Pufferfish

Virtually Normal

Michael Barone has taken the time to define what it is to be normal in America:

This is similar but not identical to a point I’ve often made: that the Republican Party is the party of people who are considered, by themselves and by others, as normal Americans—Northern white Protestants in the 19th century, married white Christians more recently—while the Democratic Party is the party of the out groups who are in some sense seen, by themselves and by others, as not normal—white Southerners and Catholic immigrants in the 19thcentury, blacks and white seculars more recently. Thus it’s natural for the Democrats to be more fissiparous.

Married white Christians, eh? If we're paying attention to divorce records in Alabama then it should be re-married white Christians. Sadly for Barone this isn't breaking new ground. Republicans have been telling themselves and anyone who will listen for quite a long time that they are the patriotic protectors of Real Americans who believe in god and Applebee's, while warning against the black, Jewish, communist, homosexual hippies who like to spend lazy Wednesdays translating Italian poetry. Defining normalcy as Barone does is the soft practice of bigotry, which doubles as a nice marketing ploy favored by the GOP. But parochialism of this nature is for the intellectually callow (ie.Sarah Palin supporters). The bad news for Barone and the other conservative definers of normalcy (insert Larry Craig joke here) is that demographics are working against them - and Barack Hussein Obama is president. (Is Obama normal, Barone?) Too bad, because pretty soon the plain-bellied Sneetches will outnumber the "normal" Sneetches who have stars upon thars. So if Barone - like many in the GOP base - wants to continue to differentiate between political parties based on race and religion, he should absolutely do so. I'm sure Latinos and blacks and gays would love to hear more about the GOP's ideas on what it is to be normal.

Oh and Barone, your party is being run by people who have no idea what 'fissiparous' means and who would belittle anyone that might decide to look it up in the dictionary. Noodle that.

Cheney's Snuff Squad

Scott Horton on the non-denial, denial from Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser John Hannah, when asked by CNN about the targeted killings program operated out of the White House by Cheney:

President Ford outlawed just the program that Hersh describes when he issued Executive Order 12333. It has long been whispered in intelligence circles that George W. Bush turned Ford’s prohibition on targeted assassinations into a dead letter. It’s time now for this aspect of the Bush legacy to be exposed. Did Bush give specific authorization to a targeted assassinations program? And what was done pursuant to this authority?

Whatever advantages such a program may offer in tactical counterterrorism operations, the downside is also clear. What would happen if major powers around the world adopted the same stance that Bush adopted and sent hit squads abroad to “take out” their enemies of choice?

That day may be dawning. Yesterday brought news of the assassination of a refugee Chechen leader in Dubai,who was long thought to be a target of the Kremlin. The United States will not be able to complain too loudly about this. After all, if George W. Bush can have an assassinations program, so can Vladimir Putin. Indeed, so can any world leader. Welcome to the lawless world of Dick Cheney. Doesn’t it make you feel safer already?

There isn't a single good reason to investigate Cheney and his cabal. There's literally dozens.

More Car Talk

Yglesias on the most socialist move our socialist president has made:

Long story short, this looks like an economically responsible way to avoid a cataclysmic implosion of these firms at an inopportune moment. But this isn’t going to prevent the conditions facing the population of Michigan from further deteriorating. That state more-and-more looks like it’s going to be the 21st century version of the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl. The most important policy question facing us in this regard thus continues to be what can be done to help the people of the Rust Belt that doesn’t just involved indefinitely propping up shrinking firms. The first step is simply to turn around the shrinkage in the larger economy, but the question will remain even if recovery reaches the rest of the country.

I know a lot of liberals are incensed right now with Obama over this move, which will further devastate the Midwest and continue the downward spiral in the demilitarized zone that is Detroit. But we're talking about making a choice between bad options and worse options. Continuing to pump billions into auto companies was never a good answer.

It's also important to keep in mind that Democratic senators like Ohio's Sherrod Brown and Michigan's Carl Levin are a lot less likely after today to sign off on more bailout money for Wall Street. Yesterday's events have all but ensured that the Democrats own auto company loving elected officials will demand that Wall St. offer a few pounds of flesh in return for the scalping of Detroit's blue-bloods.

