Big Balagan

The People v. Bush

It is a pleasure to see the Bushrovers being dealt with like the little criminals they are. 

It's not only that Libby has been indicted.  The whole process that Fitzgerald and his team have pursued is a classic of prosecutorial form, in particular the way in which they are winding it up.  They are dealing with the inner Bush team like any other band of gangstas---starting with the smaller fish, leaning on them to provide the scaffolding into the main arena, corroborating (or, mainly, anti-corroborating) statements with various press tools used in the Bush spin cycle, letting the principal targets twist in the wind for as long as possible (gaining, no doubt, additional 'cooperation' along the way); and for the piece de resistance, putting a big arm on the VP's COS. 

The grand jury has run through its maximum allowable tenure---but Fitzgerald has mentioned that he may call them back for one or two bits and pieces as he wraps up  (or another grand jury, its not clear).  Having landed Libby for five counts, what could be left?  And, really, why Libby?

Libby is one of the more self-effacing of these operators.  Rove is a star, though he may appear to slave for W---W is his creation in so many ways.  Cheney is absolutely his own creation, and sui generis as well.  So Scooter is a junior G-man---can anyone imagine that he pursued the Wilson vendetta without clear direction from Cheney? 

Luckily, Fitzgerald was able to catch Scooter in some lies.  As he insists, this is not a trivial matter in a national security investigation---in fact, he was pretty clear that, in terms of his personal theory of prosecution, going after prejury and obstruction is continuously necessary for the health of the justice system.  It is only when viewed amongst his co-conspirators that Libby's indictment seems a bit of a denoument.

But wait, there is more.  For gentle reader, know that Fitzgerald is still using leverage.  We didn't see Hannah or any other apparently cooperating minion hauled away in chains.  They were useful in hooking Libby.  But Libby is also only bait---for Rove, or better yet, for Cheney.  Because Libby is going to think hard about the cost and pain  if the trial goes forward, and is going to worry in a way that Rove would not (he can write his own ticket with any rightwing national candidate in the country) and that Cheney will never have to (Dick could pay a lot of legal bills without running through all that blind trust money from his Halliburton days).

Fitzgerald has pulled of a very elegant piece of plotting.  He has landed on Libby like a ton of bricks, in the most public and humiliating way possible (the guy didn't even reveal a secret agent, he is just a liar).  This sets Libby up for the next phase.   If his trial goes forward, we get Cheney and Rove on the stand---will all sorts opportunity for perjury.  Alternativly, Scooter can cop a plea---but there is a price for that: Cheney and/or Rove.  For all of his air of "I'm done and I'm heading back to Chicago", Fitzgerald is still heading for the real finale.

[Elliot Ness over on the right]

UPDATE 11/11/05:  see Murray Waas' piece in National Journal (lead grafs here):

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald delayed a decision on whether to seek criminal charges against Karl Rove in large part because he wants to determine whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, can provide information on Rove's role in the CIA leak case, according to attorneys involved in the investigation.

Even if Fitzgerald concludes in the near future that he does not have sufficient evidence to charge Rove, the special prosecutor would not rule out bringing charges at a later date and would not finish his inquiry on Rove until he hears whatever information Libby might provide -- either incriminating or exculpatory -- on Rove's role, the sources said.

Where are the Weapons of Mass 1st Amendment Destruction?

An explosion of indictment rumors has been coruscating through blogland and the MSM in the past couple of days.  One pair of sparks was the publication in last Sunday's New York Times of both Judy Miller's statement about her grand jury testimony as well as (finally) coverage of her situation in depth by a team of NYT professionals (Van Natta, Liptak and Levy).  (There is excellent rumor-parsing, news aggregation, and commentary in Dan Froomkin's Washington Post column,  the bunch at Needlenose, those at firedoglake, and Laura Rozen at Warandpiece.)

The Times' front page effort carries, unobtrusively, a nevertheless bright thread of scepticism, including the last subhead, "A Puzzling Outcome".  Along the way, it implies that editorial management was fragmentary and lax, and even after the jailing, unable to come to grips with the intricate plotting via multiple agendas in the case.  It does not paint a complimentary picture of Ms. Miller, but one has to say it is far easier on her than a number of other commentaries by fellow journalists that have emerged.  (Just scan through the recent entries at Romenesko.)

Those of us who were disgusted by the sychophantic reporting of US correspondents from the Iraqi front during the invasion phase of the war have good reason to recall Judith Miller's work from that period, not least since it appeared in lead positions in the blessed Newspaper Of Record.  In the US, war reporting has been carried out with neither fear nor favor since WW2 and certainly so during the Vietnam War.  George Clooney has apparently constructed a large extended middle finger aimed at the news media in his just-released Murrow film, for example, celebrating Murrow's courage in calling out Joseph McCarthy on the air.

Judy, on the other hand, has functioned as a virtual mouthpiece for the Bushrovers, especially in justifying the Iraqi invasion based on supposed WMDs in Hussein's possession.  Eventually, in May 2004, the Times published some retrospective criticism.

Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.

The mea culpa cites a number of "problematic" articles, without citing authors, but as Sunday's professional Times coverage summarizes,

The note said the paper's articles on unconventional weapons were credulous. It did not name any reporters and said the failures were institutional. Five of the six articles called into question were written or co-written by Ms. Miller.

One has to feel for the embittered pros on 43rd Street.  Reporters are famous for protecting their turf, but Judy is infamous for it.  The story about her supposed Secret clearance, claimed by her to other reporters on the battlefield as grounds for excluding them from her particular place in the WMD search, is either an indication that she will lie for exclusive control of her sources, or will utterly compromise her journalistic objectivity for them.  Yet after all that specious coverage of the run up to the war, and after virtually gagging her colleagues for months on a story that potentially is leading to a governmental traffic accident of Watergate proportions, once waivered by viva voce she still won't break a crust with them:

In two interviews, Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.

And three of the last four grafs of their piece must have been particularly ironic to write:

On Tuesday, Ms. Miller is to receive a First Amendment award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She said she thought she would write a book about her experiences in the leak case, although she added that she did not yet have a book deal. She also plans on taking some time off but says she hopes to return to the newsroom.

She said she hopes to cover "the same thing I've always covered - threats to our country."

The Times incurred millions of dollars in legal fees in Ms. Miller's case. It limited its own ability to cover aspects of one of the biggest scandals of the day. Even as the paper asked for the public's support, it was unable to answer its questions.

