Golf is the Game of Presidents, So Get Over It

Presidents play golf.... Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter (although after his presidency), Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama.... Dana Milbank knows this fact, but nonetheless....

On June 14, Sunni rebels threatened Baghdad after seizing much of Iraq — and President Obama fearlessly played a round at the Sunnylands Golf Course in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

The next day, the militants posted pictures of their mass execution of Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces — and Obama boldly teed off again, at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s Rancho Mirage estate.

These split-screen scenes were reminiscent of the weekend in March when Russia was about to annex Crimea. Obama played golf both Saturday and Sunday at Key Largo, Fla.’s Ocean Reef resort with former NBA star Alonzo Mourning and former NFL player Ahmad Rashad.

It’s enough to make one wish the president would take up a different pastime — like, say, stamp collecting.

Yes, a president needs down time. And, yes, he can run the country whether he’s in a sand trap or the Situation Room. But Obama’s golf habit needlessly hands his critics a gimme.

Only if reporters like Milbank treat it as a serious accusation, rather than dismissing it as tripe.

Former vice president Dick Cheney, writing in the Wall Street Journal with his daughter Liz, complained: “Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing.” House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers gave a TV interview asking Obama to “please come back from the golf course” and find an Iraq solution.

An appropriate response to Rogers might be, "What do you imagine that the President might do to solve Iraq's problems that he is not already doing?" That would go for the Cheneys as well, but the absurdity of the Cheney accusation triggered another memory in Milbank:

I was one of the many who had fun with George W. Bush’s classic tee shot in 2002: “I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now watch this drive.” But as The Post’s Colby Itkowitz noted, Bush hung up his spikes after the Iraq invasion. (He busied himself with other leisure pursuits, such as clearing brush.)

Bush earned himself the jokes not by playing golf, but by foolishly adding the "Now watch this drive" line to what should have been a serious response to a serious issue. Had Bush stopped before that final sentence, it would have been just another day on the golf course. Don't take it from me -- take it from Milbank:

Don't watch this drive. In his first three years in office, Bush played golf 16 times. But, according to the White House's unofficial statistician, CBS News's Mark Knoller, Bush has not teed off since Oct. 13, 2003. Some muse that Bush was cowed by filmmaker Michael Moore's mocking of Bush's golf habit in "Fahrenheit 9/11" which featured footage of Bush mixing remarks on Middle East violence with a command to "watch this drive." But Bush's golf ban far predates the Moore film and seems to coincide with Bush's discovery of mountain biking -- a better sport for appealing to the common man.

For goodness sake, even Dwight Eisenhower played golf. Woodrow Wilson played golf. Harry Truman didn't play golf at all, so there's no inference to be drawn from his abstention. And really -- the staged brush clearing photo ops on the ranch G.W. sold immediately upon retiring from the White House? Milbank believed that stuff?

As former Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower, who dubbed the Crawford digs a "ranchette," said in 2004, "Bush is always inviting the media out to take pictures of him clearing brush. In my experience real ranchers spend virtually no time clearing brush. They're usually tending cattle....the cattle you see as part of the photo op aren't even his. They're somebody else's that he rents the land to."

Milbank complains,

The image problem isn’t from leisure activity per se but the type of leisure activity. A majority of Americans now believes that Obama doesn’t understand their problems, and images of him playing golf — perceived, fairly or not, as a rich man’s game — confirms this out-of-touch reputation.

Yet Reagan was a man of the people, and G.W. was a guy you would want to drink a beer with.... Go figure. Maybe Milbank would have the President take up a real "man of the people" hobby, like watercolor portraiture?

This is similar to the problem that dogged Mitt Romney, and now Hillary Clinton. The Post’s Philip Rucker this week noted that influential Democrats are concerned that her “rarefied, cloistered lifestyle could jeopardize the Democratic Party’s historic edge with the middle class.”

Wait... this happened because Hillary Clinton plays too much golf? Because if not, perhaps opportunistic demagogues like Rogers and Cheney aren't sincere in their mention of golf, but are using it as a basis for a criticism that they would be making no matter what the President were doing in his leisure time. Ya think? And as for Mitt Romney, he doesn't play golf, either... so it's actually possible to be perceived as elitist and out-of-touch without playing golf? Who would have thought....

Perhaps this is the real problem....

The game has driven another wedge between the president and White House reporters who, during their turns on pool duty, chronicle with envy his weekly outings with friends and aides.

“Beautiful day for hitting the links,” the Washington Examiner’s Susan Crabtree wrote from Fort Belvoir. “Unfortunately pool is headed to the base rec center for the duration.”

“Looked like a nice place to play golf,” wrote the Houston Chronicle’s Kevin Diaz from the “exclusive” Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, “at least from the maintenance shed where pool spent the day.”

How... moving. It must be tough to have to watch the President from a distance, rather than getting an up-close view as you're handed packaged talking points and photo ops.

Heck, if Iraq is so much more serious than golf, why are reporters following the President to a golf course where they know they won't get a story? Why is Milbank writing a story about those poor, unfortunate reporters? Think of all the shoe leather and column inches they could be devoting to stories on Iraq! I have to ask, though, did Milbank offer similar sympathy to White House reporters when they watched G.W. race off on his mountain bike?

I know that he has columns to write and deadlines to meet, but when his game is on Milbank can do so much better than this.

Cheney On Tour, Selling Alibis

Dick Cheney's quite a guy:

Mr. Cheney still hearts waterboarding. "Are you going to trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your honor?" he asked, his voice dripping with contempt.

Here's the thing, Dick: Such decisions are harder when you have honor to begin with. "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose".

As Usual, Michael Gerson Overplays His Hand

It's not that he gets off to a good start - he's eager to jump sharks from the word "go" - but how can the man look himself in the mirror after serving up a whopper like this one:

There is a political problem at the heart of the budget debate. If Democrats get what they want — tax-rate increases on the wealthy — they can crow about it in public. If Republicans get what they want — structural reductions in entitlement spending — they are unable to crow. Their motivation is fiscal and ideological, not political.

