Watching the Watchers for June 5, 2007

Democratic Dustup

Commenting on the New Hampshire Democratic debate, Eugene Robinson made a good point: After highlighting Obama's response to Edwards's criticism that the Illinois Senator hasn't exactly been bringing down the walls with his outrage over the Iraq War, i.e. Obama saying that John Edwards's indignation is "four and a half years late," Robinson wrote:

Edwards is asking the right questions. If the war in Iraq is the most urgent issue facing the country -- and both Clinton and Obama said bringing the troops home would be their first priority as president -- then why aren't theirs the loudest, clearest, most eloquent voices in opposition to Bush's tragic misadventure? Each is asking for the opportunity to lead the nation. Shouldn't each be showing some leadership on the war?

Republican Wreck

Politico is reporting a stampede of former Bush-Cheney aides hedging their bets and jumping on the movie-actor-turned-presidential-candidate Fred Thompson's campaign bandwagon - - and payroll. Not sure that is a good development? Fred Thompson already shares positions identical to Mister Bush's on all the major issues including the war, now he has the president's advisers, too?

It appears that the Republicans haven't figured out yet, that the issue isn't the messenger - - it's the message and having a mediocre actor delivering the lines isn't going to make it sound or appear any more appealing.

The Republican message, however, isn't Fred Thompson's only problem. Richard Cohen shined the spotlight on a growing concern (i.e. Thompson's tendency to shun hard work):

If Thompson's name came up in some sort of free-association game, he would be a genuine stumper: Thompson and what? There is no Thompson Act, Thompson Compromise, Thompson Hearing, Thompson Speech or Thompson Anything that comes to mind. No living man can call himself a Thompsonite. Instead, Thompson came and went from the Senate as if he were never there, leaving only the faint scent of ennui. "I don't want to spend the rest of my life up here," he once said. "I don't like spending 14- and 16-hour days voting on 'sense of the Senate' resolutions on irrelevant matters." As a call to action, this lacks a certain something.

Lamenting a Bad Bet

New York Times columnist and onetime big-time Iraq War supporter, David Brooks, has been spending a fair amount of time lately licking his, "how could it have all gone so wrong?" wounds. His latest lament, however, is noteworthy if for no other reason than that it goes beyond whiney and enters into the macabre:

Iraqi society has continued to fracture and is so incoherent that it can’t even have a proper civil war any more.

Brooks seems to be upset that things have gone so far off track in Iraq (his not-so-long-ago most prized cause) that the people there can't even manage to go about the business of slaughtering one another properly. By the end of his piece, however, Brooks is completely contradicting his previous lament:

In the Baghdad neighborhood of Kadhimiya, Shiite militias are gradually consolidating control. They are expelling the Sunnis. They have created a system of street justice, complete with underground Islamic courts. They’ve battled rival militias. They fund their activities through extortion and bribery. But amid the mafia behavior and ethnic cleansing, they’ve created relative calm. Two thousand Shiite families have moved in.

To the common sense observer, that sounds like a right proper civil war!

An Inconvenient Reality

Bob Herbert had a little sit down chat with Al Gore. The discussion was supposed to be about Mister Gore's new book, "The Assault on Reason," but Bob's mind keeps drifting around to all the "what ifs." As in, "What if Al Gore and not George W. Bush had been selected as President by the Supreme Court in 2000?"

By the end of the first paragraph a person finds him or herself knowing where Herbert is going with the piece and, too, going there for themselves:

You look at him and you can’t help thinking how bizarre it is that this particular political figure, perhaps the most qualified person in the country to be president, is sitting in a wing chair in a hotel room in Manhattan rather than in the White House.

Can't blame Bob for feeling that way. Laura Bush and the family dog, Barney, have probably wondered about that, too.

The Evening National and World News for Monday, June 4, 2007

U.S. NATIONAL REPORT

Bush's Iraq Plan Coming Undone

The recent surge in Iraq doesn't appear to be faring any better than all other previous attempts to bring the country under control. The goal had been for the U.S. to have control over all Baghdad's neighborhoods by July, but with time winding down the military controls less than one-third of the city.

The biggest hindrance, other than a determined enemy, appears to be a less than enthusiastic Iraqi military. Iraq's military was supposed to "hold" the neighborhoods after being cleared by the U.S., but they appear to be turning a blind eye to returning insurgents.

