's compatibility with the Republican Christian base

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

Kevin Drum voices what seems to be the prevailing sentiment regarding Rudy Giuliani: "I don't think Giuliani has the faintest chance of winning a presidential contest in 2008, which is the reason I insisted a few days ago that the Republican field was so poor this cycle." I think the opposite is true -- Giuliani is by far the most formidable, and most dangerous, Republican candidate, and the notion that he cannot win the Republican nomination is grounded in several myths.

There is a widespread assumption that within the Republican "base" -- specifically among the party's religious "conservatives" -- there are two distinct categories of issues: (a) foreign policy issues (relating to terrorism, Iraq, etc.) and (b) issues of religion and morality (gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, etc.). Conventional wisdom holds that Giuliani's views on the former are acceptable, even exciting, for the base, but his views on the latter are anathema to them, even fatal to his chances for attracting their support.

But for the bulk of religious conservatives, foreign policy issues are not distinct from religious and moral issues. Our Middle East foreign policy is a critical, really the predominant, item on their moral and religious agenda. Among the Christian right, aggressive, war-seeking policies in the Middle East -- specifically against Muslim religiosity and Israel's enemies -- are embraced on moral and theological grounds far more than on geopolitical grounds.

James Dobson was a leading advocate of the invasion of Iraq, telling Larry King as early as September, 2002:

KING: What do you make of going into Iraq? Does any part of that question your Christian values about going to war?

DOBSON: No, not at all. It doesn't. No, I -- you know Saddam Hussein is a tyrant, and he is out of the mold of Hitler and Stalin and others. And you can't negotiate with a tyrant. One who is blood thirsty, one who's willing to kill innocent people. You can't do that. And he'll take your shorts if you try. And I think there's only one thing to do, and that's go in there and confront him. I just can't imagine Adolf Hitler negotiating in good faith or Stalin or Pol Pot or any of the other tyrants.

For Dobson, the impact of 9/11 on America was primarily spiritual: “we had this resurgence of patriotism and this renewed religious faith, belief in God,” and it was that “renewed religious faith” which drove him to urge that the U.S. wage war on the Evil tyrant. In the same interview, Dobson said: “I feel very strongly about Israel. You know it is surrounded by its enemies. And it exists primarily because God has willed it to exist, I think, according to scripture.”

Since 9/11, various incidents (Ann Coulter's demand to convert Muslim countries to Christianity, Gen. Boykin's casting of the War on Terror in terms of a religious war, Franklin Graham's administration-supported conversion efforts, the controversy sparked by Pope Benedict's anti-Muslim commentary, even the President's view of his policies as a "crusade") have left no doubt that, in key isolated Bush-supporting circles, the “War on Terror” – and specifically more wars on more Islamic states such as Iran – is supported because such wars are seen as religious wars to be waged in defense of Christianity. Some of the most aggressive advocates of war against not only Iraq but also Iran prominently include leading Christian evangelicals, who have stressed the centrality of these hawkish foreign policy views to their moral and religious agenda.

As The New York Times reported late last year, Rev. John Hagee "called the conflict [between Hezbollah and Israel] 'a battle between good and evil' and said support for Israel was 'God's foreign policy.'" Gary Bauer said of Iran's President Ahmadinejad: "I am not sure there is a foreign leader who has made a bigger splash in American culture since Khrushchev, certainly among committed Christians,' he said."

In a March, 2002 speech, Oklahama Sen. James Inhofe blamed the 9/11 attacks on America's insufficiently supportive "spiritual" posture towards Israel: “One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States was that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them."

Giuliani's talent for expressing prosecutor-like righteous anger towards "bad people" -- as well as his well-honed ability to communicate base-pleasing rhetoric towards Islamic extremists -- are underappreciated. I don't think any candidate will be able to compete with his ability to convey a genuine hard-line against Middle Eastern Muslims (see here for one representative maneuver), and that is the issue that -- admittedly with some exceptions -- dominates the Christian conservative agenda more than gay marriage and abortion (concerns which he can and will minimize by promising to appoint more Antonin Scalias and Sam Alitos to the Supreme Court, something he emphasized last night in a highly amicable interview with Sean Hannity).

The second issue typically used to argue that Giuliani cannot attract the necessary support from the party's Christian conservative faction is the wreck of a personal life he has suffered -- the two broken marriages, the publicly documented adultery, his cohabitation with a gay couple, etc. But there are few things that are clearer than the fact that Christian conservatives care far less about a person's actual conduct and behavior (and specifically whether it comports to claimed Christian morality standards) than they do about the person's moral and political rhetoric, and even more so, a person's ability to secure political power.

Two of the most admired political figures among Christian conservatives -- Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich -- have the most shameful, tawdry, and degenerate personal lives (using the claimed standards of that political faction). Yet the gross disparity between their personal conduct and the religious and moral values they espouse has not injured their standing in the slightest among the "values voters." Here, to take but one of countless examples, is how Kate O'Beirne speaks of Rush Limbaugh:

Rush's angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the "facts." We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.

Rush Limbaugh has been married and "engaged" more times than one can count, has had a series of tawdry unmarried affairs and break-ups, developed a pleasure-providing and illegal drug habit, and has been caught with fistfuls of unprescribed Viagra while returning from a weekend jaunt to the Dominican Republic. But the pious and moral O'Beirne, speaking on behalf of Christian conservatives, says that they "trust his good judgment" and his "unerring decency."

The measuring stick for someone's "morality" among the bulk of Christian conservatives -- and certainly for their political leaders -- is the rhetoric someone spews, not whether their actions or personal conduct comport with the moral sermons. Supporting Giuliani would hardly be the first time Christian conservatives chose as their standard-bearer someone whose actual personal behavior deviates as fundamentally as can be from the moral standards which Christian conservatives claim to embrace. If anything, that discrepancy between their leaders' sermons and their leaders' behavior seems par for the course (the incident most likely to harm Giuliani in any meaningful way is when he dressed in drag, as highly alienating an act as possible for a political movement that venerates, above all else, those who play act pure masculinity and substance-less poses of physical courage).

Rudy Giuliani is, I think, by the far the smartest and most politically talented candidate in the Republican field, a fact to which most residents of New York during his mayoralty - including those who dislike him -- would likely attest. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, he won two elections, including a landslide for his second term. And he does have in his past many incidents which will uniquely appeal to Christian conservatives, such as the war he waged periodically on works of art and other cultural expressions which offended his religious sensibilities.

As this excellent and comprehensive article documents, Giuliani is an "authoritarian narcissist" -- plagued by an unrestrained prosecutor's mentality -- who loves coercive government power (especially when vested in his hands) and hates dissent above all else. He would make George Bush look like an ardent lover of constitutional liberties. He is probably the absolute worst and most dangerous successor to George Bush under the circumstances, but his political talents and prospects for winning are being severely underestimated.

UPDATE: To clarify a couple of points arising out of the discussion in Comments: there are, of course, some Christian Republican voters who will not vote for Giuliani exclusively because of his position on social issues. But the influence of those type of voters -- single-minded social issues voters -- is often overstated. There is a reason he is leading in most Republican public opinion polls.

A significant part of the Republican "base" cares more, perhaps far more, about hawkish Middle East policies than about gay marriage and abortion. They are still looking for their Churchillian hero, and Giuliani's crime-busting, 9/11-hero-posturing, prosecutorial toughness (staring down mafia leaders, terrorists and Wall St. criminals) makes him the most credible authoritarian Leader figure in the field. There is often a view of the "evangelical Republican" voter that is more monolithic than is warranted; they crave "strong" authoritarian leaders as much as they crave anything else.

