Eating Their Own

Back when Senator David Vitter (R-LA) admitted to fooling around with prostitutes, GOP reaction was notably muted. He was not condemned by his colleagues nor was he urged to resign.

Sheesh, what a difference the word "gay" makes.

As everyone knows by now, Senator Larry Craig (R-IH) pleaded guilty and paid a fine for cruising for quick nookie in an airport bathroom. Good Lord, from the way the right wing has gone off on him, you'd think he read from the Koran on the Senate floor:

Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN): "Senator Craig pled guilty to a crime involving conduct unbecoming a senator. He should resign."

Senator John McCain (R-AZ): "I believe that he - that he pled guilty and he had the opportunity to plead innocent. So I think he should resign."

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI): "However, he also represents the Republican Party, and I believe that he should step down as his conduct throughout this matter has been inappropriate for a U.S. senator."

Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN): "While additional concerns are being raised, Senator Craig already demonstrated that he is unfit to serve in the U.S. Congress when he pled guilty. I believe that he needs to step down."

And so on. Ain't it fun to watch moralistic Republicans turning on their own?

Corruption and Callousness in Iraq

All I know is first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm a human being. Goddammit, my life has value." So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Things have got to change my friends. You've got to get mad. You've got to say, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open your window, stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) in Network

Granted, the Bush Administration has set a pretty high standard for outrage over the last few years. From blowing off pre-9/11 warnings to lying us into invading Iraq to letting New Orleans drown to everything in between, it often seems like nothing these clowns do can royally piss us off anymore.

Trust me - that will change once you read the Rolling Stone article "The Great Iraq Swindle." In exquisite squalor, it details how the Bush Administration not just allowed Iraq to become a playground for corrupt war profiteers, but actively facilitated the process.

Contracts were handed out not on the basis of competence or ability, but on connections. Politically active Republicans were given the job of (re)building Iraq's financial and governmental infrastructures despite having no experience whatsoever. Contractors focused on squeezing the absolute maximum profit out of the US taxpayer - that's you and me - rather than actually doing the job, resulting in unusable projects and wrecked facilities.

It has gotten to the point where there are more American contractors (who in another age would have been more correctly called "mercenaries") in Iraq than American soldiers.

The Bush Administration, far from cracking down on rampant fraud, has done everything in its power to protect these crooks by derailing even criminal investigations.

The part of the story that truly got my blood boiling was not the hundreds of tons of cash handed out in payments and bribes with little or no accountability, nor of the billions of dollars stolen by crooked contractors. No, it's the story of one Russell Skoug, hired by a company called Wolfpack supposedly to maintain air conditioners for a Halliburton (there's that name again) subcontractor. But when he arrived in Iraq, he was told to fix Humvees. Never mind the fact that Skoag was not an automotive tech, nor that the limit of his car-repair knowledge was how to change the oil.

After being allowed to do what he was hired for in the first place - with his tools being limited to a screwdriver and a Leatherman - he was being driven in a convoy when a bomb went off under his vehicle, severely injuring him.

Before bringing Skoug to Iraq, Wolfpack promised they would cover all his expenses, including medical ones. But when he was injured, they refused to lift a finger to help him.

They refused to coordinate his evacuation and care. They refused to cover his medical costs, despite American law requiring that every contractor fully insure all of its employees in a war zone. And they even refused a direct appeal from Skoug's wife that they help the man they discarded.

"After I have put forth to help you all out," Wolfpack owner Mark Atwood whined via E-mail, "you are going to get on me for your husband not having insurance."

Think about that for a moment.

A company puts an employee in the middle of a war zone and then callously jettisons him when everything goes sour. Sorry about that, pal, but you're on your own.

A year after he was wounded, Skoug is now crushed by more than half a million dollars in debts, mostly from medical costs.

That's the Iraq War in a nutshell. The fat cats make out like bandits, raking in billions that in another age would rightfully be called obscene profiteering. And it's the Russell Skougs of the world who get screwed.

If that doesn't piss you off, nothing will.

Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Larry

I firmly believe that people's private lives are their own business, and as a rule I have less than no interest in the sex lives of politicians. They are, after all, only human, with the same drives as everyone else. That rule, however, goes by the wayside when a holier-than-thou person gets caught in matters of the zipper.

