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By Weldon Berger, on January 24th, 2007
This year’s State of the Union speech promised little and delivered less. Bush has no domestic policy clout with which to press the few wan policies he mentioned — and no more intention of pushing for “energy independence” now than the previous five times he’s mentioned it — and his credibility in the arenas where he continues to enjoy considerable power, foreign and military policy, continues to fade; the most recent polls show even his most dependent supporters are beginning to peel off. That makes him more dangerous rather than less, but it moves his comments on the subjects from the category of rhetorically crippled into white noise.
Health care reform was supposed to be a significant part of the speech. It wasn’t. The reason is that the administration’s proposal is sketchy, weak and curiously vindictive.
According to the White House, the tax cut for individuals and families with health insurance will bring fewer than 10% of uninsured Americans into the fold. They acknowledge that rising costs will eat up the entire break within a decade or less, and that the likely immediate result — the intended immediate result — is that Americans who get their health insurance through their jobs will switch to high-deductible, less comprehensive insurance, leaving themselves open to the sort of back-breaking medical expenses that insurance is at least in theory intended to ward off. What numbers they have in support of the presumed beneficial effects are tentative and unsubstantiated. So it’s no wonder that the initiative got a scant 350 words in the 5500-word speech.
Continue reading State of the Union? Not so healthy
By Weldon Berger, on January 22nd, 2007
Washington Post columnist Colbert King noted last month one of the many ironies associated with Bush’s misbegotten war. A number of people have made lists of things on which the money wasted in Iraq could have been invested — in a later column, King revived Martin Luther King’s vivid description of Vietnam as “some demonic, destructive suction tube” vacuuming up lives and money — but this little parable focused on the administration’s willingness to practice socialism in Iraq by way of resurrecting the country’s state-owned industries, which were mothballed and left unprotected by Lord Bremer during his tenure as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority but are intended to play a key role in The New Way Forward. (Iraqis also in theory enjoy universal health coverage, but the health care sector there is not what it used to be.) King uses a neighborhood barbershop to highlight the administration’s employment epiphany.
Mr. Carl reminded the barbers that the Bush administration prefers to let unemployed Americans fend for themselves, relying on the free market. Not so in Iraq, he said. Mr. Carl stated that Pentagon planners intend to — reading again — “bring life to nearly 200 state-owned factories.” Continuing, he read: “Their goal is to employ tens of thousands of Iraqis in coming months, part of a plan to reduce soaring unemployment and lessen the violence that has crippled progress.”
Citing another paragraph, Mr. Carl said the Pentagon also plans to divert 25 percent of the Defense Department’s $4 billion of spending orders from firms in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Kuwait to Iraqi companies. That’s a $1 billion noncompetitive set-aside program for Iraq, he observed.
With a wistful smile, Mr. Carl read aloud a quote from Army Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the top U.S. field commander in Iraq: “We need to put the angry young men to work.”
Yes, we do; even the ones who may be more depressed than angry. Communities ravaged by unemployment, urban and rural, need jobs programs. Many of our schools, like the ones in Iraq, are in dire need of physical attention. Many of our citizens are in dire need of health care coverage.
Continue reading Bush revives Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society … in Iraq
By Weldon Berger, on January 19th, 2007
Every high profile criminal trial seems to spawn a raft of books, and the Lewis “Scooter” Libby proceeding is certain to do the same. Although the legal question at issue is whether Dick Cheney’s former top aide lied to investigators and a grand jury about his role in outing former CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame, the trial takes place in a larger context that includes the Bush administration’s conduct in selling and defending the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the role of the Washington press corps in abetting or (much more rarely) undercutting that conduct. With a witness list set to include high-ranking members of both government and the Washington journalism community, what better choice to write one of those inevitable books than a Libby juror who is a former Washington Post reporter, the author of a recent espionage-related book, and well acquainted with many of the potential witnesses on both sides of the case?
Just such a prospective juror survived the first cut in the selection process to join the 36-strong pool from which the final selections will be made. The unnamed journalist — whom the reporters at the trial know and are legally proscribed from identifying, but who probably won’t remain anonymous in the wider world for long; among the details reported in the Post story linked above are that he worked in the Post Metro section under Bob Woodward, went to grade school with New York Times columnist and D.C. citizen-from-birth Maureen Dowd (age 54), and lived across the street from Meet The Press honcho and prosecution witness Tim Russert — told attorneys for both sides that he would be skeptical about his potential for impartiality were he them, but added that while he wasn’t “making a pitch to be on this jury … I don’t lean one way or the other in finding out the truth.”