More significantly, who is the candidate whom the hard-core, single-issue Religious Right voters are going to support? They dislike McCain intensely, and Romney's social conservative credentials are now very much in doubt. The appeal of George Bush as a candidate was that he had both establishment/front-runner credibility and evangelical appeal. That role was supposed to be filled by George Allen, but with his disappearance, there is no such candidate. For the hard-core religious voter, Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee will be more appealing than Rudy Giuliani, but it is very hard to envision either of them winning, which illustrates the main point: Giuliani's stance on social issues will lose him some votes, but it is far, far from certain that it will preclude his winning the nomination.

UPDATE II: Evangelical Bush-lover Hugh Hewitt -- who resides at the intersection of all of the most extremist factions comprising the GOP "base" -- has this to say today:

Mayor Giuliani and Governor Romney are eager to appear on media preferred by the center-right. Senator McCain sticks primarily to Beltway elite shows . . . Mayor Giuliani had a great appearance on Hannity & Colmes last night . . .The Governor and the Mayor seems disposed to engage the grassroots that way.

Powerline's John Hinderaker -- as GOP base-like as it gets -- featured a You Tube video of Giuliani's appearance with Hannity and said: "It was a good reminder of how able a politician and leader Giuliani is, and also of the areas where his record diverges from the party's base. Giuliani approaches the social issues like abortion in what I think is the most effective way; he doesn't back off from his moderate-to-liberal policy views, but says that as President, he would appoint strict constructionist judges."

Given that the bulk of Hannity's questions were about Giuliani's positions on social issues, these favorable reactions from highly representative GOP dead-ender types is, I think, significant and a sign that fewer people in the GOP base will write Giuliani off than is typically assumed.

UPDATE III: Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog examines the transparent rehabilitative propaganda campaign surrounding Giluiani's personal life which was unleashed today via a coordinated effort between the Giuliani campaign and The New York Post (which, incidentally, also included a gushing column from supreme Bush-lover John Podhoretz, in which he insists that conservatives love Giuliani and that he should be considered the front-runner to win the nomination).

Angry, uncivil liberal bloggers

The National Review today promotes Byron York's article on Valerie Plame:


The sheer hatred directed at Valerie Plame by Bush followers has always been intense, extreme, and deeply personal -- even when assessed within the context of their standard operating procedure of despising any government employee, civil servant, and especially any military or intelligence professional who is perceived to have done something politically harmful to the Leader (the textbook case for that were the immediate threats of criminal prosecution directed at former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill after he criticized the Leader upon resigning his position). But for reasons best left to the field of psychology rather than political science, many of them harbor a special, particularly deranged and particularly irrational hatred for Valerie Plame.

In that regard, the decision by National Review to label Plame on its front page as "The C Word" -- please let us dispense with the pretext that they only meant "covert" -- may not be surprising, but it ought to be worth at least a six month moratorium on all of the pious protests over how angry, profane and uncivil "the Left" and "liberal bloggers" are. As York himself fretted in his book, The Vast LeftWing Conspiracy: "The Left is angry—angry at President George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, the 'right-wing media,' and more."

Somewhere along the way it was decided that the most egregious act of "incivility" is not spewing vile ideas or violence-inciting rhetoric, but instead, the absolute worst injury to our body politic, the most disturbing sign of "anger," is the use of naughty words. From National Review's Stanely Kurtz, reviewing Peter Wood's new book on anger in politics:

New Anger is nowhere more at home than in the blogosphere, where so far from being held in check, look-at-me performance anger is the path to quick success. Wood’s section on the “proud maliciousness” of bloggers (titled “Insta-Anger”) will stir debate, yet it’s far from a blanket indictment. The Insta-Pundit himself is off the hook, for example. “[Glenn] Reynolds’ comments are often sardonic but seldom angry,” says Wood. On the other hand, Atrios explaining “Why We Say ‘F***’ a Lot” (expurgation most definitely not in the original) fares far less well at Wood’s hands.

Glenn Reynolds spews bigotry and paranoid rantings as overt as can be imagined, continuously smears the media and political opponents as traitors, calls for one war after the next, disseminates the most baseless and false innuendo virtually on a daily basis, but there is nothing "angry" or "uncivil" about any of that because he refrains from using naughty words.

Indecent accusations and wretched ideology decorated with civil-sounding words are acceptable. But substantive ideas and protests against government action which periodically include a naughty word is an unparalleled bane on civilization that no decent person can accept. Using those (shallow though almost universally accepted) standards, what does National Review's application of "the C Word" to Valerie Plame reveal about its place in our political discourse?

Profile of the Neoconservative Warrior

Mark Steyn is one of the most extremist warmongers in our country and is gripped by the fear that the European race will die out as Muslims breed too rapidly and take over. He has also been as fundamentally wrong as one can be about virtually every issue he has touched. Guess who considers him a foreign policy guru? From a New Yorker profile of the Independent Senator from Connecticut, by Jeffery Goldberg:

Lieberman says that he does, at times, feel isolated. . . .

In another conversation, he told me that he was reading “America Alone,” a book by the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, which argues that Europe is succumbing, demographically and culturally, to an onslaught by Islam, leaving America friendless in its confrontation with Islamic extremism.

“The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics, in Europe particularly,” Lieberman said. “That’s what struck me the most. But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know and what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism.”

Goldberg also includes this seemingly insignificant but quite revealing incident from Lieberman's past:

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

That is about as vivid a profile of the neoconservative warrior mentality as one can get: paranoid and frightened guys who derive personal and emotional fulfillment by giddily cheering on military destruction from a safe and comfortable distance -- who see war as a fun video game to play, through which one can feel the pulsating sensations of power and triumph -- combined with an obsessive focus on, really a paranoia of, the threat of Islamic fantacism to the seeming exclusion of every other issue and danger.

Combine those two traits and one not only finds the principal sentiment that drove us into Iraq and will keep us there for the foreseeable future, but also the primary reason why a majority of Americans now believe that the U.S. will soon be at war with Iran. Lieberman also smears unnamed colleagues who are opposed to the "surge" by claiming: “A lot of Democrats are essentially pacifists and somewhat isolationist," even though there is not a single Democrat, at least not in the Senate, who could be accurately described that way. Lieberman now even wields the lowest smear tactics used by people like Mark Steyn.

Joe Lieberman believes, accurately, that he can openly praise Mark Steyn's foreign policy "theories" (embraced just as enthusiastically by the right-wing blogosphere and Marty Peretz) because -- while everyone to the left of The New Republic is deemed to be a fringe, untouchable radical -- there is no such thing as a right-wing pundit too extreme or pernicious to be declared out of the mainstream.

How the super-smart, insider experts opine

(updated below)

The New Republic has published an article by Benjamin Wittes, a "Guest Scholar" at the Brookings Institution, which argues that the issues surrounding the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping activities are so complex and sophisticated, and raise such grave matters of national security, that not even the most brilliant and well-informed insider-experts -- such as Wittes -- could possibly form an opinion about whether the Bush administration did anything wrong. Only blind, ignorant partisans would claim that President Bush acted wrongfully or illegally here.

Wittes' article is the perfect textbook illustration of how the above-it-all, very-serious, super-smart, self-anointed pundit-experts churn out empty, cliched decrees -- which, though totally devoid of substance, nonetheless enable the Bush movement's worst excesses. Wittes executes this formula perfectly. First comes the Broder-ish tactic of equating and then dismissing both "extremes" in the debate in order to establish one's nonpartisan, elevated, detached objectivity:

Many liberals are convinced that the program represented a deep affront to the rule of law, though they don't know quite what the program was. Many conservatives are no less certain of the program's absolute necessity. And, though they don't know quite what it was either, they are sure as well that President Bush had the authority to implement it--whatever federal law on the subject may happen to say.