Vermont Wants Out of U.S.

A group in Vermont is working hard at creating a movement for the state to secede from the United States. T-Shirts declaring, "US Out of Vt.!" are selling almost fast as they can be produced.

Disillusioned by what they call an empire about to fall, [the movement's leaders] hope to put the question before citizens in March. Eventually, they want to persuade state lawmakers to declare independence, returning Vermont to the status it held from 1777 to 1791.

The drive for Vermont to secede appears to have plenty of supporters. Vermont has a history of being decidedly progressive, outlawed slavery before any other and is currently represented by the nation's only socialist federal Senator.

"The argument for secession is that the U.S. has become an empire that is essentially ungovernable — it's too big, it's too corrupt and it no longer serves the needs of its citizens," said Rob Williams, editor of Vermont Commons, a quarterly newspaper dedicated to secession.

"We have electoral fraud, rampant corporate corruption, a culture of militarism and war," Williams said. "If you care about democracy and self-governance and any kind of representative system, the only constitutional way to preserve what's left of the Republic is to peaceably take apart the empire."

Republicans Look to Thwart Democrats' Gonzales 'No Confidence' Vote

An online news outlet, Raw Story, is reporting that an effort is underway among Republicans to try and undermine a Democratic vote of 'No Confidence' against Attorney General Gonzales. Gonzales has been caught, while under oath, lying to Congress on at least two occasions and some believe he may have also tried to obstruct justice by possibly trying to manipulate his aide, Monica Goodling, into altering her testimony to match his.

According to the report:

Republicans are likely to tie up the Senate floor with all kinds of procedural mischief and introduce any number of amendments, including perhaps one on whether the Iraq War is actually 'lost' as Reid has suggested.

THE WORLD REPORT

Fighting in Lebanon Worsens

There is growing concern that the two-week-long battle taking place within a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, might be spreading to other camps. A second skirmish erupted at a second camp and claimed the lives of two soldiers and two militants.

Thousands of the camps inhabitants fled, but officials say as many as 6,000 people are caught in the crossfire.

Radical Fringe Moves into Gaza

As instability spreads from Iraq across the Middle East, al-Qaeda inspired groups are finding fertile ground for establishment and growth within the chaos. The latest enclave to play host to a newly emboldened "radical fringe" is the Palestinian enclave, Gaza.

Some Palestinian officials blame the radicalisation of some of Gaza's 1.4 million people on poverty and despair deepened by sanctions imposed by Israel and Western powers last year after the Hamas Islamist movement won a parliamentary election.

On Friday, a group that emerged this year, the Righteous Swords of Islam, threatened to "slit the throats" of women presenters on Palestine Television if they do not cover their hair: "The corruption that is coming from their mouths and their faces ... raises fears for the future of our children," it said.

Along with The al Qaeda Organisation in Palestine and other mysterious groups, the Swords have claimed several bomb attacks.

Canada Backs Germany in G-8 Climate Fight

Originally Canada's conservative government refused to take sides in the U.S.-G8 fight over how best to meet the challenge of climate change. Canada's government, however, softened its tone and aligned itself with German Chancellor Angela Merkel's position.

Despite the Canadian Prime Minister's more supportive G-8 stance, he didn't win too many friends after making clear his country would not be meeting its Kyoto obligations.

Merkel [told] the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. on Monday that "of course at this point we are not happy that Canada has abandoned Kyoto's goals".

Commentary: Iraq's Terrorism is Spreading

by: Georgie Anne Geyer

That there are stunning similarities between what happens medically in the body of man and what occurs sociologically and militarily in the societies of men is far less noticed – but just as frightening and dangerous.

Think of what has happened in only the last week in the Middle East. In northern Lebanon, in the long-established Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, out of the blue arose a new al Qaeda-related insurgent group, Fatah al-Islam. Within days and even hours, the recurring hell of the Middle East was loosed, and refugees poured out of the camp in terror.

There had been none of this kind of terror networking in these northern camps. Indeed, since this camp was established in 1949 to accommodate refugees from northern Palestine after the creation of Israel, it has housed one of the more formal and conservative of peoples.

But it was soon established that these new "insurgents" or "terrorists" – or whatever they really are – had arrived at the camp only recently, that they marched in one day with brand-new weapons, ready to fight.