Watching the president call Wagnor's ass onto the carpet and hand him a pink slip must make every banking CEO anxious. By asking Wagoner to step down in return just for a 60-day bailout time-line, Obama has clearly boxed himself in. He can't continue to let Wall St. off the hook. Members in his own party won't let him. Maybe that's just what he's counting on.

Why Did He Burn The Tapes?

For some reason, Nixon never did. Cheney and Rumsfeld always believed that not being proactive and destroying evidence was their former boss' biggest mistake. Which makes it pretty easy to jump to the conclusion that they knew the CIA torture tapes of Abu Zubaida - whose brutal treatment yielded only bad information - had to be destroyed:

It has been my belief from the outset that the reason the "torture tapes" were destroyed was not simply because they depicted the brutal torture of detainee subjects but, just as importantly, if not more so, they demonstrated there was no credible/usable information produced as a result of that torture...

Such is the clincher as to why the torture tapes had to be destroyed. It wasn't just that Bush/Cheney et. al wanted to keep evidence of their torture program secret, there was never any complete way to do that. But there was only one thing that could prove they tortured for nothing and got nothing - the tapes. Cheney and his coterie of fellow Torquemadas were fiends proud of their handiwork; if they had evidence that it worked, they would have kept it. They burn spies for fun, crow on television about their willingness to torture and what they have accomplished, do you really think for one second they wouldn't retain proof if they had it?

With that as motive, we know that Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet and Ashcroft were part of the White House Principals group, which participated in the meetings to approve torture techniques. From there, we know that top White House lawyers including Gonzales, Addington, Bellinger and Miers, urged  the CIA in the decision and process to destroy the torture tapes of Abu Zubaida and others.

What was on the tapes? Someone knows. And they should tell the American people.

Detroit Takes The Fall; Who's Got Next?

While Obama unveiled his administration's harsh stand toward the auto industry today, it was tough to avoid an obvious issue: Why was the administration going so easy on Wall St. while playing hardball with GM? The answer could be an ominous harbinger for banks - or an ugly reality for liberals.

Predictably, conservatives have preoccupied themselves with dire warnings against the government firing the CEO of a company. That, at best, is a side issue. It's much more difficult to explain how GM's CEO Rick Wagoner kept his job as long as he did. The follies of Detroit's car companies in recent years demonstrate, unavoidably, that they failed to compete with their global competitors. Detroit has itself to blame and restructuring is now its fate. Any gripes about Wagoner's treatment are meant to distract from the obvious and bog Obama down.

But perhaps more important than what this means for Detroit is what it signals for New York. Earlier today Obama said:

Year after year, decade after decade, we have seen problems papered over and tough choices kicked down the road, even as foreign competitors outpaced us. Well, we have reached the end of that road. And we, as a nation, cannot afford to shirk responsibility any longer. Now is the time to confront our problems head-on and do what's necessary to solve them...It will require creditors to recognize that they cannot hold out for the prospect of endless government bailouts.

The administration's plan to bailout Wall St has been a boondoggle for shareholders that in comparison to Obama's treatment of GM now stands as blatant hypocrisy. Citigroup and BOA aren't being held to the same standard as rust belt workers. The questions that immediately follow are these: If Obama can force Wagoner to resign, then why haven't Citigroup's Vikram Pandit and Bank of America's Ken Lewis already been show the door? And if the White House can declare that GM's bondholders must accept they will not be repaid in full, then why aren't Citigroup and BOA's debtholders being told the same thing?

The disconcerting answer is that Obama - as presidents Bush, Clinton and Reagan were before him - is beholden to the interests of bankers and will allow that to determine his economic policy; we all know this would make the MSM very happy, because the Dow will tell them this is good policy. But there's also a reasonable chance that Obama isn't being pimped out by Wall St. banksters and that Geithner's stress-testing scheme is an elaborate ritual that needs to play out before the Obama administration sweeps in for the kill. I'm one of those fools who remains willing to argue that the administration's approach to the banking sector could actually be preparation for the ultimate hostile takeover, rather than the Get Out Of Jail Free card it currently appears to be. In that scenario, failing the stress testing will green light the Treasury's move to place these multi-national behemoths into bankruptcy restructuring, while providing Obama cover to argue that all other options have been exhausted.