Right at the start we learn how very clever and objective Wittes is: both "liberals" and "conservatives" have formed strong opinions about the NSA scandal despite knowing nothing. Thus, those who object to the President's law-breaking are exactly the same as those who defend it: merely loud-mouth partisan extremists -- opposite sides of the same shrill, lowly coin -- who can be scornfully dismissed away as know-nothing hysterics. Such blind ignorance, of course, stands in stark contrast to the very high-minded and insider expertise of Wittes:

Unlike many of these oh-so-confident commentators, I actually know something about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I am one of the very few journalists--to my knowledge, in fact, the only one--who ever physically set foot inside the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. FISA has been a particular interest of mine since the mid-'90s, when I was a young reporter at a legal trade paper and the court it created was the most obscure corner of the federal judiciary. Precisely because nobody knew anything about it, I studied it obsessively. I talked to the judges who heard the government's surveillance requests and to the Justice Department lawyers who advanced these applications. I learned, in some detail, the contours, value, and the limitations of FISA at a time when very few people cared about it.

So what is my assessment of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, informed by my decade of watching the court and the law that underlies it?

I don't know.

Just preliminarily, do The New Republic editors really not realize how adolescent this all sounds? "I actually know something about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." "I am one of the very few journalists--to my knowledge, in fact, the only one--who ever physically set foot inside the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court." "I studied it obsessively." "I learned, in some detail, the contours, value, and the limitations of FISA at a time when very few people cared about it." To The New Republic, this sounds impressive, because they think it constitutes a persuasive (even necessary) foundation for someone to begin an argument by insisting, based on nothing, how much more knowledgable they are than everyone else.

In fact, Wittes' insider credentials are so impressive that he can simply decree the truth about issues without even bothering to offer any rationale or facts at all. His entire article is devoid of any facts or arguments. He simply assures us that he knows so much more about FISA than you do, and because of how much he knows, he realizes that these matters are way too complicated even for him -- let alone for you -- to form an opinion about whether the President did anything wrong here. This is his whole "argument":

I don't know what the program is. I don't know whether it was lawful before the recent change. Truth be told, I don't even understand what the change announced in Gonzales's letter really means. I can arrange the facts in the public record so as to describe a program that would, in my view, offend the Constitution. And I can arrange the facts in the public record so as to describe a program that would not, in my view, offend the Constitution. I can imagine a program outside of FISA that the law should be amended to accommodate. And I can imagine a program that violates the FISA precisely because it involves the kind of warrantless surveillance the law was passed to prevent. What's more, the more I learn about this program, the less I understand it.

For the eager-to-please, self-styled Beltway insider-experts, a failure to form a clear political opinion is the mark of both intellectual and moral superiority, of emotional maturity, and is the hallmark of that most coveted Washington virtue -- seriousness. Unlike you, who has formed one of those dirty opinions that the President has no right to break the law, Wittes understand that these matters are much, much more complex and sophisticated than that -- after all, this involves computers and national security threats and data and things you cannot possibly begin to understand -- and it is only your ignorance, your extremely unserious partisanship, that has enabled you to think that you are in a position to oppose or condemn what George Bush has done here (TNR's Jason Zengerle long ago pronounced that "some of the outrage [over the NSA scandal] is in fact outrageous").

Like most of these pundits, Beltway journalists, and think-tank "fellows," Wittes wants the President's lawbreaking to implicate all sorts of murky and complex matters because, that way, the expertise which Wittes thinks he has would be needed. It would mean that only Wittes, but not you, is qualified to form judgments and that your obligation would be to listen to him and rely on what he says, rather than form your own views. So he asserts that there are all kinds of complicated issues (never identified) which only insiders can understand and which prevent any meaningful opinions to be formed by non-insiders (i.e., the masses).

As is so often true with articles like this one in The New Republic, and similar venues, Wittes' eager attempt to show how much more than everyone else he knows ends up revealing the precise opposite -- a profound ignorance regarding the issues about which he is purporting to enlighten us all. The FISA law, as intended, is one of the clearest laws in the U.S. Code, and the issues raised by the NSA scandal are everything but complicated or murky.

I think everyone other than Wittes and a handful of still-confused Bush followers understands now that the U.S. Code provides that "the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . may be conducted", and FISA itself provides that "A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally (1) engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute."

The administration admits that the eavesdropping it has been conducting outside of the FISA court -- whatever that might entail -- is precisely the type of eavesdropping for which the FISA law requires a court order. And the fact that the administration has now agreed to conduct this same eavesdropping under the purview of the FISA court by itself proves that this eavesdropping is the type covered by FISA (otherwise, the FISA judges would have no jurisdiction to supervise it). For that reason, Wittes' grand conclusion is completely bereft of logic and just factually wrong on every level:

For whatever it's worth, here's my best guess--and, I stress, it's only a guess--about what this NSA program was all about: I suspect it was an earnest attempt to address problems that the drafters of the FISA would have been mortified to learn they had created for the intelligence community. . . .

This hypothesis could be totally wrong. The point is that, without knowing the precise contours of the program, it is simply impossible to evaluate it against a complicated and subtle law written at a time when the computer age was still in its infancy. Some day, we will finally learn what the program really was and why it couldn't, and then could, be approved through the FISA Court. Details will leak, or the technology will become too obsolete to warrant continued protection. When that day comes, those who insist that no possible combination of technology, law, and national emergency could excuse bypassing the court may find themselves embarrassed. . . .

What facts could possibly emerge that make us all realize how Good and Right the President was to break the law, or for us to conclude that he didn't? Wittes doesn't bother to identify such possible facts, because none exist. By definition, none can exist.

FISA -- at least the parts relevant to the administration's lawbreaking -- is not a "complicated and subtle law" except to people who do not understand it or who want purposely to obscure it. And one does not need to know "precise contours of the program" in order to know that the President broke the law. That he engaged in the precise eavesdropping without warrants for which FISA requires warrants renders all of Wittes' very, very complicated and angst-ridden speculation completely irrelevant.

But this is how this sort of pompous, self-styled partisan-transcendence almost always operates. They think that things like emphatic beliefs and principles -- and especially stern criticism of our Serious National Security Leaders -- are for the lowly, anti-intellectual masses. The true guardians of wisdom and serious political thought in our society struggle endlessly with complex intellectual dilemmas and never reach any definitive conclusions because they are too smart and too serious for things like convictions or beliefs or things as shrill and irresponsible as accusations of wrongdoing against a sitting wartime President (the classic case illustrating this mindset was when The New Republic's Jonathan Chait chided those whom he revealingly labelled as "partisan hysterics" -- meaning those who objected to his magazine's defense of Ann Coulter and thus, unlike the complex and thoughtful Chait, failed to appreciate what a "clever, interesting, very well-executed" intellectual achievement it was).

The impact of this petty, self-regarding mentality is hard to overstate. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it manifested as endless condemnation against war opponents on the ground that war opponents were simply too shrill and emphatic and failed to grapple with all of the fascinating, multi-layered, theoretical challenges which any serious, complex political thinker had to confront when pondering Iraq.

And the same thing is occurring now with Iran. Only "partisan hysterics" would take the position that a military attack on Iran is unwarranted, unnecessary, and insane. More sophisticated, trans-partisan, serious thinkers understand that the issue is far more complex than that and cannot be reduced to such crass partisan certainties.