The First Amendment award from the professional society, the book deal, the millions in legal fees, the damage to other reporters' work and the paper's image with its readership---and, hopefully, a return to covering "threats to our country"---its a wonderful bloody life in journalism. 

I expect to see some high-level damage at the Times in the near future, including (one can only hope for the sake of the other reporters who have sweated and occassionally lost blood for their work) the departure of Ms. Miller herself---despite her attempt last Sunday to out-parse the parsers.

From her account, she seems lost in a parallel journalistic universe in which protecting her special governmental access is the only public good she can serve.  So sensitive is she to the rights of endangered "sources" that she must wait patiently by the phone until these sources call her direct, and she can monitor by the tone of their voice for a desired absence of coercion, before spilling the beans.  Despite signed waivers that permitted other reporters to cooperate with the grand jury, Judy claims to be receiving contradictory signals on some sideband no one else can pick up:

At the behest of President Bush and Mr. Fitzgerald, Mr. Libby had signed a blanket form waiver, which his lawyer signaled to my counsel was not really voluntary, even though Mr. Libby's lawyer also said it had enabled other reporters to cooperate with the grand jury.  [from Miller's "personal account"]

Ms. Miller authorized Mr. Abrams to talk to Mr. Libby's lawyer, Joseph A. Tate. The question was whether Mr. Libby really wanted her to testify. Mr. Abrams passed the details of his conversation with Mr. Tate along to Ms. Miller and to Times executives and lawyers, people involved in the internal discussion said.

People present at the meetings said that what they heard about the preliminary negotiations was troubling.

Mr. Abrams told Ms. Miller and the group that Mr. Tate had said she was free to testify. Mr. Abrams said Mr. Tate also passed along some information about Mr. Libby's grand jury testimony: that he had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife.

That raised a potential conflict for Ms. Miller. Did the references in her notes to "Valerie Flame" and "Victoria Wilson" suggest that she would have to contradict Mr. Libby's account of their conversations? Ms. Miller said in an interview that she concluded that Mr. Tate was sending her a message that Mr. Libby did not want her to testify.  [from Sunday's Times Van Natta, Liptak and Levy piece]

Mr. Tate was "sending a message", or "signaling" the opposite of what he was saying.  When, rather than risk the extension of her heroism to another grand jury term, Miller authorized one of her attorneys (Bill Bennett) to contact Libby's lawyer on August 31, Tate told him

Mr. Libby had given permission to Ms. Miller to testify a year earlier. "I called Tate and this guy could not have been clearer - 'Bob, my client has given a waiver,' " Mr. Bennett said.  [again, from Van Natta, Liptak and Levy]

I guess it wasn't clear enough when it was clear the first time.  Alternatively, even if (as it appears from Murray Waas' article) the issue of permissive versus tampering communication from Libby's lawyer to Miller's lawyer is a potential grand jury issue, it is hard to understand why a journalist with a waiver wouldn't write the story.  After all, we are talking about a source who is blatantly trying to control news spin, after the fact of a collosal failure of policy and of governmental intelligence (of several varieties), not some whistle-blower on the low end of the GSA scale.  Judge Hogan, who sent Miller to jail, said "She has the keys to release herself.  She has a waiver she chooses not to recognize."

And there turns out to be no difficulty at all in navigating the supposed conflict between Tate's supposed representation of Libby's testimony that he told Miller neither Plame's name nor anything about her undercover status, and the fact that Miller found variants of Plame's name in her notes.  In summarizing (we assume accurately) her testimony in last Sunday's piece, Miller says

My notes indicate that well before Mr. Wilson published his critique, Mr. Libby told me that Mr. Wilson's wife may have worked on unconventional weapons at the C.I.A.

My notes do not show that Mr. Libby identified Mr. Wilson's wife by name. Nor do they show that he described Valerie Wilson as a covert agent or "operative," as the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak first described her in a syndicated column published on July 14, 2003.

These points are important, because it is illegal to expose the identity of a covert agent.  But by Miller's account, Scooter didn't do it, so what's the problem?

What is ironic, and may become more so as we learn the extent, if any, of Fitzgerald's indictments and the actual charges, is that all this havering about what Libby meant or didn't mean to convey, which is necessary to protect her sacred news source and the First Amendment, has potentially contributed to what current speculation defines as Libby's greatest technical exposure: witness tampering.  Laura Rozen quotes Murry Waas:

Evidence indicating that Libby or his attorney may have tried to discourage or influence Miller's testimony is significant for two reasons, outside legal experts say. First, attempting to influence a witness's testimony might in and of itself constitute obstruction of justice or witness-tampering, said the experts.

So let's review the position.  Judy prefers not to testify about her conversations with a senior public official.  The only way to avoid this is to ignore the de jure waiver she has from him, and pretend that representations made by his lawyer constitute a form of message from him requesting that she not testify.  But in explaining these implicit "messages" that drove her to source-protective silence, Judy damages her source in another way, by reinforcing a suspicion that Libby was trying to tamper her testimony as a grand jury witness.  Finally, why does she care?  Perhaps Libby has answered this in his own poetical way, to quote from his September 15 letter to his reporter friend:  "Out west, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning.  They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

But these apparently directive "messages" are of course different from the kinds of information Libby was supplying during the meetings in question.  Journalism-tampering is not a crime, at least (so far) not at the Times.

There is a cancer on the Presidency

Think I'm crazy for yesterday's post on IMPEACHMENT?  Hot off the blogs and wires just today:

Andrew Card's disquisition on Harriet Miers and constitutional law, pointer thanks to Laura Rozen at Warandpiece.com (my daily read along with the WSJ and NYT).  Laura calls out coverage by Harold Meyerson in a TAPPED account of a talk by Andrew Card about Ms. Miers' qualifications, delivered last night at the Hudson Institute in front of Robert Bork among other right wingnut luminaries.

According to Meyerson's account of Andrew's talk:

As White House chief-of-staff, he [Card] found the most intriguing article, he said, to be Article II, which established the presidency and the executive branch. Miers, he continued, understood Article II as well, and would defend it "when challenged by those given the power to challenge it by Article I [i.e., the Congress] and Article III [i.e., the courts]."

[...] At minimum, he suggested that Miers would be the staunchest proponent of executive power over that of the other two branches that the Court had seen in a very long time.