Continue reading Former reporter gets the inside track on Libby trial book
By Weldon Berger, on January 18th, 2007
The last time former Nixon defense secretary Melvin Laird popped up in the pages of the Washington Post, it was to chide the retired generals who were unloading on Donald Rumsfeld. They didn’t have the big picture, he said, and anyway they had plenty of opportunities to speak up within the chain of command when they were on active duty. Only history could grade Rumsfeld’s performance, and meanwhile the generals were confusing the public, dispiriting their former colleagues and emboldening the enemy. That was in April of 2006; history has since arrived, no doubt much sooner than Laird anticipated, and enthusiastically endorsed the low marks awarded Rumsfeld by the generals. But Laird, like most people afforded regular access to the nation’s premier opinion pages, is not one to let past stupidities discourage him from future ones.
Accordingly, he’s back in the Post, this time to chide congressional Democrats for not rescuing president Bush. “Democrats are positioned to offer a plan for Iraq,” he says, “but cutting off funding is not a plan. Holding hearings to excoriate the executive branch is not a plan. Emotional oratory about casualties is not a plan. Such is the stuff of dinner-party debates and protest rallies.”
He’s right, of course. Cutting off funding isn’t a plan; it’s a tactic in service of a plan to get us out of this mess with the least awful consequences. Hearings aren’t a plan either; they’re a vehicle for illuminating the administration’s cluelessness and perfidy. Neither is oratory a plan; it’s a tool for further isolating the administration and bringing additional pressure to bear on them. Laird is either compulsively dishonest in his characterization of the current dynamic or delusional about it, or both. He’s at pains to point out that he spent 16 years in Congress and four with Nixon, so it’s even money which, but the evidence points toward the last.
Continue reading In which Melvin Laird doesn’t even try to make sense
By Weldon Berger, on January 16th, 2007
The New York Times gave one of its coveted op-ed page columns over to reactionary blogger Glenn Reynolds today, while the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation(RTNDF) is about to bestow its First Amendment Leadership Award upon Fox News chief Roger Ailes.
Reynolds’ Times column, which may well have been ghostwritten by his long-time . . . → Read More: Crackheads storm the media gates
By Weldon Berger, on January 15th, 2007
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino came up with the quote of the young year when she told CNN that the Bush administration, in contrast to Iran, “are not the ones being meddlesome and troublesome in Iraq.” No doubt she’s sincere, because her head would explode if she weren’t, but this seems a good time to remind her that WE INVADED THE FRICKEN COUNTRY AND DESTROYED IT. How much more “meddlesome and troublesome” can one get?
If Iranian involvement in Iraq is troublesome, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recruiting drive in Latin America can’t be much less so. Ahmadinejad has met with all of the Latin American leaders most irritating to the US, including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez — who has a lot in common with Bush; he’s asking his legislature to allow him to govern by decree (at least he’s asking) — with whom he inked a deal to create a substantial social action fund, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, the former Sandanista leader to whom Ahmadinejad promised foreign aid.
The administration has been rather quiet on the subject of Ahmadinejad’s trip, but it has to be galling to see Iran participating in and moving forward what is becoming a solid anti-US — or more accurately, anti-Bush — coalition in our own back yard, and doing so without invading so much as a single country. Call it the Coalition of the Unbecomingly Eager (CUE).
Continue reading Turnabout is fair play: Iran’s Ahmadinejad in Latin America
By Weldon Berger, on January 14th, 2007
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice granted an interview to three somewhat incurious New York Times reporters on Friday. During the course of it she implied that Iraq would be unsalvageable if Baghdad wasn’t under control by sometime this summer and, in bits and pieces, identified concerns about Iran that echo, sometimes almost verbatim, those the administration professed about Iraq in 2002.
Among the things Rice told the reporters is that the US would pursue unilateral action (sanctions) against Iran because the recent UN Security Council debate on sanctions was “not actually helpful,” and she didn’t know what further use the UN could be.
Why was the debate unhelpful? Because it was a debate.
Continue reading Reporters are stupid and Rice is tired of the UN
By Weldon Berger, on January 13th, 2007
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, an early supporter of the Iraq invasion and occupation, is ready to roll— conditionally.
In his Friday column, Friedman told the president that “I’ll surge on the condition that you once and for all enlist the entire American people in this war effort, and stop putting it all on the shoulders of 130,000 military families, and now 20,000 more.” By “surge,” Friedman appears to mean that he will pay the additional gasoline taxes and support the petroleum detoxification program that he says Bush must inaugurate to enlist his support and that of the entire American people.
One could hardly ask fairer than that.
