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October Opens - What People Were Saying
It seemed a shame not to open the month with what looks like a train wreck, even if it's just a political one. But that's what the buzz opening the month was.
Think back to last weekend and what people were saying. Things were falling into place.
First up is Digby - it seems there's no rhyme or reason to how one chooses a pseudonym - over a Hullabaloo (on the other hand the site name makes some sense) with this list -
- A new book by the official court scribe describes an administration so inept, unorganized and incoherent that if most people were aware of the details, the president's fear campaign would blow back hard against him. If the terrorists really are coming to kill us in our beds any day now, then we are in deep shit with these guys in charge.
- We have more news this week-end that Karl Rove and the white house were actively and personally involved in all the Jack Abramoff congressional corruption scandals which feature ripping off taxpayers of many millions of dollars.
- It turns out that Bush fired Colin Powell.
- The intelligence community agree that the invasion of Iraq super-charged the extremist jihadist movement and is fuelling terrorism far more quickly and broadly than we would have had to deal with otherwise.
- We have officially sanctioned torture and the repeal of habeas corpus - at the least competent president in history's discretion.
That's some list of Republican scandals, enough to bring them down, maybe. And Digby notes that "if we lived in a nation that wasn't completely dysfunctional," the unlisted scandal - the Republican congressman from Florida resigning after the mildly salacious emails and then the rather sick instant messages to a sixteen-year-old male page were revealed - wouldn't be at the top of the list of scandals that have been revealed in the last week in September. But that's the top October scandal.
As Digby phrases it - "Lord Almighty, it looks like we got us a gen-you-wine Republican sex scandal. And it's a doozy, isn't it? Maybe people will notice that something is seriously rotten under GOP rule now."
Or maybe not, as this is the assessment we're offered -
… it looks like Mark Foley's raunchy emails are going to be the scandal that may just bring it home for November. They made their puritanical, moralizing bed, now their going to have to roll around in the muck and the mire they made it with. Let's let 'er rip.
First of all, Mark Foley is clearly one exceptionally screwed up dude. A semi-closeted gay Republican whose signature issue is online sex predators and missing kids sending sexually explicit IM's to congressional pages is one of the most blatant act of self-immolation I've ever seen.
But that's not the real scandal, is it? While I'm sure the religious right will make the same charges about "gayness" they always do when their institutional leaders turn out to be hypocrites and chickenhawks (in all senses of the word), Foley's unsavory habit of hitting on teenagers who worked at the capital and the GOP leadership's truly disgusting propensity to cover it up at all costs is the issue.
Of course, Sunday, October 1, George Will mentioned "Elmer Gantry" on the ABC political show This Week, and the idea here is that the book "perfectly describes "the modern Republican moralists who've been kicking us in the teeth with their alleged family values for the past couple of decades." And that has to do with this famous line from the book - "He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason."
Digby -
- The politicians of the modern Republican Party are a bunch of Elmer Gantry's who sold a lot of Americans a bill of goods for a long, long time. I don't know if their supporters are ready to hear it, but I have to believe that if the leadership of the GOP congress allowing one of their own to sexually prey on sixteen-year-old male pages doesn't wake them up, nothing will. I am not sanguine.
No, there's no reason to be sanguine. Somehow this will be all Bill Clinton's fault.
Actually, that is underway - Brit Hume on Fox News -
It is very serious misbehavior on the part of Congressman Foley, whether it stems from arrogance or just weakness of the human flesh is another question. It's probably worth noting that there's a difference between the two parties on these issues. Inappropriate behavior towards subordinates didn't cost Gerry Studds his Democratic seat in Massachusetts, nor Barney Frank his. Nor did inappropriate behavior toward a subordinate even cost Bill Clinton his standing within the Democratic Party, even though indirectly he was impeached for it. Mark Foley found out about this, was found out to have done this, and he's out of office and in total disgrace in his party.
Republicans will take care of this because they are the "values" people - but Democrats still like Bill Clinton, because they have no values. And that proves… something, but it's a bit unclear.
But they aren't exactly taking care of this. They're doing the finger-point at each other. When the whole thing blew up and the man resigned, Majority Leader John Boehner - the man who replaced the indicted Tom DeLay - said he had told the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, about the problem last year and Hastert, who long ago was a high school boys' wrestling coach, had said he'd take care of it. Hastert did the no-you-didn't and Boehner did the yes-I-did. They talked and Friday night, September 29, Boehner called the Washington Post and told them to change their coverage - maybe he hadn't told Hastert. He didn't really remember. Right - and there's a handy timeline here of all they events, and the many players. It's not pretty. Hume should study it.
Next up - Greg Saunders at the site This Modern World, run by the political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow (great pseudonym) with The Scandal That Dare Not Speak Its Name -
By now, you probably know about Rep Mark Foley stepping down after being revealed to be a sexual predator. Foley wasn't just caught sending creepy emails to underage boy(s), but some sexually explicit IMs. [ABC News has them in full here] You've also probably heard last night's revelation that some members of the House leadership were aware of the emails (at least) for almost a year and did nothing about it. But unless you've been glued to your computer all day, you may have missed all of the twists and turns the scandal has taken today. It's every man for himself as the GOP leadership is pointing fingers at each other.