Two points grip you:

The first is found in the words of French scholar Bernard Rougier, author of Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam Among Palestinians in Lebanon. "The main point is that these camps are no longer part of Palestinian society," he told The Washington Post . "They are only spaces – now open to all of the influences running through the Muslim world."

The second is that Iraq, where we were supposed to be "containing terrorism," is now clearly exporting insurgents to other regions – to Lebanon, to Syria, to Gaza, to Bangladesh, to Kurdistan.

And so, on the one hand, you have weakened societies vulnerable to the "new answers" of "new insurgencies," and on the other hand, you have Iraq set up as a school for terrorists with American troops and policy providing the constant inspiration for their fight.

This, of course, is not the way the Bush administration sees it.

The White House sees terrorists as born, not created by history, bearing the mark of Cain, not the mark of circumstance. There is a scarlet "T" written on their foreheads at birth and the only answer is to destroy them. This kind of thinking, of course, relieves the thinker of any responsibility for the presence of the insurgent-terrorist-whatever in our innocent midst.

What's more, there is not much real give in the administration's policies. True, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other American diplomats met Memorial Day weekend with the Iranians in Baghdad (a good first move but limited, since the Iranians have most of the power because of our incredible stupidity in Iraq). But by all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.

Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated "I am the president!" He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of "our country's destiny."

The truth of the steadily deteriorating situation in the Middle East is, of course, quite different. The Palestinian people of 40 and even 30 years ago were formal, conservative people who remained closely tied to their families, clans and religious groups. Theirs was a highly stratified society, which has now been shattered.

In the institutional vacuum that is a camp like Nahr el-Bared, a few hundred men trained and tempered in Iraq can make a huge difference. At the same time, the Turkish military is ready to go into northern Kurdistan, al-Qaeda operatives from Iraq are popping up in hitherto untouched places, and the American military's advice to its troops is, "Get down with the people – listen to them!" Only four years and thousands of bombs and night missions too late.

Anyone who knows anything about cancer knows that the danger point comes when the cancer suddenly and unexpectedly appears in another supposedly "clean" part of the body. As when, say, breast cancer, an implacable traveler, reappears in the bloodstream or the bones.

U.S. National News for Sunday, June 3, 2007

Iraq 'Surge' Stumbling in Bloody Fashion

The AP reported 14 U.S. service personnel killed in action over the weekend in Iraq. Seven of the 14 were killed on Sunday. May had been the deadliest month for the U.S. military with 127 troops killed. It was the third deadliest month since the invasion began in March, 2003.

The report of U.S. deaths came only days after the Bush administration floated the possibility of American forces occupying Iraq for at least 50 years. The president's spokesmen likened the idea to the U.S. presence in South Korea, but some warn the occupation would more resemble Israel's post-six-day war occupation of the West Bank - - that is to say, an endless war.

Still, the bad news doesn't end with the increased U.S. casualties. Mister Bush had been touting a decline in the number of sectarian killings as proof of progress in Iraq, but a new report indicated such killings were up between 30 and 50 percent in Baghdad and across Iraq. In the last 24 hours alone, the bodies of more than 30 sectarian-related murder victims were found in Baghdad.

Mississippi's Infant Death Rate Little Better Than Some Third World Countries

To CBS News's credit, they reported on a very real social issue - - one that didn't include drugs, children, and a celebrity.

After a brief lull, Mississippi's infant death rates have skyrocketed. In 2005, Mississippi's infant death rate increased by nearly 20 percent over 2004.

For whites in Mississippi, the 2005 infant death rate was 6.6 per thousand, around the national average.

Among blacks, the rate soared to 17 per thousand, similar to rates in Sri Lanka and Russia.

Europe Seeing Red Over Bush's Green Pitch

Few in European leadership were as impressed by Mister Bush's call for a summit of the world's 15 biggest polluters as was the American media. Most Europeans, long distrustful of President Bush's motives, viewed the timing of the plan as being designed to simultaneously provide cover for his refusal to participate in G-8 efforts to curb global warming and, too, an effort to derail the U.N.'s ongoing work on reducing the impact of climate change.

Immigration by the Numbers

There are currently as many as twelve million undocumented workers in the United States today. The current immigration reform bill pending in congress is more than 3,000 pages long. Sixty-two percent of the American people believe undocumented workers should be allowed citizenship:

A CBS News/New York Times poll found that 62 percent believe illegal immigrants who have lived and worked in the U.S. for at least two years should have a chance to apply for legal status.

