Somewhere in America, a psychology graduate student is doubtless preparing the definitive thesis of the modern conservative mindset. After all, the Bush years produced a cottage industry of analyses on the roots of Dubya's "dead or alive, bring 'em on" macho talk. And now that Sarah Palin has added "impotent" and "limp" to a right-wing vernacular replete with over-sexualized and even homoerotic terms like "bend over" and "ram down our throats," it's clear that the leading lights of the Republican Party could use a little couch time with Dr. Freud.

As authors including Tom Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?) and Rick Perlstein (Nixonland) among others have thoroughly documented, the conservative narrative of victimization, violation and persecution by coastal liberals and Ivy League elites - even when Republicans are in power - long predates the likes of Sarah Palin and even Richard Nixon. But in recent years, the not-too-thinly veiled innuendo of the new vulgarians on the right has descended to appalling new levels.

Even before the election of Barack Obama, right-wing radio host and Viagra enthusiast Rush Limbaugh debuted "bend over" as a Republican talking point. Before regularly using terms like "man-child" and "little boy" to describe the first African-American president, Limbaugh declared "Democrats will bend over, grab the ankles, and say, 'Have your way with me'" to black and progressive voters. (In case listeners had any lingering confusion about his metaphor, he later added "anal poisoning" to his repertoire.) After Obama's inauguration, Limbaugh announced ""We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president." And in August 2009, Limbaugh coughed up this metaphorical two-fer:

"You people are out calling us Nazis, saying we're running around with Swastikas. We get tarred and feathered as Nazis because we don't just bend over, grab the ankles and let you guys ram whatever down our throats you want."

As he made clear during the 2008 election, among the "we" was Sarah Palin. Her Troopergate scandal, Limbaugh insisted, was just "pure sexism in Alaska on the part of these old boys trying to get rid of Sarah Palin, and she didn't put up with it, and she didn't bend over and let them have their way."

By now, references to and imagery of Barack Obama "raping America" is standard fare for the GOP's amen corner. But for the political party obsessed with the biblical admonition that it is better to give than receive, another orifice has come to dominate conservative rhetoric. And it lies at, so to speak, the other end of the spectrum.

On virtually every issue from the stimulus to health care and so much more, Republicans claim that Democrats are "jamming" or "cramming it down our throats."

Before she introduced cojones, impotent and limp into political oratory, Sarah Palin was already one of the Republicans protesting that Democratic policies were tough to swallow. In January, Palin warned about "the big growth of government and health care takeover measures that it seems Capitol Hill wants to cram down our throats today." During a single March appearance with Sean Hannity, Palin three times used some variant of the "shoved down our throats" sound bite. In November, as Politico reported, the half-term Governor blasted President Obama's policies as "back assward":

Palin then criticized the president for "punishing [small businesses] by forcing health care reform down their throats, by forcing an energy policy down their throats that ultimately will tax them more and cost them more to stay in business."

Of course, Palin was just mouthing the party line amplified by her Fox News colleagues. In January, Glenn Beck, too, cautioned Democrats about biting off more than they could chew, warning, "they see the response to health care and the debacle that they're jamming down our throats [and] they are becoming desperate." A month earlier, Sean Hannity lectured guest Lanny Davis about the health care reform bill "your Democratic friends keep ramming it down America's throat." And when his mind isn't on getting a nice loofah rub or writing soft core porn, Bill O'Reilly is also complaining about the members of the Democratic Party and the left:

"I, and many other white journalists, now don't do nearly as many reports on African Americans or their problems because we don't want to be put in a situation where our opinion is taken out of contest, rammed down our throat as Media Matters and all these other sleazeoids do."

And it's not just the media mouthpieces of the Republican Party. When they aren't fretting about President Obama wanting to "ram it through" Congress, the brain trust of the GOP is screaming about Democrats "jamming it down the throats of the American people."

Wyoming Senator John Barrasso made that point repeatedly, even on the floor of the Senate. Appearing on Fox News with Liz Cheney last month, Barrasso blasted the Affordable Care Act, insisting again:

"This was passed, this health care law was passed with people yelling and screaming, do not force this down our throats, we don't want this!"

Of course, Barrasso was just taking his cue from the Republican leadership in the Senate. Earlier this year, John Cornyn (R-TX) joins the ranks of Republicans choking on health care reform, claiming the American people "want their country back" and "don't want the elites here in Washington deciding what's best for them and then trying to jam it down their throat whether they like it or not.", Minority Leader Mitch McConnell mouthed his opposition on Fox News:

"But the American people who are already quite angry about the effort to jam this down their throats are going to be even angrier...But I think the fundamental point I want to make is the arrogance of all of this. You know, they [Democrats] are saying, 'Ignore the wishes of the American people. We know more about this than you do. And we're going to jam it down your throats no matter what.'"

And now, the Tea Party, too, is getting in on the hot, opposition action. And for a political movement founded on "tea bagging" as metaphor, they are very in your face about it.

Take, for example, Matt Kibbe of Freedomworks, the right-wing money machine helping fund the ersatz grassroots Tea Party movement. Democrats, Kibbe declared, "jammed the stimulus bill down our throats" and "this health care bill down our throats." As Huffington Post reported, Tea Party favorite Rand Paul wrapped his lips around the same expression when defending coal mine operators:

Paul claimed Obama "cares nothing about Kentucky and cares even less about Kentucky coal."

"We have a president who is forcing the EPA down our throats."

And so it goes.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have revealed the conservative mind to be uncomfortable with uncertainty and often immune to empirical evidence contradicting its most deeply held beliefs. In The Political Brain, Drew Westen suggests that this is due in part to the neurology and emotional processing of the brain. Given their sexually-laden rhetoric, today's Republicans clearly need help from Sigmund Freud's successors. Because if their words are any indication, conservatives have something besides politics on their minds.

—Perrspective 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

As the New York Times reported, of the total $13,770 average tab, "workers are now paying nearly $4,000 for family coverage, according to the survey, and their costs have increased much faster than those of employers." How much faster?

Since 2005, while wages have increased just 18 percent, workers' contributions to premiums have jumped 47 percent, almost twice as fast as the rise in the policy's overall cost.

With companies instituting higher deductibles or even capping their share to a fixed dollar contribution, a grave situation for employees is growing grimmer still. As Kaiser noted, "in past years, employers typically have shared the increase in health costs with worker," but this year, "employers' contribution to the premium remained flat on average." The result is a record-setting burden for American workers:

The share of the premium paid by workers jumped 3 percentage points to 30 percent. In the dozen years the survey has been conducted, the employee share of family coverage has never topped 28 percent and has never risen more than 2 percentage points in a single year.

As Drew E. Altman, the chief executive of the Kaiser foundation put it, "The long-term trend is pretty clear. Insurance is getting stingier and less comprehensive."

The KFF analysis is just one of many in recent months which document employers' stepped-up efforts to shed health care costs even as the private insurance market punishes individual policy seekers. In March, a Goldman Sachs analysis documented insurance rates for individuals jumping by up to 50% in some markets. That same month, a survey of large employers found that 56% will hold workers responsible for a greater share of health care costs next year. Coming on the heels of studies showing companies dropping workplace coverage altogether, the data reveal a system of employer-provided health insurance teetering on the brink of collapse.

As the Washington Post reported this spring, a study by the National Business Group on Health of 507 companies with over 1,000 employees found that:

Many say they may charge more to cover spouses, tighten eligibility standards for their health plans and dispense financial rewards or penalties based on the results of certain lab tests. At some companies, overweight employees could be excluded from the most desirable plans.

Meanwhile, employees at many companies can expect significantly higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments.

That cost-shifting will take a number of forms. Twenty-eight percent of employers plan to use spousal surcharges next year, up from 21 percent this year. Meanwhile, 12 percent of employers plan to offer only high-deductible coverage next year. And the percentage of firms considering employee biometric screening and health care appraisals to incentives for hitting weight, blood pressure and cholesterol targets is growing rapidly.