If this isn't from the horse's mouth (or perhaps, given its undoubted effect on those exercising their power of advice and consent, from its other end), I don't know what is. 

Then there are all the Nixonian twitches, ticks, and tensions, summarized today by Dan Froomkin in his Washington Post White House Briefing.  Froomkin quotes reporting by WaPo columnist Dana Milbank on the topic:

"The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was 'trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression,' Bush blinked 24 times in his answer. When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.

"When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer -- along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling."

He continues to paraphrase and quote Milbank:

Milbank also touches on Bush's habit of making inappropriate facial expressions. At one point, he writes, Bush "seemed to lose control of the timing. He smiled after observing that Iraqis are 'paying a serious price' because of terrorism."

And Milbank doesn't even mention the tic that has been the subject of intense speculation in the blogosphere for several months: Bush's bizarre, shifting lower jaw movement that increasingly punctuates the ends of his sentences.

 

In fact, Froomkin's whole column is a nice little slice o' Watergate.  He covers (I'm using his subheads):

• Tension city (above)
• Rove, Card at War---over Iraq? (Chris Matthews asks Newsweek editor Howard Fineman, "You believe that the fight between those who may be headed toward indictment, the vice president's [deputy] chief of staff, Karl Rove, there is a war between them and the people who are going to survive them, Andy Card, etcetera?")
• Rove, Card at War---over Miers? (quoting National Journal's Hotlineblog "Is it just us or is there already a storyline developing about 'who's to blame for Miers'? And if so, is WH CoS Andrew Card about to be on the wrong end of this blame game?")
• Et tu, Cheney? (circumstantial blogospheric evidence of cooling love between W and The Vice)
• David Ignatius writing in the Post "that the GOP is entering the post-Bush era. A war of succession has begun, cloaked in a war of principles. "
• Plame Endgame:

Signs are everywhere that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is tightening his noose, possibly around Bush's and Vice President Cheney's two most essential aides: Rove and Scooter Libby. But even more than that, it also looks more and more like his investigation, once it's made public, could pull back the curtain on some less than savory White House efforts to incite the country to war in Iraq and then prevent the press from exposing its secrets.

Froomkin quotes Carol Leonard's Post reporting:

"Numerous lawyers involved in the 22-month investigation said they are bracing for Fitzgerald to bring criminal charges against administration officials. They speculated, based on his questions, that he may be focused on charges of false statements, obstruction of justice or violations of the Espionage Act involving the release of classified government information to unauthorized persons."

• Impeachment Watch

After waiting fruitlessly for a polling company to repeat a question first asked by Zogby in June, a group that supports a congressional inquiry into Bush's decision to invade Iraq paid another polling company to do so.

The question: "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

AfterDowningStreet.org reports on the results .

"By a margin of 50% to 44%, Americans say that President Bush should be impeached if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll. . . .

"The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 8-9."

The Zogby poll in June found 42 percent of respondents agreed with a very similar statement.

Laura Rozen has a good collection of reporting, current and recent, on the White House Iraq Group.  This seems to have been a Big Lie-type propaganda committee designed to put over the Iraq War in just the way that so many Americans object to, including in its weekly convocations Rove, Scooter, Card, Matalin, Rice, Hadley, and a couple of others (here, here, here, and, in large part, here).

Another interesting sign for me, again highlighted by Laura, is in the testimony of Vanity Fair's Michael Wolff, talking on Hardball:

Well, I—I mean, I think the whole White House in is turmoil over this [the special prosecutor's Plame investigation].

And I would slightly disagree with Howard, that I‘m not sure it‘s so much of a division as lots of people running around and trying to protect themselves, because—because this could—this could wash over everyone. I mean, one of the—one of the reasonable questions here is—is, what were the guys in the Oval Office thinking?

In fact, Mathews' whole leadin for Hardball last Monday is amazing, given his usual orientation:

Karl Rove, the president‘s political ramrod, has been called back to the grand jury probing the CIA leak case.  If you don‘t think this leak case matters, ask yourself, what was the most frightening case you heard for going to war with Iraq?  Probably it was that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium yellow cake in Africa to build nuclear weapons.  The president said it in his 2003 State of the Union address.  The vice president repeated it with military precision, almost like a Gatling gun, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, Saddam Hussein, nuclear weapons, again and again. 

But it wasn‘t true.  There‘s no evidence even now that Saddam tried to by nuclear materials in Africa.  We know that now because the man the CIA sent down there to Niger to check it out, sent there after Vice President Cheney asked the CIA to check it out, wrote a “New York Times” article a few months after the war started that there was no deal.  Worse yet, the former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, wrote that the people around the president must have known there was no deal, even when the president and his people kept telling the country there was. 

What did they know, and when did they know it?  I'm sure that's the Special Prosecutor's main question.   Now, will W execute him at dawn (actually on a Saturday night) like Nixon did Cox?

Call me a sentimental old Watergate fool (what a fascinating summer I had watching the daily rushes from the Ervin committee each evening on WNET in New York).  But it's strangely familiar.  The special prosecutor chewing on the top aides.  The military longing to pull out, the CIA closely watching for an opportune moment to dump more toxins into the Presidential publicity bloodstream.  The crimes allegedly committed to cover up for more serious breaches of the public trust.  The snarling, self-appointed guardians of American virtue, the legacy of a hopeless war, and---more than anything---the religious conviction of the Chief Executive that he is the right man at the right time and can do no wrong.

The key moment inside the Watergate White House was the point at which the enormously ambitious, slavishly Nixonite, highly organized machine degraded from political juggernaut to a bunch of lawyered-up victims of someone else's hubris and wrong-doing.   It happened suddenly, after the application of thousands of small cuts like those we've been seeing lately.

We need to watch very carefully, without the gloating we deserve, when, after the trashing of our country, our economy, our military, our national security, our childrens' fiscal future, our reputation, and our elective system, the Bad Guys start receiving it in the neck.  These are junkyard dogs, Cheney and Rove most of all, and they will not go gentle into that good night.

    

Macbush

The right wing is certainly unhappy with their commander in chief on the Supreme Court front.   For once, right wingnuts have better arguments against the Bushrovers than the lefties.  The execrable Michele Malkin provides a great roundup.

