The Rovian Era
“Turn over a scandal in Washington these days and the chances are you’ll find Karl Rove. His tracks are everywhere: whether it’s helping to purge United States attorneys, coaching bureaucrats on how to spend taxpayers’ money to promote Republican candidates, hijacking the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for partisan politics, or helping to organize a hit on the character of one of the first people to publicly reveal the twisting of intelligence reports on Iraq.”

This Times editorial contains more truth than the paper has published in six years, including this characterization of the BushCo mission:

“…the Bush administration’s far more menacing failure to distinguish the Republican Party from the government, or the state itself.”

All of this just makes me wonder if tomorrow the Times will retract it all with a big “April Fools” headline.

The President spoke yesterday at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and defended his escalation plan for Iraq. As support for his argument that things are getting better, he cited bloggers with a surprisingly rosy view of life in Baghdad:

“Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now.”

What Bush did not mention is that these so-called “average” bloggers were actually old friends, Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, who had met with him in the White House in 2004. Their blog is available at Pajamas Media, a conservative leaning blog network. And in an interview with Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post in December of 2004, they declared:

“Now we want to say in a loud and clear voice that we welcome American troops and consider this a liberation, not an occupation. People outside Iraq are more worried than the Iraqis themselves.”

Exactly how numb do you have to be to believe that? I don’t know about the Fahdils, but if dozens of bodies were discovered each morning in the city where I live, I would be pretty worried. But it’s not surprising that Bush would select these gleeful cheerleaders to affirm the gaiety of Baghdad. They almost make me regret living in the doldrums of Southern California and thinking about all the good times and parties I’m missing in Iraq.

The latest out of touch, fringe-dwelling loons to hop aboard the dump Gonzales bandwagon is that bastion of socialist propaganda, the National Review. [For those of you who don’t know the National Review, I was being facetious. They are caveman right wingers]

Despite their place on the political spectrum, they actually provide some of the best reasons for setting the Attorney General adrift. They point out that Democrats might eventually uncover evidence of real wrongdoing. They fret that, “he was either deceptive or inexcusably detached from the operations of his own department.” They are critical of his blaming his staff for misconduct that he concedes has occurred. And they allege that his position is hanging by a thread of concern that Democrats will exploit his ouster to for political gain. All of those points are true. But here is the part I find most interesting:

“While we defended him from some of the outlandish charges made during his confirmation hearings, we have never seen evidence that he has a fine legal mind, good judgment, or managerial ability.”

Somebody pinch me. Did the editors of the National Review just admit that, although they never saw evidence of “a fine legal mind, good judgment, or managerial ability,” they still defended him during the hearings to confirm his as Attorney General? What on earth was the basis for their support? Did he make a mean margarita? Did he offer free legal advice? Or were they just sucking up to an administration that was accustomed to having its people and proposals rubberstamped by a compliant media and Congress?

What should we take from this admission going forward? Obviously, the National Review doesn’t believe that intelligence and experience are prerequisites for service in the President’s cabinet. And if agency heads are held to such low standards, then where is the bar for under-secretaries, ambassadors, or judges? I think it’s clear that, after this, anyone looking to the National Review for endorsements has to concede that they are not interested in a nominee’s competence or qualifications. The National Review has forfeited all credibility in that regard.

However, I will gladly accept their opinion that Gonzales must go, because, in the realm of the inadequate, the National Review is unsurpassed.

George W. Bush: “If Congress fails to pass a bill to fund our troops on the front lines, the American people will know who to hold responsible.”

America: “A majority in the March 23-25 poll favor a timetable for withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by fall 2008 (60% favor, 38% oppose).”

That’s right…We’ll know who to hold responsible.

Last week the House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill that endorsed a timetable for removal of American troops from Iraq. This afternoon, the Senate followed suit with a similar measure. What has ensued in the press subsequently has been a torrent of opinion, delivered as fact, that the legislation was meaningless and would never become law. That analysis illustrates the shallowness of media pundits who have disdain for the principles of democracy.