This really illustrates the core of why our pundit class and Beltway opinion-making mechanisms are so corrupt and worthless, but also so destructive. The whole point -- the only objective -- of Wittes' article, and of columns and articles from most of our establishment pundits, is to establish their own special place of wisdom and insight. To achieve that, they reduce all political matters to nothing more than grand intellectual puzzles, and equate any real beliefs with primitive ignorance. That is what they mean by heinous, lowly "partisanship" -- genuine political convictions.

There is no place for hard-core beliefs or passion and especially not for anger. Such emotions are just the misguided stirrings of the masses. And thus, a President and his political movement start disastrous wars, are provoking still new ones, systematically and deliberately break the law, destroy U.S. credibility, and introduce a whole array of radical and destructive measures. But those are all just fascinating intellectual matters which we should ponder with delicacy and civility and mild, restrained discourse. None of them warrants any strong reactions or condemnations.

And so the super-smart, insider pundit class merrily buzzes along, never forming a definitive thought or opinion about anything other than to haughtily condemn those who object to what the President and his political movement have done and plan to do. Regarding the destruction which this President is wreaking on the country, Wittes summarizes how the truly smart, sober, non-partisan experts (as opposed to the partisan hysterics) should react: "'I don't know' seems like a good place to me."

UPDATE: The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin has published a superb list of basic journalistic rules which ought not be controversial but which are nonetheless routinely violated by our nation's press corps (h/t Jay Ackroyd and Christy). Just fathom how much more effective and meaningful our media would be if they complied with these minimal guidelines.

Enforced orthodoxies and Iran

(updated below)

On Thursday, the neoconservative New York Sun published a remarkable article reporting on an event to be held that night by AIPAC, at which Hillary Clinton was to deliver the keynote address and John Edwards was to appear at the pre-speech cocktail party. The article made several points which are typically deemed off-limits to opponents of neoconservatism -- ones which almost invariably provoke accusations of anti-semitism when made by others.

First, the Sun noted how important AIPAC's support and financial contributions are to presidential candidates:

"When it comes to important gatherings like this, there is going to be a lot of pressure on the major candidates to not let one of their competitors have the room to themselves," a Democratic strategist [and former Joe Lieberman aide], Daniel Gerstein, said.

Tonight's event is the first time any of the 2008 candidates have competed for attention in the same room since they launched their campaigns in earnest. It is also an important illustration of just how much stock all of the presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, will put in the pro- Israel community, particularly for campaign dollars.

Then, the Sun emphasized how vital it was for presidential candidates to attract contributions from New York Jewish groups generally, and how such contributions (as is true for all interest groups) are available only to those candidates who support those groups' so-called "pro-Israel" agenda:

A Democratic political consultant who worked on President Clinton 's re-election campaign, Hank Sheinkopf, noted that the Aipac dinner always draws a parade of politicians.

New York is the ATM for American politicians. Large amounts of money come from the Jewish community," he said. "If you're running for president and you want dollars from that group, you need to show that you're interested in the issue that matters most to them."

And, according to the Sun, what do presidential candidates have to do in order to ensure access to "the ATM for American politicians" -- the "large amounts of money from the Jewish community" in New York? What is the "issue that matters most to them"? Belligerence towards Iran:

Indeed, how to deal with Iran is likely to be the next majority foreign policy conundrum the 2008 presidential candidates face.

While Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton have different positions on how to deal with the Iraq war, each has used harsh language on Iran.

The Sun also highlighted how vital (what it calls) "the circuit of influential Jewish donors" is to Hillary Clinton specifically:

Mrs. Clinton, who has opted out of the public campaign financing system, has tapped into the circuit of influential Jewish donors for years and has strong support in the community. A spokesman for Aipac, Joshua Block, said yesterday that the senator and former first lady has "an extremely consistent and strong record of support on issues that are important to the pro- Israel community."

"She is an extraordinary leader on those issues in the United States Senate," he said.

So, according to The New York Sun (and the sources it cites): (1) financial support from groups like AIPAC is indispensable for presidential candidates; (2) the New York Jewish community of "influential" donors is a key part of the "ATM for American politicians"; (3) the issue which they care about most is Iran; and (4) they want a hawkish, hard-line position taken against Iran. And the presidential candidates -- such as Clinton and Edwards -- are embracing AIPAC's anti-Iran position in order to curry favor with that group.

If any public figure made those same points, they would be excoriated, accused of all sorts of heinous crimes, and forced into repentance rituals (ask Wes Clark). But this is what the New York Sun reported on Thursday.

As expected, Sen. Clinton matched Edwards' hard-line anti-Iran rhetoric by including all sorts of hawkish threats in her AIPAC speech:

Calling Iran a danger to the U.S. and one of Israel's greatest threats, U.S. senator and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said "no option can be taken off the table" when dealing with that nation. . . . "We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force," she said.

But according to the equally neoconservative New York Post, Clinton's speech was poorly received by many of the AIPAC members, because she committed the crime of suggesting that diplomacy (presumably as opposed to war) ought to be attempted first in order to resolve these issues with Iran:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton drew grumbles at a pro-Israel dinner in Times Square last night when she encouraged "engaging" with Iran before taking stronger action to keep it nuke-free. . . .

Clinton's remarks at the Marriott Marquis were met with little applause, and after she left the stage, several people said they were put off by the presidential candidate. "This is the wrong crowd to do that with," said one person at the dinner, noting the pro-Israel crowd wanted to hear tougher rhetoric.

Is there anything that Wes Clark said that is not included in these articles from the Sun and the Post? No, there is not. In fact, what Clark said is but a small subset of what these articles documented.

It is simply true that there are large and extremely influential Jewish donor groups which are agitating for a U.S. war against Iran, and that is the case because those groups are devoted to promoting Israel's interests and they perceive it to be in Israel's interests for the U.S. to militarily confront Iran. That is what the Sun and the Post have made clear.

There is just no point in denying that or pretending it is not the case, and in any event, the way in which these groups have ratcheted up their explicit anti-Iran advocacy has made it impossible for these facts to be concealed any longer (and, as I have noted before, neoconservatives have been increasingly arguing that American Jews of all political stripes are compelled to support the Bush administration because of its supposedly "pro-Israel" policies -- a claim grounded in the very "dual loyalty" theories which they claim to find so offensive and outrageous when advanced by others).

It goes without saying that there are other factions and motives behind the push for war with Iran besides right-wing Jewish groups. There is the generic warmongering, militarism and oil-driven expansionism represented by Dick Cheney. And there are the post-9/11 hysterics and bigots who crave ever-expanding warfare and slaughter of Muslims in the Middle East for reasons having nothing to do with Israel. There are evangelical Christians who crave more Middle Eastern war on religious and theological grounds, and there are some who just believe that the U.S. can and should wage war against whatever countries seem not like to us. And, it should also be noted, a huge portion of American Jews, if not the majority, do not share this agenda.

Nonetheless, the influence of self-proclaimed "pro-Israeli" American Jewish groups in helping to push the country into what looks more and more every day to be an inevitable conflict with Iran is very significant and cannot be ignored. Along those lines, I want to return to the David Brooks column which I wrote about on Thursday -- a column I criticized on the ground that Brooks falsely asserted, in essence, that "Americans" want continued U.S. military domination of the Middle East, and that the disaster of Iraq hasn't changed their views on that topic, even though polling data show precisely the opposite.

Despite all of that, Brooks did make a point which is both true and important -- namely, that among all of the leading presidential candidates, and within the dominant American political discourse, the only view that is really represented is the view that America should continue to militarily dominate the Middle East:

Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world.