One of the more practical arguments from this right side of the debate questions what pragmatic use Ms. Miers will be in any issue before the Court that is related to what she worked on as White House counsel.  The "worst" case assumes that this includes prisoner of non-war policy, partial-birth abortion, and the legality of administration activities in prosecuting their so-called Global War on Terror.

(subliminal telegraphing of my argument!---do you recognize this man?)

John Wohlstetter, writing in American Spectator, covers this anti-Miers position in "The Recusal Trap".

Under federal law, if Ms. Miers is confirmed, and has professionally advised on a matter that subsequently comes before her on the bench, she must recuse herself. Federal law is quite specific here. Title 28 U.S. Code sec. 455 covers recusal of judges, justices, and magistrate judges. Sec, 455 (b)(3) recites one ground for mandatory recusal: "Where [a judge, justice, magistrate judge] has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceeding or expressed an opinion concerning the merits of the particular case in controversy." Sec. 455 (e) adds: "No justice, judge or magistrate judge shall accept from the parties to the proceeding a waiver of any ground for disqualification enumerated in subsection (b)." 

Wohlstetter is associated with the Discovery Institute, one of the "non-partisan" organizations spearheading the drive for intelligent design creationism.  If we need further provenance for his point of view on this as right wingnuttery (though perhaps cogent as well), Dumb-as-a-Bag-of-Krauthammers weighs in contra Miers in his Washington Post column:

But what does she bring to the bench?

This, say her advocates: We are now at war, and therefore the great issue of our time is the powers of the president, under Article II, to wage war. For four years Miers has been immersed in war-and-peace decisions and therefore will have a deep familiarity with the tough constitutional issues regarding detention, prisoner treatment and war powers.

Perhaps. We have no idea what her role in these decisions was. But to the extent that there was any role, it becomes a liability. For years -- crucial years in the war on terrorism -- she will have to recuse herself from judging the constitutionality of these decisions because she will have been a party to having made them in the first place. The Supreme Court will be left with an absent chair on precisely the laws-of-war issues to which she is supposed to bring so much.

Of course, we should take into account Scalia's response to the motion of the Sierra Club to recuse himself from In Re: Cheney (Docket #03-475, related to the Energy Task Force case):

Let me respond, at the outset, to Sierra Club’s suggestion that I should "resolve any doubts in favor of recusal." Motion to Recuse 8. That might be sound advice if I were sitting on a Court of Appeals. But see In re Aguinda, 241 F. 3d 194, 201 (CA2 2000). There, my place would be taken by another judge, and the case would proceed normally. On the Supreme Court, however, the consequence is different: The Court proceeds with eight Justices, raising the possibility that, by reason of a tie vote, it will find itself unable to resolve the significant legal issue presented by the case. Thus, as Justices stated in their 1993 Statement of Recusal Policy: "[W]e do not think it would serve the public interest to go beyond the requirements of the statute, and to recuse ourselves, out of an excess of caution, whenever a relative is a partner in the firm before us or acted as a lawyer at an earlier stage. Even one unnecessary recusal impairs the functioning of the Court." (Available in Clerk of Court’s case file.) Moreover, granting the motion is (insofar as the outcome of the particular case is concerned) effectively the same as casting a vote against the petitioner. The petitioner needs five votes to overturn the judgment below, and it makes no difference whether the needed fifth vote is missing because it has been cast for the other side, or because it has not been cast at all.

So we may imagine there is a circumstance where an unnecessary recusal might impair the functioning of the Supreme Court, and is therefore not prudent.  (How about when the outcome of a presidential election is before the court?)

The White House has its own interesting reasons for soliciting right-wing support for Miers.  Ken Mehlman ticked off three main points in a 10/6 RNC/White House concall with other conservative do-bees (summary notes from Savethecourt.org here, transcript from nocrony.com here, audio from CrooksAndLiars here, thanks feministing):

So we've . . . other speakers are going to talk about other issues but I think these are three very important things, number one, how do we avoid what those in the, what I like to call [4:27] people who grow in office, which is to say who would do up things do differently than we expect them to. I think the way we know that is cause this president knows his nominee better than ever before. Second, top advisor at a time when this president has made some incredibly effective decisions, and third her unique ability to understand how bad judicial activism is on the [4:50] critical issue of the global war on terror.

Talking point number three loosely translates as "she'll trample on civil rights and judicial  prerogative in the name of the GWoT".  Not an unreasonably Rovian maneuver.

So---known quantity? Key advisor on incredibly effective decisions? Paid-off vote to cover GWoT civil-rights abuses? 

My money is on none of these.  I think they’re setting up for the impeachment.

They know that things are very dicey for Rove and Scooter (despite Judith Miller’s best attempts to go away and shut up). They know that DeLay won’t be in the House to cover their corrupt posteriors, and suspect that Frist will not be arranging the chairmanships of select committees in the near future.  Cheney was Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and a close observer of the drama and aftermath of the Nixon resignation. The key issue in defending the Oval Office (as the key lieutenants fall in the cross-fire) will be Executive Privilege. W will need to keep his bidness private in order to survive. His very own Supreme Court Justice will certainly know where the landmines are.

Let’s not loose sight of the context---we’re talking about strategists who are playing the ultimate power game. These are  not people who will let judicial process, law, or a few thousand dead soldiers or a few hundred thousand dead foreign civilians prevent them from striving toward their ends.  There hasn’t been this level of frank corruption in executive politics since---well, that's a tough one.  My sense is that on a dollar basis, the Bushrovers are far and away the modern world record holders.  In this league, covering the Presidential ass is not just a political game, it is about the continuity of power and influence, and of the flow of greenbacks and oil, all under political attack now as never before in this administration.  The current extreme level of political threat should lead us to look for correspondingly extreme countermoves by the Bushrovers.  Buying a Supreme Court Justice is no big deal, if it ensures a key support in a time of constitutional need.

Wouldn’t you think of it yourself if that very Court had made you the President illegally in the first place?

Idiot Wind

Back in April, I started to think that Bush was finally heading for the public fall that he so richly deserves.  I was remembering how slowly and inescapably Nixon's political opponents built his gibbet during the months of the Watergate hearings, a public hanging to which he himself brought all the rope his opponents would ever need.  In that case there was no rapier thrust of public exposure that suddenly toppled the presidency, but an careful, insidious death of a thousand cuts.  The closest moment to an explosion was the revelation, offhandedly, by Alexander Butterfield, that Nixon had compulsively taped himself.  As dramatic as that was, it had to be followed by  weeks of legal bickering and counter-maneuver before the tapes themselves started to add inexorably, conversation by conversation, to the President's political doom.  (Then Justice Rehnquist abstained from the Supreme Court vote in United States v. Nixon which sustained the special prosecutor's subpoena of the White House tapes.)

