Evvvvvrybody gets a taste.
Seems not only did Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) make a quick killing last year when he was given a sweetheart option to buy into a new politically-juiced California bank. Seems Lewis had his campaign committee buy in too.
Both purchases on the same day.
Marcus in Ha’aretz, “A Race Against the Clock,” and what the Chief of Staff of the IDF says the IDF is doing in Lebanon.
Judis on the war: “In their communiqué on Sunday, the G-8 nations warned that Hamas and Hezbollah threatened to “plunge the Middle East into chaos and provoke a wider conflict,” and they also cautioned Israel “to exercise utmost restraint” in retaliating against attacks. The United States was a signatory to, rather than a subject of, the document; but when the final account of this crisis is written–perhaps years from now–the Bush administration is sure to figure as a factor. That’s because over the last few decades most, if not all, Arab-Israeli crises have occurred when the United States has been either unable or unwilling to play an aggressive role as a mediator; and most have only abated after the United States has finally thrown itself into the middle of them. This latest conflict, which has engulfed Gaza and Lebanon and could spread eastward, may not prove to be an exception to this rule.”
Michael Walzer (sub.req.) on just wars and whether that is what Israel is fighting. And Bill Arkin on how civilian deaths are the seedbed of future terrorism.
Spencer Ackerman on how Chairman Roberts is going to sit on ‘phase II’ of the Iraq intel inquiry forever.
So it seems that we are on the brink of a far more intense and bloody phase of this war, as it now looks next to certain that Israel has already begun or is in the process of beginning a major ground incursion into southern Lebanon.
All I will say on the final outcome of this is that there won’t be peace on that border or in the region more generally as long as southern Lebanon is controlled by a militia that is not controlled from Beirut, especially one that is supported if not necessarily directed by Iran, and most importantly one that still seeks confrontation with Israel. Our whole state system rests on sovereignty and governments strong enough to exercise it.
There is only one conceiveable way back from the brink here — a multinational force to patrol southern Lebanon, get Hizbullah, or at least its rockets, off the Lebanon-Israeli border and put the region back under the control of the Lebanese central government, first nominally and then, as soon as possible, actually.
Clearly, Beirut is not capable of doing that on her own. Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon would be a disaster for Israel, Lebanon and the entire region. The bad consequences that would flow from that are just too numerous and dire to catalog.
It’s clear that the Bush administration thinks that the answer to the situation is to let Israel crush Hizbullah, to whatever extent that is possible and then come in with some sort of international settlement once the changed situation on the ground is fait accompli. But I really wonder whether there is any serious grappling in Washington with how many fires are currently burning in the Middle East and how close they all are to bleeding into one another into a truly regional confrontation. We have three fairly hot wars going on right now in a relatively small amount of space — four depending on how you choose to measure — each of very different sorts: Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and a quasi-war in Gaza.
Who are we talking to exactly?
I don’t think you need to oppose Israel’s response to the initial Hizbullah attack or question the need to change the status quo in southern Lebanon, to get an eerie feeling that the Bush administration seems content to let this take its natural course, as though it were some geopolitical common cold or flu, with just as predictable an outcome. If Israel goes into southern Lebanon, how does she get out? And how does this end with a Lebanese government stronger, rather than weaker, than it already was — a fairly key issue considering that the weakness of the Lebanese state, its inability to take control of the southern border region is the underlying cause of the problem. For all the lessons on offer in Iraq, I don’t get the sense that the powers-that-be in the White House grasp the malign effect of what you might call geopolitical scar tissue or the unpredictability of war. This can quickly develop a dynamic that will be beyond our control to counter or guide.
Quite a bit of this flows from the Bush administration’s general indifference to the peace process — writ small (negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians) and writ large (trying to wrestle the various conflicts in the region toward some peaceful equlibrium) — and their out of the gate conceit that managing the conflicts of the Middle East, particularly Israel-Palestine, accomplished little and only generated political grief for the president. But as we can see, things can always get worse. For the moment, however, forget about the past. What are they doing now?
Italy to host ceasefire conference next week; Rice to attend. The conference, according to Italian FM (and former PM) Massimo D’Alema, was called at the behest of the State Department and will not include representatives from Israel, Syria or Iran.