World News for Sunday, June 3, 2007

Lebanese Government Struggles in Fight Against Militants

The Lebanese government appears to be struggling in its effort to subjugate militants within the Palestinian refugee camps. It would seem that the Lebanese military has embraced the dangerous fallacy -- doctrine? -- advocating the notion that terrorism can somehow be exterminated through brute force.

The army on Friday attacked Fatah al-Islam positions at the entrances of the [refugee] camp with the declared aim of wiping out the militants.

Perhaps, it might be possible to "wipe out" the militants, but bullets and bombs cannot kill ideas or ideology. Only better ideas can do that.

Nigerians Battle Big Oil Companies, Kidnap Russians

As world demand for oil and other natural resources increases, Africa has become the latest exploitation hotspot. Energy and mining corporations have rushed into African countries, often bribing government officials as they go, in search of oil and minerals and increased profit margins.

More often than not, African governments and associated cronies -- outside the corporations, of course -- are the only people to benefit from the sometimes generous income being generated by the invading multinationals. Unfortunately, Africa's poorest citizens appear to have been excluded from the process.

Excluding Africa's impoverished people from the benefits of their countries' resource exploitation, has led to increasingly desperate attempts at seizing a share in the wealth.

Nigerian gunmen kidnapped six Russians and shot dead a local driver in a dawn attack on a residential compound of the world's top aluminium producer, authorities said on Sunday.

The kidnapping of the Russian workers is only the latest in a long line of similar incidents in 2007. Scores of foreign workers, most associated with oil corporations, have been abducted in Nigeria.

Frank Rich - Failed Presidents Ain’t What They Used to Be

A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon.

That’s in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in “Frost/Nixon” next Sunday while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. “Frost/Nixon,” a fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon’s record. But Mr. Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it’s hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you’ve left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W. Bush?

Perhaps not. It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president than Nixon — some already have — at the personal level his is not a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella’s talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew McConaughey’s).

This is in part why persistent cries for impeachment have gone nowhere in the Democratic Party hierarchy. Arguably the most accurate gut check on what the country feels about Mr. Bush was a January Newsweek poll finding that a sizable American majority just wished that his “presidency was over.” This flat-lining administration inspires contempt and dismay more than the deep-seated, long-term revulsion whipped up by Nixon; voters just can’t wait for Mr. Bush to leave Washington so that someone, anyone, can turn the page and start rectifying the damage. Yet if he lacks Nixon’s larger-than-life villainy, he will nonetheless leave Americans feeling much the way they did after Nixon fled: in a state of anger about the state of the nation.

The rage is already omnipresent, and it’s bipartisan. The last New York Times/CBS News poll found that a whopping 72 percent of Americans felt their country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” the highest figure since that question was first asked, in 1983. Equally revealing (and bipartisan) is the hypertension of the parties’ two angry bases. Democrats and Republicans alike are engaged in internecine battles that seem to be escalating in vitriol by the hour.

On the Democratic side, the left is furious at the new Congress’s failure to instantly fulfill its November mandate to end the war in Iraq. After it sent Mr. Bush a war-spending bill stripped of troop-withdrawal deadlines 10 days ago, the cries of betrayal were shrill, and not just from bloggers. John Edwards, once one of the more bellicose Democratic cheerleaders for the war (“I believe that the risk of inaction is far greater than the risk of action,” he thundered on the Senate floor in September 2002), is now equally bellicose toward his former colleagues. He chastises them for not sending the president the same withdrawal bill he vetoed “again and again” so that Mr. Bush would be forced to realize “he has no choice” but to end the war. It’s not exactly clear how a legislative Groundhog Day could accomplish this feat when the president’s obstinacy knows no bounds and the Democrats’ lack of a veto-proof Congressional majority poses no threat to his truculence.

Among Republicans the right’s revolt against the Bush-endorsed immigration bill is also in temper-tantrum territory, moving from rational debate about complex policy questions to plain old nativism, reminiscent of the 19th-century Know-Nothings. Even the G.O.P. base’s traditional gripes — knee-jerk wailing about the “tragedy” of Mary Cheney’s baby — can’t be heard above the din.