Gerson's memory is perhaps too short to recall, but when his former boss, George W. Bush, was elected to office our nation had a budget surplus. A few years later we has massive tax cuts, two unfunded wars, the unfunded Medicare Part D benefit, and a massive budget deficit. And then, for Act 2, we got the collapse of the economy. Their motivation is fiscal? If you believe that the Republican Party cares about balancing the budget, you're a fool.

Remind me again, where was Michael Gerson when the Bush Administration was taking the explicit, public position that deficits don't matter? Oh yeah... he was writing Bush's speeches.

Is Republican opposition to Social Security and Medicare ideological, at least within the party itself? Certainly, but not an ideology born in a vacuum. The ideology that drives the Republican Party to attempt to undermine Social Security and Medicare is very much about politics - it's about pleasing powerful and monied interests that bankroll the party, and is about gaining and holding power over the long term.

If Gerson means to suggest that it's a double-edged sword - that the Republicans accept a certain amount of political risk when they make massive cuts to Medicare and Social Security a central part of their party's ideology, and that they thus misrepresent their motivations and goals so as not to alienate the beneficiaries of those programs - he has a point. But to make that point he has to actually admit that the leaders of his party cannot be trusted to tell the truth. That is to say, opposition may be driven by ideology at the top, but the rank and file Republican voters like Social Security and Medicare. They don't share the ideology of the party's elite, and the Republicans therefore obfuscate lest they find themselves unable to win an election.

The heart of the present conflict is that the Republicans have been lying to the public for years, a lie exemplified by the Romney/Ryan budget proposal. Romney promised that he was going to cut taxes, significantly increase military spending and, although he proposed an idea to transform Medicare into a voucher program starting a decade in the future, that he would maintain Medicare benefits for those 55 and older and would not cut Medicare spending. When he was asked for specifics we got "I'll fire Big Bird".

The truth is, if you want to balance the budget it's going to be painful. If you want to balance the budget without increasing tax revenue, it's going to be extremely painful to the middle class. Gerson had no problem with the Bush-era lie that "deficits don't matter", and he has no problem with the present Republican lie that the budget can be balanced - with trillions freed up for tax cuts and increased military spending - by closing loopholes in a revenue-neutral fashion and eliminating waste. His problem is that the Democrats refuse to take ownership of the Medicare and Social Security cuts his party desires.

In focusing on the specifics of Gerson's mendacity, let's not lose track of the big picture. This Congress cannot bind future sessions of Congress to its spending plan. What Gerson and the Republicans want is not an actual, workable plan to balance the budget over a period of years. They want the President to agree to structural changes to Social Security and Medicare that would be difficult for future sessions of Congress to undo, while offering no assurance that they won't be every bit as profligate and irresponsible as Bush with the "savings" that result.

The President is resisting that "deal", and Gerson's unwilling to articulate the stakes in an honest manner, so instead we get this noisome whinging about how the President is a meany-pants who isn't offering enough concessions to the poor, downtrodden Republicans.

Capitalism... Bad?

And David Brooks calls himself a Republican?

In "yet another 'kids these days'" editorial, Brooks complains that "kids these days" don't have a strong sense of moral virtue:

Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”...

Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.

Smith and company are stunned, for example, that the interviewees were so completely untroubled by rabid consumerism.

 The effective Republican reaction to Carter's "malaise" speech was to kick of an orgy of consumerism that propelled the U.S. economy from the Reagan era through the Great Recession. Dick Cheney: "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy"; "Deficits don't matter". George W. Bush on reaction to 9/11: "I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy". Keep shopping, don't conserve, don't worry about deficits, don't worry about the future. Some of that "morality" got internalized by the kids who grew up under the Bush/Cheney brand of Republicanism? Go figure.

When Brooks claims, "now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit" or "Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart", is he talking about today's young people or the 1960's? His observations seem remarkably... generic.

There are a few obvious problems with Brooks' reasoning:

1. Complaining that kids these days are somehow different from kids in the past only works if you present a point of comparison. "In 2008 kids were surveyed and they thought X" is a commentary on what kids thought in 2008, not how the thinking of young people has changed over time. The authors quoted by Brooks complain "that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values", leading Brooks to opine, " Many of these shortcomings will sort themselves out as these youngsters get married, have kids, enter a profession or fit into more clearly defined social roles." So maybe even Brooks recognizes that nothing is different.
   
2. The zeitgeist reflected by the kids, which does seem to echo the moral philosophy of the Bush/Cheney years, is not necessarily worse than the more structured, institutionalized moralities that Brooks seems to favor.
   
   
3. When a "kids these days" author complains about "an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism." it usually actually means, "The kids aren't bothered by stuff that bothers me," and possibly also, "They're bothered by things that don't bother me."

Are "kids these days" really worse than the car-obsessed youth of the 50's, the free love generation of the 60's, the drug-addled youth of the 70's, the selfish youth of the 80's.... We have caricatures for each generation of kids that are going to ruin the future, and yet somehow (as Brooks, to his credit, implicitly recognizes) they grow up.

Thomas Friedman's Bipartisan Utopia - Where Everybody Agrees With Him

It seems fair to wonder, sometimes, if Thomas Friedman reads anything but his own columns. He seems oblivious to any opinion other than his own, and recycles his subject matter as often as Richard Cohen. Today's offering is a lazy column in which Friedman once again proposes that the solution to all of the nation's significant problems lies in a "grand bargain", involving the full cooperation of both political parties, that focuses on balancing the budget. He advances the idea by imagining John Boehner and President Obama making statements about how they have made mistakes in the name of their respective ideologies but are going to set aside their differences and find a way to both balance the budget and raise money to invest in the future. Friedman argues,

What’s sad is how much this is a fantasy and how easily — with just a little political will — it could be a reality.

Which, as usual, means that Friedman finds it to be a tragedy that the nation doesn't set aside its differences, appoint him "Philosopher King", and implement his personal agenda for what's best for the country? Jobs? Economic security for individuals and families? Not quite. King Friedman wants to serve you up a giant helping of entitlement cuts:

Let me say publicly what I committed to you privately: I have asked Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson to revive their deficit commission and to use their recommendations for how to cut spending and raise revenues as the starting point for our negotiations. But it will now be called ‘The National Commission for American Renewal.’ Because in addition to the original Bowles-Simpson members, it will include Senator McConnell, Speaker Boehner, Senator Reid and Congresswoman Pelosi, and its goal will indeed be a comprehensive plan for American renewal.

