I am sure you will be SHOCKED to learn that Obama is acting in much the same way. I know, I know – what a surprise. Ahem. Well, it seems some one has been doing a little investigative journalism, something in VERY short supply of late. But get this – I tell you, you better be sitting down – in this case, it was – WAIT FOR IT –
MSNBC. YES, the very network to which we routinely refer as “MSNBO”! Once I recovered from the shock of it all, I couldn’t wait to see just how transparent President Obama was compared to Bush. (I wonder if there is a way for us to do a pool on these kinds of things, like for NCAA basketball or something?)

This is what MSNBC uncovered in this report:

Obama Names 110 White House Visitors

The White House on Friday released a small list of visitors to the White House since President Barack Obama took office in January, including lobbyists, business executives, activists and celebrities.

No previous administration has released such a list, though the information out so far is incomplete. Only about 110 names —and 481 visits —out of the hundreds of thousands who have visited the Obama White House were made public. Like the Bush administration before it, Obama is arguing that any release is voluntary, not required by law, despite two federal court rulings to the contrary.

The emphasis there is mine. This is a bit of a schizophrenic opening. On the one hand, they want to champion that Obama released 110 names – Woohoo!! On the other hand, they have to acknowledge that, once again, President Obama is using the SAME arguments as Bush. Moreover, this “Constitutional Scholar” is doing so in clear violation of not one, but TWO federal court rulings! Maybe the KoolAide was made improperly that day, I don’t know, but the report continues:

Under the Obama White House’s policy, most names of visitors from Inauguration Day in January through the end of September will never be released. The White House says it plans to release most of the names of visitors from October on, and that release is due near the end of the year. There are limitations there as well, including potential Supreme Court nominees, personal guests of the First Family, and certain security officials.

The names released Friday include business leaders and lobbyists with a lot to gain or lose from Obama policies. They include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (whose foundation is pushing for changes in teacher pay), former AIG chairman Maurice Greenberg, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Chevron CEO David O’Reilly, Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, JP Morgan’s James Dimon, Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis, John Stumpf of Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, State Street bank’s Ron Logue, BNY Mellon’s Robert Kelly, labor leader Andrew Stern of the Service Employees International Union (22 visits)*, American Bankers Association CEO Ed Yingling, community bankers president Camden Fine, and lobbyists Heather and Anthony Podesta, whose brother John Podesta led Obama’s transition team.

Besides Gates, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt are also on the list. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC. One of NBC’s parents is GE.)

Advocates and nonprofit leaders include National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy, and Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is interested in health policy.

So, this is how Obama is paying these people and organizations back, by having them in the White House? I bet Kim Gandy was just all aflutter after she threw ALL women under the bus to endorse Obama over a life-long women’s advocate. There is more on her below.

I know many readers will be interested in this White House guest:

Democratic donor and businessman George Soros visited with White House aides twice.

Yes, indeedy, a major funder of Moveon.org has been to check up on his biggest investment – ahem – twice.

We’re just getting started:

Political figures include former Sen. Thomas Daschle, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, former Gov. Howard Dean, Sen. Al Franken, former Vice President Al Gore, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, and Democratic strategist Steve Elmendorf.

Celebrities at the White House include Oprah Winfrey, actors Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Denzel Washington, and tennis star Serena Williams. Journalists include Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner in economics.

Conservative religious leader Gary Bauer visited, as did liberal civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Okay, the last two, along with Oprah, are NOT a surprise. Gary Bauer? Just a tad surprising.

For anyone who wants to see more:

Msnbc.com has put the full list in a handy PDF file, and also in an Excel file for those who like to sort.

One guest is mighty interesting:

Not that Bill Ayers

The White House warns that many names that may appear familiar — and controversial — do not in fact refer to the most famous people to carry those names. Jeremiah Wright is on the list, but it’s not the president’s former pastor. This Michael Jordan is not the basketball player. This Michael Moore is not a filmmaker. The William Ayers who took a group tour of the White House isn’t the former radical from Chicago who figured so prominently in the 2008 campaign. And the Angela Davis on the list has a different middle initial than the activist and former fugitive.

The White House could have avoided some of that sort of confusion by providing more information on the visitors, such as an employer name and the city they hail from. For example, is the Shawn Carter who attended a poetry reading the same one who goes by Jay-Z and had campaigned for Obama?

“This unprecedented level of transparency can sometimes be confusing rather than providing clear information,” a White House special counsel, Norm Eisen, wrote on the White House blog.

If you spot a name on the list that bears investigating, please drop us a note.

Of COURSE we will just trust Obama and his spokes-minions when they assure us that this Bill Ayers could not POSSIBLY be domestic terrorist – Capitol Building and Pentagon bomber – long time friend and mentor Bill Ayers! He is just some guy who wanted to visit the White House Gift Shop and pick up a couple of Marine One helicopter models for his boys. I am sure of it. Sheesh. Really? They expect us to believe this crap? Evidently – they got plenty of other people to believe that kind of crap and more, so why stop now?

Okay – if you are consuming any liquids right this minute, I suggest you put it down when you read this:

Limited release

Despite the accompanying White House claim of “transparency like you’ve never seen before,” the Obama White House continues to take the same legal position as the Bush White House, arguing that the records are not public records subject to the Freedom of Information Act. Only limited “voluntary releases” are being made to settle a lawsuit filed by an advocacy group, though a federal judge has twice ruled that all the visitor logs are public. (Again, emphasis is mine.)

Yet there are severe limitations to the transparency:

Most of the visitors from Inauguration Day to September will never be released by the White House under this voluntary disclosure — unless the public can guess their names. The White House policy doesn’t allow members of the public or press to ask for “everyone who visited health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle,” or everyone who visited on May 4, or everyone from the American Medical Association. Only individual names can be checked.

I know, right? Didn’t this sound just a little pissy?? From someone at MSNBC?? The bigger picture is that the Obama Administration is BREAKING THE LAW. Hell to the YES, that information falls under FOIA – this is OUR White House, not the Obamas. We most definitely DO get to know every single John Smith and Jane Doe who cross the threshold of the White House. You better believe we do.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but it is a start:

The list released at 4:30 p.m. Friday includes just about 110 names with 481 visits. Those names were among those requested by members of the public so far, for visits during the period from Inauguration Day through July. (That’s why we know of visits by the wrong Bill Ayers, the wrong Angela Davis, etc., but we don’t know of visits by countless unnamed lobbyists.) Members of the public who used the White House online form to check names did not receive a personal reply indicating whether or not the request was received, or whether the name appeared on the list, so the system provides no feedback. Does the absence of Bill Clinton’s name on the list mean that he has not been to the White House, or that the request wasn’t received by the White House online system?

A request for the complete records of all visitors from the first months of the administration, filed by msnbc.com, was rejected by the White House, and an appeal is pending. The news organization requested the names of all visitors to the Obama White House beginning with Inauguration Day. Msnbc.com has filed an administrative appeal with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.

Say whaa?? The White House rejected a request from their lapdog “news” source?? Huh. There’s a shocker. Welcome to the “Under The Bus” club, MSNBC!

The Wall Street Journal focused on the most frequent visitor to the White House. He was mentioned in the list above, but without the acknowledgment of the frequency:

SEIU’s Stern Tops White House Visitor List

Promising “transparency like you’ve never seen before,” The White House released its visitor log this evening under a new voluntary disclosure policy.

The log chronicles 481 visits to the White House from individuals ranging from Jay-Z to Bill Gates from January through July.

The list includes William Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Michael Moore, Robert Kelly (R. Kelly), Malik Shabazz, and Michael Jordan.

But the White House said those aren’t the guys you’re thinking of. Nor is the log complete.

Ahahahahahahaha!!! I just cannot get enough of this one – sure, they aren’t the same people. Yeah, okay, we believe you. NOT. And because it is just so much fun to see them squirm, I am keeping in the part that is repetitive of the article above, especially the quotes from Eisen. Oh, what a funny guy:

“A lot of people visit the White House, up to 100,000 each month, with many of those folks coming to tour the buildings. Given this large amount of data, the records we are publishing today include a few ‘false positives’ – names that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else,” Norm Eisen, a special counsel to the president, writes on the White House blog. “The well-known individuals with those names never actually came to the White House. Nevertheless, we were asked for those names and so we have included records for those individuals who were here and share the same names.”

Adds Eisen: “This unprecedented level of transparency can sometimes be confusing rather than providing clear information.”

Uh, ya know, I think we are all smart enough to not get all confused by this incredible level of “transparency.” Beginning with, we actually know the definition of “transparency,” something Eisen and Obama apparently do not.

And then there is this:

One thing is clear: *Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern holds sway at the White House, where he’s listed for 22 visits—the top number on the logs. Visitors in the top 10 also include former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, National Organization for Women President Kim Gandy, and NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan.

So THAT’S what Gandy and Keenan got for stabbing Hillary Clinton and, well, WOMEN, int he back – visits to the White House. I guess there is something gained by selling your soul, though, personally, I don’t think it is worth it. But that’s just me.

Anywho – yes, the President of the SEIU, again, the union co-founded by the founder of ACORN, Wade Rathke, is the TOP visitor at the White House. The SEIU has been in the news quite a bit, especially for holding California hostage – threatening that their good buddy, Obama, would not give the state any federal stimulus funds if it had the audacity to expect the union to cut wages like everyone else so the state wouldn’t go bankrupt. NOW we know how the union was able to do that. All those visits to the White House apparently paid off – for the union, not California, the state with one of the largest budgets around (as in 5th in the world). What makes this more egregious is that California pays a lot into the federal tax system and receives little comparatively speaking. And this union is allowed – by the White House – to hold it over a barrel. Yep, all those meetings seemed to do the trick!

Aren’t you just so heartened by all of this “transparency”? And by seeing who Obama is welcoming into our White House? Yeah, me, too. As long as the Obama Administration continues to thumb its nose at Federal Law, I reckon we should be “thankful” for this (no, not really – it’s BS that they are still sitting on so much information).

Oh, but if you can just GUESS who might else have been there and submit that form asking them, maybe you can confirm some other folks who have been there, too. Lemme know what you find out, okay? I am sure we would all just love to know…

General McChrystal’s proposal for Afghanistan has been on Obama’s desk for almost two months now. And what is Obama doing about it? Well, he appears to be deciding on how to decide what his decision will be, but he’s not there yet. Nope, instead, he is throwing up some smokescreen about the need for a do-over in Afghanistan’s election (wait – how come WE can’t get one of those??) before he will commit. And smokescreen it is. Even Secretary of Defense Gates has told him he can’t wait that long.

Obama needs to stop tip-toeing around Afghanistan, and own it, as a part of his presidency. For that matter, he needs to own his presidency, as Peggy Noonan points out in this commentary, It’s His Rubble Now: And the American people want him to fix it.. Uh, yeah. Pretty much. She writes:

At a certain point, a president must own a presidency. For George W. Bush that point came eight months in, when 9/11 happened. From that point on, the presidency—all his decisions, all the credit and blame for them—was his. The American people didn’t hold him responsible for what led up to 9/11, but they held him responsible for everything after it. This is part of the reason the image of him standing on the rubble of the twin towers, bullhorn in hand, on Sept.14, 2001, became an iconic one. It said: I’m owning it.

Mr. Bush surely knew from the moment he put the bullhorn down that he would be judged on everything that followed. And he has been. Early on, the American people rallied to his support, but Americans are practical people. They will support a leader when there is trouble, but there’s an unspoken demand, or rather bargain: We’re behind you, now fix this, it’s yours.

President Obama, in office a month longer than Bush was when 9/11 hit, now owns his presidency. Does he know it? He too stands on rubble, figuratively speaking—a collapsed economy, high and growing unemployment, two wars. Everyone knows what he’s standing on. You can almost see the smoke rising around him. He’s got a bullhorn in his hand every day.