“White America is in flight” is how Pat Buchanan sounds the immigration alarm. “All they have to do is go to Bank of Amigo and pay the fine with a credit card” is how Rush Limbaugh mocks the bill’s punitive measures for illegal immigrants. Bill O’Reilly, while “reluctantly” supporting Mr. Bush’s plan, illustrates how immigration is “drastically” altering the country by pointing out that America is “now one-third minority.” (Do Jews make the cut?) The rupture is so deep that National Review, a fierce opponent of the bill, is challenging its usual conservative ally, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, to a debate that sounds more like “Fight Club.”

What the angriest proselytizers on the left and right have in common is a conviction that their political parties will commit hara-kiri if they don’t adhere to their bases’ strict ideological orders. “If Democrats do not stick to their guns on Iraq,” a blogger at TalkLeft.com warns, there will be “serious political consequences in 2008.” In an echo of his ideological opposite, Mr. Limbaugh labels the immigration bill the “Comprehensive Destroy the Republican Party Act.”

But there’s a strange paradox here. The decibel level of the fin-de-Bush rage is a bit of a red herring. In truth, there is some consensus among Americans about the issues that are dividing both parties. The same May poll that found the country so wildly off-track showed agreement on much else. Sixty-one percent believe that we should have stayed out of Iraq, and 63 percent believe we should withdraw by 2008. Majorities above 60 percent also buy broad provisions of the immigration bill — including the 66 percent of Republicans (versus 72 percent of Democrats) who support its creation of a guest-worker program.

What these figures suggest is that change is on its way, no matter how gridlocked Washington may look now. However much the G.O.P. base hollers, America is not going to round up and deport 12 million illegal immigrants, or build a multibillion-dollar fence on the Mexican border — despite Lou Dobbs’s hoax blaming immigrants for a nonexistent rise in leprosy. A new president unburdened by a disastrous war may well fashion the immigration compromise that is likely to elude Mr. Bush.

Withdrawal from Iraq is also on its way. Contrary to Mr. Edwards, only Republicans in Congress can overcome presidential vetoes and in so doing force Mr. Bush’s hand on the war. As the bottom drops out of Iraq and the polls, those G.O.P. votes are starting to line up. The latest example came last Sunday, when the most hawkish of former Rumsfeld worshipers, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, joined his party’s Congressional leaders, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, in talking about drawing down troops if something “extraordinary” doesn’t happen in Iraq by the time Gen. David Petraeus gives his September report on the “surge.” No doubt Mr. Sessions, who is up for re-election in 2008, saw a May 12 survey in The Birmingham News showing that even in his reddest of states, nearly half the voters want America out of Iraq within a year and favor candidates who agree.

This relatively unified America can’t be compared with that of the second Nixon term, when the violent cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s were still fresh. But in at least one way there may be a precise political parallel in the aftermaths of two failed presidencies rent by catastrophic wars: Americans are exhausted by anger itself and are praying for the mood pendulum to swing.

Gerald Ford implicitly captured that sentiment when he described himself as a healer; his elected successor, Jimmy Carter, was (to a fault, as it turned out) a seeming paragon of serenity. We can see this equation at work now in Mitt Romney’s unflappable game-show-host persona, in John McCain’s unconvincing efforts to emulate a Reagan grin and in the unlikely spectacle of Rudy Giuliani trading in his congenital scowl for a sunny disposition. Hillary Clinton’s camp is doing everything it can to deflect new books reminding voters of the vicious Washington warfare during her husband’s presidency. Then again, even Michael Moore is rolling out a kinder, gentler persona in his media blitz for his first film since “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

Edgy is out; easy listening is in; style, not content, can be king. In this climate, it’s hardly happenstance that many Republicans are looking in desperation to Fred Thompson. Robert Novak pointedly welcomed his candidacy last week because, in his view, Mr. Thompson is “less harsh” in tone than his often ideologically indistinguishable rivals and “a real-life version of the avuncular fictional D.A. he plays on TV.” The Democratic boomlet for Barack Obama is the flip side of the same coin: his views don’t differ radically from those of most of his rivals, but his conciliatory personality is the essence of calm, the antithesis of anger.

If it was a relief to the nation to see a president as grandly villainous as Richard Nixon supplanted by a Ford, not a Lincoln, maybe even a used Hoover would do this time.