Look at the leaders emerging amid this crisis. The two major Republican presidential contenders are John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, the most aggressive internationalists in a party that used to have an isolationist wing.

The Democrats, meanwhile, campaigned for Congress in 2006 by promising to increase the size of the military. The presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, is the leader of the party’s hawkish wing and recently called for a surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan. John Edwards, the most “leftward” major presidential contender, just delivered a bare-knuckled speech in which he castigated the Bush administration for not being tough enough with Iran. “To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table,” Edwards warned.

Even though Americans do not support military intervention in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, and fewer and fewer support military adventurism in the Middle East generally, Brooks is right about the fact that all of the leading presidential candidates embrace the militaristic Middle East agenda shared by AIPAC and similar groups. Who are the candidates who reject it? Any who would are immediately marginalized and would be subjected to the Wes Clark treatment (i.e., demonized as an anti-semite unless and until they repented, appeared before Abe Foxman to request absolution, repudiated their views, and then took an oath of allegiance to that agenda). And they would be cut off from what Hank Sheinkopf called the "ATM for American politicians."

Thus, no leading presidential candidate seems able to articulate clear opposition to the militaristic, war-seeking posture we are obviously taking with regard to Iran. Instead, they are all spouting rhetoric which -- as Digby pointed out last night -- amounts to an endorsement, or at least a re-inforcement, of the Bush Doctrine: namely, that preemptive war is permissible in general and may be specifically necessarily against Iran. Regardless of whether there is merit in the abstract to the notion of "keeping all options on the table," this sort of talk now has the effect, as Digby argues, of enabling Bush's increasingly war-provoking moves towards Iran.

There is a real, and quite disturbing, discrepancy between the range of permissible views on these issues within our mainstream political discourse and the views of a large segment of the American public. The former almost completely excludes the latter.

That has to change and quickly. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, we did not have a real debate in this country about whether that was wise or just. Cartoon images and bullying tactics supplanted rational discourse -- not only prior to the invasion but for several years after -- and we are paying the very heavy price for that now. That is simply not a luxury that the country can afford this time. It is genuinely difficult to imagine anything more cataclysmic for the United States than a military confrontation with Iran.

If part of our motivation in confronting Iran is that Iran is a threat to Israel, then we should declare that openly and debate whether that is wise. That topic cannot be rendered off-limits by toxic and manipulative anti-semitism accusations. All the time, Americans openly debate the influence which all sorts of interest groups have on government policy. There is nothing, in substance, different about this topic.

Just as is true for Iraq, we have been subjected to a carousel of ever-changing, unrelated "justifications" as to why Iran is our mortal enemy against whom war is necessary. First was the alarm-ringing over Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Then, the President began featuring the (highly misleading) claim that Iran is the "leading sponsor of international terrorism." That was followed by an unrelenting emphasis on the ugly statements from Iran's President (but not its "leader"), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now the emphasis has shifted to Iran's alleged (but entirely unproven and apparently overstated) fueling of the civil war in Iraq.

The only clear fact that emerges from this morass of war-fueling claims is that there are significant and influential factions within the country which want to drive the U.S. to wage war against Iran and change its government. What matters to them is that this goal is achieved. The "justifications" which enable it do not seem to matter at all. Whatever does the trick will be used. Candid and explicit debates over these issues -- and clear, emphatic opposition to the course the President is clearly pursuing with regard to Iran -- is urgently necessary.

If all we have are the type of delicate, fear-driven, partial "debates" which we had over Iraq and the muddled, ambivalent, politically fearful positions from our political leaders that preceded the Iraq invasion, then we will have the same result with Iran as we had with Iraq. And there just is no more pressing priority than ensuring that does not happen. But, at this point at least, one searches in vain for the political leaders who are committed to stopping it. The Wes Clark humiliation and punishment ritual was intended to deter exactly such opposition, and it seems to be achieving its objective rather well.

UPDATE: The very same New York Sun today publishes an article -- headlined Imagining a War with Iran -- that begins with this sentence: "With America heading toward a war with Iran, inadvertent or otherwise, the picture of how the conflict is likely to pan out is becoming clearer." The article then proceeds to describe how the war will play out.

On a related note, Powerline's Scott Johnson points to an article from Heather Robinson, who attended the AIPAC event and is angry over Hillary's suggestion that war with Iran may not be necessary: "But while Hillary’s rhetoric of 'engagement' may sound good, the community of anti-terror activists and Israel-supporters must realize that, at the most basic level, engaging with people who wish your destruction–and are actively working to achieve it–means strengthening a pernicious enemy."

UPDATE II: The American Jewish Committee commissioned a poll late last year to ascertain the views of American Jews on various foreign policy matters, and found (h/t EJ):

Support among Jews for an American military strike against Iran has declined during the past year, according to an annual survey of American Jewish opinion released Monday.

The survey, commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, found that only 38% of American Jews support American military action, down from 49% last year.

And, of course, 3 out of 4 American Jews voted against George Bush in 2004, notwithstanding the fact that (or because) Bush's Middle East militarism was a predominant issue in the campaign. Despite their influence, Jewish neoconservatives and groups like AIPAC are highly unrepresentative of American Jews as a whole. Those facts only further undescore the baselessness and pure malice driving the attempt to equate opposition to their agenda with "anti-semitism."

Blogs, alternative political systems, funding

(updated below)

There are several topics I was hoping to write about today (and I will), but there is a lingering issue which arose from my announcement yesterday about moving to Salon that I think is important and want to address. The vast majority of people who sent e-mails and left comments were very supportive of the move and recognize its benefits and the rationale behind it (and, I am quite certain, the same is true for the much larger group who read this blog but who neither comment nor e-mail).

Nonetheless, the complaints and objections -- though anticipated -- were voiced by a slightly larger group than I expected, and they reveal some assumptions and underlying beliefs that are commonplace but, I think, quite harmful. So I will try hard to set aside what I confess up front is some mild personal irritation over the nature of those complaints and instead focus on the more substantive, far-reaching issues which they reflect.

The political blogosphere is driven by many factors, but the predominant one, I think, is a pervasive dissatisfaction with the dominant media and political institutions in this country. The blogosphere is essentially a reaction to that dissatisfaction -- an attempt to create an alternative venue where citizens can debate political issues and organize and inform one another without having to rely upon our country's empty media stars and the myopic, corrupt opinion-making insitutions which have wrought so much damage and continue to do so.

The principal value of the blogosphere is that it democratizes our political discourse almost completely. Anyone can become a "pundit," find an audience, report facts, create a community of like-minded citizens and activists, and influence the public discourse -- all without having to mold oneself into what is demanded by The Washington Post and without having to care about pleasing the editors of Time Magazine.

In that regard, the blogosphere enables a very potent freedom. Pre-blogosphere, in order to have one's voice heard, that voice had to conform or be squeezed into the suffocating orthodoxies of the dominant media outlets. That is no longer the case. They are no longer the gatekeepers of the public discourse, and the blogosphere enables people to say what they want, how they want, without caring if that alienates or offends a small group of Beltway media elites.

But any competing system that exists outside of the national political and media institutions has to be financially self-sustaining. The sprawling right-wing noise machine has sustained itself, in large part, by constructing what Jane Hamsher (among others) calls a vast "welfare" system. A huge portion of the right-wing pundits and influence-peddlers whom you see on television or read in newspapers have extremely well-funded organizations behind them that pay them to opine, to disseminate the right-wing gospel, which buy their books in bulk and give them away for free in order to create artificial best-sellers -- all of which enables them to work full-time spreading the right-wing message without being preoccupied with earning a living.