The NBGH survey is just the latest symptom of the rapidly deteriorating system of employer-provided health insurance coverage. A 2007 report from the Economic Policy Institute showed a dramatic decline in employer-provided health care. That drop-off from 64.2% of Americans covered through workplace insurance in 2000 to just 59.7% in 2006 alone added 2.3 million more people to those without coverage. Census data since showed workplace coverage dipped further in 2007, down to an alarming 59.3%. A Thomson Reuters survey last year put the figure for 2009 at a stunning 54.6%. (Data from the U.S. Census revealed that it was only the expansion of government programs including SCHIP and Medicaid which offset the erosion of employer coverage in 2008.)

And as it turns out, the crisis of the employer-based system is worse than Kaiser predicted even a year ago. Thanks in part to the depth of the Bush recession, employer cost-shifting was more pronounced than anticipated just 12 months ago. As the Washington Post wrote at the time;

Forty percent of employers surveyed said they are likely to increase the amount their workers pay out of pocket for doctor visits. Almost as many said they are likely to raise annual deductibles and the amount workers pay for prescription drugs.

Nine percent said they plan to tighten eligibility for health benefits; 8 percent said they plan to drop coverage entirely. Forty-one percent of employers said they were "somewhat" or "very" likely to increase the amount employees pay in premiums -- though that would not necessarily mean employees are paying a higher percentage of the premiums. Employers could simply be passing along the same proportional share of the overall increase that they did in 2009.

With health care costs spiraling out of control, the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) can't take effect too soon. Americans' health care expenditures are expanding at triple the rate of wages. Pointing to data from the actuaries at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Center for American Progress warned last year that per capita medical costs are forecast to rise by 71% over the next decade. That would catapult the cost of the average family's insurance policy from $13,000 a year to over $22,000 by 2019.

As the Post detailed in 2009, business groups themselves are also ringing the alarm bell. A new report from the Business Roundtable concluded, "If current trends continue, annual health-care costs for employers will rise 166 percent over the next decade -- to $28,530 per employee." Antonio M. Perez, chief executive of Eastman Kodak and a leader of the Business Roundtable concluded:

"Maintaining the status quo is simply not an option. These costs are unsustainable and would put millions of workers at risk."

Mercifully, the status quo is changing, albeit not enough. The health care reform law passed this spring offers some relief for businesses and workers alike. In addition to federal subsidies for families purchasing insurance in the private market, the Times notes that the ACA will help companies "better afford insurance, including $40 billion in tax credits for small businesses and $5 billion to help companies pay for retiree health benefits." Still, benefits like lower cost exchanges for employees who have to spend more than about 9.5 percent of their income buying health coverage through an employer won't be in place for almost four years. "The new health law, which will expand health coverage to 32 million Americans starting in 2014," Kaiser reported, "will bring no immediate cost relief for most workers getting coverage in the workplace."

As Kaiser's Altman lamented, "The new law helps a lot of people in a lot of ways ... but in general it left employer-based coverage alone. That is what the politics of health care dictated and what the American people asked for."

—Perrspective 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Less than a mile from where Lincoln's "honored dead" gave "the last full measure of devotion" to the Union, the Mason-Dixon Resort & Casino hopes to offer a 70,000 square foot facility with 50 gaming tables and 600 slot machines. Promising to create 375 jobs and save 100 by converting an existing hotel, developer David Levan told state regulators:

"Mason Dixon can empower the region and re-energize a struggling county."

But as Reuters reported, a casino of the people, by the people with profits for private developers is being viewed as a betrayal and an act of desecration:

But opponents, who have collected more than 30,000 signatures and stacked the petitions in cardboard boxes marked "Save Gettysburg" in front of the five-member gaming board at the hearing, are not convinced.

"This petition is signed by Americans nationwide and shows that this is much more than a local issue," said Cinda Waldbuesser, of the National Parks Conservation Association. "Gettysburg National Military Park is a national treasure that belongs to all Americans."

Critics also showed a video that included statements from filmmaker Ken Burns, actor Sam Waterston and historian David McCullough. They argued that allowing the casino to go ahead would be the equivalent of building a gaming hall at Arlington National Cemetery or on the site of New York's Twin Towers.

Levan, who was turned down by the gaming board in 2006 when he tried to build a larger casino closer to the battlefield, has his supporters. About 250 showed up at a hearing this week to voice their approval. The Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association, a local nonprofit group, previously voted 10 - 1 in favor of the project. Its president Brendan Synnamon said, "We would not support a commercial property that would go on the battlefield," adding, "This does not represent a preservation issue."

If this controversy sounds familiar, it should. In 1994, the Walt Disney Company announced plans for a theme park in Manassas, Virginia near the site of the Civil War battles of Bull Run. After facing a firestorm of public pressure, Disney abandoned what the New York Times deemed "the most irresponsible idea ever hatched in the Magic Kingdom":

Michael Eisner, Disney's chairman, argued that Americans were ignorant about their history and needed Disney-style fun to teach them. As the historian David McCullough has pointed out, this episode has shown that Americans do know their history and care about ground made sacred by what occurred there.

Sadly, not all Americans.

Washington Post columnist and bitter foe of the New York Islamic Center Charles Krauthammer was all for Disney's bull at Bull Run. As he acknowledged in his blistering column titled "Sacrilege at Ground Zero", the psychiatrist turned conservative attack dog who fears the "hallowed ground" in lower Manhattan will be "misappropriated" by Americans exercising their freedom of religion was untroubled by Mickey Mouse at Manassas:

That's why Disney's 1993 proposal to build an American history theme park near Manassas Battlefield was defeated by a broad coalition that feared vulgarization of the Civil War (and that was wiser than me; at the time I obtusely saw little harm in the venture). It's why the commercial viewing tower built right on the border of Gettysburg was taken down by the Park Service.

That the future of lower Manhattan must build on the best of its past is why Krauthammer's feeble analogies fail. Of course, the site where 150,000 Americans fought and 50,000 were killed or wounded in 1863 isn't Ground Zero - or like any place else on earth. And Ground Zero is not the battlefield-turned-national cemetery as Gettysburg, the death camp turned memorial at Auschwitz or the once and future naval base at Pearl Harbor. And Sarah Palin notwithstanding, the site of the Twin Towers is not Srbrenica. Thousands of Americans didn't just die in Lower Manhattan; it's where many thousands more - and the timeless values they share - will live.

As for Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln explained Americans' shared responsibility both to those who died there and to posterity:

"But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract."

Unless, that is, we build a casino there.

—Perrspective 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

For his part, McCain obliged by providing his own version of the speech - and history.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Obama's rival declared, "Whether they admit it or not, the administration's Afghanistan policy suggests they have learned some lessons from Iraq--some, but not all." Appearing later on Fox News, McCain sneered:

"What [Obama] should have said: 'I opposed the surge. I was wrong. I made a mistake and George W. Bush deserves credit for doing something that was very unpopular at the time.' Instead he had to say it's well known that George Bush loves the troops."

But as the record shows, it is John McCain and not Barack Obama who needs to say "I was wrong. I made a mistake." At almost every turn in the run-up to the invasion and the ensuing American occupation, McCain's judgment was almost always wrong, often disastrously so. From his predictions of a short war, claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators and that the U.S. would find weapons of mass destruction to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over Sunni and Shiite, friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, the would-be President John McCain gets failing marks.

Here, then, is a look back at John McCain's reign of error on Iraq:

On the Run-Up to War

"Next up, Baghdad!"
John McCain, aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, January 2, 2002.

"I am very certain that this military engagement will not be very difficult."
John McCain, September 12, 2002.

"Look, we're going to send young men and women in harm's way and that's always a great danger, but I cannot believe that there is an Iraqi soldier who is going to be willing to die for Saddam Hussein, particularly since he will know that our objective is to remove Saddam Hussein from power."
John McCain, September 15, 2002.

"But the fact is, I think we could go in with much smaller numbers than we had to do in the past. But any military man worth his salt is going to have to prepare for any contingency, but I don't believe it's going to be nearly the size and scope that it was in 1991."
John McCain, September 15, 2002.

"He's a patriot who has the best interests of his country at heart."
John McCain, on Ahmed Chalabi, 2003.

On Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction

"I think we're doing fine [in Afghanistan]...I think we'll do fine. The second phase - if I could just make one, very quickly - the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may - and I emphasize may - have come from Iraq."
John McCain, on the fall 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S., October 18, 2001.