It’s his now. He gets the credit and the blame. How do we know this? The American people are telling him. You can see it in the polls. That’s what his falling poll numbers are about. “It’s been almost a year, you own this. Fix it.”

Pretty much. Though he seems to be using his bullhorn for all the wrong things, IMHO. Noonan continues:

The president doesn’t seem to like this moment. Who would? He and his men and women have returned to referring to what they “inherited.” And what they inherited was, truly, terrible: again, a severe economic crisis and two wars. But their recent return to this theme is unbecoming. Worse, it is politically unpersuasive. It sounds defensive, like a dodge.

The president said last week, at a San Francisco fund-raiser, that he’s busy with a “mop,” “cleaning up somebody else’s mess,” and he doesn’t enjoy “somebody sitting back and saying, ‘You’re not holding the mop the right way.’” Later, in New Orleans, he groused that reporters are always asking “Why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?” His surrogates and aides, in appearances and talk shows, have taken to remembering, sometimes at great length, the dire straits we were in when the presidency began.

This is not a sign of confidence. Nor were the president’s comments to a New York fund-raiser this week. Democrats, he said to the Democratic audience, are “an opinionated bunch.” They always have a lot of thoughts and views. Republicans, on the other hand—”the other side”—aren’t really big on independent thinking. “They just kinda sometimes do what they’re told. Democrats, ya’ll thinkin’ for yourselves.” It is never a good sign when the president gets folksy, dropping his g’s, because he is by nature not a folksy g-dropper but a coolly calibrating intellectual who is always trying to guess, as most politicians do, what normal people think. When Mr. Obama gets folksy he isn’t narrowing his distance from his audience but underlining it. He shouldn’t do this.

But the statement that Republicans just do what they’re told was like his famous explanation of unhappy voters are people who “cling to guns or religion.” (What comes over him at fund-raisers?) Both statements speaks of a political misjudgment of his opponents and his situation.They show a misdiagnosis of the opposition that is politically tin-eared. Politicians looking to win don’t patronize those they’re trying to win over.

No kidding – insulting people you want to win over is thoroughly unhelpful, though it’s a strategy we have seen way too much of of late (and for a great post on that little soundbite of Obama’s, I recommend fellow No Quarter writer, Ani’s, post, “President Obama Is Insulting Americans Again”). I, for one, do not respond well to it, but that’s just me.

Back to Noonan:

But the point on the We Inherited a Terrible Situation and It’s Not Our Fault argument is, again, that it is worse than unbecoming. It is unpersuasive.

How do we know this? Through the polls. In all of the major surveys, the president’s popularity has gone down the past few months. A Gallup Daily Tracking Poll out this week reported Mr. Obama’s job approval dropped nine points during the third quarter of this year, that is between July 1 and Sept. 30, when it fell from 62% to 53%. It was the biggest such drop Gallup has ever measured for an elected president during the same period of his term. A Fox News poll out Thursday showed support for the president’s policies falling below 50% for the first time. Ominously for him, independents are peeling off. In 2006 and 2008 independents looked like Democrats. They were angry and frustrated by the wars, they sought to rebuke the Bush White House. Now those independents look like Republicans. They worry about joblessness, debts and deficits.

The White House sees the falling support. Thus the reminder: We faced an insuperable challenge, we’re mopping up somebody else’s mess.

The Democratic Party too sees the falling support, and is misunderstanding it. The great question they debated last week was whether the president is tough enough: Does he come across as too weak? It is true, as the cliché has it, that it’s helpful for a president to be both revered and feared. But this president is not weak, that’s not his problem. He willed himself into the presidency with an adroit reading of the lay of the land, brought together and dominated all the constituent pieces of victory, showed and shows impressive self-discipline, seems in general to stick to a course once he’s chosen it, though arguably especially when he’s wrong. His decision to let Congress write a health-care bill may yield at least the appearance of victory. And if Mr. Obama isn’t twisting arms like LBJ, and then giving just an extra little jerk to snap the rotator cuff just for fun, the case can be made that day by day he’s moving the Democrats of Congress in the historic direction he desires. All his adult life he’s played the long game, which takes patience and skill.

She forgot the lying, cheating, stealing, and downright theft, that helped propel Obama into the presidency, but whatever. What I don’t get is why people continue to forget that the Democrats were in charge of both houses of Congress for TWO YEARS before Obama became president. All of the stuff that happened in the two preceding years, like the stimulus bill, the economy, all of that, is on their hands. This, “Oh, poor me – look at how much I have to clean up! Being president is HARD WORK, just like Bush said!” has long passed its usefulness, if it ever had any.

It’s more than that:

The problem isn’t his personality, it’s his policies. His problem isn’t what George W. Bush left but what he himself has done. It is a problem of political judgment, of putting forward bills that were deeply flawed or off-point. Bailouts, the stimulus package, cap-and-trade; turning to health care at the exact moment in history when his countrymen were turning their concerns to the economy, joblessness, debt and deficits—all of these reflect a misreading of the political terrain. They are matters of political judgment, not personality. (Republicans would best heed this as they gear up for 2010: Don’t hit him, hit his policies. That’s where the break with the people is occurring.)

The result of all this is flagging public support, a drop in the polls, and independents peeling off.

In this atmosphere, with these dynamics, Mr. Obama’s excuse-begging and defensiveness won’t work.

Everyone knows he was handed horror. They want him to fix it.

At some point, you own your presidency. At some point it’s your rubble. At some point the American people tell you it’s yours. The polls now, with the presidential approval numbers going down and the disapproval numbers going up: That’s the American people telling him.

Not for nothing, but he kept telling US he could handle this job. Many of us knew he couldn’t, wouldn’t, but at some point, it’s sink or swim, and we are already beyond that point. No more whining and crying about the crap sandwich you got handed when you fought so dirty to get there in the first place. I guarantee you, Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be complaining left and right. She’d push up her shirt sleeves and get to work. That is what we expect of Obama, too.

Oh, one last thing. About those fundraisers Obama is flitting around doing while we have all of these major issues detailed above? In the first nine months of his presidency, Obama has gone to TWENTY-THREE fundraisers. In the first twenty, he has raised $20 million for the DNC coffers. That’s just jake.

Want to guess how many Bush did in the same amount of time? Six. I said, SIX. And Bush raised $48 million from his six, and he did none after the attacks on September 11th.

I can’t leave Bill Clinton out. He did five fundraisers in nine months. That’s it.

Sure shows you what is important to Obama, and it is not running this country. Time for him to own the presidency he fought so dirty to get, and roll up HIS shirt sleeves like Secretary Clinton has done. Way, way past time, in fact. Get to it already.

The American Idol president is running his own reality show and we are picking up the tab. Mr. Obama seems to think that he and his wife are the most fascinating part of the American narrative. Last Friday, the IOC clarified the butter for the Obamas. In the past months, we have published many articles reporting on Kool Aid drinkers who have lifted their heads from the pink trough, dazed and confused, wondering where the “Change” is. The list is long: Peggy Noonan, Frank Rich, Susan Estrich, Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia, Robert Reich. Feel free to add your own. Today I add three more to that growing list.

First WaPo’s Richard Cohen complains Obama Doesn’t Seem Ready to Lead:

Barack Obama’s trip to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago for the Olympics would have been a dumb move whatever the outcome. But as it turned out (an airy dismissal would not be an unfair description), it poses some questions about his presidency that are way more important than the proper venue for synchronized swimming. The first, and to my mind most important, is whether Obama knows who he is.

This business of self-knowledge is no minor issue. It bears greatly on the single most crucial issue facing this young and untested president: Afghanistan. Already, we have his choice for Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, taking the measure of his commander in chief and publicly telling him what to do. This MacArthuresque star turn called for a Trumanesque response, but Obama offered nothing of the kind. Instead, he used McChrystal as a prop, adding a bit of four-star gravitas to that silly trip to Copenhagen by having the general meet with him there.

Mr. Cohen is blaming Gen. McChrystal for someone else leaking his report to the President. The more important point is, as Gen. Wes Clark or anyone else who’s actually been in this position will tell you (and as he did say in an interview this weekend), you’d better listen to your commanders on the ground. Cohen is right that the 25 minute meeting with McChrystal on Friday was merely a photo op. He’s still deliberating. How many more months of ‘deliberating” are required while our soldiers are dying in Afghanistan?

This is the president we now have: He inspires lots of affection but not a lot of awe. It is the latter, though, that matters most in international affairs, where the greatest and most gut-wrenching tests await Obama. If he remains consistent to his own rhetoric of just last August, he will send more troops to Afghanistan and more of them will die. “This is not a war of choice,” he said. “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”

President Obama has the disastrous example of Iraq where Bush’s Generals told him from the outset that an overwhelming force was needed. They did not get it. You saw the result. Obama himself admitted that the belated 2007 surge was wildly successful. How much more evidence does he need? Define the mission, and either send the forces in to get the job done or pull all our men and women out of there. Choose. Lead. That’s the job description. Date night I don’t care about. Dog walking I don’t care about.

Cohen concludes:

But the ultimate in realism is for the president to gauge himself and who he is: Does he have the stomach and commitment for what is likely to be an unpopular war? Will he send additional troops, but hedge by not sending enough — so that the dying will be in vain? What does he believe, and will he ask Americans to die for it? Only he knows the answers to these questions. But based on his zigzagging so far and the suggestion from the Copenhagen trip that the somber seriousness of the presidency has yet to sink in, we have reason to wonder.

Has the seriousness of the presidency sunk in? Now there’s a question.

You may be surprised to note that NY Times columnist Bob Herbert is wondering the same thing. A huge cheerleader for Obama, Herbert cried racism and even saw phallic symbols in the leaning tower of Pisa in a misguided attempt to defend his chosen hero last year. Now he wonders Does Obama Get It? Well, Mr. Herbert, don’t feel bad. This question has been keeping me up nights, too. He states:

The big question on the domestic front right now is whether President Obama understands the gravity of the employment crisis facing the country. Does he get it? The signals coming out of the White House have not been encouraging.

Clearly Mr. Herbert, if you have to ask, then Obama does not understand the gravity of the situation. Where is his good judgment? How can one not understand 9.8 unemployment – in reality it is a much higher number when one includes Americans out of work for so long they have fallen off the rolls.

The Beltway crowd and the Einsteins of high finance who never saw this economic collapse coming are now telling us with their usual breezy arrogance that the Great Recession is probably over. Their focus, of course, is on data, abstractions like the gross domestic product, not the continued suffering of living, breathing human beings struggling with the nightmare of joblessness.

Even Mr. Obama, in an interview with The Times, gave short shrift to the idea of an additional economic stimulus package, telling John Harwood a few weeks ago that the economy had likely turned a corner. “As you know,” the president said, “jobs tend to be a lagging indicator; they come last.”

The view of most American families is somewhat less blasé. …

Nearly one in four American families has suffered a job loss over the past year, according to a survey released by the Economic Policy Institute. Nearly 1 in 10 Americans is officially unemployed, and the real-world jobless rate is worse.

It is a nightmare. No one is blasé when they are worried how they are going to feed their families. What about the porkulus package? Is this administration waiting to release most of the funds in 2010 to help them at the polls? If that is the case, shame on them.

Why should Obama understand when he isn’t spending his own money? Half million dollar pizza parties, an obscene amount spent on the inauguration and several million on this reckless Copenhagen junket show a frightening disconnect between Obama’s priorities and his fiduciary responsibility to the American people. Herbert continues:

The Obama administration seems hamstrung by the unemployment crisis. No big ideas have emerged. No dramatically creative initiatives. While devoting enormous amounts of energy to health care, and trying now to decide what to do about Afghanistan, the president has not even conveyed the sense of urgency that the crisis in employment warrants.