And so it is, and Josh Marshall (real name) over at Talking Points Memo, who have been covering all the twists and turns in great detail, sums it up with this -
I've been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you've got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I'm not sure I've ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It's mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.
… These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he's in a fight for his life.
Saunders -
As well they should be. Their careers are probably over at a minimum. There may be legal liability as well. And depending on how deep the cover-up goes, this could very well bring down the entire GOP with them. People who vote on "moral values" probably aren't going to like the fact that their party leaders have been covering up for a guy who asked an underage boy to "get a ruler and measure it for me." This is a milder form of the same sickness that brought down Cardinal Bernard Law and it'll bring down any Republican who sat on this information as well. As it should.
But it won't, even if now the FBI is involved. And Hastert called for that, but then there's this - the FBI is supposed to investigate ABC's sources and see if they can find any Democratic Party or liberal interest group involvement in the IM leaks.
It's just too bizarre. And the other items on the original list are for more important in the great scheme of things (assuming there is one). But it could be a tipping point. Seeming small events do sometimes cause large events to occur - Sarajevo, 1914.
On the right, John Miller at The Corner, the blog of the arch-conservative National Review, with this -
The news that House Republican leaders may have known about disgraced former congressman Mark Foley's behavior as early as several months ago is dynamite.
... If House Republican leaders really did avert their gaze from a problem they knew about, however, Foley could become the new Jack Abramoff. Except that whereas the details of Abramoff's were always a bit complicated for the public to follow closely, the accusations now leveled at Foley are much simpler and more appalling. Foley is on the verge of becoming the poster child of a party that is concerned about little more than preserving its power.
One the left (or mildly left), Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, with this -
I think he's right. Even my eyes glaze over a bit when I try to remember everything that was going on with Jack Abramoff or even Duke Cunningham. But Foley? That's easy. He was preying on teenage pages, and the Republican leadership looked the other way and allowed it to continue for nearly a year. It doesn't get much easier than that.
This scandal may not expose systemic corruption the way the Abramoff scandal did, but it has plenty of legs. It involves sex, it involves cover-ups, it involves powerful players turning on each other to protect their own skins, and it involves lots of documentary evidence. Unlike the Abramoff scandal, this one is going to get covered in People magazine and the National Inquirer. It may finally be the GOP's Waterloo.
We shall see. When you don't have real political discourse on policy issues - oppose what's in place and you're somewhere between intellectually and morally confused (Rumsfeld) or a traitor (Ann Coulter) - posturing about illicit sex will do. People love to talk about that. It's a "real" issue for a change. I
s that cynical? Wake up.
As for the other matters, Bob Woodward sat down with Mike Wallace on the Sunday, October 1, broadcast of CBS's 60 Minutes to discuss his new book, State of Denial. The transcript and streaming video are here - the Bush administration is so convinced that what they're doing in Iraq is right that they refuse to acknowledge the reality on the ground, and they refuse to level with the American people. Yawn.
As the New York Times summarizes here -
In Bob Woodward's highly anticipated new book, "State of Denial," President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war. It's a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in "Bush at War," his 2002 book, which depicted the president - in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed - as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the "vision thing" his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.
But where's the sex?
On the other hand, the book is bad news for the White House - particularly because it reveals a July 10, 2001 meeting where George Tenet and his counterterrorism chief Cofer Black call for a meeting with then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. They think al Qaeda is going to attack soon. She blows them off. See Peter Rundlet, a Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, here, saying the Commission was never told about this meeting. And he concludes - "At a minimum, the withholding of information about this meeting is an outrage. Very possibly, someone committed a crime. And worst of all, they failed to stop the plot." They didn't think it was important.
It's getting interesting. And Bush fired Colin Powell, he didn't resign willingly? What's that about?
That's the new book about him, written with him, part of which was released here. He's not happy, he knows he was used and abused, and the details in this one are as devastating as anything in the Woodward book. More will follow on that as its publication date nears.
There's only one countermove to all this coming down - a war with Iran a week before the election. That's to only thing that will divert the public's attention.
But consider what Matthew Yglesias says here -
I would have thought this was simply obvious, but a few people at dinner thought it might be useful to make the point plainly. The Bush administration is considering airstrikes against Iran. Some people think the decision has already been made to do it. Most people think this isn't totally clear, but some folks inside the government want strikes and may win the fight. The options being seriously considered all involve, basically, launching a surprise attack. This means, among other things, a war without any serious basis in domestic or international law. No UN resolution, no congressional resolution, just an order from the President to the relevant military assets. There'll be vague gestures in the direction of this or that - the crew that's argued the 9/11 Resolution repealed FISA and the 4th Amendment will argue that it authorized just about anything - but basically they'll just be making shit up which isn't at the end of the day, a novel situation for them to be in.
The War Powers Act states that "The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." Meaning, in other words, that simply launching an attack on Iran would be illegal. Dick Cheney has, however, argued for decades that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional, so this isn't going to stop them. You'll be able to file an after-the-fact lawsuit, if you like, but that's not going to have much practical impact.
But at least you won't have sex on your mind.
So note, in an odd way the first of the month was not just another random day. The day actually acted as a marker of big changes. That's rather convenient.
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