"Proponents of containment claim that Iraq is in a "box." But it is a box with no lid, no bottom, and whose sides are falling out. Within this box are definitive footprints of germ, chemical and nuclear programs."
John McCain, February 13, 2003.

"I remain confident that we will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."
John McCain, June 11, 2003.

On Being Greeted as Liberators

"Absolutely. Absolutely."
John McCain, asked by Chris Matthews, "you believe that the people of Iraq or at least a large number of them will treat us as liberators?" March 12, 2003.

"Not only that, they'll be relieved that he's not in the neighborhood because he has invaded his neighbors on several occasions."
John McCain, asked by Chris Matthews, "And you think the Arab world will come to a grudging recognition that what we did was necessary?" March 12, 2003.

"There's no doubt in my mind that we will prevail and there's no doubt in my mind, once these people are gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators."
John McCain, March 24, 2003.

On a Rapid Victory and Mission Accomplished

"I think the victory will be rapid, within about three weeks."
John McCain, January 28, 2003.

"It's clear that the end is very much in sight...It won't be long. It, it'll be a fairly short period of time."
John McCain, April 9, 2003.

"We won a massive victory in a few weeks, and we did so with very limited loss of American and allied lives."
John McCain, May 22, 2003.

"I thought it was wrong at the time. Do I blame him for that specific banner? I can't."
John McCain, on President Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, May 1, 2008.

"Well, then why was there a banner that said mission accomplished on the aircraft carrier?"
John McCain, responding to assertion by Fox News' Neil Cavuto that "many argue the conflict isn't over," June 11, 2003.

"I have said a long time that reconstruction of Iraq would be a long, long, difficult process, but the conflict -- the major conflict is over, the regime change has been accomplished, and it's very appropriate."
John McCain, June 11, 2003.

"I'm confident we're on the right course."
John McCain, March 7, 2004.

"We're either going to lose this thing or win this thing within the next several months."
John McCain, November 12, 2006.

"My friends, the war will be over soon, the war for all intents and purposes although the insurgency will go on for years and years and years."
John McCain, February 25, 2008.

On the Safe Streets of Baghdad

"[There] there "are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today."
John McCain, after touring a Baghdad market wearing a bulletproof vest and guarded by "100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead, April 1, 2007.

"There's problems in America with safe neighborhoods as we well know."
John McCain, March 8, 2008.

On President Bush and His Team

"We are very fortunate that our president in these challenging days can rely on the counsel of a man who has demonstrated time and again the resolve, experience, and patriotism that will be required for success and the hard-headed clear thinking necessary to prevail in this global fight between good and evil."
John McCain, on Dick Cheney, July 16, 2004.

"I think he strengthened our national defenses. I think he has a good team around him."
John McCain, on President Bush, September 3, 2004.

"I said no. My answer is still no. No confidence."
John McCain, on whether he had confidence in Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, December 15, 2004.

On the Non-Existent Alliance Between Al Qaeda and Iran

"But Al Qaeda is there, they are functioning, they are supported in many times, in many ways by the Iranians."
John McCain, February 28, 2008.

"As you know, there are al Qaeda operatives that are taken back into Iran, given training as leaders, and they're moving back into Iraq."
John McCain, March 17, 2008.

"[Iranian operatives are] "taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back."
John McCain, March 18, 2008.

"[It is] common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate."
John McCain, March 18, 2008.

"Al Qaeda and Shia extremists -- with support from external powers such as Iran -- are on the run but not defeated."
McCain campaign statement, March 19, 2008.

"To think that I would have some lack of knowledge about Sunni and Shia after my eighth visit and my deep involvement in this issue is a bit ludicrous."
John McCain, March 19, 2008.

"Do you still view Al Qaeda in Iraq as a major threat? Certainly not an obscure sect of the Shiites overall..."
John McCain, questioning General David Petraeus, April 8, 2008.

On the Timeline of the Surge and the Sunni Awakening

"Too often the light at the tunnel has turned out to be a train, but I really believe -- I really believe that there's a strong possibility that you may see a very substantial change in Anbar province due to this new changes in our relationships with the sheiks in the region."
John McCain, January 5, 2007 (five days before President Bush announced the surge strategy and the deployment of more U.S. forces to Iraq.)

"Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history."
John McCain, July 22, 2008.

On a Permanent American Military Presence in Iraq

"We cannot keep our forces indefinitely staged in the region. Were we to attempt again to contain Saddam, we would eventually have to withdraw them. The world is full of dangers and, more likely than not, we will need some of those brave men and women to face them down."
John McCain, February 13, 2003.

"Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because - if it was an elected government of Iraq - and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."
John McCain, April 22, 2004.

"We have had troops in South Korea for 60 years and nobody minds."
John McCain, June 7, 2007.

"Make it a hundred."
John McCain, told that President Bush had said American troops could remain in Iraq for 50 years, January 3, 2008.

"I asked McCain about his 'hundred years' comment, and he reaffirmed the remark, excitedly declaring that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for 'a thousand years' or 'a million years,' as far as he was concerned."
David Corn, January 3, 2008.

"The U.S. could have a military presence anywhere in the world for a long period of time."
John McCain, February 20, 2008.

"By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom."
John McCain, May 15, 2008.

"I can tell you that it is succeeding. I can look you in the eye and tell you it's succeeding. We have drawn down to pre-surge levels. Basra, Mosul and now Sadr city are quiet and it's long and it's hard and it's tough and there will be setbacks."
John McCain, on a day when Mosul was rocked by suicide bombs and U.S. troop strength remained abve pre-surge level, May 30, 2008.

"No, but that's not too important."
John McCain, asked by NBC's Matt Lauer if he had a better estimate of when American troops can come home from Iraq, June 11, 2008.

—Perrspective 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

In her response to a speech on health care by President Obama last September, Palin joined the long list of conservatives before her who sought to polish the Iraq turd by seamlessly connecting it to the September 11 attacks. That night, President Obama noted the inescapable truth that the $900 billion, projected 10-year cost of health care reform would be less than revenue lost to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy or the expenditures on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For that simple math exercise, the Quittah from Wasilla blasted the President, suggesting he betrayed both those killed on September 11 and those who sacrificed for our country since:

"Finally, President Obama delivered an offhand applause line tonight about the cost of the War on Terror. As we approach the anniversary of the September 11th attacks and honor those who died that day and those who have died since in the War on Terror, in order to secure our freedoms, we need to remember their sacrifices and not demonize them as having had too high a price tag."

Barack Obama, of course, did no such thing. But for her part, Sarah Palin helped perpetuate the Republican lie that won't die: the invasion of Iraq, part of her "War on Terror," was a necessary response to the September 11 horror, the war on Saddam part of the "price tag" to be paid to "secure our freedoms" from the Al Qaeda killers who struck 9 years ago.

Which puts Sarah Palin in the large group of Bush administration officials including Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, Condoleezza Rice and President Bush himself who continue to peddle the long-debunked 9/11 - Saddam link this year.

In March 2009, the former Vice President insisted to CNN"s John King that the invasion of Iraq was "absolutely the right thing to do," adding:

"I think if you hark back and look at the biggest threat we faced after 9/11, it was the idea of a rogue state or a terrorist-sponsoring state with weapons of mass destruction -- say, nukes, for example -- and providing those to terrorist organizations.

What happened in Iraq is we've eliminated that possibility."

Appearing on Fox News in June just one day after blaming Richard Clarke for his own failure to anticipate the September 11 catastrophe, Cheney pointed the finger at the CIA and the intelligence community ("they missed 9/11"). As for his own repeated past claims that an Iraqi connection to the attacks he once described as "pretty much confirmed," Cheney admitted, not so much:

"On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that," he told the "On The Record" host in a joint interview with his daughter Liz. "There was "some reporting early on ... but that was never borne out," Cheney said. "George ... did say and did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9-11."

Cheney's latest revisionist history echoes former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who that same March insisted, "No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11."

Of course, Rice wasn't the only one in the Bush White House contending "there were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime," as she insisted as late as September 2006. Echoing President Bush's farewell address in January, former press secretary Ari Fleischer made the Saddam - September 11 connection just the previous week.

