DOJers work up to the food chain to DeLay. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
John McCain has “agreed to disagree” with Jerry Falwell about intolerance so they can “move forward.”
I think Atrios has them dead to rights. The administration is refusing to release this year’s Social Security report, apparently in violation of federal law.
When you start investigating a politician’s apparently fishy dealings, there’s always a chance said politician will come forward with an explanation that really does clear the whole thing up and show there’s no cause for suspicion.
Seems like Paul Kiel’s continuing reporting on Rep. Jim Ryun’s fishy house purchase isn’t going to fall into that category.
Late last week Ryun came out with a statement and some contracting paperwork that purported to show that the house wasn’t bought for as much as $100,000 under the market price. But there appears to be no documentation of his key claims and what the paperwork actually does seem to show is that Ryun saved so much money with the bargain-basement sale price that he had enough money left over to fancy the place up redoing the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom and a bunch else.
Paul’s got the details.
A bit more follow up on this issue of this year’s Social Security actuarial report. Atrios got hold of this portion of the Social Security Act which mandates that the annual report be released no later than April 1st of each year. It’s only April 3rd so it’s not that late — black letter law notwithstanding. But Matt Yglesias called Treasury Department public affairs and was told not only that it isn’t out yet but that there’s not even any timeline or projected date when it will be released.
This administration doesn’t play fast and loose with the law on Social Security for nothing. Something’s up.
Okay, it doesn’t have anything to do, at least not that we know of, with Rep. Jim Ryun’s sweetheart real estate deal. But the contractor he hired to snazz the house up after he bought it from Ed Buckham’s front group got arrested last year for “illegal construction.”
(ed.note: Thanks to TPM Reader JD for the tip.)
A few days ago I was flipping through a copy of The New Yorker and found Steve Coll’s Talk of the Town piece on the Pentagon’s own classified history of the Iraq war. Parts of report are included in Cobra II, a new book by Michael Gordon and retired Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainer. And certain declassified sections are available at the Foreign Affairs website.
“Reading them,” writes Coll, “it is easy to imagine why the Administration might resist publication of the full study. The extracts describe how the Iraq invasion, more than any other war in American history, was a construct of delusion. Frustratingly, however, we now understand much more about the textures of fantasy in Saddam’s palaces in early 2003 than we do about the self-delusions then prevalent in the West Wing.”
There are a number of ways I could come at writing this post — on the qualities of Coll’s comment, which is taut, concise and devastating, or the contents, to the extent we know them, of the report itself or the various remaining myths it explodes.
But the heart of Coll’s brief comment, or at least what it told me, is the veritable cloud of unknowing, the organized campaign of public denial that still holds the ground in discussions of our war in Iraq — despite the fact that public support for the war, its rationales and conduct, have fallen dramatically.
The president, his key advisors and their public defenders keep looking over the horizon to history’s more positive verdict on their gamble. But there’s little reason — either from what we know of this war or the evolving view of past wars — to think this adventure will be remembered as anything but a disaster.
And yet, only last month the country was knocked off the rails into a dingbat debate about whether things were actually bad in Iraq or whether the media was just telling America things were going badly and hiding all the good news. We actually had that debate — not more than two weeks ago. It’s like the AIDS patient who desperately needs treatment but falls under the spell of some charlatan who gets him wondering whether AIDS actually really exists.
Only we’re a whole country with no real excuse.
I’ll let others speak for themselves. But this is why I devoted such time to skewering that clown Howard Kaloogian for his bogus picture of how well things are going in Iraq. Someone who so clearly cares more about his political party and its sacred cows than his country — and that’s the only explanation for spouting such lies — scarcely deserves a place in public life, let alone Congress.
Read Coll’s short note. It won’t take you more than a few minutes. Even though public opinion has turned fairly decisively against the war, our whole public life today — not just related to this war, but centered on it — is awash in a sea of disinformation, official lies and denial. Indeed, lies and bad-faith obfuscation still set the terms of the public debate. We’ve barely scraped the surface in understanding how we got into this war — largely because there’s been no serious or independent investigation. And the dominant voices in the media are still willing to indulge the voices of liars on a par with those who are at least trying to grapple with what’s happening.
The jackals really are out for Cynthia McKinney. But, man, does she give them a lot to work with. A TV station in Atlanta is now reporting that McKinney spent around a $1000 worth of taxpayer money to fly Isaac Hayes to Georgia to help dedicate her new district office in Atlanta. This, as one would expect, is not allowed under congressional rules.
Perhaps there’s a South Park angle too. But who knows?