What they are trying to convey is their prediction that the President will veto the bill and the Congress will not have the votes to override him. There are two problems with that display of newsiness.

First, the President has not vetoed the bill yet. It should be further noted that he has previously issued veto threats which never came to pass. For example:

• Bush threatens veto to keep FCC changes.
• Bush Says He Will Veto Any Bill to Stop UAE Port Deal.
• Senate ignores veto threat in limiting detainee treatment.
• Bush threatens to veto patients’ rights bill.

Is there much of a likelihood that Bush will either negotiate or relent on his threat of a veto for this bill? Probably not. But there are no foregone conclusions in politics and Bush has a number of other serious problems to attend to that could weaken his hand. A president with an Attorney General who is mired in a political corruption scandal, an FBI that is illegally spying on American citizens, and an approval rating that is just north of Hades, might find it difficult to cheer on a war that is just as unpopular as he is.

Secondly, the Congress has not yet failed to override the veto that the President has not yet made. To assume that such an outcome is impossible is to ignore the reality that played out today. The bill that the Senate passed a few hours ago was defeated just two weeks ago. That shows that the positions of some members of Congress remain fluid. What appears to be a trickle now could easily snowball into a deluge depending on the pressure applied by constituents or, more ominously, the course of events in Iraq.

What’s more, the measure of whether these votes in Congress have any meaning extends far beyond their eventual fate on Capital Hill or at the White House. Even if there is a veto and a failure to override, the Democratic legislature will have made a durable statement that, polls show, will resonate with the American people. The public will know who has their interests at heart and will carry that knowledge with them well into 2008.

But the biggest problem is the arrogance of the media that pretends to know the outcome of all partisan scuffles. The lock-step conformity of their assertions that this bill will never become law is an affront to the democratic process. It dismisses out of hand the notion that it is the people to whom the reigns of power belong. The press, in reporting the events of today, might correctly include the obstacles to passage, but it is downright un-American to declare that passage is an impossibility and that the effort has no meaning. They might want to consider letting the people have their say. They might want to show some faith in democracy. They might want to listen to Patti Smith’s “People Have The Power.”

Vengeful aspects became suspect
and bending low as if to hear,
and the armies ceased advancing
because the people had their ear.

People have the power.
The power to dream / to rule
to wrestle the world from fools.

Writing at the DailyKos, Hunter has articulated an insightful and inspiring essay about the embarrassingly inadequate pundit class in American media. It really needs to be read in full, but here are a few choice excerpts:

• “What, and pardon my French, the flying baguette is going on in our media when large swaths of the pundit class, lethargic and addled, can’t figure out that the manipulation of our very system of justice itself…is not merely a political concern, but one with rather substantial implications towards the very way American democracy is practiced?”
• “…there is a special place in hell for anyone who, at any point, figured that America should elect their President according to who they’d like to “have a beer” with, or opined in the national media that such reasoning was anything but a godforsaken sophistry.”
• “…we’ve got possibly the least intelligent, most buffoonish President we’ve had in a generation (elevating all others as paragons of comportment and adroitness in the comparison), a man whose daily struggles with English are a window into a mind untarnished with complex thought, a man whose lack of understanding of foreign policy issues has knocked the wind from even those brought in to educate him on the subjects, a man whose daily pronouncements give trembling comedians ice cream headaches as they try to ingest the glory of it all.”
• “…there is little evidence that the Washington pundit media ranks any higher on the competence scale than the fool-riddled government they purport to cover. Intelligence, is, shall we say, not held in high regard, in our national debate. Intellectualism is scorned: knowledge, such as the environmental knowledge that Gore was able to rattle off with little difficulty during the millennial American campaign, is seen as pushy, or snobbish, or gauche. It is decidedly unappreciated.”

The condensed version identifies a trio of pundit shortcomings: Heatherism, bias, and stupidity. But I don’t want to spoil it for you. Go read the whole thing.