Fleischer used a March 2009 appearance with Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball to display his gift for fiction regarding the Iraq war and 9/11:

"After September 11th having been hit once how could we take a chance that Saddam might strike again? And that's the threat that has been removed and I think we are all safer with that threat removed."

But if Fleischer was butchering history to justify the calamity in Iraq, he was only following George W. Bush's lead.

An unapologetic President Bush made that clear during his final address to the American people on January 15, 2009. Just days before his departure, Bush seamlessly wove the invasion of Iraq into his revisionist history of the aftermath of September 11, 2001:

"As the years passed, most Americans were able to return to life much as it had been before 9/11. But I never did. Every morning, I received a briefing on the threats to our nation. I vowed to do everything in my power to keep us safe...

...And with strong allies at our side, we have taken the fight to the terrorists and those who support them. Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States."

Of course, Bush's subtlety in January was nowhere on display during his jaw-dropping December 15, 2008 interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz. The President wasn't merely content to ignore the bipartisan 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Al Qaeda and Iraq had no "operational relationship." Boasting that "there have been no attacks since I have been president, since 9/11," the President simply dismissed any criticism that it was only his 2003 invasion which brought Al Qaeda forces to Iraq:

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take -

RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

In an address ten days earlier to the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington, DC, President Bush argued on December 5th that the truth should not be the lens through which his decision to invade Iraq should be viewed. Whether Saddam had actual connections to Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the September 11 calamity, he proclaimed, was virtually irrelevant:

"It is true, as I have said many times, that Saddam Hussein was not connected to the 9/11 attacks. But the decision to remove Saddam from power cannot be viewed in isolation from 9/11. In a world where terrorists armed with box cutters had just killed nearly 3,000 people, America had to decide whether we could tolerate a sworn enemy that acted belligerently, that supported terror, and that intelligence agencies around the world believed had weapons of mass destruction. It was clear to me, to members of both political parties, and to many leaders around the world that after 9/11, this was a risk we could not afford to take."

For his part, Dick Cheney (aided and abetted by his biographer and 9/11-Iraq fabulist Stephen Hayes) has continued to proclaim as fact the nonexistent Bin Laden-Hussein connection. (In March 2008, Cheney anticipated Bush's "so what?" response to Martha Raddatz, shrugging off her assertion that "two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting" in Iraq by simply remarking, "So?") And in an interview with Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour on January 14, 2009, Vice President Cheney regurgitated his blatantly discredited claim about an Iraq-Al Qaeda nexus. Answering "I think so" when asked whether the 4500 Americans killed in Iraq was worth it, Cheney continued:

"He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida. Now, we've had this debate, keeps people trying to conflate those arguments.

That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say - as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate - that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years."

Of course, as ThinkProgress detailed, President Bush and Vice President Cheney throughout 2002 and 2003 warned of the mythical alliance between Saddam and Bin Laden. For example, on October 14, 2002, Bush announced that "We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." On the eve of the war, the President told Americans that Iraq "has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda." And as hostilities commenced, Cheney on March 21, 2003 decried Iraq as the "geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

As I documented back in June 2005, President Bush continued to nurture the false Iraq connection to 9/11 long after he grudgingly admitted on September 17, 2004 that "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." Bush's intentional conflation of the two included the amazing June 18, 2005 statement that "we went to war [with Iraq] because we were attacked." By December 2008, Bush's linkage had morphed into the "risk we could not afford to take."

As it turns out, for George W. Bush the "risk we could not afford to take" was not averting war with Iraq, but the absence of a compelling sales pitch for it. And to be sure, Bush was in that regard quite successful. As an October 2003 PIPA survey showed, even after the invasion of Iraq, majorities of Americans continued to believe Bush administration claims about Saddam (Iraq role in 9/11, an alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and Saddam's WMD) all long since proven false. (Unsurprisingly, viewers of Fox News were the most delusional.) And as late as July 2006, fully 50% of Americans still believed the discredited claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For that national delusion, Americans can thank the leadership past and present of the Republican Party. But as President Obama announces the end of combat operations in Iraq, Sarah Palin proved once again that being Republican apparently means never having to say you're sorry, "admit you were wrong" or "being honest with us."

UPDATE: In his address, President Obama showed great generosity towards President Bushin calling for the nation to "turn the page," generosity certain not to be returned by Obama's Republican critics.

—Perrspective 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

"At that price," the shopper says, "even if you don't need it, it's a bargain." And so it is with the Iraq War, at least according to Fox News. Citing numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), "the total cost of the eight-year war was less than the stimulus bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress in 2009." For a mere $709 billion, the United States fought an unnecessary war in Iraq that cost 4,400 American lives, wounded over 20,000 more, gutted the essential effort against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, nearly broke the overstretched U.S. military, catapulted Iran to regional dominance and undermined the nation's international standing. What a steal!

That's the conclusion of Fox News and its fellow travelers over at Fox Nation. On the eve of President Obama's primetime speech to the nation on the situation in Iraq, Fox suggested that the strategic and financial disaster President Bush's invasion produced was a much better deal than the stimulus package needed to help offset his mismanagement of the economy:

According to CBO numbers in its Budget and Economic Outlook published this month, the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations.

The projected cost of the stimulus, which passed in February 2009, and is expected to have a shelf life of two years, was $862 billion.

The U.S. deficit for fiscal year 2010 is expected to be $1.3 trillion, according to CBO. That compares to a 2007 deficit of $160.7 billion and a 2008 deficit of $458.6 billion, according to data provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.

Left unmentioned, of course, is that the projected fiscal year 2009 deficit was also abou $1.3 trillion the day Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House. More important, the glitzy chart (below) hyping the supposedly minimal impact of Bush's Iraq conflict on the American bottom line obscures the flood of red ink his tax cut windfall for wealthy has produced.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities demolished the mythology promoted by President Bush ("You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase") and the usual suspects on the right. CBPP found that Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure. And as Citizens for Tax Justice documented last year, between 2001 and 2010 the Bush tax cuts busted the budget to the tune of almost $2.5 trillion. (A figure which, by the way, is than double the price tag for the deficit-reducing health care reform law.)

Looking ahead, the picture is much grimmer still. And as another recent CBPP analysis revealed, over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts if made permanent will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession put together. $700 billion of that - about the cost of the Iraq war - would go to the richest 2% of American taxpayers.

Not content to rest its bizarre case, Fox News provided less context to confuse matters further. "According to an analysis by the American Thinker's Randall Hoven," the article declared, "the cost of the Iraq war from 2003-2008 -- when Bush was in office -- was $20 billion less than the cost of education spending and less than a quarter of the cost of Medicare spending during that same period."

Money, one can imagine Fox News suggesting, better spent on the next war against Iran.

—Perrspective 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

During his rally Saturday, Beck proclaimed, "America today begins to turn back to God." And while he didn't say which one, he made clear on Sunday it wasn't the Almighty worshipped by Barack Obama:

"I don't know what that is, other than it's not Muslim, it's not Christian. It's a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it."

Sadly for the Fox News host, as many of his Tea Bagging allies view his Mormon faith in precisely the same terms.

As CNN reported on Friday, "Some evangelicals on defensive over partnering with Glenn Beck, a Mormon." And as ThinkProgress noted, a Christian NewsWire press release titled "Glenn Beck's Mormonism Will Not Lead to Revival" was harsher still:

Glenn Beck promotes a false gospel. However, many of his political ideas can help America. ... Mormonism is not a Christian denomination but a cult of Christianity. ... Many endorse false gospels including Mormonism.

If that language of condemnation sounds familiar, it should. As former Massachusetts Governor and LDS member Mitt Romney ramped up his 2008 presidential run, Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network offered a similar primer in a document titled, "How Do I Recognize a Cult?" Mormon religious beliefs, CBN concluded, "are, to put is simply, wrong":

Mormonism teaches that God is not the only deity and that we all have the potential of becoming gods. (Ibid., p. 576.) (Remember that Satan's fall came about because he wanted to be like God.)... There has been constant revision of Mormon doctrine over the years, as church leaders have changed their minds on a number of subjects including polygamy, which was once sanctioned by the church.

In summary, the Mormon church is a prosperous, growing organization that has produced many people of exemplary character. But when it comes to spiritual matters, the Mormons are far from the truth.