The latest example of this? Senator Larry Craig (R-IH), who we now know was arrested back in June for "cruising" an undercover cop in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. He tried to talk his way out of it with some "do you know who I am?" bluster, but pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a $500 fine. Now that this minor awkwardness has become public, he claims he wasn't cruising anyone, pleaded guilty only to avoid further embarrassment, and calls the whole flap a "he said/he said misunderstanding," to the derisive hoots of many.

Now, it just so happens that Craig has made a name for himself being one of the more vociferously anti-gay voices in the Senate, opposing such items as gay marriage, civil unions, gays serving in the military, and the expansion of federal hate-crime laws to cover gays and lesbians. And yet he has been rumored to be gay himself (or, at the very least, bisexual) for many years.

And so Craig joins a long, long list of Republicans and conservatives who loudly proclaim their moral uprightness in public while behaving very differently in private, including:

• Representative Mark Foley, who was forced to resign from Congress when it was revealed that he had hit on underage male pages for years and was protected by the House leadership
• Über-pastor Ted Haggard, who resigned from his church leadership position after being caught patronizing a male escort and buying drugs from said escort
• Representative Bob Allen, who was arrested after offering $20 to an undercover police officer to let him perform oral sex on said officer
• Senator David Vitter, who proclaimed that "remaining faithful after [marriage] is the best choice for health and happiness" but admitted consorting with prostitutes from the infamous "DC Madam" escort agency
• Jack Ryan, who dropped out of his Senate campaign against Barack Obama once it was revealed that he had tried to talk his then-wife into group sex
  
• Former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who told his second wife he was dumping her by holding a press conference at which he introduced the woman who would become his third wife
• Former Representative (and House Speaker) Newt Gingrich, who not only served his first wife with divorce papers while she was recovering from cancer surgery, but led the impeachment jihad against Bill Clinton while cheating on his second wife with the woman who would become his third wife
  

And so on and so forth. While progressives are generally leaning back to enjoy the spectacle, conservatives have gone berserk and are turning on Craig with a vengeance, demanding that he resign from his Senate seat.

Hypocrisy is a very bad thing. You'd think this would be pretty obvious, but all these politicians, preachers, pundits, and everyone else who makes a career out of being more righteous than the rest of us still haven't figured it out. If you talk the talk, you'd better make real sure you can walk the walk.

UPDATE: Craig just gave a statement in which he strenuously denied doing anything wrong, insisted he is not gay, blamed the Idaho Statesman for investigating his hypocrisy, and said he only pleaded guilty "in the hope of making it go away." Interestingly, he also admitted keeping his family in the dark about his arrest, implying he would never have told them at all had it not become public. This story isn't going anywhere.

Another One Thrown Under the Bus

After weeks and months of insisting that he would not resign, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has done just that. It seems that President Bush, who (in)famously stuck by Gonzo long after he became a political disaster, finally realized there is no up side to keeping him on the payroll and has thrown him under the bus.

So now what happens? Washington rumors say Bush will nominate Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff as the new AG, apparently because he has not disgraced himself like Gonzales did. But Chertoff has his own problems, particularly in the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina two years ago.

You may remember that when the storm hit New Orleans with full force, the levees broke and people started drowning in the streets. And it was Chertoff who waited more than a day to begin relief efforts with the "White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response." This despite repeated pre-landfall warnings from the National Hurricane Center that Katrina would hit the Gulf Coast and hit it hard. DHS' response just went downhill from there.

It is tempting to declare that no one could ever bring the level of politicized quackery to the Justice Department that Gonzales did, but it's dangerous to underestimate a Bush appointee.

This gives Senate Democrats a golden opportunity to finally muck out the White House stables. If they're smart, they'll simply refuse to move on a nomination until Bush finally come clean on all the warrantless spying and other illegalities they've been up to. The GOP and Fox News (one and the same, really) will doubtless scream "obstructionism," but the Dems should stick to their guns. We may not get another chance like this again.

Spy or Die

For six and a half years, President Bush and his crowd have often said they don't care what people think. Whether it's massive anti-war demonstrations (before and after the invasion of Iraq), opposition to the Patriot Act or just plain stinky poll numbers, the Administration goes on as always, blissfully ignorant of the real world.

Earlier this summer, Bush rammed the "Protect America Act" through Congress, giving him the power to spy on anyone he likes, whenever he feels like it. He doesn't even have to pretend that it's related to terrorism, only that it is "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States." The American people were, to put it mildly, pissed off, and that reaction just might be making an impact on the White House.