It is a game that Washington insiders understand very well as an art form, especially as it does not produce, at first, any of the publicity that is their lifeblood.  As the wounded victim bleeds, more sharks circle, with no need for planning or coordination.  This phenomenon is at the root of Hillary Clinton's "gigantic right-wing conspiracy", for example---its practitioners can claim that they never breathed together, while it inescapably appears to be a well-coordinated attack.

One of the signs, for me, was the bolting on Bolton.  This was followed by the bi-partisan anti-filibuster Gang of Fourteen.  None of these events were in themselves enough to halt the administration in each particular moment.  But in sequence they sent the blood-in-the-water signal that should tell the target that it would be a good time to stay out of the water.

The administration has been veering more sharply away than ever from the planet on which its Iraqi war is happening.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the public is starting to veer away from the line of fantasy and spin that has been pumped out of the White House like toxic waste from the scene of a chemical accident.  It is no longer possible to imagine that combat operations are over, or even that the "insurgents" are killing more people out of a feeling of being desperately cornered. 

The only thing holding the show together, the only thing that has ever held this show together, is the administration's ability to manufacture and dominate its own publicity.  This started with the PR campaign that stole the 2000 election and buffaloed the Supremes into bowing down before a bogus concept of recounting as a national emergency.

In this circumstance, the ultimate signs of catastrophic failure of the political machine can be seen in a number of public processes and moments.  The last pseudo-justification for invading Iraq must surely have evaporated in front of even the eager fantasists in the White House if the chilling post hoc ergo propter hoc argument of enduring more death in order to honor previous deaths is now emerging from the press room.  And how thin must they feel the ice is under their feet to avoid simply walking down the driveway at the ranch to hear out Mrs. Sheehan?  Finally, how incredibly disconnected must they all be to allow their poster boy to fly over the flood damage en route from weeks of vacation back to the eye of the storm of ineptitude in Washington DC?

What political country are these guys living in?  I really don't mean that as a rhetorical question.  Just imagine you are the president.  You are in Texas, next door to Louisiana, where the worst natural disaster in living memory is rapidly unfolding.  Don't you head right for the scene, even if you are the most cynical political manipulator in the history of American politics?  With what mindset would his handlers allow the President to conduct a fly-by, much less to let pool photographers capture him looking pensively out the window?

  Jim Watson / AFP - Getty Images

Can you imagine an image better calculated to show a lack of engagement---a stratospheric indifference?  Now he could be viewing things from a couple of hundred feet---his handlers should never have let this image out of the privacy of their own little Air Force One world, and he never should have been merely flying past, by the standard of any cynical political manipulator.

In all the bullshit that has emanated from the Administration since this (latest) disaster, the most symptomatic text so far has been the one embedded in this Bumiller/Nagourney piece from the NY Times September 3rd:

In a sign of the mounting anxiety at the White House, Mr. Bush made a rare Saturday appearance in the Rose Garden before live television cameras to announce that he was dispatching additional active-duty troops to the Gulf Coast. He struck a more somber tone than he had at times on Friday during a daylong tour of the disaster region, when he had joked at the airport in New Orleans about the fun he had had in his younger days in Houston. His demeanor on Saturday was similar to that of his most somber speeches after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"The magnitude of responding to a crisis over a disaster area that is larger than the size of Great Britain has created tremendous problems that have strained state and local capabilities," said Mr. Bush, slightly exaggerating the stricken land area. "The result is that many of our citizens simply are not getting the help they need, especially in New Orleans. And that is unacceptable."

A rare Saturday appearance.  More somber than his jolly self on Friday while visiting the disaster region, when he joked around.  His geography, like everything else, is inaccurate.  But the phrase that for me captures the essence of this administration's dysfunction is that "tremendous problems...have strained state and local capabilities".

The reason that the feds didn't jump into furious action on this is simply that from the top, the view is that this sort of situation is a state and local problem.  The federal government exists to defend the republic from external aggression---no more, no less.  The fundamental New Deal view of federal government power and purview is so deeply ingrained (even on the right, where activist conservatives long for a far right majority on the Court) that few of us  can reflexively understand how fundamentally at odds with most of the rest of America this President really is.  Thus it is only in a disaster which has a major aspect of external aggression that the President is ready to mobilize federal power.  With much of the Homeland Security apparatus, not least FEMA itself, riddled with patronage and campaign rewarded appointees (how else would one take advantage of the newly created and massive cabinet department?), we can't be surprised that they get the message beaming out from their Maximum Leader and his evil amplifier Mr Rove:  big government is when you use the power of federal authority to solve problems within the boundaries of the states.

There is no other explanation for an administration that leaves no child behind but spends nothing on education.  That kisses Veterans' asses every VFW chance they get, and allows the VA health system to crash and burn.  That pretends to protect us from terrorist threats while ignoring the thousands of gaping security holes across the domestic landscape.  In fact, so basic is this view of domestic neglect that, far from ensuring a healthy national guard is available for action during the projected next domestic terror incident from hell, the Bushrovers have happily airlifted the National Guard over to Iraq, committing the fraud of extending their tours to encompass career-military deployments in order to continue the war without stirring up too much domestic political trouble, otherwise spelled D-R-A-F-T.

Now, in the wake of Katrina, Bush is not only suffering from the thousand cuts of summer, but from his own radical amputation of his lower political legs at the knees.  Bill Clinton, that king of smiley-faced snark, counseled us to wait a while before judgment. "It's an appropriate thing to look into, but not at this time - they're still finding bodies there."  But there is no fearsome alien enemy to face here, no way to accuse Bush's accusors of lacking patriotism.  What is more patriotic than communal aid?  Perhaps now, with the aura finally dissolved in the  stench of those bloated domestic corpses (since the stink of foreign ones hasn't apparently penetrated far enough inland) we can get down to cases.  Voter fraud, widespread influence peddling, war profiteer corruption, criminal military incompetance, the cover-up of human rights abuses, a far too well integrated relationship with large oil companies and their Saudi brothers, the illegal lobbying tactics of Rove's close allies, the use itself of the first large-scale attack on domestic soil since Pearl Harbor as a way to misdirect our defensive reaction toward a wholly unrelated war on Iraq---why can we not reasonably hope for articles of impeachment? 