If that does not change, these staggering levels of joblessness have the potential to cripple not just the well-being of millions of American families, but any real prospects for sustained economic recovery and the political prospects of the president as well. An unemployed electorate is an unhappy electorate.

Mr. Herbert, they are already crippled, but instead of addressing the urgency of the economy and Afghanistan head on, we get what George Will calls The Obamas’ Narcissism on Display. Speaking of Mr. and Mrs. Obama’s speeches before the IOC last week,

…Their separate speeches to the International Olympic Committee were so dreadful, and in such a characteristic way, that they might be symptomatic of something that has serious implications for American governance.

Both Obamas gave heartfelt speeches about … themselves. Although the working of the committee’s mind is murky, it could reasonably have rejected Chicago’s bid for the 2016 games on aesthetic grounds — unless narcissism has suddenly become an Olympic sport.

George Will suggested that since the Obamas used so many “I” and “me” references in their speeches, Obama’s genius speechwriters (Favreau et al) should have substituted the words I and me with “sauerkraut” to underscore the ‘antic nature of their excessive appearances.’ Someone needs to tell the Obamas that what is compelling about America is all Americans – all colors of the rainbow, all states, all social strata – together. All of us. Not just the two of them. And all of us are hurting out here. Our soldiers are hurting, too.

Will also points to Obama’s excessive use of cliché:

“At this defining moment,” a moment “when the fate of each nation is inextricably linked to the fate of all nations” in “this ever-shrinking world,” he aspires to “forge new partnerships with the nations and the peoples of the world.”
…
Does our Cicero even glance at his speeches before reading them in public?

All this is indicative of a man not connected to his words or not caring enough about either his audience or the subject at hand to come up with anything better than patented brand phrases that some focus group told him “resonate” with the public.

Our soldiers and our economy need a coherent plan. Now. He has had ample time to figure this out, as has Congress. Too much energy is focused on infighting for a health care plan that is such an incoherent monstrosity that they should trash it and start over. This is not even supposed to take effect until 2013, after the next election. Hmmm I wonder why. All things considered, that leaves health care the least urgent issue of the three.

On Afghanistan and the economy, pressing matters where lives, jobs and homes are on the line – where is the president? Will concludes:

Unhappy will be a president whose defining adjective is “vain.”

In keeping with the vanity of this man’s administration, we also see that nothing President Obama does is his own fault. This is the job he wanted. And a majority of the electorate voted him in to do it. What is he waiting for? There is no one else to blame if he hems and haws so long that Afghanistan is lost. There is no one else to blame if he insists on focusing on parts of an agenda that are not helping put the American people back to work. This is his presidency now. So I’ll ask again.

Mr. President, why did you want this job?

Transparency, said President Barack Obama in a memo not long after he took the oath of office, was going to be a “touchstone” of his administration. His advisors then gathered around, breaking into a paroxysm of giggles interlaced with assurances to each other that dumbbell Americans would actually buy this stuff.

What fun to have power, they laughed. What fun!

OK, true enough, I cannot vouch for any post-promise merriment, but I can vouch that it did not take all that long for the administration to emulate former Vice President Dick Cheney’s thoroughly castigated private meetings with top energy executives working with him on policy issues. The public did not learn what was said or who attended. Especially among liberals, suspicion of dastardliness was high.

Well, speaking for myself, I concur – I was pretty upset about Cheney’s secret meeting with energy executives to craft our energy policy. Amazingly, there is a correlation:

The Obama version was to meet secretly with coal executives while devising the content of a cap-and-trade global-warming tax, explaining that presidential communications are privileged and did not fall under the Freedom of Information Act. Judges had differed with that idea, and so did Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which filed suit and, then, not too much later had reason to try again to get the names of people visiting the White House for sessions on the nation’s future.

This time it was health-care executives on hand to lend their ideas and expertise about health-care legislation. The administration at first resisted divulging the names, but finally did — which is hardly the same as saying we can now figure on the steadfast openness which once upon a time was guaranteed by Obama himself.

Oh, wait – did I write “correlation”? I meant, “correlationS.” Obama hasn’t stopped with just energy, obviously. Yep – health care people, too – and we are seeing how well that is going over right now.

Naturally, there is more:

Take a glance, for instance, at the Environmental Protection Agency. According to a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Alan Carlin, a senior analyst with EPA’s National Center for Economics, had the temerity along with a colleague to produce a paper casting doubt on global-warming theory and especially on the reliability of computer models predicting catastrophe down the pike. His boss made it clear that the thesis was contrary to policy and the paper would not be allowed out the door.

I missed the liberal outcry on this, as opposed, say, to what we heard when NASA’s global-warming alarmist James Hansen whined that his press releases might be reviewed before being released during the Bush administration. No such reviews ever took place, which hardly stopped one outraged commentator from complaining that we were now in an era reminiscent of Josef Stalin’s viciously controlling discourse in the Soviet Union. Hansen, the Journal piece reminds us, had given hundreds of speeches on the terror of warming, many of them during the Bush years.

Look next at what’s been happening in Congress: Votes on nation-altering legislation roughly as transparent as a stone wall is transparent, last-minute concoctions of 1,000 pages and more that not a single member of Congress could conceivably have had time to read. For that matter, few if any members could have had a grasp of any number of important elements in these bills even through the secondhand summaries, which is to say, the democratic process was rendered meaningless. Then-Sen. Obama had pointedly complained when Republicans did this sort of thing in the Bush years. Now, as president, he was cheering on rush-job legislating as crucial to the common good.

Obama is more nearly Mr. Obfuscation than he is Mr. Transparency, as he showed during the campaign when he failed to tell us anything much about his passport or medical records, his clients as a lawyer or his college records. Even if you hold hands with him on some of his secrecy then and now, a point to consider is that this is a politician like so many who talk one way and behave another, not someone refreshingly candid and different, just someone who is very good at an old game.

True enough. I like it: Mr. Obfuscation. I think that is a perfect moniker for Obama. The Obfuscator In Chief. Sure, works for me!

Actually, it doesn’t. What he is doing is working for a select, very select, group of people, not for US. And that is the problem with the lack of transparency, with the reneging on promises made, for all of us. Obama, and Congress, are serving the interests of a very few, the same complaint we had about Bush and Cheney.

Here we go again…

Secretary Clinton can’t be seen to differ from the president without sabotaging her own power.
…
Left behind on major presidential trips, overruled in choosing her own staff—Hillary Clinton is the invisible woman at State. But Obama’s brilliant foreign-policy spouse may not stay silent forever.

It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa.

Consider the president’s Moscow trip a week ago. In a cozy scene at Vladimir Putin’s dacha, the boys enjoyed traditional Russian tea and breakfast on a terrace. Sitting on Putin’s right was the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. Where was Lavrov’s counterpart? She was back home, left there with a broken elbow to receive a visit from the ousted Honduran president, José Manuel Zelaya.

Ms. Brown paints this as a deliberate slight by Obama, or a way to put his own ever-present and over exposed visage out front while keeping Hillary’s far more knowledgeable one out of the limelight. That may be so, but Brown leaves no room for the fact that Secretary Clinton may not have been able to travel last week due to her injury. No matter. Let’s try to harp on the fact that Hillary is diminished anyway. Other articles have been cropping up intimating the same and wondering “how long Hillary is going to put up with this.”

The far more important point Brown neglects to mention is that Obama’s solo trip was not considered a success. He made his amateurish pronouncements on the Cold War and received a long lecture by Putin and did not really get what he came for. President Obama’s actions will not be considered too clever in the long run if he reaps repercussions for having left the only adult in the room at home.

Ms. Brown continues…

Same thing last month, when the president stopped off to see King Abdullah en route to his oratorical home run in Cairo: no Hillary. Nor was there any sign of Middle East envoy George Mitchell or anyone else from the State Department on the Saudi leg of the trip, even though its main mission was to recruit Abdullah into a peace-making partnership with Israel. The king told Obama no, by the way, so it’s fair to ask whether the president could have used a bit more Foggy Bottom prep work. Jim Hoagland noted in Sunday’s Washington Post that the White House’s leak of Obama’s decision to send an ambassador to Syria took Clinton’s State Department by surprise and trumped State’s efforts to squeeze another concession or two out of Damascus first.

As. Mr. Hoagland rightly points out in his piece White House Fault Lines, this may be another strike against the Obama Administration, clearly making a mistake by trying to trump their own very loyal team at State – for no apparent reason.

Ms. Brown seems to delight in pointing out President Clinton’s being “curtailed” by Obama as a concession to his wife’s position. Yet I am sure Brown has a point in noting how Obama, together with Emanuel and Axelrod, need to stick their nose in appointments that should be left up to her:

Hillary, with her usual iron discipline about the big picture of power, is behaving like a stalwart team player. Before she took the job, she was assured she could pick her own trusted team. Yet she was overruled in appointing her own choice for deputy secretary, Richard Holbrooke. Instead, she was made to take an Obama guy, James Steinberg, who had originally been slated to become national-security adviser. (Hillary took care of Holbrooke, one of diplomacy’s biggest stars, by giving him the most explosive portfolio—Pakistan and Afghanistan.) She lost the ability to dole out major ambassadorships, too. A lot of these prizes are going to reward Obama fundraisers instead of knowledgeable appointees like Harvard’s Joseph Nye, whom she wanted to send to Japan.

Ms. Brown complains that Hillary was not given credit for getting Obama to put more troops in Afghanistan, inferring VP Biden is given credit for this. Well, this runs contrary to Ben Smith’s article in Politico, Clinton Gains Respect Out Of Spotlight, as quoted by CBS News, that Hillary trumped Biden on Afghanistan so perhaps Ms. Brown is overstating. Smith’s article is quick to point out that SoS Clinton’s popularity now stands at 71%, higher than the President’s. While pundits the likes of George Stephanopoulos intimated her portfolio and role is decreased because of envoys Holbrooke and Mitchell, Hillary always campaigned on hiring just such heavy hitting personnel to concentrate more diplomatic power in the middle east. Some choice quotes in this regard from the Politico article:

The envoys will be the primary metric through which you will judge her legacy…And even skeptical observers said Clinton appears to have won sufficient control over the envoys after a precarious start.

Rep. Mark Kirk, a Republican who serves on the House subcommittee that oversees the State Department and describes himself as a Clinton “fan” for her role in pushing for sending more troops to Afghanistan…

“Between her consideration and her final confirmation she had lost some authority and power as all of these envoys were appointed,” he said. “Once she did get confirmed, though, what we have seen is a steady increase in her authority and control as we have seen envoys seeming to now work with her.”

Leaders in the region, he said, view her as “pre-eminent.” …Clinton is also afforded a level of day-to-day deference that underscores her stature. …The deputy secretary of state, Jim Steinberg, described Clinton’s role with the envoys as “the closer.” ….”The envoys tee it up for her,” he said in an interview. “It’s an extremely powerful way to use someone with her stature.”

Hillary Clinton has also been credited on many fronts as having, in short order, put diplomacy back under the charge of the State Department, rather than the military. Smith states her style as SoS echoes her arrival in the Senate in 2001 — putting her head down, figuring out the job and working hard rather than looking for the spotlight. Tina Brown likewise points out how, historically, this suits Clinton’s work ethic even as she seemingly objects to it elsewhere:

The former first lady and New York senator is no stranger to the big game of politics. Obama’s presidency is tightly White House driven and she is not the only player on a tight leash. … But I doubt she cares about losing the spotlight at this time in her life when she’s not running for something. Unlike Bill, she hates glad-handing and does TV only because she has to. Policy is her meat and drink. On her State Department plane, Hillary is always eager to throw off her well-groomed public look and sit up front with no makeup, wearing sweats and her bookworm glasses, as she crunches her way through a big fat file of foreign-policy memos. She is as formidably well-informed in this job as she was at the Rose law firm in Arkansas, doing all the legal backup work for the guys on a big deal. Or when she played the canny sounding board and strategist for Gov. Bill Clinton in his run for president.