Those of you who are familiar with Bowles-Simpson may remember that, contrary to Friedman's curious assertion that the President abandoned its recommendations due to "tactical political considerations", the commission failed to achieve consensus. Those of you who are also familiar with Thomas Friedman will be able to read between the lines of his column to understand that, although Friedman doesn't even mention Social Security and Medicare, its cuts to those programs that excite him. Yes, in Friedman's enlightened, bipartisan future, the guy who portrays Social Security as being "like a milk cow with 310 million tits" will head up the reform commission.

So we'll revive the commission that failed to endorse, under its rules, its own blueprint for reform. But we'll make it work better by adding Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to the panel, and charging them with both balancing the budget "" while simultaneously finding hundreds of billions of dollars to spend, each year, on "infrastructure, education and scientific research". Because Friedman, putting his own fantasies into President Obama's mouth, is "confident that real tax and entitlement reform will unleash billions of dollars in investments". Best of all, by making Obama his sock puppet Friedman gets to avoid taking any ownership of that assertion - he doesn't have to share with us the location of the magic money tree, with hundreds of billions of dollars ripe for the plucking even in a seriously troubled economy.

Friedman represents the worst of the beltway's monomania about "bipartisan solutions." Friedman knows that the closest thing we've had to a "grand bargain" was a proposal made by the President during the debt ceiling debacle - a proposal that was not only rejected out-of-hand by the Republicans, but which they have used to demagogue against the President for suggesting that such a deal include cuts to Medicare and Social Security. The President suggested a deal that largely echoed Friedman's beloved Simpson-Bowles report, and the Republicans said "no". Even David Brooks was able to look at that and say, in essence, "My party is nuts". To Friedman, though, there's always blame to spread around - if the Republicans say no it can only mean that the Democrats were somehow too partisan and weren't trying hard enough. (Under the rules of this game, the same criticism applies to both parties: If Democrats say no it can also only mean that the Democrats are somehow being too partisan and aren't trying hard enough.)

What about boosting the economy? Job creation? Is it sensible to follow Friedman's approach of slashing entitlements and government spending in a jobless recovery - even if we pretend that the cuts can be "integrated and timed to minimize pain and maximize job creation" or that money will be found to spend on research and infrastructure? Is it credible that the magic money tree, wherever it is hidden, will produce the enormous crop of money Friedman predicts? Wouldn't it be better, from any rational, economic standpoint, to say, "We're right to worry about the deficit and debt, and we're going to work toward a grand solution that will take us there over the longer term, but right now we're going to stop the demagoguery and chest-thumping over budget deficits and focus on getting the economy up and running and spurring job growth, even if that means a couple more years of big deficits leading into our balancing of the budget in a more robust economy. Keep in mind, interest rates are so low right now we would pay virtually no interest on the money we borrow - this is the time to borrow and invest in our futures."

When Friedman proposes a "long-term budget deal", does he truly believe that it is possible to create and pass such a deal? By what mechanism does he propose that this Congress will tie the hands of future Congresses, who may have different taxing and spending preferences, policies and priorities? If his answer is, "Once the seed of bipartisanship is sown by my 'National Commission for American Renewal', it will grow and flourish right alongside the magic money tree, and we'll all live happily ever after," he will be making as much economic sense and he usually does - but I'm not buying it.

I favor balanced budgets and reducing the nation's debt. I thought Greenspan was full of [partisan nonsense] when he suggested that it would have been a horrible thing to reduce the deficit in lieu of offering massive tax cuts to the rich. I thought Cheney was full of [partisan nonsense] when he took the position that deficits don't matter. I thought G.W. was full of [partisan nonsense] when he made his "trifecta" joke about his out-of-control spending habits. But when I say I favor balanced budgets and reducing the debt I don't mean "Let's slash spending when times are bad" - I mean, "Let's act responsibly when times are good, so that we can afford to spend what we need to spend in the face of a crisis or emergency." Friedman finds it easy to complain that we're not slashing entitlements in the midst of a jobless recovery, but he does not appear to have any appreciation of how tax cuts and war spending factor in, and it does not appear to have occurred to him that the party he fantasizes can be a responsible and reasonable participant in working out his desired "grand bargain" has not been fiscally responsible in word or action for well over a decade. (To say "The Democrats have acted more responsibly" is, for the most part, to damn them with faint praise - but right now they're the the closest thing we have to grown-ups in Washington.)

The only place we're going to resolve the nation's problems through principled bipartisanship is in Friedman's pipe dreams. But if bipartisanship means foisting Friedman's personal beliefs on the nation, unless the rest of us also get a Freidman-style mansion, luxury hybrid SUV and Rolex, maybe partisanship isn't so bad after all.

When Your Actions Are Defensible, You Don't Have to Lie

I'm sure that there are any number of online reactions to John Yoo's recent prevarications in the Washington Post but, even if so, I'll add one more. One of the most incredible aspects of the successful raid on Osama bin Laden's compound is how various incompetents from the Bush Administration have attempted to use the raid to justify torture. Long gone are the days when those same incompetents argued that we didn't actually torture people, and long gone is the "ticking time bomb" excuse for torture. Now the case appears to be that if you obtain through torture any information that with the application of hindsight might somehow connect to a law enforcement success at some point in the future, no matter how many years pass, torture is wonderful, necessary and successful.

The argument belies itself. If the fruits of torture are so accurate and useful, and if the mite of information allegedly gleaned from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in fact led inexorably to the raid on bin Laden, that raid should have occurred six or so years ago - when the information was fresh. Instead what did we see? Yoo's former lord and master, G.W. Bush, declaring that bin Laden was no longer among his priorities - even as far back as 2002:

"The idea of focusing on one person, is, um, really indicates to me that people really don't understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. And, uh, he's just, he's a person who'se now been marginalized.... So, I don't know where he is, nor, you know, I just don't spend that much time on it, Kelly, to be honest with you."