Dutch treat

When I arrived in Maastricht, the Netherlands,  on Sunday the 8th, the flight attendant on the small Cityhopper jet excitedly pointed out the Queen's airplane, parked next door to our spot on the tarmac.  The Maastricht airport is modest.  Besides my flight from Amsterdam, the Queen's plane was it---a small commercial jet (like a downsized 737) sitting with no guard or other activity around it.

Once I was off the plane, getting onto the bus to go 100 yards to the "terminal", I noticed a couple of other planes, off in the maintenance area at the far end of the airport.  They were somewhat larger---in fact, two 747s, quite recognizably Air Force 1 and its clone. 

Then I walked to the parking lot with the cab driver, rather than climbing into the cab in front of the terminal.  Then I noticed an unusual number of police in multiple clusters around the place.  Then the snipers out toward the edge of the airport, and the police and soldiers at checkpoints, the soldiers in full camo and automatic weaponry every 100 yards along the adjoining highway.  From anywhere in town, once I got there, I noticed choppers convoying along the presumably secure routes, ready for any kind of gunship activity called for.  The President of the United States was in town.

Turns out the US (that's us) asked the authorities in the Netherlands to close two major highways two weeks in advance of the 17 hour visit.  They got two or three hours.  Upwards of five thousand police, soldiers, and other security personnel were mobilized.   The only cost estimate I've heard or been able to find so far (for the Dutch, or course) was north of 3 million Euros.

Unscientific polling amongst my colleagues during the following week revealed a strong trend in opinion: the level of security for the visit was ridiculous.  You need to know how socially sane the Dutch are (despite recent cracks in the rational plaster) to grasp just how ridiculous this looked to them.

The southerners (Maastricht is practically in either Belgium or Germany, down there in that little southern peninsula of the country) don't particularly like the Northern, Protestant Queen---but country-wide, they are way less happy about the war in Iraq.  They still appreciate the Allied efforts to rid them of Nazi occupation, which is what the Bushrovers were over there to celebrate. 

But I have to tell you, my fellow citizens, that the military full-court press looked like nothing more than another Fascist occupation.  I was struck by the surmise, which has since proved to be the case as far as I can google the US press, that domestic audiences have no idea what the President traveling looks like to the rest of the world.  He looks like a visiting warlord with his surrounding centurions (even if most of them are rented from the host country). 

I wonder if the day will come when he and his chancellery don't care whether this appearance is acceptable or not for domestic consumption.  What if---here's an evil fantasy for sure---there was to be some grievous terrorist incident early in November 2008, in which one or both of the candidates were disabled.  Somehow I can see a Bushrover interregnum ("just until the country is back in order again---and the Supreme Court can certify that fact") accompanied by such military domestic shock and awe.  Maybe I'm overly paranoid, or a hostage to my reading of history, but can anyone doubt the depth of the Bushrovers' contempt for honest, partisan differences of opinion?  Or their sublime self-confidence that Their Leader is the Lord's Annointed?  Sound familiar on this anniversary of VE Day?

5/24 Update:
I asked some friends in the Netherlands to see if they could find, in the Dutch press, any other estimates of the cost of Bush's visit.  One response:

I have no idea what the visit of President Bush did cost us, but today Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands visited Maastricht. She passed our office on her way to the local government. Her chauffeur was driving her in a nice car with a flag on the front. She was wearing a yellow hat and was kindly waving to the people that stood next to the road. She was accompanied by 6 police men on motor bikes and the road was blocked for two minutes.

And guess what, she was not shot, there where no demonstrations and above all. I think I could have paid for the cost of her visit today.

 

"Support our troops"

Should I be bothered by the fact that more than two years on, Marines still can't get armor on their vehicles, when so much additional, non-US blood has been spilled? 

For a view from Company E, see Michael Moss's article in the NY Times. 

The photo is by Capt. Kelly Royer, who "took photos of humvees in which his men died".   The opening of Moss's article explains:

On May 29, 2004, a station wagon that Iraqi insurgents had packed with C-4 explosives blew up on a highway in Ramadi, killing four American marines who died for lack of a few inches of steel.

The four were returning to camp in an unarmored Humvee that their unit had rigged with scrap metal, but the makeshift shields rose only as high as their shoulders, photographs of the Humvee show, and the shrapnel from the bomb shot over the top.

"The steel was not high enough," said Staff Sgt. Jose S. Valerio, their motor transport chief, who along with the unit's commanding officers said the men would have lived had their vehicle been properly armored. "Most of the shrapnel wounds were to their heads."

Marines, who have answered the clarion call of our Commander in Chief, are scrounging for scrap metal with which to armor their vehicles while in the war zone.

Certainly there have been a lot more people killed in Iraq who are not US Marines.  But the Leader of the Free World is not prosecuting his foreign policy directly on their backs, and praying piously with their families when their dead or shattered bodies are returned home.  Can't $80B produce a little armor for these people?  Either that, or lets stop the PR charade and put them in tanks.  Better yet, lets get them out of there altogether.  This fraud has gone on long enough.

Dr. Bolton & Mr. Bolton

In a couple of recent posts (Tweedledee & Tweedledumb 1 & 2) I said that there were some  questions that the Bolton nomination (a brand-new one at the time) impose on the left:

One is to ask what it tells us about BushRover-World that this unilateralist extremism is necessary to them.  Another is to ask what we need to recognize as resonant and realistic in their analysis.  Finally there are an important set of questions for the left. How do we avoid the fruitless converse of W's Manichean exposition?  How do we recognize genuine insights and the valuably focused purpose of the current administration (necessary in a dangerous world---nothing new about that state of affairs) while building a public understanding that the implementation (sic)  are wrongly or even fraudulently conceived? How do we speak like a Truman (plainly) about something other than fear itself?

Obviously I anticipated a much different nomination hearing than the one that has unfolded.  I was thinking that the ugliness Senators would be fighting would be about Policy. 

I expected to be able to use the event to pick apart the strands of necessary unilateral self-interest from those of pigheaded self-righteous hardon-ism.  Bolton seemed like a pure form, a kind of Platonic Idea of unilateralism, thus a perfect foil for this discussion.  This is especially true since I believed that he would not be shy in his manifestation of that Ideal, especially in the face of a 10-8 Republican majority, a majority in the Senate, and full support from the Bushrovers (even Condi).