That’s the trouble. You could say that Obama is lucky to have such a great foreign-policy wife. Those who voted for Hillary wonder how long she’ll be content with an office wifehood of the Saudi variety.

To call Hillary a Saudi wife? That’s quite a leap. And if Hillary were out front and center, I’m sure Ms. Brown would complain about how “ego driven” and “power hungry” she is. Hillary certainly heard enough of that nonsense last year. Once again, I am sure the maddening tightrope a female politician or diplomat has to walk is far more precarious than that of any man in the same position.

I can’t make up my mind reading this article as to Ms. Brown’s end game. To degrade Hillary? To throw down the gauntlet and encourage her to speak out? To slap at President Obama pointing out how foolish he is not to make better use of Secretary Clinton’s considerable abilities?

It is interesting to note that a month ago, not three days before Hillary broke her arm, Ms. Brown penned another article entitled What Hillary Can Teach Sarah Palin. Brown stated that Hillary was an example of “what real female power looks like,” that she is a “dedicated policy wonk who worked on behalf of oppressed women in unpronounceable places long before it was fashionable.”

She then engages in some revisionist history of her own when she stated that Hillary was “humbled at the polls” by Barack Obama. Oh really? So the fact that she won more votes than any candidate in primary history – male or female – 300,000 more than him – that’s humbling? Being outspent three to one, stabbed in the back by your own party, trashed in the media daily, winning more votes and still not getting the nomination, well I have another word for that – and it has nothing to do with being humbled. Knee-capped, maybe.

Ms. Brown lectures Palin to

Take a leaf out of Hillary’s book. (Or from Condi Rice, for that matter. Clinton’s predecessor in the job likewise knows how to disappear herself for a bit while she recoups and rebrands.) Bide your time, don’t waste it.

Her words of wisdom here are “it’s the substance that sustains, not the exposure.” No kidding. Hillary is all substance, that’s for sure. But in her new article – Brown demands more exposure for Hillary. Tina needs to make up her mind. Is she going to believe that Hillary is “biding her time” and knows what she is doing or not?

While I do not particularly care for Ms. Brown’s tone, I’d love to see Hillary front and center myself. Selfishly I would feel safer knowing for certain she was in charge of the foreign policy portfolio at State rather than the rest of the Administration that keeps swapping seats in the clown car. But as Brown notes, when one is starting a job, it pays to build a firm foundation before making a lot of noise.

Let’s see if we start hearing more noise from Hillary.

Colin Powell, one of President Obama’s most prominent Republican supporters, expressed concern Friday that the president’s ambitious blitz of costly initiatives may be enlarging the size of government and the federal debt too much.

“I’m concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them,”

Um, now he’s concerned?

During the campaign, President Obama made a plethora of pie in the sky promises. While he has certainly abandoned the left in cuddling up to President Bush’s lack of transparency, signing statements and the like, he has certainly trumped the Bush Administration in terms of spending ridiculous amounts of money, particularly bailing out Wall Street before Main Street. While Mr. Powell noted that

‘health care reform and many of Mr. Obama’s other initiatives are “important” to Americans…’ “one of the cautions that has to be given to the president — and I’ve talked to some of his people about this — is that you can’t have so many things on the table that you can’t absorb it all.” …”And we can’t pay for it all…”

Mr. Powell’s comments represent the growing concern that began with hard-line fiscal conservatives but is now spreading to moderates about the rate of government spending and debt under President Obama, and the long-term impact on the country’s fiscal sustainability and national security.

The national debt stands currently at $11.5 trillion and the deficit for the current fiscal year is projected to be close to $2 trillion.

Mr. Powell expressed alarm at “budgets that are running into the multi-trillions of dollars” and “a huge, huge national debt that, if we don’t pay for in our lifetime, our kids and grandkids and great-grandchildren will have to pay for it.”

He’s not alone in expressing alarm. I am very curious as to why he is making these statements now…

“So, I think the president, as he moves forward with his initiatives, has to start really taking a very, very hard look at what the cost of all this is. And, how much additional bureaucracy [will] be needed to make all of this happen?” Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell also noted that he does “stay in touch” with the Obama Administration, particularly recently.

“The federal government has become too large and too intrusive in our lives,” Mr. Powell said then. “We can no longer afford solutions to our problems that result in more entitlements, higher taxes to pay for them, more bureaucracy to run them, and fewer results to show for it.”

Mr. Powell said that now that he still believes what he said then, but that he would put it in different terms now.

“I don’t like slogans anymore like ‘limited government.’ That’s not the right answer. The right answer is, give me a government that works,” he said. “Keep it as small as possible. Keep the tax burden on the American people as small as possible, but at the same time, have government that is solving the problems of the people.”

Gee, is Mr. Powell planning his own campaign sometime in the future? Sounds like some sound advice and some pretty good campaign slogans to the bargain. It’s too bad he didn’t give President Obama that advice back when he was a candidate last fall.

How odd the Mr. Powell chose to endorse the gentleman anyway without first stopping for a moment to listen to all Obama’s campaign promises and looking carefully at the price tag. As American Girl in Italy noted in her excellent article about President Obama’s reversals on health care, he is now looking at adopting some of the very proposals he vilified Senator McCain for suggesting last year. Guess he’s finally been looking at the price tag, too – and the sticker shock is mighty big indeed.

With all due respect to General Powell, I really find it irritating that he is continually reversing himself in order to rescue his reputation. Perhaps he felt his good name and many honorable years of service were somewhat tarnished by making the case to go to war with Iraq. Who knows if his decision to endorse Mr. Obama was part of a mea culpa in that regard. Now that VP Biden acknowledged that the stimulus is sort of a bust and that their team underestimated our economy’s problems, Colin Powell is distancing himself from the President with these statements?

Gosh, I sure wish he would make up his mind.

If you want to read what all the bloggers are saying about the experiment by WLS radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller, go here. It is VITAL to note that this man was in a controlled setting and knew that he could stop the torture at any time. Now try to imagine that you’re being held under the control of others, having no rights, and being subject to their every whim — dependent on them not just for sustenance, but for one’s very next breath, and never knowing when or if the waterboarding will stop. Don’t you think you’d say ANYTHING to get it to stop? Of course you would.

Mancow is the latest in a string of media personalities taking the plunge, so to speak, in getting first hand experience with torture. Not a one has come out of the experience pooh poohing waterboarding as just a little water being splashed on one’s face.

So, what has Dick Cheney –who is constantly touting himself as the pro-torture expert — really been up to? Fighting the GOOD fight? Or, perhaps …

AHA! So is this why Dick Cheney has been on your television screens for weeks now?

Cheney Seeks Book Deal on Bush Years and More

WASHINGTON — With his sustained blitz of television appearances and speeches, former Vice President Dick Cheney has established himself as perhaps the leading Republican voice against President Obama.

Not a bad time, then, to be in the market for a multimillion-dollar book contract.

Mr. Cheney is actively shopping a memoir about his life in politics and service in four presidential administrations, a work that would add to what is already an unusually dense collection of post-Bush-presidency memoirs that will offer a collective rebuttal to the many harshly critical works released while the writers were in office and beyond.

What’s this worth? And, just for your entertainment, here’s what the other Bushies are angling to get:

the money isn’t bad, either.

A person familiar with discussions Mr. Cheney has had with publishers said he was seeking more than $2 million for his advance. That sum may prove hard to get in this economic climate, especially given his generally low approval ratings, which publishers view as a potential — but not certain — harbinger for sales.

While Mr. Bush got an advance estimated to be well into the millions for a look into 12 of his most important decisions, his payout is not believed to be as large as that of former President Bill Clinton for his memoirs, which drew a $15 million advance.

Mr. Rumsfeld was not paid an advance by his publisher, Sentinel, of Penguin Group USA, and has committed to donating his share of any proceeds to his nonprofit foundation. (Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Mr. Obama, for that matter, were represented in their contract talks by the Washington lawyer Robert B. Barnett.)

Mr. Cheney’s friends say he does not need the money and has made clear in his talks that he is eager to give a full accounting of his life in politics that will debunk his many critics.

According to a person familiar with a meeting that Mr. Cheney had with a publisher, the former vice president is proposing a memoir that would function not only as the story of his role in four Republican administrations but also as a history of “the entire Republican ascendancy going back to Nixon.” This person did not want to be named because of the confidentiality of the talks.

Mr. Cheney has talked with houses including HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, where Mary Matalin, his close friend and adviser, is editor in chief of Threshold, the conservative imprint that is also publishing Mr. Rove’s book. Marji Ross, president and publisher of the conservative publisher Regnery, said she and others at the house had talked informally to Mr. Cheney and Mr. Barnett. But Ms. Matalin’s long history with Mr. Cheney has made her imprint a logical home for his book.

John Hannah, a senior adviser to Mr. Cheney at the White House, said that when he spoke to Mr. Cheney a few weeks ago the former vice president was trying to figure out how to strike a balance between his life story and his hotly debated tenure serving with Mr. Bush. “The question was, Do you do the 40 years in Washington, given all his experiences in different jobs and perspectives?” Mr. Hannah said. “Or do you need to do something fairly quickly to answer and to discuss the last eight years?”

As the talks continue, Mr. Cheney is writing out his thoughts longhand in an office above his garage in Virginia and is in frequent contact with the other newly minted Bush administration authors, right on up to Mr. Bush.

A report by U.S. News & World Report about a visit by Mr. Cheney to Mr. Rumsfeld’s Washington office in March prompted speculation that they were trying to match up their stories, which a Rumsfeld spokesman, Keith Urbahn, denied. He said there was likely to be a greater divergence of views in the coming books than some might expect.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who is working almost full time on his book, feeding dictation to aides culling his personal papers, often differed with counterweights in other departments, like Ms. Rice. “There’s a great deal of truth to the adage of where you stand is where you sit,” Mr. Urbahn said.

Ms. Rice has a three-book deal with Crown, Mr. Bush’s publisher. Douglas Brinkley, the historian, said she indicated to him late last year that she deemed it appropriate to wait for the president to publish his book, scheduled for 2010, before she published hers on the White House.

So, if you’re not ordering torture, why not merchandise it?

Editor: Reprinted in full with Col. Wilkerson’s and Steve Clemons’ express permission from The Washington Note.

This is a guest post exclusive to The Washington Note by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, who is former chief of staff of the Department of State during the term of Secretary of State Colin Powell. Lawrence Wilkerson is also Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor at the College of William & Mary.

Last night I was on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC at the top of the hour. But before I came on, through the earpiece I listened to the five minutes that Rachel sketched as a lead-in. Most of it was videotape from the last few days of former Vice President Dick Cheney extolling the virtues of harsh interrogation, torture, and his leadership. I had heard some of it earlier of course but not all of it and not in such a tightly-packed package.

Let’s just say that five minutes of the Sith Lord was stunningly inaccurate.

So, when I got home last night, I thought long and hard about what I knew at this point in my investigations with respect to the former VP’s office. Here it is.

First, more Americans were killed by terrorists on Cheney’s watch than on any other leader’s watch in US history. So his constant claim that no Americans were killed in the “seven and a half years” after 9/11 of his vice presidency takes on a new texture when one considers that fact. And it is a fact.

There was absolutely no policy priority attributed to al-Qa’ida by the Cheney-Bush administration in the months before 9/11. Counterterrorism czar Dick Clarke’s position was downgraded, al-Qa’ida was put in the background so as to emphasize Iraq, and the policy priorities were lowering taxes, abrogating the ABM Treaty and building ballistic missile defenses.

Second, the fact no attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11–much touted by Cheney–is due almost entirely to the nation’s having deployed over 200,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and not to “the Cheney method of interrogation.”