That has to be the reason National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell made such a ludicrous comment to the El Paso Times. Basically, it boils down to this: let us spy on you whenever we want, however we want, without a peep of complaint - or die.

Or, in his words:

A: ...Now part of this is a classified world. The fact we're doing it this way [with public debate and media reporting] means that some Americans are going to die, because we do this mission unknown to the bad guys because they're using a process that we can exploit and the more we talk about it, the more they will go with an alternative means and when they go to an alternative means, remember what I said, a significant portion of what we do, this is not just threats against the United States, this is war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Q: So you're saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A: That's what I mean. Because we have made it so public.

Now, the American people have a depressingly high tolerance for super-patriotic and jingoistic bluster, but generally don't take well to naked threats. McConnell obviously knew he had gone too far, as he backtracked almost immediately: "It's a democratic process and sunshine's a good thing. We need to have the debate." But it's what he said first that reveals what he really thinks.

So not only are we supposed to let Bush et al spy on us without any restraints or accountability, we're also supposed to shut up about it?

Bush's favorite explanation for why Al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 is that "they hate our freedoms." It appears that he is trying to prevent additional attacks by taking those freedoms away:

• Freedom from unwarranted government surveillance (see above, also the indiscriminate tracking of all domestic and international phone calls as well as claiming the power to read our E-mail and snail mail)
  
• Freedom of speech (the White House's procedures for barring demonstrators and other insufficiently worshipful Americans from Bush's public appearances)
• Freedom of travel (the "no-fly list," accused of being manipulated to keep dissidents off planes)
• Separation of powers (Bush's "signing statements" defying hundreds of laws)
• Habeas corpus (the Military Commissions Act, giving Bush the power to imprison anyone he likes indefinitely)

And so on and so forth. In a thriller novel, George W. Bush would be revealed as Osama bin Laden's sleeper agent in the White House. It sure seems that way; Bush is certainly doing everything he can to turn America into the kind of frightened and compliant nation any dictator would kill for.

Bush and Vietnam, Together At Last

Ever since it became clear that the Iraq War would not be a glorious crusade but rather an intractable quagmire, it has been compared to the Vietnam War. Both conflicts were rooted in blind ideology, launched based on lies, and kept going long after everyone knew they could not be won by military means.

President Bush never went to Vietnam and never fought alongside those who did - John Kerry, for one. Rather, he was safely posted to a "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, well known for keeping sons of the state's rich and powerful out of harm's way. (And he didn't even show up for all of his deployment to boot.) But that didn't stop him from drawing his own parallels between the wars, as he did today in a Kansas City speech to the VFW convention.

"There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam," he told the assembled veterans, "and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today...' Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see it differently."

Astoundingly, Bush seems to be arguing that we were attacked on 9/11 because we withdrew from Vietnam twenty-six years earlier. Not only that, he falls back on the Rambo excuse, that we lost Vietnam because we didn't see it through and weren't "allowed to win." In his little world, we could have won the war if only we had the gumption to drop more bombs, kill more people, and devastate the entire region even more than we actually did.

Not surprisingly, his conclusions are strikingly different from those reached by people who actually know something about the war.

"What is Bush suggesting?" asked historian Robert Dallek. "That we didn't fight hard enough, stay long enough? That's nonsense. It's a distortion. We've been in Iraq longer than we fought in World War II. It's a disaster, and this is a political attempt to lay the blame for the disaster on his opponents. But the disaster is the consequence of going in, not getting out."

And just to show that the only President we've got really don't know much about history, he also said that "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'killing fields.'"

Um...George? The Khmer Rouge's killing fields were in Cambodia, not Vietnam. And they were overthrown by the very same Vietnamese you were out bashing today.

It's truly unbelievable that Bush would use one useless war to try and justify our continued involvement in another useless war. Once again, he gets an F in basic American history. Can't we flunk this guy out already?

Who Needs Democracy Anyway?

"By elevating popular fancy over truth, Democracy is clearly an enemy of not just truth, but duty and justice, which makes it the worst form of government. President Bush must overcome not just the situation in Iraq, but democratic government... President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming 'ex-president' Bush or he can become 'President-for-Life' Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons."