There is very little of that outside of that narrow, Bush-loving, (now) neoconservative gutter (a very smart and talented political writer, Ezra Klein, noted just the other day what a paucity of opportunity there is in that regard). As a result, other models need to be developed and supported in order for competing networks to exist.

One cannot constantly complain -- at least not reasonably or coherently -- that the establishment media is horrible and corrupt and demand that alternative voices be heard more, but then, at the same time, oppose efforts to make alternative media financially sustainable -- on the ground that financial models somehow render the efforts "impure" or "capitalistic" or because it imposes some small inconvenience or denies what you think is your entitlement to be provided with constant fulfillment and satisfaction without having to make the smallest effort or endure the most marginal inconvenience to help sustain it.

People who express views outside of the prevailing orthodoxy -- or who do so in a way that does not comport to the demands of two-minute cable segments or the vapid, conventional-wisdom-spewing emptiness of a Time Magazine column -- have to find other ways to be able to work on political advocacy and make a living at the same time. In his insightful tribute to Molly Ivins today (h/t Atrios), Rude Pundit notes that Ivins "never became the regular TV pundit that so many other alleged columnists became" because what she argued, and how she argued it, was not what mainstream media outlets wanted.

So, in order to read what she wrote, you had to (pre-Amazon) get in your car and go to the bookstore and buy one of her books. Or, post-Amazon, you had to order the book and then wait for it to arrive. She didn't go personally delivering her books for free to everyone's doorstep or placing it in their hands. She couldn't have done that. Those who thought she was a voice worth hearing had to expend the most minimal effort to obtain and buy her books (or find and buy newspapers that carried her columns). That's how she was able to devote her time to her punditry without compromising it and still be able to live and eat and have a place to live. That's just the reality of how the world works.

If you're someone who rails against the dominant media institutions in this country (as I do) -- and who hails the critical importance of blogs and other alternative venues as an antidote to the toxic combination of the national media and right-wing noise machine (as I do) -- then it's necessary to recognize that those alternative institutions and the people who work to build them need to support themselves (like everyone else) and to be supported by those who believe in the work they are doing. Everyone wishes that were not the case. But it is.

Some time early last year, I was posting at Crooks and Liars when John Amato began running a new form of advertising that was slightly more intrusive than the prior type of ads. The comment section was immediately filled with righteous indignation over how John was "selling out" and outrageously subjecting the loyal C&L; readers to the evils of intrusive corporatist advertising (and, in the Comment section to a C&L post about my move to Salon yesterday, one finds the same sentiments).

In order to maintain that site, John (like many, many bloggers) works between 12 and 15 hours per day, 7 days a week -- literally -- and has substantial bandwidth expenses to host the large readership and all of the video content. And yet some of the same people who benefit from that site and who believe it contributes valuable content to our political discussions complained bitterly because he found a way to generate some modest income to sustain his work.

This mentality is not only petty and self-centered -- though it is that -- but it is also extremely self-defeating. For better or for worse, the reality we live in is such that any individuals or institutions, in order to be effective, need an economic model to fuel it. Effective projects, including political movements and political advocacy, need to be funded.

The example of Salon is instructive. There are not very many models for independent online magazines to generate sufficient income to sustain themselves (for many years, Slate had its substantial losses subsidized by its corporate parent, Microsoft, and is now the corporate property of The Washington Post Company). But Salon wanted to remain an outlet for independent journalism and political analysis. And it has repeatedly faced the prospect of bankruptcy in the past. The one model that they have found that seems to work is the dual-choice of (a) paid subscription or (b) spending 10 seconds (or 30 seconds), once a day, clicking through an ad in order to access all of its content for free.

The alternative is Salon's non-existence. As Juan Cole said, Salon publishes articles -- and pays the writers who write them -- which would not be published in very many other places, certainly not ones with the readership of the size Salon reaches. So enduring an ad (or subscribing to avoid the ad) seems a small and necessary price to pay to enable the existence of punditry and reporting outside of the approved orthodoxies of Time and The Washington Post. Salon doesn't have an ad wall because they are evil, amoral corporatists trying to bombard people's brains with tools of capitalist manipulation. They have an ad wall because that's the only way they can continue to offer the content they offer for free to people without ceasing to exist.

And I just want to underscore -- these points are not specific or unique in any way to my move or Salon. Obviously, there are plenty of perfectly valid and legitimate reasons why someone might choose not to continue to read this blog at Salon. There are some bloggers I read regularly whom I would be willing to pay to read, or watch 10 minutes of ads if necessary in order to read. And then there are other bloggers I read somewhat regularly who, if they moved somewhere that I had to pay or watch ads in order to access, perhaps I wouldn't continue to read them. Those are just perfectly legitimate time-allocation choices, and these comments are not at all addressed to people who make choices like that. Nobody is entitled to a readership.

But there is a more nefarious sentiment underlying some of these complaints, and it is pervasive and significant. There is a strain of belief, found among some on the left (and again, I think it's a very small minority), which perceives issues like funding and income-generating models as some sort of insult, as something unethical and impure. And then there is another strain which is about unbridled personal entitlement -- the belief that they are entitled to access whatever they want, and have everything they want, without the slightest amount of expenditure or effort on their part (all the effort, expenditure and sacrifice should be from others).

I'm sorry that there are people who think that clicking through an ad (or subscribing to avoid it) is a grave insult and an outrageous imposition. It also can be an inconvenience for bloggers (or political analysts or activists of any kind) who -- driven by passion and a desire to contribute in some way to improving the state of the country -- spend 3 hours per day or 8 hours per day or 12 hours per day on their work without being able to earn a living. To begrudge someone the ability to do so -- or to act as though they are engaged in an act of betrayal or even some kind of corruption -- because they find a way to work on behalf of their political ideas and earn a living doing it is truly bizarre.

The national corporate-backed media is a huge, sprawling, powerful network. So, too, is the multi-headed right-wing opinion-making monster composed of think tanks, subsidized magazines, and well-fed pundits. To compete with that, to battle against it, requires the building and maintaining of strong systems that are sustainable, which means, at minimum, that they are funded and financially viable.

If there are bloggers that you enjoy reading and/or whose writing you think deserves wider circulation, contribute to them or buy ads on their blog or encourage others to do so. If there are magazines or independent journalists which you think are producing valuable reporting, subscribe to them or donate to them or, for those who can't afford that, support them in other non-monetary ways. Encourage political campaigns and organizations to buy ads on blogs rather than in mainstream media outlets. In our society, money and funding are the fuel that enables machines to work potently and effectively. That's just how it is.

Denying that, or detatching oneself from that reality, can generate satisfying sensations of purity, but it also renders one ineffective, impotent, and irrelevant. And more to the point, complaining about the "corporate media" or the "right-wing noise machine" while begrudging and impugning efforts to create alternatives seems to be nothing more than self-regarding rhetoric without any meaningful action behind it.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein adds some important and interesting insights (and, as always, the terms "liberal" and "progressive" are elastic; they have come to mean "Bush critic" or "opponent of neoconservatism" more than anything else, but that is another topic altogether). And I have a summary of my responses to many of the comments to this post, here.

And I just want to re-iterate that the vast, vast majority of comments and e-mails have been extremely supportive, which I genuinely appreciate. And again: this post is not directed at everyone who expressed concerns or even objections concerning the move, but instead is directed only to those who voiced the specific complaints I am responding to in the post.