Those troops have kept al-Qa’ida at bay, killed many of them, and certainly “fixed” them, as we say in military jargon. Plus, sadly enough, those 200,000 troops present a far more lucrative and close proximity target for al-Qa’ida than the United States homeland. Testimony to that fact is clear: almost 5,000 American troops have died, more Americans than died on 9/11. Of course, they are the type of Americans for whom Cheney hasn’t much use as he declared rather dramatically when he achieved no less than five draft deferments during the Vietnam War.

Third–and here comes the blistering fact–when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops “the Cheney method of interrogation and torture”, the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.

My investigations have revealed to me–vividly and clearly–that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering “the Cheney methods of interrogation”, simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.

What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama’s having shut down the “Cheney interrogation methods” will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods. The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

Less important but still busting my chops as a Republican, is the damage that the Sith Lord Cheney is doing to my political party.

He and Rush Limbaugh seem to be its leaders now. Lindsay Graham, John McCain, John Boehner, and all other Republicans of note seem to be either so enamored of Cheney-Limbaugh (or fearful of them?) or, on the other hand, so appalled by them, that the cat has their tongues. And meanwhile fewer Americans identify as Republicans than at any time since WWII. We’re at 21% and falling–right in line with the number of cranks, reprobates, and loonies in the country.

When will we hear from those in my party who give a damn about their country and about the party of Lincoln?

When will someone of stature tell Dick Cheney that enough is enough? Go home. Spend your 70 million. Luxuriate in your Eastern Shore mansion. Shoot quail with your friends–and your friends.

Stay out of our way as we try to repair the extensive damage you’ve done–to the country and to its Republican Party.

– Lawrence Wilkerson

In my earlier post, holder: obama does not decide who will be prosecuted, I wrote,
“It appears Obama opened a whole can of worms with the release of these memos. Not only does he lack the authority to decide whether there will be prosecutions or not, I assume he also put members of his own party at risk. (Feinstein and Pelosi, members of the Intel Committee…)”

This appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. As reported in the Washington Post a newly released report from the Senate Intelligence Committee showed that Condi Rice played a greater role than she has previously acknowledged in the CIA’s harsh interrogation program, and approved the use of water boarding. The report finds that Rice approved the CIA’s request to water board a captured al-Qaeda member in 2002, making her the first known Bush administration official to do so.

Condoleezza Rice, John D. Ashcroft and other top Bush administration officials approved as early as the summer of 2002 the CIA’s use at secret prisons of harsh interrogation methods, including water boarding, a technique that new Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has described as illegal torture, according to a chronology prepared by the Senate intelligence committee and declassified by Holder.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were made aware of the program in September 2003. “Strikingly, unless there is a further story in records not yet shown to us, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense were not involved in the decision-making process, despite the high stakes for U.S. foreign policy and for the treatment of the U.S. military,” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.).

In the fall of 2002, four senior members of Congress, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), now speaker of the House, were secretly briefed on interrogation techniques, including water boarding, according to U.S. officials. Pelosi has confirmed that she was then “briefed on interrogation techniques the administration was considering using in the future. The administration advised that legal counsel for both the CIA and the Justice Department had concluded that the techniques were legal.”

Peter Hoekstra wrote in the Wall Street Journal, Congress Knew About the Interrogations – Obama should release the memo on the attacks prevented:

…Yet last week Mr. Obama overruled the advice of his CIA director, Leon Panetta, and four prior CIA directors by releasing the details of the enhanced interrogation program. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has stated clearly that declassifying the memos will make it more difficult for the CIA to defend the nation.

It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002. We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.

Members of Congress calling for an investigation of the enhanced interrogation program should remember that such an investigation can’t be a selective review of information, or solely focus on the lawyers who wrote the memos, or the low-level employees who carried out this program. I have asked Mr. Blair to provide me with a list of the dates, locations and names of all members of Congress who attended briefings on enhanced interrogation techniques.

Any investigation must include this information as part of a review of those in Congress and the Bush administration who reviewed and supported this program.

So, it would seem to me that not only could the lawyers who drafted these recommendations be subject to prosecution, but also Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Nancy Pelosi and members of Congress.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday said she had no recourse to stop the use of enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding after receiving a classified briefing from the CIA in 2002 – an explanation the top Republican on the House intelligence committee called “the lamest of lame excuses.”

Mrs. Pelosi is one of several prominent Democrats, including Mrs. Feinstein, who is open to the possible prosecution of Bush administration officials who signed off on the use of the techniques, which Mr. Obama has deemed torture.

There was a good discussion on Morning Joe about this whole affair.

Also appearing in the WSJ today was this article, Presidential Poison – His invitation to indict Bush officials will haunt Obama’s Presidency:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their anti-terror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.

Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama’s victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

snip

Those officials won’t be the only ones who suffer if all of this goes forward. Congress will face questions about what the Members knew and when, especially Nancy Pelosi when she was on the House Intelligence Committee in 2002. The Speaker now says she remembers hearing about water boarding, though not that it would actually be used. Does anyone believe that? Porter Goss, her GOP counterpart at the time, says he knew exactly what he was hearing and that, if anything, Ms. Pelosi worried the CIA wasn’t doing enough to stop another attack. By all means, put her under oath.

Obama said that only the legal advisers who are no longer in government should be investigated. I really don’t understand how you can prosecute legal advisors, but not members of the government who actually ordered these actions be carried out.

I don’t think Obama thought this all the way through, do you? Should he have checked with Eric Holder first? Do you think he really wants Pelosi, Powell and Rice brought down?

Politico has a story up titled Obama muddles torture message:

“President Barack Obama’s attempt to project legal and moral clarity on coercive CIA interrogation methods has instead done the opposite — creating confusion and political vulnerability over an issue that has inflamed both the left and right.”

The WSJ Presidential Poison article finishes:

Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years. As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow. And speaking of which, when will the GOP Members of Congress begin to denounce this partisan scapegoating? Senior Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Richard Lugar, John McCain, Orrin Hatch, Pat Roberts and Arlen Specter have hardly been profiles in courage.

Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party’s desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.

When you have pundits like Tingles beating the drums for the take down of Bush and Cheney, it doesn’t help the case for Pelosi, Congress and all those involved, does it?

“Well if it turns out that those who drew the lines and said it was okay to use waterboarding and other coercive techniques, violated the law, and those people who did so include the Vice President and the President what do we do? You say we might consider prosecuting them. But how do we do it? Under what law do we go after them? Under international law? Under U.S. law what do we hit ‘em for? If we do it?” ~Chris Matthews

Okay, I am VERY curious. I want to ask all of you something:

Were you surprised? I’m not because I happen to know that Newt Gingrich is a great advocate for animals and against animal cruelty. So his stance on torture, in my mind, is congruent with his attitude towards the treatment of any animal helpless in human control. (MY NEXT POST WILL BE ABOUT THE ADVOCATES FOR THE HUMANE TREATMENT OF ANIMALS — and you may be surprised by who some of them are.)

And it was good of him to mention George Washington’s views and practices re torture.

I just wish that Greta had asked him what he would have done and said had he been briefed on the torture practices as were Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, and other representatives and senators.

Here, from a remarkable essay by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in 2005, we learn more about the remarkable history of this nation in leading the way against mistreatment of detainees and prisoners of war:

Every schoolchild knows that Gen. George Washington made extraordinary efforts to protect America’s civilian population from the ravages of war. Fewer Americans know that Revolutionary War leaders, including Washington and the Continental Congress, considered the decent treatment of enemy combatants to be one of the principal strategic preoccupations of the American Revolution.

“In 1776,” wrote historian David Hackett Fischer in “Washington’s Crossing,” “American leaders believed it was not enough to win the war. They also had to win in a way that was consistent with the values of their society and the principles of their cause. One of their greatest achievements … was to manage the war in a manner that was true to the expanding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution.”

The fact that the patriots refused to abandon these principles, even in the dark times when the war seemed lost, when the enemy controlled our cities and our ragged army was barefoot and starving, credits the character of Washington and the founding fathers and puts to shame the conduct of America’s present leadership.

Fischer writes that leaders in both the Continental Congress and the Continental Army resolved that the War of Independence would be conducted with a respect for human rights. This was all the more extraordinary because these courtesies were not reciprocated by King George’s armies. Indeed, the British conducted a deliberate campaign of atrocities against American soldiers and civilians. While Americans extended quarter to combatants as a matter of right and treated their prisoners with humanity, British regulars and German mercenaries were threatened by their own officers with severe punishment if they showed mercy to a surrendering American soldier. Captured Americans were tortured, starved and cruelly maltreated aboard prison ships.

Washington decided to behave differently. After capturing 1,000 Hessians in the Battle of Trenton, he ordered that enemy prisoners be treated with the same rights for which our young nation was fighting. In an order covering prisoners taken in the Battle of Princeton, Washington wrote: “Treat them with humanity, and let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British Army in their treatment of our unfortunate brethren…. Provide everything necessary for them on the road.”

John Adams argued that humane treatment of prisoners and deep concern for civilian populations not only reflected the American Revolution’s highest ideals, they were a moral and strategic requirement. His thoughts on the subject, expressed in a 1777 letter to his wife, might make a profitable read for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld as we endeavor to win hearts and minds in Iraq. Adams wrote: “I know of no policy, God is my witness, but this — Piety, Humanity and Honesty are the best Policy. Blasphemy, Cruelty and Villainy have prevailed and may again. But they won’t prevail against America, in this Contest, because I find the more of them are employed, the less they succeed.”

Even British military leaders involved in the atrocities recognized their negative effects on the overall war effort. In 1778, Col. Charles Stuart wrote to his father, the Earl of Bute: “Wherever our armies have marched, wherever they have encamped, every species of barbarity has been executed. We planted an irrevocable hatred wherever we went, which neither time nor measure will be able to eradicate.”

In the end, our founding fathers not only protected our national values, they defeated a militarily superior enemy. Indeed, it was their disciplined adherence to those values that helped them win a hopeless struggle against the best soldiers in Europe.

In accordance with this proud American tradition, President Lincoln instituted the first formal code of conduct for the humane treatment of prisoners of war in 1863. Lincoln’s order forbade any form of torture or cruelty, and it became the model for the 1929 Geneva Convention. Dwight Eisenhower made a point to guarantee exemplary treatment to German POWs in World War II, and Gen. Douglas McArthur ordered application of the Geneva Convention during the Korean War, even though the U.S. was not yet a signatory. In the Vietnam War, the United States extended the convention’s protection to Viet Cong prisoners even though the law did not technically require it.

Today, our president is again challenged to align the conduct of a war with the values of our nation. America’s treatment of its prisoners is a test of our faith in our country and the character of our leaders.

Americans United is going after Democrats who are skeptical of Mr. Obama’s plans to double the national debt in five years and nearly triple it in 10. The White House is taking aim at lawmakers in 12 states, including Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor. MoveOn.Org is running ads aimed at 10 moderate Senate and House Democrats. And robocalls are urging voters in key districts to pressure their congressman to get in line.

I refer to Americans United, Karl Rove and MoveOn as idiots, as all of them are hopelessly misinformed.

Rove believes the coordinated effort of the White House to pressure moderate Democrats through various advocacy groups will backfire. He is partially correct, but his reasoning is flawed. I quote Rove:

Every White House is faced with finding ways to nudge Congress without antagonizing it. But this overt campaign could infuriate members who won’t appreciate being targeted by a president of their own party. They could react by becoming recalcitrant. Should that happen, team Obama will have to recalculate its efforts, especially as the public sours on big spending plans.