So when G.W. announced that bin Laden was irrelevant, failing to capture or kill him was no big deal, and that he had other things to worry about it, his lap dogs had not one word of criticism. Now, almost a decade later, they're yipping at President Obama because he succeeded where Bush failed, and suddenly bin Laden is the most important fugitive in the world.

If we step back in time, the story of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's torture seems to be something along the lines of this: He was captured and detained for interrogation, and was proving to be a source of valuable intelligence. Then somebody with a Dick Cheney mindset apparently said, "Hey - we'll get even more information if we torture him," and John Yoo happily signed on to write a memo to immunize the torturers from prosecution. Torture proceeded, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed shared countless plots, many of which were never more than pipe dreams, and some of which appear to have been made up on the spot (because, as you know, that's how you stop torture - by telling the torturer what he wants to hear.) And despite the continued protestation of people like Yoo and Marc Thiessen, the torture program was declared a failure and was cancelled.

If, in fact, the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed produced a valuable bit of information that led so easily to bin Laden, as Yoo suggests - facts be damned - why wasn't that lead followed in a timely manner?

The United States located al Qaeda's leader by learning the identity of a trusted courier from the tough interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, and his successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi.

Armed with the courier's nom de guerre, American intelligence agencies later found him thanks to his phone call to a contact already under electronic surveillance. Last August, the courier traveled to bin Laden's compound, but it took another eight months before the CIA became certain that the al Qaeda leader was hiding inside.

Surely Yoo isn't going to try to argue to us that the courier did not visit bin Laden so much as once between the torture of KSM and last August. If Yoo is correct about the value of that information, then he should be honest about how torture impacted the ability of U.S. intelligence to winnow useful information out of the avalanche of garbage KSM produced under torture.

Yoo offers a childish caricature of how the U.S. might have treated captured war criminals had President Obama been in charge after 9/11:

Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things immediately following 9/11. After their "arrest," we would have read KSM and al-Libi their Miranda rights, provided them legal counsel, sent them to the U.S. for detention, and granted them all the rights provided a U.S. citizen in criminal proceedings.

Because, you know, it's either that or rendition, black sites and torture - no possible middle ground. Not only is Yoo offering a false dichotomy, it's not even consistent with his argument - he's suggesting that Bush would have tried to gently capture bin Laden, take him into custody and interrogate him, while President Obama was too much of a cowboy. A little consistency, please?

And let's also remember that the Bush Administration did arrest suspected terrorists after 9/11 and, while it did play fast and loose with the Constitution with no small amount of help from people like Yoo, some notable terrorists were Mirandized and were tried in federal court. I don't recall that, at the time, people like Yoo were decrying how the Bush Administration's successful prosecution of terrorists was undermining the war on terror. You didn't hear Yoo scold President Bush for announcing that he wanted to capture bin Laden "dead or alive." You didn't hear so much of a whimper of criticism when Bush ordered a raid that resulted in the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons, both of whom could have provided valuable intelligence had they been captured alive.

Yoo also acts as if President Obama was in the room when bin Laden was killed, rather than being the person who signed off on a carefully constructed military operation:

As Sunday's operation put so vividly on display, Mr. Obama would rather kill al Qaeda leaders—whether by drones or special ops teams—than wade through the difficult questions raised by their detention. This may have dissuaded Mr. Obama from sending a more robust force to attempt a capture.

Were Yoo an honest man he would admit that, had President Obama turned the mission into a larger operation intended to capture bin Laden, he and his ilk would be the first to point their fingers and screech about his "meddling in a military operation" had the mission failed, or had any soldiers died or been taken prisoner. Had President Obama instructed military leaders to change their plan to prioritize capture, and had that resulted in a similar failure, Yoo would similarly be screeching about the President's incompetence. Bin Laden is reported to have always had a weapon within reach, and he could easily have had his compound rigged with explosives - Yoo's fantasies of, "Maybe if we had sent more helicopters and more soldiers" really aren't reflective of the reality of what happens when soldiers enter a small room to engage in close quarters combat. (In fairness, perhaps Yoo learned military strategy by playing Doom.)

As it stands, the mission was a success, but success isn't good enough for Yoo. Perhaps it's too good, because people like Yoo sometimes seem to be programmed to root for the President to fail. But it's abundantly clear that, even if he thought otherwise, Yoo would have either lavished praise upon G.W. for a similar raid or, at most, kept his mouth shut. Just as he wouldn't be praising the current President for successfully capturing bin Laden, had the man been taken alive.

Yoo insists that capturing bin Laden "alive would have required the administration to hold and interrogate bin Laden at Guantanamo Bay". Why? Does Yoo believe that the U.S. never held an international criminal, terrorist, or war criminal before we built that prison in Cuba? Has he failed to review the Supreme Court rulings that have resulted from the Bush Administration's treatment of prisoners that have dramatically reduced what were intended as the benefits of the Guantanamo prison - the notion of people like Yoo that the U.S. could sequester prisoners in its custody from any constitutional protections? Perhaps he's imagining that it would become politically necessary, thanks to the hypocritical squawkings of prominent Republicans who, up to Obama's election, favored closing the Guantanamo prison.

As for Yoo's quaint notion that the President should "restart the interrogation program that helped lead us to bin Laden", I again remind him that it was not the Obama administration that abandoned the Bush era torture program as a failure. That was President Bush.

Sarah Palin for President in 2012?

Should Palin run for President in 2012, I've speculated in the past that it would be as an independent. Her recent comments suggest to me that she probably does want to run, but will only run for the Republican nomination if she's all-but-assured of a victory. Otherwise I continue to expect her to take the easier path of self-coronation; I expect that she has enough followers in any given state to be assured a place on the ballot.

But wait, you say, wouldn't Palin be a spoiler for the Republicans in the election, just as Ross Perot was arguably a spoiler for G.W. Bush? Yes - it's quite likely that as a third party candidate the votes she attracts would otherwise go to the Republican nominee, and that President Obama will be reelected in a walk. But I suspect Palin would argue that it "serves them right". Petty? Vindictive? Well, yeah.

It was not very long ago that Sarah Palin argued that the Republicans should work to bring the Tea Party movement into the fold. Now she's positioning herself, ludicrously, as an outsider - it's Palin and the Tea Party against the GOP.

