Okay, as you know, here at TPM, we’re getting big into video. And most of the stuff we bring you now is stuff we’ve produced ourselves. But this video piece by Max Blumenthal is such a work of genius that I’ve got to post it.
It’s Max spending some quality time at the National College Republican Convention last week.
I’m serious. Watch it. You’ll thank me.
Late Update: This one’s pretty damned funny too …
No enemy of the U.S. in the last 40 years has had as dim a view of American willpower as neo-conservatives do. To hear them tell the tale, U.S. foreign policy has been one long series of impotent withdrawals.
Here, for example, is Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman, in a letter, obtained by the AP, responding to questions from Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) about Pentagon contingency planning for a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq:
Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia.
Haunted by this dark narrative of failure, the neo-cons are bound and determined not to repeat the weak-willed mistakes of the recent past. Why, even the very discussion of how to get out of this mess will embolden our enemies and undermine our own resolve. Instead, we must march in lockstep forward, chins jutting ahead, ignoring all of the distractions which could so easily turn us into quivering Jello.
How thankful we should be to have brave men like Eric Edelman to stifle debate, to lash us in our moments of weakness, and to encourage us to be oblivious to the reality all around us. Then and only then can we achieve America’s true greatness.
If, god forbid, we were to fail, it will not be on account of such noble examples as Eric Edleman. No, it will be the fault of the weak-minded among us, besotted by our culture of tolerance and permissiveness. Men like Eric Edelman can lead, but they cannot make us follow (at least not quite yet–they’re working on that). In this, we must do our duty, following without question or reason, without reflection or pause.
Ultimately, as Eric Edelman knows all too well, our own worst enemy is ourselves.
Update: Here’s a copy of the letter.
In a post today Andrew Sullivan writes …
What we desperately need right now is less recrimination – can we all agree that the current crew is simply unhinged? – and more imagination with respect to exploiting the opportunities opened up by the moral and strategic catastrophe of the Iraq occupation.
I don’t think Sullivan necessarily disagrees with what I’m about to write. But it puts me in the mind of what Sen. Lieberman (I) said Tuesday night during the Republicans’ Iraq filibuster when he decried the partisanship and acrimony of the Iraq debate, with an undisguised emphasis on his Democratic colleagues. I agree to the extent that the dangers we face because of the Iraq catastrophe are so great and the long term consequences so vast that we can’t afford score settling and jockeying for advantage. This isn’t rhetoric. Completely setting aside the lives we’ve lost and the money we’ve squandered I don’t think this country has really taken stock of the damage we’ve done to ourselves or the prices we’re going to pay for this folly for decades to come. As it is with a family so to with a country, when catastrophe strikes everyone has to pull together to help find a way out, a way back.
But that’s not where we are. A faction in this country, and it doesn’t merit a loftier label given its quickly diminishing size and its focus on loyalty to a single man, is still focused on perpetuating the catastrophe — continuing it, expanding it and perhaps most importantly denying its very existence. One might say that denial and refusal to come clean on how we got into this mess is actually the least important element. But that’s not the case since it is these that make the continuation of the policy possible.
We can agree that the current crew is unhinged. But they still control the US military and all of US foreign policy until 60 senators agree to bring them to heel.
Things continue to look gloomy for Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA). The governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Benigno R. Fitial, announced today that he is cooperating with the federal investigation related to Jack Abramoff:
The Justice Department’s interest in Doolittle appears to focus on payments Doolittle’s wife, Julie, received from Abramoff for fundraising work unrelated to the Marianas. But Doolittle was also heavily involved in Abramoff’s advocacy for the Marianas, endorsing Fitial for governor and pushing federal funding on his behalf.
Doolittle was lobbied on the issue by his own former legislative director, Kevin Ring, who went on to work with Abramoff and now is himself under investigation.
“Doolittle, he’s also a friend,” said Fitial.
Fitial spoke to reporters after testifying against a Senate bill that would impose U.S. immigration laws on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a chain of 14 islands just north of Guam in the Pacific. A similar bill passed the Senate in 2000 but Abramoff helped block it from advancing in the House.
I suppose Doolittle will cheer this latest development, too.
Lots of readers have emailed about the Executive Order issued by the President on Tuesday, which broadly empowers the federal government to freeze the assets of Iraqi insurgents and those seeking to destabilize the Iraqi government, including U.S. citizens. Spencer Ackerman has looked into the implications of this new order and has two reports (here and here).
There’s no use trying to debunk each and every lie or half truth that comes out of Tony Snow, but this one has been gnawing at me all day. It comes from a Snow op-ed in this morning’s USA Today. Here he is referring to Saddam Hussein: “We never argued that he played a role [in] 9/11; political opponents manufactured the claim to question the president’s integrity.”