It's still too early to know where this is heading. But pretty soon we're going to find out exactly what kind of president we have. Today Obama showed he's willing to play tough with the smaller, less crucial GM. Whether he's going to eventually take a similar stand against the zombie banks on Wall St. is the big question.

Creeping Closer

On Sunday the WaPo reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Abu Zubaida's brutal treatment - and that, on the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms." This is yet more bad news for torture apologists. Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. And for several years he has been George W. Bush's Exhibit A in defense of the "enhanced interrogation" procedures that constituted torture. This news, combined with events in Spain and Britain centering around investigations being opened into Bush administration lawyers' roles in crafting the legal rationale for torture might help explain why Dick Cheney has been out in front of the recent debate. Here's Andrew Sullivan giving an overview in The Sunday Times:

So what was Cheney thinking? My guess is that he fears he is in trouble. This fear has been created by Obama, but indirectly. Obama has declined to launch a prosecution of Cheney for war crimes, as many in his party (and outside it) would like. He has set up a review of detention, rendition and interrogation policies. And he has simply declassified many of the infamous torture memos kept under wraps by Bush. He has the power to do this, and much of the time it is in response to outside requests. But as the memos have emerged, the awful truth of what Cheney actually authorised becomes harder and harder to deny. And Cheney is desperately trying to maintain a grip on the narrative before it grips him by the throat.

The threat, however subtle, is real. Eric Holder, the new attorney-general, while eschewing a formal investigation, has told Republicans “prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law”. The justice department is also sitting on an internal report into the calibre of the various torture memos drafted by Bush appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel. The report has apparently already found the memos beneath minimal legal credibility, which implies they were ordered up to make the law fit the already-made decision to torture various terror suspects. But the big impending release may well be three memos from May 2005, detailing specific torture techniques authorised by Bush and Cheney for use against terror suspects. Newsweek described the yet to be released memos thus: “One senior Obama official . . . said the memos were ‘ugly’ and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a ‘truth commission’ on torture”…

The documents detailed horrifying CIA practices that the Red Cross unequivocally called torture—shoving prisoners in tiny, air-tight coffins, waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions: all the techniques we have now come to know almost by heart. And torture is a war crime. War crimes have no statute of limitations and are among the most serious crimes of which one can be accused.

It's getting time for Dick Cheney to lawyer up. And he better get a good one.

The Gated Fourth Estate

Greenwald makes a nice point stemming from the Newsweek cover story on Paul Krugman:

In his just-released cover story on Paul Krugman’s status as Obama critic, Newsweek’s Evan Thomas includes these observations: “By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.”

Thomas then acknowledges what is glaringly obvious not only about himself but also most of his media-star colleagues: “If you are of the establishment persuasion (and I am) . . .”

One day in the near future, Thomas should have a luncheon or perhaps a nice Sunday brunch at his home, invite over all of his journalist friends who work in the media divisions of our largest corporations, and they should spend 15 minutes or so assembling these sentences together, and then examine what these facts mean for the actual role played by establishment journalists, the functions they fulfill, whose interests they serve, and the vast, vast disparities between (a) those answers and (b) the pretenses about their profession and themselves which they continue, ludicrously, to maintain.

It would be great if that were even remotely likely. But let's not count on it. As for Krugman being on the cover of Newsweek with a headline blaring that Obama Is Wrong, well, I'm happy and annoyed. It's about damn time that the establishment media acknowledged that criticism from Obama was coming from more than just semi-literate Republicans and Wall St. bankers. This can only help Obama move the debate to the left. But it's also worth noting that the Beltway establishment treated Krugman as a pariah during the Bush years even though hind-site shows his criticism was prescient. Now that Obama's in office, Newsweek has deemed him cover-worthy. Why?