He doesn’t say what will happen if the president fails to meet his conditions, but his patience is obviously at an end; probably he will personally intervene and bring the troops home now, instead of on December 1. He says December 1 is the date on which the president should remove all of our troops from Iraq if the Iraqis haven’t met the conditions he says Bush must impose on them.
Continue reading Good news for the US: Tom Friedman is ready to surge
By Weldon Berger, on January 13th, 2007
By way of explaining how we arrived at the current state of affairs in Iraq, Tony Snow recently trotted out Tommy Franks’ remark about the invasion of Iraq having proved a “catastrophic success.” Bush’s New Way Forward in Iraq seems calculated, deliberately or not, to arrive at the inverse — a successful catastrophe that will justify a US attack on Iran and Syria, followed by the final variation on the theme: a catastrophic catastrophe.
Even if US actions such as Thursday’s assault on the Iranian consulate in Irbil don’t succeed in provoking Iran into an attributable attack on US interests, Bush made clear in his Wednesday speech that from now on any US or Iraqi government failures will be ascribed to Iran and Syria on the counts of allowing foreign militants into the country and providing material support to both sides of the civil war. Tom Englehardt pointed out yesterday that thanks to the president’s speech and innumerable administration briefings and leaks on the new plan, everyone involved now has a pretty clear idea of what to expect, along with a fair amount of lead time in which to prepare their various responses. With the insurgents, the militias, the government, the Iraqi army and the somewhat obscure but fascinating 150,000-strong Facilities Protection Service operating at cross purposes with and within each other, the foredoomed plan will collapse into bloody failure sooner rather than later. And then it’s on to Iran, without all the pointless consultation that wasted so much valuable presidential vacation time before the invasion of Iraq.
Continue reading From “catastrophic success” to “successful catastrophe”: Bush and Iran
By Weldon Berger, on January 11th, 2007
The National Review is lauding Democratic (sic) Senator Joe Lieberman for warning against “excessive partisanship and rancor” in response to president Bush’s escalation of the Iraq war. Kathryn Lopez posted Lieberman’s enthused endorsement of Bush’s new policy in its entirety, with a note of thanks to Connecticut voters for sending the Senator back to Washington.
No doubt Lieberman is referring to the harsh words coming from his colleagues across the aisle, including Republican senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who told Condoleezza Rice today that escalating the conflict represents “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it’s carried out;” Gordon Smith of Oregon, who calls the president’s policy absurd and possibly criminal; Sam Brownback of Kansas, who wants to partition Iraq and says the US “should not increase its involvement” until Sunnis and Shiites stop shooting at each other; Susan Collins of Maine, who says “I don’t think more troops is the answer to the violence;” and Ohio’s George Voinovich, who says “I’ve bought into [Bush's] dream and at this stage of the game I just don’t think its going to happen.”
Continue reading Lieberman blasts Senator Chuck Hagel as rancorous, partisan
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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In which Melvin Laird doesn’t even try to make sense
The last time former Nixon defense secretary Melvin Laird popped up in the pages of the Washington Post, it was to chide the retired generals who were unloading on Donald Rumsfeld. They didn’t have the big picture, he said, and anyway they had plenty of opportunities to speak up within the chain of command when they were on active duty. Only history could grade Rumsfeld’s performance, and meanwhile the generals were confusing the public, dispiriting their former colleagues and emboldening the enemy. That was in April of 2006; history has since arrived, no doubt much sooner than Laird anticipated, and enthusiastically endorsed the low marks awarded Rumsfeld by the generals. But Laird, like most people afforded regular access to the nation’s premier opinion pages, is not one to let past stupidities discourage him from future ones.
Accordingly, he’s back in the Post, this time to chide congressional Democrats for not rescuing president Bush. “Democrats are positioned to offer a plan for Iraq,” he says, “but cutting off funding is not a plan. Holding hearings to excoriate the executive branch is not a plan. Emotional oratory about casualties is not a plan. Such is the stuff of dinner-party debates and protest rallies.”
He’s right, of course. Cutting off funding isn’t a plan; it’s a tactic in service of a plan to get us out of this mess with the least awful consequences. Hearings aren’t a plan either; they’re a vehicle for illuminating the administration’s cluelessness and perfidy. Neither is oratory a plan; it’s a tool for further isolating the administration and bringing additional pressure to bear on them. Laird is either compulsively dishonest in his characterization of the current dynamic or delusional about it, or both. He’s at pains to point out that he spent 16 years in Congress and four with Nixon, so it’s even money which, but the evidence points toward the last.
Continue reading In which Melvin Laird doesn’t even try to make sense