But what has emerged has been highly instructive without any additional help from me.  I think it is a turning point in both constructive and unconstructive ways, viewed from the left.

While Americans believe in an abstract UN, they also are sceptical and individualistic enough (perhaps toxically so) to suspect that the place is rife with corruption and diplomatic pretense.  Democratic Senators must have known that complaining about unilateralism would be about as successful for them as it was for Kerry last fall. 

So they tried something a lot more subtle (perhaps not knowing how well it might work).  The issue they focused on was the apparently overwhelming need Bolton has demonstrated to punish analysts who don't come to his conclusions.  The broader, operative linkage of this topic is to the question of why the hell we didn't consider the evidence that no WMDs existed in Iraq before blowing up a lot of stuff and killing a lot of people there.  This was brought home by concentrating on the one institution in the government that, small as it is, seems to have raised the appropriate cautionary flags pre-invasion, the State Department's inhouse intelligence bureau, where one of Bolton's victims, Christian Westermann, reported to Carl Ford.  (Is there some kind of metaphysical joke to that name, Christian Westermann, in this context?)

This conjunction represents the constructive part of the Democratic counteroffensive.  Bushrovers listen to God, so they don't need a second opinion before they get your child maimed or killed in Iraq.  Democrats can be pro-intelligence rather than anti-war and break a few Republican-made stereotypes along the way to an effective opposition.  This is why the canny Barack Obama conceded  much of the validity of Bolton's criticism of the UN, but expressed concern about the manipulation of intelligence.

But then, things went in a truly Nixonesque direction.  The amazing similarity in demeanor between Bolton and Attack Dog Bob Haldeman at the Watergate hearings should have made some Republicans (God knows some of them have been around long enough to remember personally) a little more wary of the "personal as political".  But if the Bushrovers have proved nothing else, we now know that consistency is the hobgoblin only of the small minds on the Left. 

A whole new narrative started to unroll, not just of pressure to submerge non-hard-Right intelligence assessments, but of flaggrant harassment, even, as Barbara Boxer pointed out, in the legal sense.  The phrase "serial abuser" started to take on some real weight.  His occasional sparring partner Carl Ford,  who described himself as "a loyal Republican, a staunch supporter of Bush and a 'huge fan' of Vice President Cheney", described Bolton as "a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy. He's got a bigger kick, and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he's kicking".

Since then, tales of professional abuse of women in his proximity as well as more cases of analyst intimidation have emerged, not to mention an allegation that he had the NSA put names back into some scrubbed transcripts so he could eavesdrop on internal opponents in the bureauocracy.  The drip-drip does not bode well in the long term, and culminated yesterday when Sen. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, let the Chairman know that he was not feeling so good about what he was hearing.  You could tell that Chairman Lugar was surprised (and perhaps out of his element in these kind of knife fights) because it took a few cycles to sink in that he ought not to proceed with a committee vote---a tie kills the nominee.

When a high profile appointment gets held up for three weeks for more of this kind of investigation, you can kiss it goodbye.  That  blazing star in the firmament of press secretaries, Scott McClellan, has let us know that the Administration will Stand By Their Man, but you have to wonder how they will feel when they stop posturing and playing to their Right long enough to consider the very real possibility that Bolton has perjured himself before the committee.

So there is a good chance that this nomination, amazingly enough, will sink with all hands, that Mr. Bolton will stop Dr. Bolton from getting the job he seems dearly to desire.   

But on what grounds?

It would have been best if the Democrats had succeeded in  demonstrating support of a necessary unilateral self-interest while hoisting Bolton on the petard of his all-too-blatant pigheaded self-righteous hardon-ism.  In fact, it appears that Bolton (and his handlers) anticipated just this approach, so that he bent over backwards to play the role of someone who genuinely believes that the UN is relevant and that some good can be done there.

The reason I say this would have been best is that from a Policy perspective there is something very important that Bolton has done in the past from which Democrats must learn.  The warm fuzzy Love Our Allies that prevades the liberal left has outlived its usefulness by a couple of decades---since the fall of the Berlin Wall, actually.  I've been reading about Stanley Baldwin, and I laughed at a much earlier critique from TR---in 1921, Baldwin's cousin Rudyard Kipling showed him a letter from Teddy Roosevelt in which TR referred to the (then newly formed) League of Nations as "the product of men who want everyone to float to heaven on a sloppy sea of universal mush".  Regardless of the good a UN could do, we are right to be sceptical of its ability to represent what is needful for us in our current pass.  Isolationism is as simple-minded as reflexive multilateralism, and---most importantly---just as  useless in protecting us from folks who want to blow us up on the home field.  Some kind of hardnosed, engaged pragmatism seems to me the right approach to our allies.

But none of this realism is recoverable by the Dodds, Boxers, Kerrys and Bidens.  Now it is the simple fact that Bolton is just a total prick that will sink the nomination.  He will not be seen to have the proper "temprament" to function effectively at the UN.  His very real pathological behaviors and prevarications will, in a normally appropriate way, prevent his appointment.

But: wouldn't it be the most effective politics to rip him up, then send him to the UN?  No one is going to imagine that Democratic (or even popular) pressure will cause a change of course for the Bushrovers (Cheney in particular) from their evangelical brand of unilateral hardon-ism.  In some ways this is like the argument against being too hastily successful in removing DeLay---he is such a fantastic posterboy for what is badly wrong with the Republican party.  I would argue, however, that a DeLay in the House is far more dangerous than a Bolton in the UN.   At the UN, Bolton would be just so useful in helping the Democrats recover the pragmatic unilateralism we need without the lunatic antilateralism of the Bushrovers. 

But (alas) now that we have seen what happens to Dr. Bolton when the moon is full, in our Democratic good-heartedness we cannot bear to impose Mr. Bolton on a new crop of otherwise soon-to-be-terrorized lesser bureauocrats in our mission to the UN.

Tweedledee & Tweedledumb 2

One of the problems with demonizing W and his band of BushRovers is that those they themselves demonize start to look angelic. Bolton, for example, has a personal mission to get rid of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director General of the IAEA, the atomic energy agency within the UN.  (See his IAEA bio, which features a 6M downloadable picture of himself.) ArmsControlWonk noted in late 2004 that Bolton, representing the BushRovers, had mentioned the problem directly to ElBaradei:

The Nelson Report claims that Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton has informed IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei that “the US will not support his candidacy for a third term, even though both of his predecessors served four terms (12 years) each”.