- Philip Atkinson of the conservative group Family Security Foundation, explaining why a Bush dictatorship and a global Pax Americana would be a good thing

Bush to Kids: Drop Dead

With President Bush's approval ratings hovering around those of athlete's foot and a significant percentage of Americans calling for his impeachment, you'd think he'd choose his battles a little more carefully. But apparently not. You see, he (or the people who pull his strings, same difference really) has issued new regulations barring states from expanding public health coverage to children from middle-income families.

And his reasoning? The more kids who are covered by the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the fewer who can give their business to private insurance companies.

Really.

To minimize the risk of such substitution, Mr. [Dennis] Smith [the director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations] said in his letter, states should charge co-payments or premiums that approximate the cost of private coverage and should impose "waiting periods," to make sure higher-income children do not go directly from a private health plan to a public program. If a state wants to set its income limit above 250 percent of the poverty level ($51,625 for a family of four), Mr. Smith said, "the state must establish a minimum of a one-year period of uninsurance for individuals" before they can receive public coverage.

Who could possibly have anything against wanting to help kids get the health care they need? We have millions of uninsured children in this country, to say nothing of uninsured adults, and Bush's response is to add to their numbers?

That's not only wrong, it's actively evil. We're getting into James Bond-villain territory here. I can just see Bush standing in for Auric Goldfinger, aiming an industrial laser at kids' nether regions and chortling wickedly.

Let's hope the Democrats use this as an issue in next year's elections. If they have the stones to do so instead of just knuckling under as usual, they'll get a clean sweep.

You Can Say That Again

"Sean [Hannity] is not a journalist."

- Bill Shine, Fox's senior vice president of programming, on why it was not inappropriate for Fox News pundit Sean Hannity to host a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani despite Fox's long history of attacking other networks for the same thing

Say What?

• "This seems to put us in the 'trust us' category. 'We don't do it. Trust us. And don't ask us about it,'"
• "Every ampersand, every comma is top-secret?"
• "Are you saying the courts are to rubber-stamp the determination of the executive of what's a state secret? What's our job?"
• "I feel like I'm in Alice and Wonderland."
• "The bottom line is the government declares something is a state secret, that's the end of it. No cases. The king can do no wrong."

- Reactions of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Bush Administration's position that not only do they have the power to spy on anyone whenever they feel like it, but the courts have to bug out as the spying issue is a "state secret"

Surprise, Surprise, Surprise

Back in January, President Bush, who makes a big thing out of claiming to listen to his generals, ignored said generals' warnings and announced a Surge™ of American soldiers fighting in Iraq. Ever since then, the White House and their media flacks have consistently declared that the turning point will be in September, when General David Petraeus is set to issue a status report to Congress. (The latest turning point, that is - there have been so many of them it's easy to lose track.)

Wait for Petraeus' report in September and let the generals do their job, we are told over and over again. Those of us rude enough to point out that the Iraqi mayhem was actually getting worse and not better are attacked for being anti-American, anti-military, etc, etc. As the carnage mounts daily, the White House even tries backtracking on all its previous edicts of September as a magic date, insisting they never said any such thing.

And now, the Los Angeles Times is reporting that just to make sure the report says what the Administration wants it to say without the intrusion of any inconvenient reality, they're going to write it themselves:

Despite Bush's repeated statements that the report will reflect evaluations by Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, administration officials said it would actually be written by the White House, with inputs from officials throughout the government. And though Petraeus and Crocker will present their recommendations on Capitol Hill, legislation passed by Congress leaves it to the president to decide how to interpret the report's data.

To quote Gomer Pyle, "Surprise, surprise, surprise!" It's just another PR stunt by the same people who brought us the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (remember that?) back in 2005.

Petraeus has already gone on record faithfully parroting GOP talking points. Given that fact - and Bush's well-known tendency to fire anyone who tells him what he doesn't want to hear - it's a safe bet that he will tell Bush the Surge™ is a big success. It's an even safer bet that the White House will then tell Congress and the nation that the Surge™ is in fact a tremendous success, the greatest ever in military history.

And as for the Iraqi people - you know, the ones who are dying by the dozens and hundreds every day in this savage civil war - well, who cares about them?

Target: Tehran

With the Iraq War in ruins, the Bush Administration is looking for someone to blame, and it appears that Vice President Cheney is urging President Bush to look eastward to Iran for the culprit. In recent months, the Administration has loudly proclaimed that Iran is behind everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, from the sectarian civil war to attacks on Iraqi's already-teetering infrastructure.