Disgraced former MZM executive pleads guilty to making illegal donations to Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA).
This is off topic, but congratulations to Floyd Landis, who today sealed a dramatic victory in the Tour de France. I mention it only because if you haven’t read about Landis’ ride in Thursday’s stage, you really should, regardless of whether you know anything about cycling.
In making up nearly 8 minutes on the race leader in a grueling mountain stage, the day after bonking and losing the yellow jersey, Landis turned in one of the great performances in sports history. It ranks up there with Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game, Tiger Woods’ 1997 Masters victory, and Bob Beamon’s 1968 long jump, performances that simply defied what was believed to be possible.
Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled programming . . .
The WP today offers a broad overview of the role of Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar in the ongoing investigation of Rep. William Jefferson (D-La). Most of what is in Allan Lengel’s piece has been reported before, but it’s nice to step back and remind ourselves how outrageous this whole thing is:
[A] chauffeur drove Jefferson and his Northern Virginia business partner, Lori Mody, in a Lincoln Town Car down the winding pavement on Sorrel Avenue in Potomac to Abubakar’s 2.3-acre property, partially shrouded by trees and protected by a six-foot-high black wrought-iron fence with gold tips.
Unbeknownst to Jefferson, Mody was wearing an FBI wire, and the chauffeur was an undercover FBI agent.
Jefferson met privately with Abubakar, without Mody, to discuss iGate Inc.’s involvement with a Nigerian partner in a high-tech venture to market Internet and cable television in Nigeria, according to the FBI affidavit.
Mody had invested $3.5 million, and Jefferson had a secret share of her business and of iGate.
Following the meeting on Sorrel Avenue, Jefferson told Mody that the vice president had demanded a cut of the profits. He said they also needed to give him a $500,000 payment “as a motivating factor,” the affidavit said.
On July 30, Mody gave Jefferson a $100,000 bribe to pass on to Abubakar, and shortly after, Jefferson assured her that it had been delivered.
On Aug. 3, FBI agents found $90,000 of the marked FBI bills in Jefferson’s freezer at his Capitol Hill apartment. None of cash had gone to Abubakar, according to the FBI affidavit.
If this were in a movie script, you would roll your eyes.
There are three parties in American politics. The third is the Incumbent Party. By that, I mean the peculiar (though certainly not inexplicable) tendency of the interests of incumbent elected officials to merge or align in a way that starts to erase the traditional partisan divide between them and creates a different kind of divide between them and their respective Republican and Democratic constituencies. (Iâm by no means the first to observe this, but Iâm not sure who gets the credit for first doing so.)
Much ink as been spilled in the last 30 years about the possible rise of a true third party in America. One of the reasons, and there are many others, that no third party has materialized out of the numerous third party candidacies during that period, I think, is that most independent candidates were running against the Incumbent Party rather than taking affirmative steps to unify voters around an identifiable set of beliefs. Opposing the Incumbent Party is the thread that links Perot, Nader, and the outsider candidacies by the likes of Jesse Ventura.
Sad to say but Joe Lieberman has become a member of the Incumbent Party. Ned Lamontâs candidacy is as much about opposing an Incumbent Party candidate, as it is a litmus test on the Iraq War. Others have run under the traditional party banners while campaigning against the Incumbent Party, and enjoyed some degree of success: Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean, and Arnold Schwarzenegger (to an extent) come to mind.
But off the top of my head I canât think of anyone who has epitomized the Incumbent Party dynamic to quite the extent that Lieberman has. His decision to run as an independent in the general election if he loses the Democratic primary is the perfect microcosm of the Incumbent Party phenomenon. Itâs one thing to abandon your party when you have lost election, like Buchanan did (twice). Itâs quite another for an incumbent to lose his party primary and then try to mount a general election challenge. To announce it before the primary, well, there canât be much precedent for that. Can anyone think of any?
My ambivalence about Lamont, like most of those conflicted about the race, comes from wanting the energies and resources of Democrats to be focused on defeating Republicans in a year where there is a real possibility of wresting control of one or both chambers of Congress away from the GOP. A Democratic Congress with Joe Lieberman in it is a whole lot better than a Republican Congress sans Lieberman. But itâs difficult now to see how a Lieberman victory, in either the primary or the general, is anything other than a victory for the Incumbent Party.