Reuters, however, is reporting that despite having urged ElBaradei to step down, “the Bush administration may be unwilling to undertake an all-out political battle to oust him, U.S. officials and diplomats say.” Powell previously suggested a third term for any international official was “problematic” in principle, but declined to be specific about ElBaradei. Instead, Powell claimed the US would make our judgment on specific cases..

The Nelson Report also mentions tension between Bolton and ElBaradei following revelations from the IAEA and Iraqi Interim Government that 350-tons of high explosives were looted from a previously secure site in the early days of the US occupation in 2003. This material is believed to be the primary source of the lethal car bomb attacks. The failure to secure the explosives will likely prove a major embarrassment for the Bush Administration.

ElBaradei is not a babe in the woods.  With almost perfect timing, he very neatly revealed the theft of highex from the unguarded bunkers, just before the election---Kerry made very good use of that fiasco.  For me, it's hard to escape the suspicion that they're all players. 

I also know that the UN is a huge bureaucracy, and very likely as corrupt in its own humble way as W's BushRover administration. Does this mean that I should feel really secure with ElBaradei on the case?  In a larger sense, do I really believe that the UN is an effective vehicle for multilateral peacemaking?  Do they wear halos just because John Bolton thinks they are devils?

I can understand the appeal of the unilateralist message W and his gang are hammering.  On the left, we have to recognize why this critique has resonance.  I am not asserting for a minute that W and the BushRovers are consistent with their own philosophy, if you can call it that.  But during the Iraq debate at the UN, whatever your position on US policy and options, how could anyone take the self-righteous posturing of the French, Russian and even German delegations seriously?  They supplied Saddam just as thoroughly as the US did, and I couldn't escape the strong suspicion that they were more concerned with losing that high-margin custom than anything else.

So I'll agree with some of the overt argument.  The UN is corrupt and clogged up with its own weary process.   Our "allies" are just as avaricious as us and certainly no more morally estimable.  There is a hardcore terrorist network in the world that aims to repeat disruption on at least the scale of 9/11.

How should our government respond to these challenges from a policy perspective?

I seems to me that the BushRover's fear is that if they start the discussion, they will eliminate their options and support for unilateral action.  But when everyone knows you will do what you like anyway (and that, in addition, there is no effective domestic control on your actions) why is it more pragmatic to be an in-your-face hard-on like Bolton?  They're intent on the injury, why the need to also add the insult?

A religious assurance of rectitude leads to a simple, reflexive implementation.  We know that W gets right with God and then he's set---no further doubt is necessary.  I don't know what Bolton's spiritual life is about, but it is easy to see that there are people, institutions and countries that he doesn't like, and he isn't shy about letting them and everyone else know about it. As a private person, I suppose this is a consistent kind of behavior. 

But Bolton is more than a private citizen.  He is an international diplomat, and he and his boss and his boss's boss have the responsibility of protecting the welfare of the rest of the private citizens.  Here we have the difference between epistemology and appearance that is so difficult for the BushRovers to exploit. Whatever they think about multilateral players' true motives, to give up the leverage of appearance is pure self-indulgence.

There are a number of directions to go with this question that I will explore in further posts.  One is to ask what it tells us about BushRover-World that this unilateralist extremism is necessary to them.  Another is to ask what we need to recognize as resonant and realistic in their analysis.  Finally there are an important set of questions for the left. How do we avoid the fruitless converse of W's Manichean exposition?  How do we recognize genuine insights and the valuably focused purpose of the current administration (necessary in a dangerous world---nothing new about that state of affairs) while building a public understanding that the implementation are wrongly or even fraudulently conceived? How do we speak like a Truman (plainly) about something other than fear itself?

 

Tweedledee & Tweedledumb 1

Standing to the (our) right of Condi, as he does in fact, is J.R. Bolton, W's pick for new UN ambassador.   He follows in a line of appropriate choices for this post by the BushRovers, including the peripatetic John Negroponte, now designee for intelligence czar.

Recently returned from a brief stint as ambassador to Iraq, Negroponte is well known for somehow not noticing the overactive government- and CIA-supported deathsquads in Honduras when he was there in the early 80's.  From a Scott Shane piece in the NYT about Negroponte's most recent nomination:

Jack R. Binns, who preceded Mr. Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras, said he opposed the confirmation because he believed that Mr. Negroponte had misled Congress in past testimony and because he might slant intelligence to suit administration policies.

"Based on his performance in Honduras, there's that possibility," said Mr. Binns, who was ambassador from 1980 to 1991 and is now retired and living in Arizona.

Just as Negroponte at the UN could support the world's hope that an American-controlled Abu Graib would never again be a place of savage torture, so I guess Bolton will reassure the world that W is truly interested in multilateral diplomacy.

His appointment surely indicates that the conflict in the Bush League between the Right Wing and the Far Right Wing is continuing.  A Reuters story by Carol Giacomo, with a 6 January dateline this year, stated that Bolton,

a leading hard-liner on nuclear nonproliferation who has raised hackles among America's allies as well as its adversaries, is expected to quit the Bush administration, sources said on Thursday.

His departure may signal a shift in U.S. diplomacy to a less confrontational approach as President Bush begins a second term in which he has pledged to reach out to allies estranged by the Iraq War and other policies.

Bolton, an outspoken and controversial policymaker, often provoked strong negative reactions from European allies and was identified more with the sticks than the carrots of U.S. diplomacy when dealing with countries like North Korea and Iran.  He had hoped for a promotion in Bush's second term, perhaps to deputy secretary of state, but the word went out that U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick would get the No. 2 spot under Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state designate.

"My understanding is that Mr. Bolton will move to the private sector," said one source, a friend who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The perfidity of Bolton from the left wing point of view is fully detailed in a COHA press release, picked up via Scoop (which is an interesting media outlet in its own right), headed "John Bolton's appointment would destroy State Department credibility".  You might find it interesting to read this analysis as it touches on Bolton's rejection of the International Criminal Court (ICC), along side his own analysis of the ICC, from a speech in 2002.  Right, left or center, it is clear that Bolton is not what you would call diplomatic.