The fact that the evidence of Iranian involvement is thin at best and nonexistent at worst doesn't seem to bother the White House or the Pentagon at all. Earlier this year, the Pentagon offered several news briefings, featuring secret evidence (which could not be photographed or described other than in the sketchiest manner) supposedly implicating Iran in attacks on American soldiers. But no actual proof has ever been presented.

Meanwhile, our ineffective but increasingly independent puppet government in Baghdad has been making overtures to Iran and citing its "positive and constructive stance," much to Bush's displeasure. When asked about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Tehran trip, Bush could only whimper that "I don't think he, in his heart of hearts, thinks they're constructive, either."

With Bush increasingly befuddled and hiding in his own little world, it's no secret that Cheney and his allies have been prodding him to approve an attack on Iran. Of course, non-ideologues outside the Administration who know anything about Iran all warn that such an attack would backfire disastrously, but they are studiously ignored.

Where have we seen this pattern before? Oh yes, in the run-up to the Iraq War. Back then, Bush et al were hot for an attack on Baghdad no matter what, and we're now seeing the exact same thing all over again. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has replaced Saddam Hussein as the Madman of the Middle East, Public Enemy Number One and there is no evil too black to be laid at his doorstep.

Are Bush and Cheney like Napoleon, the tyrannical pig of George Orwell's allegorical novella Animal Farm? Everywhere they look, they claim to find evidence of Iranian "meddling" in Iraq, with no more proof than that fictional porker:

At every few steps Napoleon stopped and snuffed the ground for traces of Snowball's footsteps, which, he said, he could detect by the smell. He snuffed in every corner, in the barn, in the cow-shed, in the henhouses, in the vegetable garden, and found traces of Snowball almost everywhere. He would put his snout to the ground, give several deep sniffs, and exclaim in a terrible voice, "Snowball! He has been here! I can smell him distinctly!" and at the word "Snowball" all the dogs let out blood-curdling growls and showed their side teeth. The animals were thoroughly frightened. It seemed to them as though Snowball were some kind of invisible influence, pervading the air about them and menacing them with all kinds of dangers.

Of course, no mention is made of the hundreds of Saudi citizens caught fighting with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, nor of the astounding revelation that a full third of the weapons provided by the Pentagon to the Iraqi military - that's almost two hundred thousand guns - have disappeared without a trace. That, you see, isn't in the script.

Sure You Love Them, You Just Don't Want to Catch Their Gay Cooties

"We did decline to host the service - not based on hatred, not based on discrimination, but based on principle. Had we known it on the day they first spoke about it - yes, we would have declined then. It's not that we didn't love the family."

- Rev. Gary Simons of High Point Church in Texas, trying to explain why the megachurch agreed to host - and then canceled the day before it was to happen - a memorial service for a Navy veteran whose obituary listed his gay partner as one of his survivors

Today New York, Tomorrow the World

"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

- Rudy Giuliani (at the time Mayor of New York) in 1994, opining on the true meaning of freedom

Nothing Like Mass Killing to Get People Together

"America's fabric is pulling apart like a cheap sweater. What would sew us back together? Another 9/11 attack. The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda."

- Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, actually rooting for another devastating attack and even suggesting targets

Heaven Forbid!

"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes - and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers."

- Representative Bill Sali (R-ID), suggesting that Hindus, Muslims and other non-Christians be excluded from Congress, no matter what the Constitution says

Unconditional Surrender

Let's see now...President Bush is about as popular with the American people as tooth decay, he has no credibility, his Attorney General is under investigation for lying to Congress, and his Administration has been caught spying on the public without the search warrants as required by law. With the help of craven telecommunications companies and other enablers, the Administration vacuums up obscene amounts of phone records, E-mail messages, and library reading lists, and even claims the right to open our snail mail.

Sounds like a perfect time for another power grab.

Earlier this year, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which normally gives rubber-stamp approval to national-security search warrants, rejected much of the Administration's spying program, calling it illegal and unconstitutional. So Bush rammed a bill through Congress with the Orwellian name of the "Protect America Act."