As the 2008 GOP primaries approached, Mitt Romney faced an enormous hurdle among the heavily evangelical Republican base. A December 2007 Pew Research Poll found that 45% of evangelicals did not consider Mormons to be Christians. 25% were less likely to vote for an LDS candidate as a result. (A Gallup was also a warning to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, where a candidate who was "72 years of age" or "married three times" was less likely than a Mormon to get Americans' backing.) So, it came as no surprise that on December 6, 2007, Romney tried to follow in JFK's footsteps with his speech, Faith in America."

In a speech that featured only one mention of the word "Mormon," Romney sought to walk a tightrope, proclaiming his own religion's just place in the American pantheon of faith without in any way describing it. Ironically, Romney took pains to sing the praises of the rites (and stereotypes) of other faiths while excluding his own:

"I believe that every faith I have encountered draws its adherents closer to God. And in every faith I have come to know, there are features I wish were in my own: I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass, the approachability of God in the prayers of the Evangelicals, the tenderness of spirit among the Pentecostals, the confident independence of the Lutherans, the ancient traditions of the Jews, unchanged through the ages, and the commitment to frequent prayer of the Muslims."

But when it came to his core message, Romney stressed the Constitution was on his side:

"There are some who would have a presidential candidate describe and explain his church's distinctive doctrines. To do so would enable the very religious test the founders prohibited in the Constitution. No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith."

Too bad Mitt Romney, like Glenn Beck, advocates a religious test of his own.

To be sure, atheists and agnostics have no place in leading Mitt Romney's America. That meaning was unambiguous in Romney's 2006 declaration to Fox News that "People in this country want a person of faith to lead them as their president." The former Massachusetts Governor made the point even more broadly today, proclaiming simply "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom." Columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan observed the omission in Romney's 2007 speech, concluding "he would have lost the idiot vote" if GOP primary voters thought "this Romney character likes to laud atheists."

But it is not merely the unbelievers who would be disempowered and disenfranchised by Romney even as his Mormon brethren would welcomed among America's chosen faiths. The roughly five to seven million Muslims in America, too, are second class citizens in Romney USA.

As Mansoor Ijaz wrote in the Christian Science Monitor:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "...based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

(Despite Romney's protestations that he was misquoted, Ijaz stands by his account.)

This is not to say that the Glenn Beck and Mitt Romney won't succeed with their strange political bedfellows. After all, supposed cult member Romney gave the May 2007 commencement address at Pat Robertson's Regent University, during which he praised "Dr. Robertson's dedication to strengthening and then nurturing the pillars of this community and our country." Three years later, Beck himself spoke to the graduates of the late Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, telling them, among other things, "shoot to kill."

But as CNN detailed, the suspicion of Beck's own faith among his would-be allies runs deep. Brannon Howse, a conservative writer and founder of Worldview Weekend, announced, ""While I applaud and agree with many of Glenn Beck's conservative and constitutional views, that does not give me or any other Bible-believing Christian justification to compromise Biblical truth by spiritually joining Beck."

And so it goes. As Glenn Beck touts that "return to God," many of his political fellow travelers demand Muslim Americans renounce their freedom of religion in lower Manhattan. Others target mosques in Tennessee and elsewhere. All involved would do well to heed the words of President Kennedy from that day in Houston 50 years ago:

"For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been -- and may someday be again -- a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist."

Or a Mormon.

—Perrspective 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Even as they argue with the actors at Colonial Williamsburg and offer classes on the Constitution, the Tea Bagging crowd belies its boasts like, "I've read the Constitution 20 times in the past two months." In no particular order, here are just some of the Articles and Amendments in conservative America's Constitutional Left Behind series:

• Article I, Section 8
• 1st Amendment
• 14th Amendment
• 16th Amendment
• 17th Amendment
• Other Provisions

Article I, Section 8. Ever since the New Deal, conservatives have bemoaned the Congressional expansion of federal regulatory power enabled by the Commerce Clause. Similarly, taking a dim view of Congress' power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States," the Republican Party and its elected state attorneys general have claimed the new health care reform law is unconstitutional.

As it turns out, Tea Party favorite and Sarah Palin protégé Joe Miller isn't content to rest there. The Alaska Republican Senate candidate doesn't merely want to privatize Social Security and Medicare. Miller believes the programs which lifted millions of elderly Americans out of poverty, like unemployment insurance, are unconstitutional. On Sunday, he protested being labeled an extremist:

"Well, yeah I would suggest to you that if one thinks that the Constitution is extreme then you'd also think the Founders are extreme."

Sadly for Miller and the conservative constitutional know-nothings, the Supreme Court long ago decided otherwise.

1st Amendment. As evidenced by her confusion between public criticism and government censorship, Sarah Palin is just one of many conservative leaders struggling to comprehend the First Amendment's free speech protections. (The flip-side, as Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said of Bill Maher in 2001, "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say.".) And when it comes to freedom of religion, some religions are more equal than others.

Like Beck, Palin insists Muslim Americans "refudiate" their religious freedom when it comes to building an Islamic center in lower Manhattan. That "knife," she repeated:

"Is an insensitive move on the part of those Muslims who want to build that mosque in this location. It feels like a stab in the heart to, collectively, Americans who still have that lingering pain from 9/11."

For his part, on Saturday Glenn Beck told the Tea Bagging multitudes, "America today begins to turn back to God." Twenty four hours later, Beck pleaded, "There's nothing we can do that will solve the problems that we have and keep the peace unless we solve it through God." But for the man who once demanded of Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), "Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies," those with a different God (or none at all) need not apply.

14th Amendment. To be sure, the Party of Lincoln has long bristled at the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution. After all, while Arizona Congressman Trent Franks declared in February that "Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery," GOP Governors Bob McDonnell and Haley Barbour issued Confederate Heritage Month proclamations that omitted mention of slavery altogether. And judging by this t-shirt on display at the Beck rally Saturday, at least one attendee longs for the days before the passage of the 13th Amendment.

But it's the 14th Amendment in particular (aside from the Supreme Court's novel, one-time use of the Equal Protection Clause to make George W. Bush President of the United States) that drives conservatives crazy. After all, the 14th extended most of the Bill of Rights guarantees to the states. Worse still for the right, the Supreme Court has turned to the 14th Amendment to expand the American circle of liberty to include minority and gay citizens. And if the reasoning of Judge Vaughn Walker's Prop 8 ruling in California withstands Supreme scrutiny, "equal protection of the laws" may also come to include marriage equality.

And now, the Amendment's Section 1 promise that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside" is raising the ire of Republican leaders and their Tea Party hardliners alike. While Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) has proposed legislation to curb birthright citizenship and the supposed epidemic of illegal Mexican mothers "dropping" their "anchor babies" north of the border, Mitch McConnell and Jon Kyl called for a "review" of the 14th Amendment.

On that point of constitutional excision, Glenn Beck was quite passionate in his 2009 book, Arguing with Idiots. Sadly, to make it, Beck had to both butcher history and equate illegal immigration to slavery:

But even after the importation of new slaves stopped in 1808, the South was so dependent on slavery that it was unwilling to let it go. (Sound a little like businesses relying on illegal immigration today?) Thus, it became necessary to end slavery by expanding [sic] unthinkable amounts of blood and treasure.

Beck went on to offer his own replacement version of the 14th Amendment regarding the rights of "all persons who successfully sneak into the country."

16th Amendment. Despite the facts that over 95% of American households received a tax cut courtesy of President Obama and the Democrats and that total federal, state and local taxation is at its lowest level since 1950, frothing at-the-mouth Tea Baggers and many rabid Republicans want to eliminate the IRS - and the income tax - altogether.

While only 2% of Tea Baggers know their federal taxes had been reduced by President Obama (according to a CBS poll), they are quite familiar with Mike Huckabee's plan to kill the IRS in favor of a national sales tax. To establish his bona fides with Republican primary voters, the Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor turned White House hopeful in 2007 began peddling the "Fair Tax, his national sales tax scheme:

He promises to abolish the IRS, and along with it all current income, corporate, payroll and other taxes--to be replaced with a 23% national sales, or consumption, tax. He's also promised repeal of the 16th amendment--which established the income tax--to ensure Americans don't get double-taxation.