Blog news

Beginning next Thursday, February 8, this blog will be moving to Salon, where it will be a featured front-page blog (full access to Salon is available by subscribing or for free, by clicking through an ad to obtain a 24 hour day pass). I will also be a Salon Contributing Writer and will write (at least) one feature article per month. I am very excited about this move. It will substantially increase the readership and enhance the visibility for the blog, and I think Salon is the ideal venue for both blogging and for writing. A few observations about the move:

(1) Other than some design changes (actually, design improvements), the content of this blog will remain exactly the same. The first term I negotiated with Salon was complete editorial freedom -- no editorial interventions, no topic "assignments," and no content, length or topic restrictions. I can post when and how frequently I want, and I have access to post 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and posting is immediate. In essence, Salon wants to publish this blog, not some modified or constrained version, and so I have exactly the same freedom to post there that I have here.

(2) The principal motivation in moving is that the move will immediately result in a substantially increased readership for the blog, along with enhanced visibility generally. As easy as it is to forget, there are still substantial numbers of politically engaged people who do not read blogs, or who read them only periodically.

The influence of the blogosphere is growing inexorably, and I think it is still in its incipient stages, but blog readers are still a subset of political readers generally. While the Salon readership overlaps to some extent with the blogosphere, there are large numbers of Salon readers (as is true for most magazines) who don't read blogs, and blogging there will simply enable me to be read by more people.

There is also still some lingering (albeit diminishing) bias against people who are "just bloggers." In some eyes -- myopic ones -- writing principally for your own blog is credibility-limiting. That is changing and should change more rapidly (since, as I've said before, I think the best and most reliable political writing and analysis is found, with rare exception, in the blogosphere), but that bias persists and can still be somewhat limiting.

Anyone who expends the substantial amounts of time and energy required for daily political blogging believes, I'd say almost by definition, that the more people who are exposed to what they write, the better. I think that objective will be fulfilled in multiple ways from this move.

(3) A significant factor in moving to Salon was how positive my previous experiences have been in writing there. I have guest blogged for Tim Grieve on two occasions and written numerous articles over the last few months. The editors there are excellent and the suggestions they make are always intended to improve, not dilute, what one writes. And they are committed to publishing unique and consequential content which many other media outlets probably would be too timid to publish. Juan Cole writes for Salon with some regularity, and last December he said on his blog:

See also Salon.com Editor's picks for 2006, ten articles that include my "Israel's Failed-State Policy."

Consider subscribing to Salon.com for the coming year. Much of what I've written there in the past year would not have been published by most other magazines.

In addition to Cole, Salon regularly publishes Sidney Blumenthal, Joe Conason, Gary Kamiya, and Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World.

(4) My principal concern about moving the blog was that I did not want to remove the blog or myself from the blogsphere. I think the blogosphere is and will continue to be the venue for the most vibrant and important political writing and I would not be interested in any arrangement which included the cessation of my blogging.

But several bloggers have made similar blog moves -- most notably Kevin Drum to Washington Monthly and Andrew Sullivan to Time (as well as Mickey Kaus to Slate) -- and it did not create any sensation that they were somehow blogging "outside" of the blogosphere. Access to my Salon blog will be free (albeit with the requirement of watching a short ad once per day for non-Salon-subscribers). There will also be a link left at the top of this Blogspot page to the new Salon blog. Since what I am writing is still a blog in every sense, I became convinced that blogging at Salon rather than at "Blogspot" would not create some sort of wall of separation (psychological or otherwise) between my blog and the blogosphere.

(5) One of the most valuable aspects of blogging is the Comment section. Almost all bloggers say that, and I think most, if not all of them, mean it. One of the prime advantages which bloggers have over mainstream journalists is the collective aspect of blogging. No matter how much one knows about a topic or how much expertise one has developed, there is always going to be someone who comes and adds something which the blogger did not know. For the same reason, bloggers' mistakes -- large and small -- are corrected almost instantaneously, and any credible blogger eagerly acknowledges those mistakes, corrects them quickly and clearly, and thereby is constantly perfecting what is written.

This post by Atrios from a couple of weeks ago really illustrates this dynamic perfectly. Atrios responded to a post by Time's Jay Carney which contained a clearly erroneous statement about Clinton's approval ratings which Atrios pointed out. He linked to the documentation demonstrating Carney's error. But then, within a short time after Atrios posted, several of the Eschaton commenters came and pointed out three additional, clear errors in Carney's post which Atrios did not originally include. He then added those commenters' points to his original post, which then became a virutal dossier of significant factual errors plaguing Carney's short post.

Having a high-quality comment section is almost like having a vast team of researchers and analysts constantly at work on every topic, which is why so many of the posts I write include, and sometimes arise from, something said or found by a commenter here. There will be instantaneous and unrestrained commenting at the Salon blog, just as there is here, and so I hope, and expect, that the quality of the comment section will remain the same (and even be enhanced by what will undoubtedly be new commenters from Salon).

The last post here will be on Wednesday. I will leave a post that will remain at the top with a link to the Salon blog. I really appreciate the great support from readers and from other bloggers which I've received since I began blogging just a little over a year ago, and I'm definitely looking forward to blogging in an exciting, new environment.

David Brooks, National Spokesman for "Americans"

(updated below - updated again)

One of the most common tactics among pundits of all types, but particularly Bush-supporting and pro-war pundits, is to take whatever their own personal opinion happens to be, and then -- rather than stating that opinion and providing rationale or documentation for it -- they instead preface it with the phrase "Americans believe" or "most Americans think," thereby anointing themselves as Spokesman for The American People and casting the appearance that they speak on behalf of the Silent, Noble American Majority.

Not only do they make these assertions about what "Americans believe" and what "the country wants" with no empirical evidence of any kind, but worse -- especially now that "Americans" have come to overwhelmingly reject them and their belief system -- they equate their own views with what "Americans want" in the face of mountains of empirical evidence which proves that the opposite is true. John McCain, as but one example, does this almost every time he speaks about Iraq and what "Americans think" about the war.

David Brooks is one of the leading practitioners of this tactic, fancying himself as the vessel through which the majority of good, common Americans express themselves. His New York Times column today is based exclusively on one of the most egregious and misleading instances of this tactic.

His column is headlined The Iraq Syndrome, R.I.P., and in it, he simply asserts, over and over and over, that "Americans" -- in the wake of the Iraq disaster -- have not drawn any overarching lessons about U.S. foreign policy, as they did with Vietnam, but instead, Americans want (exactly, coincidentally enough, as Brooks wants) for the U.S. to continue to rule the world -- and particularly the Middle East -- with its mighty, dominant military power:

After Vietnam, Americans turned inward. Having lost faith in their leadership class, many Americans grew suspicious of power politics and hesitant about projecting American might around the world. . . .

Today, Americans are disillusioned with the war in Iraq, and many around the world predict that an exhausted America will turn inward again. Some see a nation in permanent decline and an end to American hegemony. At Davos, some Europeans apparently envisioned a post-American world.

Forget about it. Americans are having a debate bout how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence. What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world. . . .

This is not a country looking to avoid entangling alliances. This is not a country renouncing the threat of force. This is not a country looking to come home again. The Iraq syndrome is over before it even had a chance to begin.

To demonstrate what Americans really think, Brooks cites what he calls the "masterful book" by Robert Kagan -- brother of Fred, the AEI's "surge" architect -- which argues that Americans want to assert as much power as possible in the world, and that they seek to use military power as part of our "efforts to spread freedom."

The debate over Iraq is not resulting in a diminished desire to start wars, claims Brooks, but is merely "another chapter in [America's] long expansionist story." So anyone who thinks that an attack on, say . . . . Iran, is less likely because Americans oppose the war in Iraq should think again. Iraq is only about Iraq. Americans still crave the "dominant role in the world."