Ostensibly "modernizing" FISA, the bill allowed such snooping retroactively, with no meaningful judicial or Congressional oversight and no way for anyone to find out who is being spied on or why. Not only that, the very same people put in charge of running the spy program - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell - were also given the job of certifying that it was being done legally. And to top it all off, the White House timed the bill's introduction so that Congress had almost no opportunity to examine and vote on it before leaving for its August recess.

The Democrats, who were elected in November on a platform of reining in Bush's authoritarian excesses, folded like Superman on laundry day. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.

In hindsight, the White House's plan for getting the bill passed was painfully obvious. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's much-derided "gut feeling" of terror attacks this summer set the mood. Fox News and other propaganda outlets faithfully chimed in with apocalyptic rumblings of possible attacks to come, presenting a program of all fear, all the time. McConnell, transformed into yet another mindless Bush-bot, asked Congress "to provide the legislative changes needed to protect the nation in this period of heightened threat."

Bush himself went out on the road, making speech after speech in which he said that, "America is in a heightened threat environment. Reforming FISA will help our intelligence professionals address those threats - and they should not have to wait any longer. Congress will soon be leaving for its August recess. I ask Republicans and Democrats to work together to pass FISA modernization now, before they leave town. Our national security depends on it."

The message to the Democrats was clear: give the President whatever he wants, do it now, and you get to live.

A majority of Congressional Democrats were sufficiently clear-headed to see through this cynical fear campaign and voted against the bill, but some - too many - could see only the specter of attack ads in the next election and caved in.

And so now the President can legally spy on anyone, anywhere, at any time, and for any reason. He doesn't even have to pretend that it's related to a terrorism investigation. The only bright spot is that the new law expires automatically in six months.

In an interesting juxtaposition, Bush issued an executive order on July 17 claiming the power to freeze the assets of anyone he deems to be "threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people." Combine these two with last year's Military Commissions Act, which gives Bush the unilateral authority to declare anyone to be an "enemy combatant" and to order them locked up without charge, without trial and without end, and you've got a nearly picture-perfect recipe for dictatorship. All you need is a President more reckless and amoral than Bush.

What do you want to bet that at least some in the White House are itching to use these powers on political dissidents at home?

I've Got More Important Things to Worry About

"Good morning. I just finished a Cabinet meeting. One of the things we discussed was the terrible situation there in Minneapolis... I told them we would help with rescue efforts, but I also told them how much we are in prayer for those who suffered. And I thank my fellow citizens for holding up those who are suffering right now in prayer. We also talked about the status of important pieces of legislation before the Congress. We spent a fair amount of time talking about the fact that how disappointed we are that Congress hasn't sent any spending bills to my desk."

- President Bush briefly mentioning the Minneapolis bridge collapse before changing the subject to politically attack Congressional Democrats

Back to the Bad Old Days

Back in the days of Jim Crow laws, African-Americans were by law entitled to vote, but were barred from doing so in many southern states by "literacy tests" and other dodges. Those laws are thankfully a thing of the past, but at least one commentator is apparently looking back on them with fond nostalgia.

Jonah Goldberg, an editor at National Review, wrote a column this week in which he decries how so many people are ignorant of the workings of government:

A very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn't very well qualified to vote, if by "qualified" you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges. Almost half of the American public doesn't know that each state gets two senators. More than two thirds can’t explain the gist of what the Food and Drug Administration does.

This is certainly a valid concern - no democracy can survive if the people aren't basically aware of how it functions. But rather than make a point about improving education, or how government should be more accessible to its citizens, Goldberg instead argues for restricting who can vote: "Instead of making it easier to vote, maybe we should be making it harder. Why not test people on the basic functions of government? Immigrants have to pass a test to vote; why not all citizens?"

I had to read it more than once just to make sure I wasn't seeing things.

Does Goldberg really understand what he's saying? Such tests were used back in the bad old days to keep "undesirables" from exercising their democratic rights. Does he really want to go back to that?

His suggestion is fundamentally un-American. In a democracy, all citizens have the right to vote. It's as simple as that. Does Goldberg really believe that a certain class of people should be excluded from any say in how our society functions, instead leaving it up to the "philosopher-kings" of Plato's Republic?

Of course, he also hates the very notion of public education, as he wrote in a June column. So the two notions actually dovetail nicely - deny schooling to all but the wealthiest to guarantee a permanently ignorant underclass, then use that same lack of schooling to keep them from voting.

It's diabolical, really. Too bad such a bright person has to be so wrong.