The Palin-aligned website Conservatives4Palin is using the Politico story [reporting that advisers to top potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates are united in their desire to stop Sarah Palin from winning the presidential nomination] for fundraising, as well as for the opportunity to cast what it calls the GOP establishment as an all-boys club.

"The GOP Establishment deems that nominating Governor Palin in 2012 would spell disaster," writes Whitney Pitcher. "However, for whom would a Palin nomination be a disaster? The GOP Establishment? One of the GOP boys: Romney, Huckabee, Pawlenty, Gingrich, Thune, Barbour, Daniels?"

"If Governor Palin were to win the GOP nomination, the Establishment dies," adds Pitcher.

It was fun and games for the GOP when Palin was a 50' Eyesore that the Dems couldn't stop staring at, but... funny how these things turn out.

I've heard it suggested that, as a Republican nominee, Palin could present a serious challenge to President Obama. Perhaps if the recession takes a second dip, or Obama hires David Broder as an adviser, but otherwise I don't think so. Leaving aside Palin's present unpopularity, it's highly unlikely that she's going to be coronated as the party's nominee in the manner of G.W. Bush. A primary fight will get ugly, and fast. And I would love to see who Palin might pick as VP who wouldn't make her look like a featherweight by comparison. I mean, she could appoint Dick Cheney to find a VP for her and then act surprised when he designates himself, but... that's already been done.

But seriously, note that some of the "best" candidates on the aforementioned list of "GOP boys" have little advantage on Palin in the résumé department. To the extent that some, at least, completed their terms as governor (as I've previously quipped) in their recent experience the only thing they've been running is their mouths. Newt Gingrich, devoid of charisma and a purveyor of fake awards; Mitt Romney, former corporate raider and proponent of healthcare reform that looks very much like the laws the GOP is now sworn to tear down (and was a terrible campaigner in 2008); Mike Huckabee, granter of an unfortunate pardon and resentful of the notion that a presidential candidate should be sufficiently versed in science to pass a test at the eighth grade level.... Rudy Giuliani, not even meriting a mention?

Oh yes, there's Jeb Bush. The GOP could coronate Jeb and, quite possibly, end up trailing Palin in the election returns. (But then, advice to the Republicans from Bob Shrum has to be taken in the same light as advice to the Dems from William Kristol or David Brooks - "Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly".)

So yes, everybody, keep staring at Sarah Palin. Don't point out how facially absurd it is for somebody who was crushed in the 2008 election to suggest that a vote that doesn't even take you out of office means that you "blew it". Yes, Rupert Murdoch, keep her on the payroll. Get her more reality TV shows. Keep her front, center, and "relevant". Bring her on.

You Mean It's Easier to Abolish Trials?

Who would have thunk it?

Law professor Jack Goldsmith argues that there are three reasons to offer suspected terrorists a criminal trial: "trials permit punishment, including the death penalty", "trials 'give vent to the outrage' over attacks on civilians", and

The final answer, and the one that largely motivates the Obama administration, is that trials are perceived to be more legitimate than detention, especially among civil libertarians and foreign allies.

And let's not forget, serve as a model of American justice for those in nations whose totalitarian leaders will happily agree with Goldsmith's central thesis, that there's no point in giving a trial to somebody you have no intention of ever releasing, save perhaps for a show trial with a predetermined outcome.

Although he concedes that civilian trials "often do work" and notes that "[h]undreds of terrorism-related cases in federal court" have been successfully prosecuted, Goldsmith dances around the central problem in holding civilian trials for certain key Guantanamo detainees,

But Mr. Ghailani and his fellow detainees at Guantánamo Bay are a different matter. The Ghailani case shows why the administration has been so hesitant to pursue criminal trials for them: the demanding standards of civilian justice make it very hard to convict when the defendant contests the charges and the government must rely on classified information and evidence produced by aggressive interrogations.

The use of classified information has been raised as a specter in many prior terrorist prosecutions, but has not prevented successful prosecution of even one case. Goldman himself has told us in relation to an earlier argument that many years have passed since the time of the offenses being prosecuted; it is difficult to imagine that any legitimate secrets would have to be disclosed at a trial, particularly given the track record of prosecution of similar suspects for similar acts without any such disclosure. So, Goldsmith's euphemism aside, what we're really talking about is the use of coerced confessions, principally information obtained through acts like waterboarding that the Bush Administration's defenders insist "aren't torture (when we do it)".

Goldsmith apparently can't build a general case against trial so he instead focuses on a specific case, that of "Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, accused in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in East Africa". He notes that a federal judge excluded from evidence as fruit of the poisonous tree the testimony of a witness who the government "learned about... through interrogating Mr. Ghailani at a secret overseas prison run by the C.I.A." He fails to mention a second problem with the testimony of that witness that was raised by the trial judge, whether the statements elicited from him were also coerced. Even when the judge's concerns were clear, the government chose not to present an affidavit from the witness to challenge the judge's perception.

As a former member of the Bush Administration I can understand why Mr. Goldsmith has chosen to ignore the fundamental problem - the choice by the Bush Administration to behave lawlessly. Bush and Cheney lack the courage to defend their actions, instead playing games of semantics ("It's not torture, it's an 'enhanced interrogation'") or invoking national security ("We can't afford another terrorist attack, so we're entitled to ignore the rule of law - and no, we don't have to disclose or justify our actions to anyone").

I'll admit that I have some difficulty giving the Bush/Cheney regime benefit of the doubt on issues of executive power and privilege, as their across-the-board pattern was to take an expansionist view of executive power and to act aggressively to test the limits of executive power. Also, if the Bush Administration thought its actions were defensible you would think it would have actually offered a defense of them rather than trying to reshape the debate and redefine the language used to describe its actions.