Members of Congress will not simply become “recalcitrant” as a result of their personal disdain for Obama’s tactics; they will become recalcitrant as a result of all the Republican support they will receive from their constituents. Hence why I believe MoveOn and Americans United are idiots: attempting to incite certain Democrats to pressure certain Democratic moderates, their efforts will simply alert Republicans who probably never supported these Democrats that their Senator or House Representative is indeed a moderate. And not only will this engender Republican support for the moderate Democrats in question; it will also compel the Republicans and Democrats who voted against Obama in certain states to oppose Obama’s budget in a more active and vigorous manner. Moderate Democrats in Congress will then have electoral justifications to oppose Obama, and Republicans, Independents and Democrats who oppose Obama will have a new political signifier around which they can mobilize.

Consider Mary Landrieu and Blanche Lincoln, two Senate Democrats who represent southern states. Mary Landrieu beat her Republican opponent John N. Kennedy by 6 points last cycle, warding off a Republican surge that delivered a 59-40 victory to John McCain. The reaction against Obama in Louisiana almost derailed her reelection efforts, but she managed to win by citing her centrism and independence. Not only has that centrism and independence been confirmed by the ads Democratic organizations are launching against her; the Republicans who opposed her will now support her out of sympathy. As a result, she will receive supportive telephone calls from Louisiana Republicans who will urge her to oppose Obama’s budget. Moreover, her approval ratings will increase, complicating liberal advocacy groups’ efforts to render her unelectable. And yes, many Democratic groups would be satisfied if Mary Landrieu lost a reelection. Some Democrats, in fact, believe she deserves no respect. But to the chagrin of these Democratic activists, their botched efforts to make her political life difficult will only garner her more support from the Republicans who would otherwise oppose her.

Blanche Lincoln will run for reelection in 2010, and the results of the 2008 Presidential election in Arkansas are certainly not in her favor. In fact, McCain clobbered Barack Obama by a margin of 20 points in Arkansas, a margin that would make any Democratic incumbent nervous. Republicans are targeting her for her potential support of Card Check, while some Democrats derisively characterize her as the Democrat of Wal-Mart. This is certainly a stressful position for a Democrat who hopes to cobble together the coalition required to win in 2010 in a state that rejects the current Democratic President to whom she will be tied. But now that liberal advocacy groups are airing advertisements and complaining about Lincoln on the telephone lines of Arkansans, Republicans will rally behind her, and they may even cast votes for her in 2010. Americans United and MoveOn think they are blackmailing Lincoln with the threat of political death, but they are in fact increasing her popularity in her state, thereby handing her justification to oppose Obama’s budget and agenda. Some actions have inadvertent consequences.

Rove is incorrect when he claims moderate Democrats will react personally to Obama’s efforts to manufacture grassroots opposition to their centrism, and MoveOn and Americans United are incorrect when they believe their Washington, DC, advocacy will yield results in Louisiana and Arkansas. All of them are idiots, as all of them are misinformed, and all their efforts are misguided. But at least Democrats who struggle to win south of the Mason-Dixon line will remain in office as a result of the idiocy of some groups’ version of advocacy. For similar to Bill and Hillary Clinton, these Democrats understand the predicaments and the paradoxes that sustain the Democratic Party in the South. Republicans and the operatives surrounding Obama, on the other hand, do not. Obama, after all, admires Reagan, and Reagan, to be sure, is anything but an expert on Democratic politics.

America’s First Gay President Concludes Historic Second Term

WASHINGTON—President George W. Bush was unusually reflective in the final weeks of his administration, taking time during speeches and press conferences to look back on key decisions, expound on his legacy, and tout his role in paving the way for the nation’s first African-American president by serving eight years as its first openly gay president.

“I’m inspired by our great country’s willingness to look past the color of a man’s skin—or, in my case, his overt homosexuality—and elect him based on his ability to lead,” Bush told reporters following his meeting with president-elect Barack Obama on Nov. 10. “I’ve always been proud of my homosexuality, and I am so proud of the United States.”

Bush added, “Thank you, America, for taking a chance on an openly gay man from Texas: tight jeans, cowboy hats, and all.”

Well, Bush DID have that “Brokeback Mountain” look when he was out on the range…

Recalling how he worried during his first campaign that voters were not ready to put a gay man in the White House, Bush said he was “shocked and overjoyed” to win in 2000, and could not have done it without homo-sexual adviser Karl Rove, his strong base of closeted gay ultra-conservative supporters on the Christian right, and his “best friend” Laura.

“While I tried to be commander in chief first and a homosexual man second, I knew that everything I did would be judged through the lens of ‘America’s first gay president,’” Bush said during an interview with ABC’s Charles Gibson broadcast Dec. 1. “Looking back, my personal need to prove my man-hood definitely influenced my actions. The arrogant swagger, invading Iraq, my ruthless support of the death penalty—heck, even setting back gay rights 25 years—all of it seems so silly now.”

Former press secretary Ari Fleischer agreed, saying that Bush carefully cultivated his image as a masculine, simple-minded, heterosexual male in order to combat his insecurities about appearing weak before the international community.

“Believe me, sister, he overcompensated with a capital ‘compensated,’” Fleischer said. “But when the cameras stopped rolling and the podium was put away, he was just fabulous. We had a fabulous, fabulous time.”

While many will argue for generations about Bush’s political impact, all seem to agree that his presidency at last proved to a once-disenfranchised group that anything is possible.

“I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime,” said David Nevin, a 58-year-old homosexual living in New York. “And I probably won’t again because he was a terrible f***ing president who ruined it for all of us.”

Added Nevin, “What a bitch.”

I reckon that pretty much sums it up! “What a bitch!”

Back to reality for just a minute, and Obama’s Invocation choice, alert NQ reader, Athena the Warrior provided a link to an Advocate article about Obama picking Rev. Rick Warren, out of all the THOUSANDS of qualified ministers in this country, Rev. Rick Warren, the pro-Prop 8 and anti-choice minister, to be a part of his big to-do in DC. Lemme tel you what, the vast majority of comments were from people who were HOT under the collar about Obama’s treatment. Now, you know I think it is their own damn fault for ever thinking for one MINUTE that Obama cared one whit for the GLBT community. And not all of the people there voted for Obama. But many did, and they are already seeing the errors of their ways. So check out some of their comments. Very interesting.

And, to those who jumped on the Obama Bandwagon, like Joe Salmonese of the HRC, I say, SHAME ON YOU! Shame on you for not supporting the one candidate who walks the walk when it comes to the GLBT community. The one whose praises you sang just last year. That’s right, it was Hillary Clinton. Even if they did support her initially, then throw their hands up once Obama was declared the victor by the DNC’s RBC, I say shame on you for not standing up for JUSTICE, for what was RIGHT, and against playing fast and loose with the rules when it suited them. Same to all of those women’s groups who jumped on that bandwagon, too, and for what, to be cool? To get money? Because you got “caught up” in the moment?? Please. Spare me already. There is no excuse for ignoring the reality that was right in front of your faces – Obama’s anti-gay associates. Obama’s nuanced language over gay marriage. Obama’s continuing flip-flopping on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” And the list goes on. You chose to ignore the reality. You chose to back the man who has NOT backed you up over the woman who did. So now you are upset. Huh. Imagine that.

Sheesh. Enough of you people – I am too through with you all who thought that Obama was on your side. Enjoy the laugh about Bush. Hey, if you think about all of his little outfits he put on throughout the course of his presidency – the cowboy outfits; his flight suit; his wizard outfit with Boy Toy, Putin; elf clothes – oh, no wait – that was a JibJab production…You get my point. So, in that spirit, and in recognition of George Bush being the “first homosexual president” (who just bailed out Detroit), I leave you with this:

In order to “save” the Democratic Party, Brazile resolved back in 2003 that she might have to destroy it first. And who better to help her in this lofty pursuit than her new best friend, the man neoconservatives call “The Architect”.

…………………………..

BY ROSEMARY REGELLO

It’s not every activist politico who gets to write a post in the Washington Times that begins like this: "As I sat by my window and staring out at the wonderful Washington, D.C., landscape, my office announced a phone call from Air Force One."

Evidently, Donna Brazile was reminding all the little people on Capitol Hill that she had friends in high places. In summer of 2007, Bush senior advisor Karl Rove wasn’t answering any subpoenas from Congress, but he didn’t mind talking to Brazile. From his perch at 20,000 feet, he informed her that this was probably a good time for him to get out of Dodge.

“Mr. Rove’s resignation is not a retirement,” Brazile reassured readers of the right of center newspaper. “It’s just another opportunity for him to create that lasting Republican majority he envisioned years ago and to spend his waking days doing what he so enjoys — beating Democrats in the alleys and gutters. Just ask Sen. Hillary Clinton, Mr. Rove’s target when he called in to speak to Rush Limbaugh. He couldn’t help it. Mr. Rove just had to take one last shot before riding out of town. More to come, Team Clinton.”

Brazile’s breezy account confirms what many have long since suspected. Rove’s claim to be sitting out the 2008 race is hogwash. The mastermind of today’s unraveling U.S. constitution is in no position to kick back, down gin fizzes and watch the country collapse under an Administration he put into office twice. The list of crimes that Bush’s top henchman could potentially be charged with – everything from fraud to war crimes – should be enough to keep him and his fellow Sopranos in hair-trigger mode until the next president gets sworn in. And the notion that he’d leave the choice of commander-in-chief in less capable dirty hands than his own requires more than the willing suspension of disbelief. It requires medication.

That’s why the Rove-Brazile tryst merits further exploration. They first hooked up some time in 2002, according to a New York Times article. The connection might have been a means for Brazile to expand her clientele, but she dismissed that angle in an interview, implying she had bigger fish to fry. It was the Democrats’ lackluster relations with African Americans and poor track record in elections, she said, that led her to start trailblazing new frontiers. To put it in a Brazile nutshell, the Republicans had a better machine.

”The idea is to re-energize the African-American electorate and revive the Democratic Party at the same time,” she told Times reporter Katharine Seelye, ”I want to revitalize the party from the grass roots up. We’re losing voters.”

With that noble cause in mind, she and Rove began to "chirpily exchange e-mail, chat on the phone and write letters, indulging in their shared zeal for the inner workings of politics," Seelye wrote.

Rove said he’d sometimes call Brazile before a press appearance to get feedback on various Bush policy angles he planned to discuss. In exchange, he furnished Brazile’s clients with access to White House social events.

"People think I’m crazy talking to Karl Rove," the strategist confessed to the Washington Post a month after the Times story appeared, "but there’s something about this guy."

Yes, there certainly is something about Karl Rove. In consultation with Vice-President Cheney’s office, it was Rove who outed Valerie Plame’s C.I.A. identity over a flap about uranium in Niger. Three years later, those subpoenas were overflowing his in-box because he’d told Alberto Gonzalez to fire nine U.S. Attorneys who refused to do his bidding. Rove is also under investigation for an entrapment scheme that put Alabama Democratic Governor Don Siegelman in prison for two years.

Those Republicans sure do know how to close the deal in politics. In addition to basking in The Architect’s dapper charm and irresistible company, Brazile opened diplomatic ties across town with archconservative Grover Norquist. Norquist heads one of Jack Abramoff’s favorite charities, Americans for Tax Reform, and is famous for his remark that he’d like to see federal government crippled to the point where he can take it home and drown it in his bathtub. For a brief window of opportunity, he set aside that morbid fantasy to help one of Brazile’s closest friends, D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes, push some legislation to increase revenues in her district.

According to the same Times article, “Mr. Norquist said he and Ms. Brazile, both Washington residents, were devising a plan to urge Congress to allow the city to raise the height limit on buildings as a way to broaden the tax base and improve schools.”

Brazile served as Holmes’ chief of staff and press secretary during the nineties. In that same action-packed year, her old boss teamed up with other D.C. officials to schedule an unauthorized, nonbinding earlybird presidential primary for 2004. DNC chair Terry McAuliffe sent sent out calls to the candidates to boycott the affair, but Howard Dean didn’t heed the directive. The former Vermont governor swept into D.C. and gobbled up almost as many endorsements as another candidate, Rev. Al Sharpton. Who needed those arcane DNC rules, anyway?