Brooks' entire column purports to summarize what Americans believe and don't believe about U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. role in the world. There does exist empirical evidence (beyond Robert Kagan) as to what "Americans" believe. That evidence is called "polling data." Yet such evidence is missing entirely from Brooks' column proclaiming what Americans think -- not a whisper about such data -- and it is not hard to understand why.

Polls demonstrate that Brooks' entire column is false, that the opposite of what he claims is true. The neoconservative fantasies of David Brooks and Robert Kagan and John McCain and company for glorious U.S. world domination through military adventures are increasingly repudiated by Americans. As but one example, the Pew Research Center issued a report accompanying new polling data on isolationism in American, dated February 3, 2006, entitled Bush's Concern Over Isolationism Reflects More Than Just Rhetoric. It documented:

When President Bush delivered a strong warning against isolationism in Tuesday's State of the Union address, he was speaking to a recent and dramatic turn in public opinion. A recent Pew Research survey found a decided revival of isolationist sentiment among the public, to levels not seen since post-Cold War 1990s and the post-Vietnam 1970s. Moreover, one of the main pillars of Bush's argument in favor of global engagement – the need to promote democracy around the world – has not struck a chord with the public. Support for that objective has been consistently tepid, even among members of Bush's own party.

Specifically, the notion that the U.S. should use military force to topple foreign governments and "spread freedom" -- the centerpiece of the Brooks/Kagan/McCain neoconservative worldview which Brooks claims is the mainstream -- is, in reality, about as fringe of a sentiment as one can find in the realm of foreign policy:

Of thirteen foreign policy priorities tested in Pew's October survey, "promoting democracy in other nations" came in dead last, rated as a top priority by fewer than one-in-four Americans. Despite its lowest favorability rating in two decades, more Americans see strengthening the United Nations as a top priority than promoting democracy. And in contrast with public opinion on most foreign policy questions these days, there is no partisan divide – Republicans and Democrats agree that this goal should not be a major foreign policy priority.

It is true that the Pew poll, taken almost a year ago when dissatisfaction with Iraq was not as intense as it is now, found that 42% of Americans agree with the proposition that the U.S. "should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." But, directly contrary to Brooks' entire column, that sentiment is rapidly increasing, and the notion that Americans share the neoconservative desire to spread democracy through military force is simply false.

Writing in The New Republic in November, 2005, John Judis -- unlike Brooks -- examined actual polling data rather than his own desires about what Americans should think, and concluded, in an article entitled Isolationism is Back:

Under the impact of the administration's failure in Iraq, the public has become wary of American involvement overseas. It increasingly rejects both a liberal internationalist and a neoconservative approach to foreign affairs. Instead, its attitude is similar to the prevailing outlook of the 1920s and '30s and to the worldview held by many Americans in the '90s. Voters, in short, are becoming more isolationist. This change in mood will likely affect the elections of 2006 and 2008; and more important, it could affect how future American administrations conduct themselves in the world.

Precisely because of the towering tragedy of our invasion of Iraq, Americans are rapidly growing to despise the militarism of David Brooks and -- as Judis points out -- of John McCain: "The presidential candidate who is probably most out of step with these trends in public opinion is John McCain, who favors sending additional troops to Iraq . . . ." And, all of that data was from late 2005 and early 2006. It is almost certainly the case that those anti-intervention trends have intensified as the situation in Iraq has collapsed.

In August, 2006 -- in the middle of the Israel-Hezbollah war, as Brooks' former colleague Bill Kristol proclaimed that to be "our war" (meaning the United States) -- The Washington Post and ABC News conducted a poll which asked: "As part of a cease-fire agreement, would you support or oppose the United Nations sending a peacekeeping force to southern Lebanon?" A solid majority (67-30) favored a U.N. force.

But even among those who supported such a force, a clear majority (38-59) said "no" when asked: "Do you think the United States should or should not send U.S. troops as part of that peacekeeping force"? Americans simply do not want increased U.S. involvement in more Middle East conflicts and wars, even where -- as was the case for Israel's war in Lebanon -- the conflict involves a group which Bush supporters endlessly refer to as "international terrorists."

David Brooks has his own crystal clear opinions about U.S military force -- the more the better, especially in the Middle East. He believes we should be continuing more projects like Iraq, with the only difference being that we should do it better next time. "This is not a country renouncing the threat of force," he proclaims.

But rather than honestly admit that the disaster in Iraq which he urged is causing Americans to reject Brooks' neoconservative and militaristic worldview, he instead dishonestly denies (really just ignores) the empirical evidence and clear trends and simply asserts that "Americans" agree with him on the fundamental questions of U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, he displays what really is the defining attribute of the Bush-supporting neoconservatives -- a willingness, even eagerness, to ignore empirical evidence, deny reality, in order to affirm what one wants to be true rather than what is true.

In reality, these pundits have complete disdain for American public opinion, because the American masses too frequently have the audacity to deviate from, and outright reject, the superior wisdom handed down by Brooks and Kagan and John McCain and the AEI and the rest. Like everything else -- U.S. soldiers, the Constitution, the concept of "America" -- what "Americans believe" is merely a prop to be used or exploited in order to advance their war-making and liberty-infringing agenda. So when American public opinion contradicts that agenda, they simply ignore it or distort it and claim -- even though it is so plainly false -- that those noble, silent "Americans" share their quest for neoconservative glory or whatever other radical view they happen to be pushing.

The fact that Americans are increasingly rejecting the militarism which lies at the heart of the neoconservative worldview does not, of course, prove that that worldview is wrong. But the fact that Bush-supporting pundits and presidential candidates like John McCain continue to claim the mantle of Spokesmen for "Americans" even though their views are increasingly relegated to the fringe does reveal much about their character and credibility. The next time David Brooks goes to write a column in which he masquerades his own personal, fringe views as the "belief of Americans," perhaps his editors should suggest, or require, some proof to accompany that claim.

UPDATE: One additional point: Brooks grounds his assertion about the ongoing American desire for Middle East hegemony in the claim that such a desire is shared by "the leaders emerging amid this [Iraq] crisis" -- Giuliani, McCain, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. Leaving aside the obvious grounds for contesting the accuracy of that assertion, the fact that certain presidential candidates endorse Position X is hardly proof that Position X is shared by "most Americans."

One of the tragic flaws of our current political system is that presidential candidates have to please numerous constituencies other than the American voter. One is the large donor base which funds their campaigns. The other is the Beltway media and political elite, which can single-handedly destroy a candidate with tactics having nothing to do with the candidates' actual views (ask Howard Dean, or Al Gore). That leading presidential candidates share Brooks' desire for further military adventurism in the Middle East -- even if it were true -- is hardly proof that most Americans share that view. The "views of most Americans" is knowable by examining what "most Americans think," which is precisely why Brooks studiously avoids the only data relevant to the issue about which he is opining.

UPDATE II: For those requiring still more proof that Bush supporters like David Brooks do not believe in the founding principles and values of our country, note that Brooks goes out of his way to proclaim that "this is not a country looking to avoid entangling alliances." Brooks issues as express a repudiation as can be of the central warning issued by George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address. Of course, the Founders -- along with the Constitution they enacted and the principles they embraced -- were very, very pre-9/11, and their views are thus wholly inapplicable, even dangerous, in light of our current predicament.

For Brooks and company, the real meaning of the 9/11 attacks was that we have to abandon the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the foundations of the country and replace all of that with the updated (and wholly contrary) views of Dick Cheney, John Yoo and Bill Kristol.