Yet even if we assume that in this specific context they believed that their actions were necessary in the defense of the state, you can't avoid the fact that they and their advisers - a group that would appear to include Goldsmith - knew what the consequences of their actions would be. They chose not to work through Congress or seek judicial review. It was no surprise to me to see Cheney's smug response to candidate Obama's proposal to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and try the suspects held there - because he knew that once the Obama Administration looked inside the case files it would find that between genuine state secrets and the use of torture and other questionable tactics (both by us and by regimes that 'assisted' us with detentions and interrogations, or provided information from their own prisoners) the civilian trial of many or most of the remaining Guantanamo detainees would be difficult to impossible. I would expect in many of the cases that even in the context of military tribunals, which Goldsmith assures us "have relatively forgiving evidence rules and aren’t constrained by constitutional trial rules like the right to a jury and to confront witnesses", trial would be difficult - at least, a trial expected to withstand appellate review.

So yes, as Goldsmith says, due to the choices of his former employer it is extremely difficult to try some of the high profile terrorist suspects presently detained by the United States, and as we don't want to pay the price defined by our nation's laws and Constitution for cases in which evidence is obtained unlawfully or where we're not willing to actually present evidence in court, it certainly is easier to detain people, as Goldmith euphemistically puts it, "until the conflict with Al Qaeda ends" - that is, indefinitely. Life in prison without charge or trial. Those who defend the choices of the Bush Administration no doubt happily endorse Goldsmith's description of what this means,

The administration would save money and time, avoid political headaches and better preserve intelligence sources and methods if it simply dropped its attempts to prosecute high-level terrorists and relied exclusively on military detention instead.

But really, if you think through the implications, the only people who should be happy with Goldsmith's preferred outcome are the world's remaining tyrants, despots and dictators.

By Design, Not By Accident

When it comes to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Bob Herbert is upset that there's so little shared sacrifice, and many vocal proponents of the war have no interest in putting themselves on the line.

The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again — for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours — is obscene. All decent people should object.

* * *

The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do not want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.

I recognize that Herbert's intimate experience with war was in an era during which we had a draft, while now we have a volunteer military. Sure, you can question how voluntary the military becomes once "stop-loss" policies kick in, or that some people choose the military out of economic need rather than out of a desire to become soldiers, but those arguments are peripheral to the issue of shared sacrifice. Even during the days of the draft, the children of the wealthy and connected could find ways out of service, or ways to avoid putting their lives on the line, so the sharing of the sacrifice was still not particularly egalitarian.

But more to the point, the military has switched to "all volunteer" both because it makes for a better military and because our nation's political leaders recognize that it's easier to fight wars without calling on the general public to share the sacrifice. In that earlier era, the student Herbert found who called for a "full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives" could easily have been a kid named Dick Cheney. In fairness to the Dick Cheneys of the world, and call it selfishness if you will, if not wanting "to serve in the wars" means "not wanting to get shot at on a battlefield" it's arguably evidence of sanity. The "shared sacrifice" imposed in the era of the draft was coercive.

I believe, actually, that a lot more Americans would volunteer to help support the families of deployed troops if they had a sense of how they might do that. I also believe that our government should spend more attention (and money) on reintegrating troops back into society post-combat. Without making excuses for anybody who "goes off the deep end" after their return to the U.S., there's an enormous transition to be made from being in combat to being back with your family - and even bigger if your family isn't there to support you. I spoke with a veteran of the Afghanistan War who described how he was greeted by his mother upon his return home, and knew the moment he saw her that his wife had left him - with an empty house and an empty bank account. He commented that it took about two years to transition out of the combat mindset, and to get back into a state of enjoying a "normal life" that initially seemed boring. By way of support, the military should have offered him more than a pat on the back on his way out the door.

But I digress. Herbert nails it here:

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

The political leaders who started this war, and the political leaders who want to continue the wars, don't want that type of pressure. So they continued a system carefully constructed by their like-minded predecessors - no pressure on us means no pressure on them.

Afghanistan: In or Out?

George Will is so convinced that the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq, that he comes close to complimenting President Obama:¹

On July 24, 2008, in Berlin, Obama stressed the need to "defeat the Taliban." Then, however, he spoke as a "citizen of the world," not as president. Now he is being presidential by reconsidering some implications of the politically calculated rhetoric that helped make him president. He is rightly ignoring those who cannot distinguish thinking from dithering....

Whatever strategy Obama adopts, its success cannot depend on America teaching Afghans to [elect good men]. If he is looking for a strategy that depends on legitimacy in Kabul, he is looking for a unicorn.

Here, Will is correct - Karzai's removed any doubt about how he is going to run Afghanistan, or at least those portions under which he (backed by the U.S. military) actually exercises control, and his priorities are quite different from ours. We cannot afford to hope that Karzai and Afghanistan's government somehow magically reform themselves, and a strategy that depends upon that hope is doomed to fail. (One wonders why it took some people seven years to figure that out, but there you go.)

Remember, back in the day, when the neocons were describing themselves as wanting to move away from realpolitik? How they wanted to build real nations, with real, functional, honest governments, and not simply replace one tyrant with another who was more willing to bend to the will of the U.S.? Is anybody still trying to advance that argument? If so, where can I find an example of their putting that into practice? Isn't it the paleocons who have more consistently advocated against military adventurism, the notion that governments can be magically replaced with U.S.-friendly regimes that are also competent, ethical and democratic? Sneering that the paleocons would install somebody like, you know, Karzai doesn't work so well when it's the neocons who most want U.S. soldiers to shed blood to keep him in power. And when it comes to backing traditional U.S. values, such as the ethical treatment of prisoners captured by the military, once again don't the paleocons have the moral high ground?

Turn the page and see exactly what I mean. Yet another unsigned editorial from Fred Hiatt's editorial board, insisting that we back Karzai:

As President Obama pointedly noted in recognizing Mr. Karzai's reelection a day earlier, "the proof is not going to be in words. It's going to be in deeds." True enough -- but it's also the case that the direction of Mr. Karzai's deeds is going to depend to a large degree on whether he believes he can depend on the United States, its forces and especially its president to back him up.

That's true, but not in the sense the editorial intends. Backed in the manner the Post demands, Karzai will continue to be corrupt and self-dealing, unconcerned with establishing a competent, stable government, and unconcerned with the consequences of electoral corruption that demolish our effort to nudge his nation toward democracy. Isn't that the lesson of the past seven years?

Senior envoys such as Vice President Biden have quarreled with him in private, even as Mr. Obama has held Karzai at arm's length in public. This might have made some sense if there were an alternative to Mr. Karzai. But there is none.