The Brazile Factor

At the time of these contentious political developments, Brazile chaired the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute, a program set up after the Florida recount debacle in 2000. During that earlier episode, she’d experienced firsthand Karl Rove’s unscrupulous knack for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. Now she was tasked with brainstorming new strategies to prevent any future gaming of the electoral system.

In 2004, Dean ended his presidential bid after the Wisconsin primary and Kerry lost the general election. This time, Rove generated thousands of extra Bush votes in key Ohio precincts where only a few hundred Republicans lived. Not surprisingly, Brazile remained unimpressed with her party. That winter, she submitted an essay for the left-leaning website Slate.com, which was running a series called “Why Americans Hate Democrats – A Dialog”.

Hard as it must have been to top that inspirational title, the political strategist managed with her piece “Tapping the Obama Factor”. The Chicago politician had just been elevated to the U.S. Senate, but instead of offering an introduction to him, she mostly dwelled on her own life story – rising up from poverty in Louisiana, listening to her grandmother read scripture, etc. etc. Eventually, the essay worked its way back to the stated topic.

"This is a new moment to identify and recruit better messengers," she wrote. "Perhaps it’s time to tap into the ‘Obama’ factor: Scour statehouses for young, energetic, inspiring, and emerging leaders with the ability to connect the head and heart. Too many of the old Democratic guard have stayed in Washington, D.C., too long to fully recognize how most Americans live their lives."

It was a novel way to spin the Illinois election. Obama did score a landslide victory that year, but it had little to do with his age, energy level or the obsolete nature of the Democratic Party establishment. His campaign manager David Axelrod ran the classic Rovian smear campaign, first accusing Obama’s top primary contender of sexual impropriety. After disgracing Blair Hull out of contention, Axelrod used the same device against the G.O.P. primary winner, Jack Ryan.

Of course, this is where things get interesting. House Speaker Dennis Hastert decided he must stick his oar into the battle, calling on Ryan to end his senate bid. The candidate dutifully bowed out, and in his stead, the Illinois Republican Party fielded an unknown, African American bible-thumper from Maryland named Alan Keyes. Clearly, the G.O.P. wanted Obama to win that election. No other explanation can account for the party sacrificing a senate seat to a (supposedly) liberal Democrat who’d (supposedly) spoken out against the Iraq War in 2002.

A Hollywood script writer couldn’t have come up with this storyline. Within a year of arriving in Washington, Brazile’s rising star – the product of a globe-trotting Kansas woman and a philandering tribal leader in Kenya – had launched his presidential exploratory committee. The Internet fundraising team of Howard Dean signed on for the ride. So, too, did some of Wall Street’s biggest investment banks, corporate law firms, and energy giants. By the end of 2007, Obama would post a record-breaking haul of $100 million in campaign contributions. And all while he was still "introducing himself", as Brazile and other analysts put it, to the American public.

Who exactly brought the banks and oil companies to the table still remains to be ferreted out, but it wasn’t Dean or Brazile, or even the man who placed Obama on the speaker’s list at the 2004 Democratic Convention, John Kerry. It’s more likely that Karl Rove huddled with top Bush fundraisers to set that gravy train in motion. Among the candidate’s money bundlers were George Kaiser and Robert Cavnar, both oil industry executives. Other Bush campaign pioneers joined the bandwagon soon afterward.

Now Brazile was impressed. Judging from another My Day installment penned in 2005, following Hurricane Katrina, she sounded like a woman who had been born again:

“While my family was hurting, when they were on the edge feeling left to fend for themselves, the last thing I wanted to do was whine. I got into the groove quickly and contacted Ken Melhman, Chairman of the Republican National Committee and an old friend, Karl Rove, Deputy Chief of Staff for the White House.”

Then she started tossing out the cupcakes: “President Bush, who promised to rebuild the Gulf coast in a speech at Jackson Square, invited some African American leaders over to the White House on December 7th to discuss a broad range of issues…To my great surprise, the meeting with President Bush was cordial and candid. The President listened intently and reassured us that his Administration would not drop the ball.”

Funny how such innocuous fluff takes on a new and sinister meaning when read in hindsight. Yet even from the perspective of a contemporary audience, those claims were a stetch. For people living in New Orleans, the Katrina ball had already been dropped. When the levees broke, Sec. of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was attending a conference on bird flu, the President relaxing on his Crawford ranch. Back in Brazile’s home state, over a thousand people drowned during three days of waiting for rescuers to reach their homes. Several million homeless residents survived, homeless, only to a second disaster called FEMA.

But Brazile didn’t let facts on the ground spoil her picnic. Continuing her upbeat dispatch, “Since then, I have met once more with President Bush and other leaders who are committed to working together to restore the lives and the communities devastated by these two hurricanes…I can tell from the meetings that the rebuilding of Louisiana remains high on his list of priorities.”

Preparing for Battle

One can only speculate on Brazile’s motives in streaming out that hallucination. As she would mention in the Washington Times article two years later, her “old friend” Rove had hit the ground running with the start of the 2008 election cycle, appearing on talk shows to bash frontrunner Hillary Clinton. Behind the scenes, G.O.P. rank and file activists were organizing crossover voting drives to knock Clinton out of the race before November. In the red states, they could easily outnumber Democrats at the caucuses, enriching Obama’s delegate count and allowing him to boast later “I’ve won more states.”

To recruit additional foot troops for this effort, New Hampshire G.O.P. leader Stephen DaMaura started the Facebook website “Stop Hillary Clinton (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary).”

On the Democratic side, it became Brazile’s job to smooth over Obama’s path to the nomination. That required manipulating the primary calendar. Picking up on the diversity argument of Eleanor Holmes and the D.C. coalition, she pressed for an earlybird South Carolina primary and a Nevada caucus to augment the Iowa and New Hampshire dates.

While the advantages of South Carolina were obvious, by necessity the second contest required a less obvious, more covert action plan to avoid any accusations of stacking the deck. Although the Clinton camp didn’t realize it at the time, a caucus in Nevada (like a caucus anywhere) would naturally benefit Obama, since her base of blue-collar, older and non-English-speaking supporters would not be driving across town to attend some meeting run by disorganized volunteers. On the other hand, motivated Republicans could be counted on to show up, especially if the G.O.P. candidates could be persuaded not to campaign in the state. (They didn’t.)

Nevertheless, the reason for adding more earlybird contests in the first place centered on ethic diversity, so selling the DNC (and the public) on Nevada required some tweaking of those caucus parameters. That’s why arrangements were made to allow the state’s casino workforce of some 60,000 predominantly Latino workers to attend specially set up caucus sites just for them.

But wouldn’t this huge Hispanic voting block put Clinton over the top in Nevada? Not necessarily. It turns out that the union representing casino employees, S.E.I.U., would be backing Obama, just as they had supported Dean in his presidential bid. So those voters could now be added to the Obama column.

Thus, with caucuses scheduled in Iowa and Nevada, a primary in South Carolina with its near majority African American demographic, and the New Hampshire Republican brass on the job in that state, the chance of Clinton heading into Super Tuesday at cruising altitude had spectacularly diminished.

“Including two more states will not only be good for our country, it will be good for our party and good for our nominee," Brazile told the Los Angeles Times in August 2006.

Sounding an early portent of doom, the South Carolina delegate on the rules committee said in the same article, “If you campaign in a state that is outside the rules, then you’re not entitled to delegates from that state."

A year later, that scenario unfolded like a bad dream for the DNC. Over the objections of Florida’s state Democratic Party, a Republican-controlled legislature moved its primary to January 29, 2008, one week before the official February 5^th cusp adopted by both the Republican National Committee and the DNC.

On August 25, 2007. the DNC rules and bylaws committee met to adjudicate this unspeakable crime. State party chair Karen Thurman testified at the meeting, walking the committee through the chronology of her long and fruitless battle to overturn the date switch. The Republicans had attached it as a rider to another bill, one authorizing the replacement of electronic paperless voting equipment with more traditional optical scanners. Unable to defeat the rider on a partyline vote, the Democrats begrudgingly approved the larger measure.

Anyone who has watched the re-broadcast of those DNC proceedings on CSPAN can’t help but be dumbfounded by the discussion that followed Thurman’s presentation. A slam-dunk case for a rule waiver turned into a shameless bout of piling on, as committee member Brazile and several others accused the state party of not trying hard enough to change the date. (One also noticed from the broadcast the unusually high number of African Americans on the 30-member committee, as opposed to near zero representation for other minorities.)

When asked by Brazile why she hadn’t made any plans to hold a caucus in place of the primary, Thurman balked. The logistics and $8 million price tag, she said, were beyond comprehension, given that Florida boasts 4 million eligible Democrats.

"I understand how states crave to be first,” Brazile blustered in a Washington Post interview the next day, as if none of what Thurman told her had registered. “I understand that they’re envious of the role that Iowa and New Hampshire have traditionally played, The truth is, we had a process . . . We’re going to back these rules."

Later, the head of the DNC Voting Rights Institute published an op-ed in the same newspaper, this time under the combative heading, “Why We Stood Up to Florida”. With the cockiness that was fast becoming her trademark, Brazile griped, “It was hardly an extraordinary act, although you wouldn’t know it from the furious reaction that ensued in some quarters…Why the uproar? It’s simple: state envy.”

She went on to list all the economic benefits coveted by states vying to hold early primaries, again diverting from the core issue of Republican meddling in Democratic affairs. Inexplicably, the press coverage of the showdown also overlooked the G.O.P.’s role in moving up the primary date.

The same week the rules committee stripped Florida of all its convention delegates, Michigan’s state legislature voted to move up its primary to January 15th. Both states could have easily been pegged as Clinton strongholds, making their exclusion from the election cycle suspect. Michigan is an industrial blue-collar enclave with few of the upper-middle-class voters and college students that represent Obama’s base. Florida’s Hispanic population is huge, and combined with an abundant supply of New York retirees, would likely also resist the Obama "surge".

Moreover, using Republican crossover voting to shave points off Clinton’s victories posed problems in both states. In Michigan, native son Mitt Romney had a significant campaign apparatus in place, while Rudi Giuliani was expecting to draw his line in the sand in Florida. Where these battleground territories were in play, neither gentleman would appreciate Rove siphoning away their voters. Better just to invalidate the primaries on the Democratic side. That way, Clinton’s delegate lead could be held in check on Super Tuesday.

"Seeds of Doubt"

With the votes of the country’s fourth and eighth largest states thus consigned to the junk heap, Brazile turned to other pursuits. Hired as a paid election analyst for CNN, she carried on a double life – one as an official DNC spokesperson, the other as a partisan campaigner for Barack Obama. In February, when best-guess estimates gave Clinton the support of two-thirds of the superdelegates, she declared, "If 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party."

If party leaders were as worried about negative fallout and damage control then as they claimed to be a month later, they might have reeled in their contract employee at this point for a heart-to-heart chat. That didn’t happen. Brazile just reloaded her pistol and repeated her empty threat to all who would listen. On another occasion, she accused former President Bill Clinton of being a racist. It was inexcusable, she said, that during a speech Clinton referred to Obama as a "kid" and suggested his presidential bid amounted to little more than a "fairy tale".

"And I will tell you," Brazile bristled with emotion, "as an African American I find his words and his tone to be very depressing."

To be sure, Clinton said Obama’s evolving position on the Iraq War was a fairy tale, not his candidacy. As for alluding to his youth, Brazile and other cheerleaders for the Illinois senator had been doing it themselves for the past four years. It was a classic example of the Mark Twain quip that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has put its shoes on. Only CNN’s presence in the equation gave the adage literal meaning. Surely, the DNC would intervene now that Brazile had insulted a former Democratic president on national television. But nothing.