Now it can gnaw on you, too. I feel better already.
Seventy House Democrats write a letter to Bush informing him that they won’t support any future war funding unless it pays for nothing but withdrawal of the troops. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
The Financial Times reports that some cases in the San Francisco U.S. Attorney’s office are moving so slowly that the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering moving forward with its civil cases alone rather than waiting on the Justice Department, with whom the SEC usually jointly files cases:
The San Francisco slowdown is the most dramatic example of larger problems that have surfaced at the DoJ since the mass sackings of eight US attorneys, including Mr [Kevin] Ryan, caused a furore in February. Six top posts at the DoJ in Washington are empty or filled with temporary appointees, and 23 of the 93 US Attorneyâs offices around the country lack permanent political leadership.
Frankly, I wouldn’t call this the “most dramatic example” of the problems at DOJ. The politicization at all levels that has emerged since the USAs purge is far more dramatic and more serious. But the FT report does show how even the routine work of the department is being disrupted by the dreadful leadership of Alberto Gonzales.
Greetings. I was away for a couple days because I was serving jury duty. Like many of you, I suspect, I have mixed feelings when I get called for jury duty. On the one hand I feel a strong civic obligation. On the other, I feel the tug of all my professional responsibilities. And in this case in particular I was anxious because we’d just relaunched the site. So I felt particularly pained and uncomfortable not being around when we were getting the new set up up and running, since so much of it is new and different from what we’ve done before.
The only jury I’ve ever served on was one in Washington, DC about four years ago. It was a fairly straightforward drug sale at an open air drug market, cigarettes dipped in PCP, two charges. I think I was one of one or two jurors who wasn’t willing to convict on the first round. And we ended up convicting on one count (possession) and acquitting on the other (sale). There’s a certain illogic to the combination, I grant you. But in the particular set of factual findings we had to make there was a logic to it.
In the everyday sense of reasoning it was fairly clear the defendant was guilty. But it was also clear that several key facts the police claimed had happened could not have happened — it came down to pretty straightforward physics that even I can understand, like people not being able to see through buildings. There was the backdrop of the draconian punishments for small time drug crimes. But I set that aside as I was instructed to. But I could not see convicting the kid when it was clear that two of the central fact witnesses for the prosecution lied about key details to make the case stronger. We, the jury, argued for some time and decided to acquit on one count and convict on another where there was physical evidence that appeared impossible to dispute.
In any case, this time — back to the present — I was nervous about getting impanelled for the reasons I’ve described above and I had this and that person tell me their bright idea about how to get oneself knocked out of contention in the jury selection process. So I showed up yesterday morning, waited, didn’t get called, didn’t get called, then finally got called with twelve other perspective jurors down to the civil branch on the third floor.
We were escorted into a spacious and well-lighted closet for the voir dire process. One of the two attorneys, a snappily dressed man, began describing the case to us. And it became clear it was a medical malpractice claim. He gave us a brief thumbnail description of the case. And it occurred to me that having married into a family of doctors probably wouldn’t make me a particularly attractive candidate. Then the defense attorney began discussing the case and in passing told us her client’s name, the defendant.
And I’d gone to college with him. That’s a decent number of years ago now. But not a common name, the right kind of doctor, the right location. Obviously him. And not just a name I remembered, but a friend, if one I haven’t seen or heard of in going on twenty years. My hand popped up. “I think I know one of the parties to the case.” At which I drew a bunch of sharp stares like I’d just popped a balloon. And that pretty much was the end of my jury duty this time.
I got sent back to the waiting pond, came back this morning and got my walking papers at lunch.
Huge new claim of executive privilege from the White House is about to be reported in the Post.
Late Update: And here it is …
Bush administration officials unveiled a bold new assertion of executive authority yesterday in the dispute over the firing of nine U.S. attorneys, saying that the Justice Department will never be allowed to pursue contempt charges initiated by Congress against White House officials once the president has invoked executive privilege.
The position presents serious legal and political obstacles for congressional Democrats, who have begun laying the groundwork for contempt proceedings against current and former White House officials in order to pry loose information about the dismissals.
Under federal law, a statutory contempt citation by the House or Senate must be submitted to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.”
And this …
Mark J. Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who has written a book on executive-privilege issues, called the administration’s stance “astonishing.”
“That’s a breathtakingly broad view of the president’s role in this system of separation of powers,” Rozell said. “What this statement is saying is the president’s claim of executive privilege trumps all.”