One of the side benefits of the Fair Tax, according to the same man who proposed that "what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards," would be:

"You end the underground economy. Illegals, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, drug dealers - everybody pays taxes."

And in right-wing America, Mike Huckabee has a lot of company. The Tea Party's "Contract from America" similarly calls for "scrapping the internal revenue code." And after domestic terrorist Joseph Stack crashed his plane into an Austin IRS building and killed a federal employee there, Iowa Congressman Steve King declared:

"It's sad the incident in Texas happened, but by the same token, it's an agency that is unnecessary and when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the IRS, it's going to be a happy day for America."

17th Amendment. As the Washington Post reported in July, many Tea Partiers also have problems with one of the more important advances in the evolution of American democracy:

Some conservative activists also point to the 17th Amendment, but in this case they oppose it. That amendment established direct election of U.S. senators by popular vote rather than appointment by their state legislatures. The thinking in that case is that the amendment removed the powerful Senate from control by the states.

Alas, that fringe view is supported by some not-so-fringe Republican politicians. GOP candidates like Steve Stivers in Ohio and Palin favorite Vaughn Ward in Idaho got in hot water over their support for "Repeal the 17th." And as TPM reported:

There are, of course, plenty of conservative Republicans who favor repealing the 17th Amendment. Tim Bridgewater, the man who got the most votes at the Utah GOP convention that ousted Sen. Bob Bennett, says on his website that he'd support rewriting the constitution to put the power of choosing Senators in the hands of the states. And Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) has actually put forward legislation that would repeal the amendment.

Of course, the right-wing's selective reading of the Constitution hardly ends there. Republicans now grant the President unlimited powers as commander-in-chief under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution unless, of course, the President is a Democrat. (While John Yoo considered his justifications of illegal domestic surveillance and presidential power to crush a child's testicles "my gift to the Obama presidency," his Tea Party allies call President Obama a "tyrant" and a "dictator.") For Republicans like Pat Roberts, Jeff Sessions and John Cornyn, the President's war powers trump acts of Congress and the Fourth Amendment alike. (As Cornyn put it, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead.") And it's not too much of a stretch to imagine, as The Onion did, conservatives repealing the 22nd Amendment so that the reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan could seek a third term in the White House. All told, Republicans in Congress have proposed 42 constitutional amendments.

As for the devoted followers of Glenn Beck, the man who declared the intent of his Saturday rally to "reclaim the civil rights movement," there is a Constitution they can love. Sadly, it belonged to the Confederate States of America:

Language promoting "the general welfare" was omitted, while the right to own slaves was explicitly guaranteed (although foreign slave trade was forbidden).

The president, serving a single six-year term, was given line-item veto power over the budget, and his cabinet awarded nonvoting seats in Congress. To guarantee Southerners their much-desired states' rights, the federal government had no authority to levy protective tariffs, make internal improvements, or overrule state court decisions, while states had the right to sustain their own armies and enter into separate agreements with one another, and were given greater power in amending the constitution.

In the mean time, Glenn Beck's hordes will concentrate on stopping the Constitutional mandate to conduct the Census. After all, Beck insists, it's now just a tool to "try to increase slavery [and] your dependence on the master in Washington."

—Perrspective 4:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

That's the word from Politico, which detailed the plans of Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Lamar Smith (R-TX) to lead a new Republican majority into perpetual investigations of the White House. It's no wonder that Clinton veteran Lanny Davis lamented, "I actually think it will be even worse than what happened to Bill Clinton because of the animosity they already feel for President Obama." In its preview of the potential "season of subpoenas", Politico reported:

Everything from the microscopic -- the New Black Panther party -- to the massive -- think bailouts -- is on the GOP to-do list, according to a half-dozen Republican aides interviewed by POLITICO...

Issa would like Obama's cooperation, says Kurt Bardella, spokesman for the ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. But it's not essential.

"How acrimonious things get really depend on how willing the administration is in accepting our findings [and] responding to our questions," adds Bardella, who refers to his boss as "questioner-in-chief.'

No doubt, now that their party stands on the brink of recapturing the House, GOP leaders including Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and Darrell Issa (R-CA) have made a campaign pledge to lead exactly the kind of witch hunt they once pretended to decry. And to be sure, with their talk of subpoenas, investigations and even impeachment, that Republicans are making American voters a promise, not a threat.

Despite his own checkered past, Rep. Issa has emerged, in the words of the New York Times, as President Obama's "Annoyer-in-Chief." And fresh off his inquisition in the Sestak no-pay-for-no-play non-scandal he deemed "Obama's Watergate", Issa last month made clear he plans to ramp up the GOP's efforts to protect its friends and target its enemies. As to a Republican takeover of the House in November, Issa warned:

"That will make all the difference in the world. I won't use it to have corporate America live in fear that we're going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing."

As for Michele Bachmann, a Republican inquisition isn't merely a plank in the GOP platform for the fall, it's the entire agenda. In an interview in July, the head of the new Congressional Tea Party caucus vowed perpetual investigations of the Obama administration:

"Oh, I think that's all we should do. I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another, and expose all the nonsense that has gone on."

If this sounds like it flies in the face of decades of Republican talking points, it should.

Mr. Bush said today that the Walsh prosecution reflected "a profoundly troubling development in the political and legal climate of our country: the criminalization of policy differences."

The "criminalizing politics" canard has been part of the Republican scandal survival kit ever since.

Take, for example, the imbroglio surrounding the politically motivated firings of U.S attorneys in 2006. On PBS Newhour in May 2007, Republican California Congressman Dan Lundgren was only too happy to offer the criminalization of politics ruse for Monica Goodling and Alberto Gonzales alike. Just moments after acknowledging Goodling's admission of violating civil rules and Hatch Act prohibitions ("she did admit that she made mistakes in that regard"), Lundgren returned the script:

"Let me just say this -- and I think it's an important point -- there is too much of a tendency in this environment to try and criminalize political disputes. That's been the effort here. They have found no basis for criminality, so the suggestion is now a vote of no confidence. Who knows what is next?"

But it was Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) who beat Lundgren to the punch, defending Goodling in the opening moments of her testimony. Pence, who famously compared his March 2007 visit to a Baghdad market to shopping in his home state of Indiana, trotted out the tired GOP talking point for her:

"I'm listening very intently. I'm studying this case. And I want to explore this issue of illegal behavior with you. Because it seems to me so much of this -- and even something of what we've heard today in this otherwise cordial hearing -- is about the criminalization of politics. In a very real sense, it seems to be aabout the attempted criminalization of things that are vital to our constitutional system of government, namely the taking into consideration of politics in the appointment of political officials within the government."

Later that morning, of course, Monica Goodling admitted her own lawbreaking and suggested that Attorney General Gonzales may have obstructed justice in trying to coach her. Acknowledging that "I believe I crossed the line, but I didn't mean to", Goodling clarified for all why she sought immunity in the first place:

"I do acknowledge that I may have gone too far in asking political questions of applicants for career positions, and I may have taken inappropriate political considerations into account on some occasions, and I regret those mistakes."

(As it turned out, the DOJ's own inspector general later rejected Goodling's criminalization of politics maneuver.)

GonzoGate, however, is far from the first 21st century use of the "criminalizing politics" defense by Team GOP and its echo chamber. Consider the case of Tom Delay. As early as April 2005, a furious Delay declared of the ethic charges swirling around him, "Democrats have made clear that their only agenda is the politics of personal destruction and the criminalization of politics." Amazingly, that comment came before Delay's own October 2005 indictment in Texas for money laundering in association with his Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC).

Unsurprisingly, the conservative echo chamber rushed to Delay's defense and magnified his talking point. Days after Delay's indictment by District Attorney Ronnie Earle, Robert Novak penned a column titled "Criminalizing Politics", concluding:

'Democrats are ecstatic. The criminalization of politics may work, even if the case against DeLay is as threadbare as it looks."

No discussion of Robert Novak and the Republican redefinition of GOP crime as everyday political disagreements could be complete without a look the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. While neither Karl Rove nor others were ever charged with the technical and narrowly defined offense of revealing the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert Novak and others, Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby was convicted by jury on four counts of perjury and obstruction of justice. But for the familiar goose-steppers of the conservative ascendancy, Libby the felon too was a victim of the criminalization of politics.