Notwithstanding the character smears and 24/7 swiftboating by the American media, Sen. Clinton persevered, scoring big wins in the Texas, Rhode Island and Ohio on March 4^th. On March 5th, she was accused of engaging in a “negative” campaign designed to "destroy" her adversary.

“Despite Obama’s impressive victories in February, Clinton’s comeback is based on sowing political seeds of doubt,” Brazile informed the Associated Press that day, “If these attacks are contrasts based on policy differences, there is no need to stop the race or halt the debate. But, if this is more division, more diversion from the issues and more of the same politics of personal destruction, chairman Dean and other should be on standby."

(ABC’s Jake Tapper went Brazile one better, claiming Clinton was exercising the "Tanya Harding option".)

In response to the call to arms, Dean promptly petitioned Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to intervene in the protracted race, while Senators Dodd, Richardson and Leahy demanded that Clinton end her candidacy for the good of the party.

Now this sounded familiar. Jack Ryan must have been chuckling to himself from his perch inside a bar, drinking rot-gut whiskey. In Washington, meanwhile, Reid promised that “things will be done” to determine a nominee before the convention. Pelosi told George Stephanopolis on his Sunday talk show that the superdelegates should not overturn “the will of the people”, but denied rumors that she was telling members of Congress that Clinton, if nominated, would be a "drag" on their own campaigns. As the Democratic Party version of the Adams Family was thus occupied in their hand-wringing, chest-beating and sharing of apocalyptic visions, Clinton pressed ahead, picking up 9 out of the final 13 primaries. Three of them she won by more than 30 points.

But no sooner had the daylight begun to shine at the end of the tunnel when another Rove-Brazile shoe dropped. For some reason, her triumph in the popular vote was not matched proportionally by delegates earned, and it had something to do with Obama’s phenomenal gains in the caucus states of Idaho, Nebraska, Kansas, etc. One would not have expected an African American liberal to clobber his opponent by a two-to-one margin as he did in many cases. More importantly, her delegate gains in the primaries involving millions of voters seemed to pale in comparison. This made no sense.

In late May, a disability activist named P. Cronin appeared on scene to sort out the Twilight Zone phenomenon. Cronin, who like most disabled people is not a big fan of caucuses, spent some time in late May analyzing the tallies from the 2008 Democratic contest, comparing the impact of the two different voting methods on the race.

According to Cronin’s study, nearly all of Obama’s 138-delegate lead over Clinton could be traced to 12 red state caucuses. In most of these contests he routinely won by 2-1 margins, even though polls in those states showed the candidates much closer. In Idaho, for instance, with its scant African American population, few colleges and relatively few Starbucks outlets, he captured 15 of the state’s 18 delegates.

Something fishy was going on here. Did Dean’s so-called 50-state strategy include the recruitment of pro-Obama activists to organize on the candidate’s behalf in caucus states? Did the number of DaMaura’s G.O.P. crossover voters wildly exceed expectations? Or was there just downright lying in the computation of the vote tallies?

The case of Washington state underscores the mystery of this Bermuda Triangle for Clinton delegates. On February 9^th, Obama earned a whopping 52 of the Washington’s 78 delegates after a 36-point victory in the party-run caucus. Over 240,000 allegedly eligible voters cast ballots in that contest. But a week later, just ahead of a state-run certified primary, the polling data showed that Clinton might actually win the election. On February 19th, after 650,000 ballots were counted Obama eked out a 5-point victory, hardly the 2-1 margin responsible for his 26-delegate net gain in the state. Unfortunately, the primary was non-binding.

Cronin notes in the study that those states that furnished the newcomer’s vast delegate booty contribute a grand total of 69 electoral votes in the general election. Few of these territories have voted Democratic since 1964.

It also appears that the votes of those lucky caucus-goers counted for 5-10 times more than the traditional Democrats who attended primaries. Obama netted more delegates in his Idaho win, for instance, than Clinton in her entire Ohio-Texas-Rhode Island romp on March 4th. The following table illustrates the questionable validity of these dispersements. Notice that the last column shows the delegate gain for the winner:

2008 Democratic Presidential Preference Election © 2008 P. Cronin
—————————-

Even in the Navada caucus that Clinton won, Obama was awarded more delegates. The New York senator couldn’t seem to win for winning. There, the S.E.I.U. endorsement dissolved into wishful thinking when the casino workers broke for Clinton two to one, giving her a 6-point victory. A few months later, Obama left the state convention with 3 more delegates.

While there’s no evidence implicating Dean in Obama’s caucus routs, the DNC had maintained staff on the ground in all 50 states since 2005, when he first became the chair. In August 2007, a few weeks before his rules and bylaws committee stripped Florida of its delegates, he announced in a press release that his 50-State Strategy project, the Voting Rights Institute and another DNC division known as the National Lawyers Council were collaborating on a nationwide survey of voter databases, registration procedures and other "election mechanics". According to the release, DNC staff would work with local election boards in gathering information in advance of the 2008 presidential election. "Protecting the right of every eligible American to vote is a top priority for our party," Dean and Brazile said in a joint statement. "Every eligible American deserves the confidence that when they go to the polls to cast their ballot they can do so without fear of intimidation or harassment, and that their vote will be counted fairly and accurately."

Throwing Mama Under the Bus

On May 31, 2008, the rules committee reconvened to discuss those "eligible Americans" living in Florida and Michigan. A week before the meeting, the Democratic Party tried to attach an air of legitimacy to the proceedings by having legal counsel weigh in on the dispute. Although by Brazile’s own account, the Supreme Court gives political parties wide latitude for determining how they pick their nominees, the lawyers claimed it would be unlawful to fully honor the certified votes of January 15^th and 29^th . The committee could do no more than restore half the nearly 350 convention delegates up for grabs.

Always amenable to compromise, the Clinton campaign accepted that limitation but rejected a proposal for Obama to receive some of her Michigan delegates, plus those of all the other candidates in the Michigan primary. After all, the Illinois senator voluntarily withdrew his name from the ballot, then vetoed a re-do primary which Clinton donors raised $10 million to fund. In a sane world, one could argue that he forfeited the state and therefore deserved no delegates.

Former Governor of Michigan Jim Blanchard didn’t present that line of attack, however. The Clinton spokesman stuck to the modest request that the candidate receive delegates in proportion to the votes cast for her. A few minutes later, it was Brazile’s turn to speak, and the CNN analyst first took the opportunity to congratulate herself for displaying restraint in the meeting up until that point. Then she repudiated Blanchard as if he were a child.

"My mama taught me to play by the rules and respect the rules…When you decide to change the rules, especially, in the middle of the game, it’s called cheating."

Dispatching the governor to go stand and in a corner and contemplate the error of his ways, Brazile’s committee allocated the Michigan delegates according to a fruitcake-like recipe involving exit polls, alleged write-in votes for Obama, the palm-reading of a psychic (just kidding) and the actual tally. In the end, Clinton gained a mere 4.5 delegates from the contest.

Any masochist following the 2008 election knew by then that Brazile had disregarded her own mother’s counsel long ago. Neither she nor her co-horts have lost any sleep over the thousands of complaints filed about the conduct of the caucuses, including some 2,000 submitted in Texas alone. Voter intimidation, stacks of fabricated sign-in sheets slipped in with the legitimate records, phony declarations from Republicans about their intention to switch parties, votes delayed until deep into the night, inaccurate tallies called in by phone, and other dirty tricks have yet to warrant even a cursory investigation by those who preach that playing by the rules represents a core value of the Democratic Party.

Even in the aftermath of her power grab, Brazile continues to denigrate those who challenge the authority of the party’s new African American leadership. In a July 22nd post on Daryl Cagle’s website, she groaned, "How many ways do these Hillary delegates, voters and supporters need to hear it before they get it? Sen. Barack Obama is the party’s nominee. He won. He will get to choose his running mate. Obama sets the agenda for the convention, and, while I understand their passion in wanting Hillary to be on the ticket and to have a prominent role at the convention, it’s not her decision… As much as we all would have loved to see a woman in the Oval Office, it wasn’t Hillary’s time. Period."

It’s ironic when you think about it. The DNC’s Voting Rights Institute was created to stop exclusionary practices and increase participation at the polling booth. Now its chairwoman is presiding over one of the most hostile and fraudulent campaigns since those newspaper delivery trucks ran over the boy scouts in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

"Mr. Rove proved you can win elections with rumors, fear, division and manipulation." Brazile wrote back in 2007, after that friendly exchange with Air Force One. "But you can’t win hearts that way."

No, you can’t. But then, this influential political fixer no longer appears to have use for that particular organ. Which may be why she finds men like Karl Rove and Grover Norquist so appealing.

- Rosemary Regello editor@thecityedition.com

(For more on the G.O.P. manipulation of the Democratic Primaries, see our in-depth report Bamboozling the American Electorate Again)

Copyright 2008 TheCityEdition.com

“Last week, the New York Times outed a CIA agent — I’m not going to mention his name — who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” said O’Reilly. “The CIA asked the New York Times not to do that, it obviously puts the CIA agent in danger because al Qaeda knows who he is, and they say, ‘Well, we’ll out anybody unless they’re under cover.’”

The Times added an Editor’s Note to the story following its initial publication, explaining why they had revealed the interrogator’s name even though the CIA asked them not to do so. “After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover. … The newspaper seriously considered the requests from Mr. Martinez and the agency. But in view of the experience of other government employees who have been named publicly in books and published articles or who have themselves chosen to go public, the newspaper made the decision to print the name.”

“The New York Times has a double standard,” Rove replied to O’Reilly. “It was deeply concerned when Richard Armitage outed Valerie Plame. Of course, they were only concerned until the point that it became apparent it was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove.”

Gee Karl. Early onset Alzheimer’s? Don’t you remember what you told Tim Russert and Chris Matthews?

Fair game. You said that a real undercover CIA officer was fair game for political attacks. And how about Matt Cooper and Robert Novak?

– Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper said, “Karl Rove told me about Valerie Plame’s identity on July 11, 2003. I called him because Ambassador Wilson [Plame’s husband] was in the news that week. I didn’t know Ambassador Wilson even had a wife until I talked to Karl Rove.”

– A week prior to publishing his column which outed Plame, Robert Novak spoke with Rove. Novak brought up Plame’s role at the CIA, and Rove confirmed that Plame worked at the CIA: “I heard that too,” said Rove.

You did not get it then and you do not get it now. The current CIA officer in question, Deuce Martinez, is not undercover. He is an analyst working in an overt (i.e., uncovered) job. His identity is not a secret. His future success in the CIA does not depend on going to work overseas.

And the notion that he is at danger from Al Qaeda is laughable. Why? Because, the CIA despite all of its flaws and shortcomings, has done a good job of killing and capturing key Al Qaeda operatives. They are a decimated organization. (See Marc Sageman for more on this.) It does not have the ability to send a hit team to track down Deuce Martinez. Of course, Bill O’Reilly and Karl Rove did not give a shit about a genuine risk to Valerie Plame back in 2003. At that time, Al Qaeda actually did threaten to kill her. And Valerie was left on her own to figure out how to protect herself and her family.

Now, even though Deuce was not undercover, the fact that the CIA requested the NY Times not print his name should have been taken seriously. The NY Times just proved that it has the scruples of Robert Novak, who also rejected several pleas from the CIA to not print Valerie’s name.

But there is a big difference between exposing an undercover CIA officer like Valerie, who had a network of spies overseas, and an overt analyst. The good news is that the recent revelations by Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, seals the deal for the Wilson’s law suit against Karl Rove and others. McClellan has stated flatly that Rove lied about his role in outing Valerie Plame. If that case goes to trial Mr. Rove will have a chance to explain why it is okay to out an undercover officer but not okay to write about an officer who is working in the open. I still want a frog march.