Well, um, yeah, there are alternatives. Sure, Bush and Cheney squandered most of the good ones, and even toyed around with a bad one, but no question there are alternatives.

A fair question, what does Karzai actually bring to the table? He undermines our effort to democratize Afghanistan. He undermines our effort to establish good governance. He happily enriches himself at the expense of his people, aligns himself with warlords and Taliban leaders... Is it enough that he looks good on camera? That he presumably pledged his pliance to the Bush Administration? Karzai depends upon useful idiots like Hiatt, always willing to give him "another chance" because "there aren't any alternatives", rather than insisting that he demonstrate that he's worthy of another chance.

But more to the point, how can Hiatt's and his crew, or any neocon, argue in support of the perpetual, unquestioning support of Karzai without admitting that their concerns about establishing good governance in troubled or lawless nations were a fiction? Because here's the rub: If you truly want an Afghanistan that is less tribal, less radical, less fundamentalist, at least tolerant of women's rights, you need to do a lot better than Karzai. Hoping that he'll change, or not even hoping but insisting that he's our Obi-Wan Kenobi,² is unlikely to turn out any better than Russia's experiment with Mohammad Najibullah.

I hate to harp on this, but if the best strategy we can come up with for Afghanistan is to prop up Karzai and significantly expand our military presence in order to just tread water, with no strategy for success or even a concept of what success will look like,³ we're not doing favors to anyone... Well, except Karzai. I would detest a future for Afghanistan that involved a resurgent Taliban, but it's unrealistic to expect that the U.S. will tread water indefinitely.
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1. Ever since Clinton's election, Will's had something of a pathological need to insult Democrats; even, or perhaps especially, when he criticizes Republicans, he traditionally makes sure to suggest that the Democrats are nonetheless worse.

2. "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're our only hope."

3. The "Groundhog Day" approach.

Having a Volunteer Military

I'll give Bob Herbert his due, as he was drafted into military service and served in Korea. But when he speaks of the modern, volunteer military, I disagree with some of his contentions. He's completely right, in my opinion, that many members of the public don't appreciate what's involved in military service (and arguably you can't fully appreciate what's involved unless you've served in combat), but that's in no small part a matter of design - a political convenience advanced by the Bush Administration and continued under Obama.

As long as media coverage of casualties remains low, there's little pressure to change present policies. No doubt, the book Herbert mentions contains chilling pictures of the casualties of war, but if you're shocked by them it's because the mainstream media has decided it's distasteful, exploitive, or [insert excuse of the day] to run them.

America’s young fighting men and women have to make these multiple tours because the overwhelming majority of the American people want no part of the nation’s wars. They don’t want to serve, they don’t want to make any sacrifices here on the home front — they don’t even want to pay the taxes that would be needed to raise the money to pay for the wars. We just add the trillions to deficits that stretch as far as the eye can see.

It's hard to argue with that. Again, that's the fruit of deliberate political policy. The Bush Administration's response when asked about sacrifice on the home front? It boiled down to "Ignore the war and keep on spending." If you took the Republican Members of Congress who were the strongest advocates of the Iraq War they would still howl like banshees at the notion of raising taxes to pay for the war, even as they use the cost of the war as an excuse for opposing healthcare reform, stimulus bills, or similar initiatives.

But Herbert continues,

A clear idea of the pathetic unwillingness of the American people to share in the sacrifices of these wars can be gleaned from a comment that President Obama made in his address last week to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. “We are a country of more than 300 million Americans,” he said. “Less than 1 percent wears the uniform.”

The president was not chiding those who are not serving, he was only intending to praise those who are. But the idea that so few are willing to serve at a time when the nation is fighting two long wars is a profound indictment on the society.

Well, yes and no. It's an indictment of our present political culture that praises ever soldier as a hero while burying the most painful illustrations of sacrifice. For individual members of society, I think it's a fair indictment of the "fighting typists" - the faction of the Republican Party that expressed unbridled support for the war in word but not in deed. The Rush Limbaughs and Dick Cheneys of this world always have "other priorities".

Does it indict those who argued that the Iraq war was a war of choice, would put an undue burden on the military and jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan? Not so much. Had Bush not launched the war in Iraq, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. If Obama succeeds in significantly reducing troop levels in Iraq, we wouldn't need this discussion.

But even taken at face value, the argument has its limits. Yes, if we had more volunteers we would have a reduced need for "stop loss" and might even be able to eliminate it. But how many more volunteers do we actually need? If you raised the number of volunteers from "less than 1 percent" to 1%, you would likely exceed capacity. If you believe the need is to put 650,000 combat troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, you must have the capacity to train, support and supply those troops - you're talking about adding millions of people to the military. And in fairness to the American public, after 9/11 there was great interest in joining the military.

Five years after military recruiting hit the ceiling after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, recruiting remains solid, with every service meeting its active-duty recruiting goal for the 15th consecutive month.

To the extent that interest in joining the military has declined, it's less an indictment of society than it is of the Iraq war and the Bush Administration.

Herbert continues,

If we had a draft — or merely the threat of a draft — we would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan. But we don’t have a draft so it’s safe for most of the nation to be mindless about waging war. Other people’s children are going to the slaughter.

I disagree with this, as well. I recognize the talking point that, with a draft, people will oppose entering wars of choice. but... let's take another look at Herbert's résumé:

He was drafted during the buildup to the Vietnam War, but was ultimately sent to Korea.

Which of those two wars was prevented by the fact that there was a draft? For that matter, what war in any country has ever been prevented by virtue of conscription? To put it another way, with conscription in place, was the country not largely supportive of the Vietnam War at its inception, as it was with Iraq?

If you want to learn about the sacrifice of soldiers, you have to work at it. It's not in the mainstream media. Beyond platitudinous expressions like "support our troops" it's not in the right-wing media. It may well be that our political leaders and media conglomerates are right - we don't want to hear about it - and if true that is an indictment of our society. But it's more of an indictment of our media and political system.

Almost Seven Years Late....

You know what would have been a suitable time for the New York Times to advocate a gas tax? The months following 9/11. Instead we seemed to get what amounted to a quiet endorsement of Dick Cheney's position, "Conservation may be a personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

Article II Humor

Oren Kerr makes a funny.