Journo-Listing

Michael Calderone's article on the large, secretive liberal media email group JournoList sparked a lot of debate over the last couple weeks on whether their emailings are a good thing for the coverage of politics. The reaction from many on the right has been predictably reactionary, with cries warning that this is indicative of liberals' hold on the MSM. That is nonsense.

Across the ideological aisle, the left has reacted with more or less a shrug and acceptance of Ezra Klein's explanation that "the idea, then as now, was to foster a safe space where policy experts, academics, and journalists could freely talk through issues, bringing up the questions they considered urgent and the information they thought important, with the result being a more informed commentariat." But that also sounds off. I'm finding myself a bit skeptical about the whole thing, though admittedly that comes without knowing the exact nature of their conversations.

As I understand it, the unnamed 300 or so members of J-List are largely public thinkers. So it stands to reason that their thinking should be done publicly. It sounds phony to privately air an idea among those who share your worldview before offering it up for general consumption. While Ezra might be right that it helps with gathering information on a specific issue, there's also reason to figure that it stifles dissent. As Ezra says, "the point is to create a space where experts feel comfortable offering informal analysis and testing out ideas." But the marketplace of ideas is typically strengthened by having a more robust public discourse. Screening those ideas with your peers could only help to engender a heard mentality that we all should be trying to avoid.

Yes, They're Lying

I'm assuming most people at least read or heard about Wednesday's New York Times editorial by former AIG Financial Products employee Jake DeSantis, whose resignation letter basically asks us all to take a step back and reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit:

"I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to AIG. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down."

Wow. That almost sounds altruistic. Almost. Matt Taibbi does a great job deconstructing this canard by making a crucial point that some have overlooked. DeSantis is full of shit. AIGFP only had 377 employees who received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, with a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million in salary per person. The reason that's important is that gossiping about each others' bonuses, and bitching about each others' compensation is treated as sport among that crowd. The second most popular conversation point is figuring out how someone else is getting rich. The idea that DeSantis and the other people working in that division didn't know nothing isn't remotely likely.

Taibbi also makes a larger point about the idea of retaining "talent," a ruse which is repeated as gospel by bobbleheads in the media, especially among those saying we must pay the bonuses:

Half of Wall Street is unemployed right now. There are plenty of unemployed traders out there whose resumes don't include such entries as "Worked for years at small unit of AIG that helped destroy the universe; throughout that time was completely ignorant of burgeoning global disaster unfolding 5 feet from my desk.

The idea that other companies would be so eager to pass over the seas of truly innocent available people in order to scoop up some still-employed veteran of AIGFP -- and that they would be so enthusiastic in their pursuit of said AIGFP employees that AIG would need to pay those AIGFP folks million-plus retention bonuses to get them to stay -- is so ludicrous it almost defies comment.

Show me, anywhere, the Wall Street firm that's willing right now to spend more than a million dollars poaching still-employed midlevel executives like DeSantis, when they can just put an ad in the paper and have 500 recently unemployed CEOs begging for work at almost any salary in five minutes.

So the idea that the rest of Wall Street is breaking down AIGFP's doors to lavish its idiot personnel with million-dollar offers is just utterly preposterous. The fact that DeSantis expects us to believe this is insulting in itself.

Spain Goes There

With another Bush official offering a testimonial that the administration used torture, Spain’s national newspapers, El País and Público, reported that the Spanish national security court it doing what our government has so far refused: Spain has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush lawyers who provided the spurious rationale for torture at the prison in Guantánamo. Público identifies the officials being investigated as former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, and former Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith.

The investigation stems from an investigation into allegations heard by Spain’s Supreme Court that a Spanish citizen was tortured in Gitmo.

Judge Baltazar Garzón, who is overseeing the investigation, is best known for his prosecution against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet that resulted in the issuance of an arrest warrant for Pinochet while he was visiting England. Harper's Scott Horton says that "The Spanish criminal court now may seek the arrest of any of the targets if they travel to Spain or any of the 24 nations that participate in the European extraditions convention (it would have to follow a more formal extradition process in other countries beyond the 24). The Bush lawyers will therefore run a serious risk of being apprehended if they travel outside of the United States."

And so the noose tightens.