The usual cavalcade of apologists for Republican law-breaking swarmed to Libby's defense. With his looming indictment in the fall of 2005, Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison compared Libby to Martha Stewart, and offered a new variant of the Delay sound bite, the "perjury technicality." Hutchison said she hoped that:

"That if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars."

Hutchison, of course, had plenty of company in offering the criminalization of politics canard in the CIA leak case. On October 14, 2005, Bill Kristol complained, "I am worried about what happens to the administration if Rove is indicted," adding, "I think it's the criminalization of politics that's really gotten totally out of hand." In succeeding days, Kristol's Fox News colleagues Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Stuart Varney and Chris Wallace joined the chorus singing from the RNC's criminalization of politics hymnal. On October 24th, Kristol took to the pages of the Weekly Standard to denounce a supposed Democratic strategy of "criminalizing conservatives." When Libby was later convicted, the Wall Street Journal editorial page called for a pardon. The WSJ cited grave dangers if the Libby verdict were to stand: "perhaps the worst precedent would be normalizing the criminalization of policy differences."

Sadly, two years later, President Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder were complicit in aiding and abetting the Republican criminalization of politics defense. This time, the misdeeds concerned the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture.

During his confirmation hearings in January 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder reassured Republican torture enthusiasts in the Senate when he declared "we don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist" with the outgoing Bush White House. But with prosecution of the Bush torture team back on the table after the release of the OLC memos and reports from the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, the Republican echo chamber is quickly circling the wagons in defense of the indefensible.

In a scathing April 2009 editorial titled, "Presidential Poison," the Wall Street Journal went on the attack using the GOP's tried and untrue criminalizing politics canard:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret...

Above all, the exercise will only embitter Republicans, including the moderates and national-security hawks Mr. Obama may need in the next four years. As patriotic officials who acted in good faith are indicted, smeared, impeached from judgeships or stripped of their academic tenure, the partisan anger and backlash will grow...

Mr. Obama is more popular than his policies, due in part to his personal charm and his seeming goodwill. By indulging his party's desire to criminalize policy advice, he has unleashed furies that will haunt his Presidency.

Of course, those furies were unleashed long before Barack Obama took the oath of office. But just in case Americans needed a reminder, former "blog of the year" Power Line lashed out in a piece called "Criminalizing Conservatism." Rather than advising conservatives to try the novel approach to governing which excludes committing crimes, John Hinderaker warned that his persecuted right-wing partisans are rapidly becoming an endangered species:

"Many liberals don't just want to defeat conservatives at the polls, they want to send them to jail. Toward that end, they have sometimes tried to criminalize what are essentially policy differences...

President Obama and his party may achieve another objective by publicly making this kind of threat: deterring Republicans from serving in public life. For many Republicans considering whether to accept an appointment to government office, the prospect that they may be subjected to criminal prosecution if the next administration is Democratic could well tip the balance in favor of remaining in private life."

Columnist and Fox News regular Fred Barnes has been making that same bogus case for years. Whether the scandal involved Plamegate, federal prosecutors or even public broadcasting, Barnes played the same "criminalizing politics" card. And with the prospect of torture prosecutions, he's sounding like a broken record:

"Pat Leahy, the senator from Vermont, is one of the most partisan people in the history of politics, and certainly in Congress today. And what he wants is to criminalize policy differences...I think that's exactly the wrong thing to do."

Regrettably, Barnes was seconded by David Broder, the supposed dean of the Washington press corps, who declared of the potential prosecution of the Bush torture team in April 2009:

"It would set the precedent for turning all future policy disagreements into political or criminal vendettas"

Predictably, Senators Kit Bond and John McCain among others faithfully reproduced the GOP talking point about potential torture prosecution constituting a "banana republic," Following the script, Bond insisted, "We don't criminally prosecute people we disagree with when we change office."

As for Darrell Issa, Lamar Smith and Michele Bachmann, they couldn't agree more. Unless, that is, they are in the majority and the office in question is held by a Democrat. And should their Party win in November, everyone should expect the Republican Inquisition.

—Perrspective 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

As it turns out, the year was 1993, not 2010. At issue was President Bill Clinton's $496 billion program of stimulus and upper income tax increases. And what Republicans then decried as disaster ushered in the longest economic expansion in modern American history, a period which produced 23 million new jobs and a balanced budget.

But that hasn't stopped the GOP brain trust from resurrecting their 1993 predictions of gloom and doom, forecasts which were spectacularly wrong.

Launching his campaign for House Speaker, Minority Leader John Boehner on Tuesday decried President Obama's "job-killing tax hikes" and called the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the rich "a recipe for disaster - both for our economy and for the deficit." His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell told Fox News, "It would be a disaster." On Meet the Press last week, Dick Armey rejected the notion of returning the tax rates for the top 2% of earners back to their Clinton-era levels, mocking Obama's "new cockamamy ideas" and insisting the President "not raise taxes and take away the return on an investment" And as Newt Gingrich predicted in July:

"This economy will sink deeper into recession. There will be higher unemployment. The recovery will be longer."

If this all sounds familiar, it should. After all, as ThinkProgress, Congress Matters and Andrew Tobias all documented, pretty much the same people said pretty much the same thing back in 1993.

If Barack Obama's experience with Republican obstructionism has been painful, Bill Clinton's was unprecedented. When Clinton's 1993 economic program scraped by without capturing the support of even one GOP lawmaker, the New York Times remarked:

Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party.

Inheriting massive budget deficits and unemployment topping 7% from Bush the Elder, Clinton's $496 billion program was nonetheless opposed by every single member of the GOP, as well as defectors from his own party. As the Times recounted, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Al Gore to earn victory:

An identical version of the $496 billion deficit-cutting measure was approved Thursday night by the House, 218 to 216. The Senate was divided 50 to 50 before Mr. Gore voted. Since tie votes in the House mean defeat, the bill would have failed if even one representative or one senator who voted with the President had switched sides.

(It's worth noting that while Bill Clinton met with total opposition from Republicans over his economic program, neither Ronald Reagan before him nor George W. Bush after was similarly subjected to scorched-earth politics from Democrats.)

Throughout 1993, President Clinton faced venomous - if completely baseless - charges from his Republican opponents. Newt Gingrich announced that February, "I believe that that will in fact kill the current recovery and put us back in a recession," while also warning the day before the budget vote, "This is the Democrat machine's recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable." Bob Dole, Clinton's future reelection opponent, complained, "People out there in the real world just don't understand how record-setting tax increases and a taxpayer-financed spending spree by Congress will solve the deficit or put Americans back to work." While John Kasich (R-OH) told Clinton and the Democrats, "your economic program is a job killer," Dick Armey looked into his crystal ball to claim:

"Clearly this is a job killer in the short run. The revenues forecast for this budget will not materialize; the costs of this budget will be greater than what is forecast. The deficit will be worse, and it is not a good omen for the American economy."

Most dramatic of all was Texas Senator Phil Gramm. The same man who led the 1990's crusade to gut regulation of Wall Street and the IRS and later called America a "nation of whiners," boldly - and wrongly - predicted:

"I believe hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs...I believe Bill Clinton will be one of those people."

The Republican naysayers were, of course, wrong on every count. Bill Clinton kept his job and presided over a rapidly growing economy, expanding incomes, new stock market highs and a balanced budget. Clinton, who authored one of the best eight-year economic performances of the modern presidents, bequeathed a CBO-estimated $5.6 trillion surplus to his successor, the man with the worst economic record. Alas, with his tax cut windfall for the wealthy, George W. Bush squandered it and derailed the American economy.

Of course, Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton. And to be sure, the current Bush recession and red ink are far more severe than that produced by his father. But for Republicans protesting a return to the same upper class income tax rates in place during the years of the Clinton boom, the gloomy rhetoric and its mouthpieces are almost unchanged. Put another way, the copy-and-paste GOP approach to the tax proposals of Barack Obama is just the same s**t, different day.