If Dick Cheney's office truly isn't an executive office, why did the courts give so much credence to his claims of separation of powers?

Cheney argues that the executive branch needs to defends its right to confidentiality against "continual encroachment by Congress."

You've Never Heard of Hyperbole, Mr. Goldberg?

Apparently there actually is a person who reads Maureen Dowd's columns while somehow missing her often over-the-top use of sarcasm, irony, and hyperbole - Jonah Goldberg:

Maureen Dowd, the reigning scribe of unthinking liberalism, recently wrote in the New York Times that Dick Cheney — whom she calls "The Grim Peeper" — is trying to turn America into a "police state." "I don't like the thought of Dick Cheney ogling my Googling," Dowd writes without rhyme or reason.

It was a silly column, even for Dowd, but it does capture a certain level of both the legitimate fear and the outright paranoia out there.

Partisanship is obviously part of the equation. For instance, the heretofore-unknown disease of Cheneyphobia seems to be reaching epidemic proportions. It seems to cause some people to believe that the vice president of the United States has superhuman powers and that he is capable of personally reading hundreds of millions of e-mails while listening to thousands of hours of phone conversations and — simultaneously — scanning trillions of web searches.

Oh, I recognize that Goldberg doesn't believe in the literal truth of what he writes. He is smart enough to recognize that Dowd does not literally expect Dick Cheney to be personally reviewing her Google searches. Further, it is not the fault of the political left that Dick Cheney has become the poster child for intrusive government. Has Cheney ever spoken publicly on any government intrusion into individual privacy without warmly embracing the intrusion?

Goldberg doesn't identify even a single person who "seems to" believe Cheney capable of serving as a one-man Total Information Awareness project; I doubt that he sincerely believes that such a person exists. One would think that somebody so gifted with the use of hyperbole would recognize its use by others.

This Is Sad....

A Bush supporter penned a blog entry for the Racine, WI "Journal Times", entitled "The vice president strikes back".

Cheney easily quoted facts and figures, names and situations, voting records and current trends with the ease that some of us quote "Simpsons" episodes. (Or "Star Wars" movies.)

Um... Leaving the fact-checking to others for the moment, the author expects us to be impressed that Cheney's abilities parallel her uncanny ability to quote "Star Wars"? So she is telling us that we should cast our votes for Senator Palpatine? (Does that put GW in the role of Darth Vader?)

The Vice Presidential Debate

What to me was perhaps the most significant result of the VP debate was the fact that, as combative and pointed as it often was, it had no estimable impact on my opinion. That is, nothing about the Vice Presidential candidates or their respective performances had an appreciable impact on how I view the heads of their respective tickets. That might not have been the case, had one of them had an on-stage meltdown, but obviously that didn't happen.

If I were to declare a "winner" in the context of which candidate looked most Presidential, it would be Edwards. If I were to declare a "loser" in the context of which candidate clung most desperately to a pathetic lie, it would be Cheney and his continued advancement of an Iraq-Al Qaeda nexus with an implied link to 9/11.

If I were to give a candidate bonus points for refusing to bend his personal convictions to the will of his party, they would go to Cheney for his silence on the issue of rights for domestic partnerships. Certainly it isn't bravery to sit in silence, rather than speaking one's conscience, but it demonstrated that there are lines Cheney will not cross with respect to his family and his party. When Cheney's boss was put to a similar test, and could have spoken out against the smear campaign over Kerry's war record, he failed - that is, unless his claimed personality traits of courage and credibility exist only as fiction. I am not sure that similar tests have yet been put to Edwards or Kerry.

At the same time, if I were to give penalty points for stubborn idiocy, it would be for Cheney's insistence that he would handle Iraq in exactly the same way if he were to do it again. That simply can't be true.

The "Zap Them With A Cattle Prod And Wake Them Up" award goes to Babbling David Brooks and Narcoleptic Mark Shields, who provided some post-debate commentary on PBS. They found the Iraq material exciting, but were bored by the domestic issues. Thus, declared Brooks, this election really does turn on Iraq. What a pathetic way to prioritize the many important issues this nation faces.

White House Press Briefings... By Maxwell Smart

Would you believe,

Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was told in 2002 that Cheney's former company would receive no-bid work to secretly plan restoration of Iraq's oil facilities, but the information wasn't given to the vice president, a White House official said Tuesday.

Well then, would you believe

Q Can I ask about Vice President Cheney, because yesterday he repeated what is a very controversial claim. He said that Saddam Hussein had long-established ties with al Qaeda. Does the President believe that Saddam Hussein had long-established ties with al Qaeda?

MR. McCLELLAN: We certainly talked about the ties with terrorism between the -- between the regime that was removed from power, and we talked about those ties prior to the decision to remove that regime from power. So that was well-documented. Secretary Powell went before the United Nations and talked about some of those ties to terrorism, as well. And Zarqawi is certainly a senior al Qaeda associate who was in Iraq prior to the decision to go in and remove the regime from power.

Q There's also al Qaeda in the United States. That does not mean the United States is cooperating with those members of al Qaeda. Just by the presence of someone does not mean there's a cooperation.

MR. McCLELLAN: But, remember, we're talking about an oppressive regime that was in power in Iraq that exercised control over that country. And go back and look at what we documented, Norah. We documented all this, and I think that's what the Vice President was referring to.

No? Just because the President and Prime Minister Blair disclaim any such connection, and because the 9/11 commission finds no such connection?

What sort of CONTROL Agent are you?

Scalia's "Conflict"

In a small Michigan town, a local businessman brought a small claims suit against a man who had failed to pay for services rendered. The judge found for the businessman, then observed in regard to the defendant, "Do you have your checkbook with you? I have a feeling that if I let you walk out of this courtroom, the plaintiff is going to have a hard time getting you to pay this judgment." The defendant indicated that he had his checkbook. The judge instructed him to write a check satisfying his debt to the plaintiff. Then, as the parties were leaving the courtroom, the judge called out to the Plaintiff, "Hey Joe - do you want to go fishing this weekend?"

But, I guess that's okay.

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