—Perrspective 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

With his much-hyped call for the firing of President Obama's economic team, House Minority Leader John Boehner ensured his speech in Cleveland today would get a lot of attention. But sadly for the would-be House Speaker, the address also spotlighted his unique combination of political cowardice and fuzzy math. After all, while Boehner claimed to be "serious about bringing down the deficits that threaten our economy," he conveniently omitted both the $700 billion lost to the Treasury for another tax cut windfall for the wealthy and any specifics on what budget cuts Republicans plan to make.

By now, John Boehner's cognitive struggles with basic budget math are legendary. In June, Boehner comically insisted that the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 did not contribute to the federal government's exploding budget deficits. On August 8th, Boehner tried - and failed - five times to evade Meet the Press host David Gregory's simple question about the GOP talking point that "tax cuts pay for themselves." As Nancy Pelosi's would-be replacement put it:

"Listen, what you are trying to do is get into this Washington game and their funny accounting over there."

Of course, there's nothing funny about the fiscal devastation wrought by the Bush tax cuts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities demolished the mythology promoted by President Bush ("You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase") and the usual suspects on the right. CBPP found that Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure. And as another recent CBPP analysis revealed, over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts if made permanent will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession put together. That's why, after the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan, it doubled again under George W. Bush.

While neither President Obama nor Congressional Democrats have called for the expiration of tax cuts for households making less than $250,000 a year, John Boehner nevertheless warned that "raising taxes on families and small businesses during a recession is a recipe for disaster - both for our economy and for the deficit." As it turns out, only 2% of American taxpayers are impacted by the Democratic proposal, a group who windfall Boehner's GOP wants to protect at all costs. As a nonpartisan assessment of the Republicans' latest $700 billion giveaway to the gilded class concluded this month:

New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.

As it turns out, John Boehner not only can't add and subtract. He refuses to even try.

That was clear in his grandstanding today on spending:

Fourth, President Obama should submit to Congress for its immediate consideration an aggressive spending reduction package.

When Congress returns, we should force Washington to cut non-defense discretionary spending to 2008 levels - before the 'stimulus' was put into place. This would show Washington is ready to get serious about bringing down the deficits that threaten our economy.

Of course, if John Boehner was serious about spending reduction, he might mention what cuts he had in mind. As it turns out, not so much:

Republicans on the House Budget Committee, led by Congressman Paul Ryan, have already identified $1.3 trillion in specific spending cuts that could be implemented immediately.

These are common-sense steps - like canceling unspent 'stimulus' and TARP bailout funds - that put the brakes on Washington's out-of-control spending spree.

Republicans have also proposed establishing strict budget caps to limit federal spending on an annual basis

But TARP is winding down and the stimulus (including remaining infrastructure spending and middle class tax cuts) will end after this fiscal year. And the bulk of that $1.3 trillion in savings over the next decade comes from $925 billion in unidentified cuts Rep. Ryan and House Republicans hyped in May. Their "Cut Spending Now" proposal only mentions the "how much" and not the all-important "where":

Cut and Cap Discretionary Spending. Return non-defense discretionary spending to pre-Obama (fiscal year 2008) baseline levels. Saves up to $925 billion. Legislation introduced by Reps. Ryan and Hensarling (H.R. 3964) and Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio (H.R 3298) include caps on discretionary spending.

(As an aside, the endorsement Tuesday of Paul Ryan's budget thinking is a little ironic, given John Boehner's comical contortionist act to distance himself from Ryan's proposals to privatize Social Security and ration Medicare.)

And so it goes. Despite the protests from Boehner and his Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell ("Why did it all of a sudden become something that we, quote, 'pay for'?"), giving rich people gigantic tax cuts costs the rest of the American people a lot of money. And while talking tough about cutting trillions in spending is easy, actually telling voters what you plan to cut takes, as Sarah Palin would say, "cojones."

—Perrspective 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) |

On Monday, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman summed up Republicans wanting to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. At a time of record income inequality and massive budget deficits, Republican "politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country." While that single sentence encapsulates this latest $700 billion GOP windfall for the wealthy, the story of the Republicans' perpetual push for upward income redistribution is perhaps best visualized in a few handy charts.

Here, then, are the Bush tax cuts in pictures.

Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation examined the impact of the Democratic proposal to let the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 lapse for just the top bracket households making over $250,000 year. "Taxpayers with income of more than $1 million for 2011 would still receive on average a tax cut of about $6,300 compared with what they would have paid under rates in effect until 2001", the New York Times reported, adding, "that compares, however, with the roughly $100,000 average tax cut that households with more than $1 million in income would receive under current rates." In words and pictures, The Washington Post explained the payday for the rich if the GOP gets its way:

New data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation show that households earning more than $1 million a year would reap nearly $31 billion in tax breaks under the GOP plan in 2011, for an average tax cut per household of about $100,000.

(Click here to see full size chart.)

The price tag for Americans' largesse for the wealthiest who need it least? $36 billion in 2011 alone, and $700 billion over the next decade.

In July, the reliably Republican Wall Street Journal offered its own pretty picture of the contending Democratic and Republican tax proposals. Despite GOP mythmaking about a "$3.8 trillion tax increase" and the "ticking tax bomb," President Obama and his Democratic allies are offering middle class Americans greater tax relief at virtually income level:

But while the next gilded class giveaway can still be stopped, the vault-fattening the past nine years is already a done deal.

In February 2004, President Bush proclaimed, "we cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." Of course, some people are more equal than others.

As the Center for American Progress noted at the time, "for the majority of Americans, the tax cuts meant very little," adding, "By next year, for instance, 88% of all Americans will receive $100 or less from the Administration's latest tax cuts."

But that's just the beginning of the story. As the CAP also reported, the Bush tax cuts delivered a third of their total benefits to the wealthiest 1% of Americans. And to be sure, their payday was staggering. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities detailed that by 2007, millionaires on average pocketed $120,000 from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Those in the top 1% stashed an extra $45,000 a year. As a result, millionaires saw their after-tax incomes rise by 7.6%, while the gains for the middle quintile and bottom 20% of Americans were a paltry 2.3% and 0.4%, respectively.

And as the New York Times uncovered in 2006, the 2003 Bush dividend and capital gains tax cuts offered almost nothing to taxpayers earning below $100,000 a year. Instead, those windfalls reduced taxes "on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000." As the Times explained in a jaw-dropping chart: "The top 2 percent of taxpayers, those making more than $200,000, received more than 70% of the increased tax savings from those cuts in investment income."

(Click here for full size image.)

So it should come as no surprise, as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders lamented last month, that under President Bush the 400 richest taxpayers saw their tax rates halved - and their incomes double.

To help sell these lottery-style winnings for the wealthy, Republican leaders including Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Judd Gregg, John McCain, Tom Coburn, Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio and an endless parade of others insisted that the Bush tax cuts did not contribute to the mushrooming national debt and that "tax cuts pay for themselves." (As recently as Sunday, McConnell asked, "Why did it all of a sudden become something that we, quote, 'pay for'?")

As it turns out, of course, the Bush tax cuts produced - and will produce - nothing but red ink as far as the eye can see.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities demolished the mythology promoted by President Bush ("You cut taxes and the tax revenues increase") and the usual suspects on the right. CBPP found that Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half of the mushrooming deficits during his tenure:

And as another recent CBPP analysis revealed, over the next 10 years, the Bush tax cuts if made permanent will contribute more to the U.S. budget deficit than the Obama stimulus, the TARP program, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and revenue lost to the recession put together.

The Bush tax cuts didn't come anywhere close to paying for themselves. And making them permanent is the very worst thing the so-called deficit hawks could do to reduce the U.S. debt.

By now, you get the picture. But as the "10 Republican Lies about the Bush Tax Cuts" reveals, the GOP's strategy requires that you don't. As Paul Krugman summarized the latest Republican pitch for the rich:

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that's the least of it: the policy center's estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he's going to get the majority of that group's tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few -- the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year -- would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

Not a pretty picture, is it?

—Perrspective 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (11) |

In its article titled, "Republicans question whether President Obama deserves a vacation," the Washington Post tees up both the right-wing charge and the obvious response:

But this year, more so than last, political opponents are trying to hang a question over the visit: Does President Obama deserve a vacation?

The Republican National Committee has taken to calling Obama "the Clark Griswold president," a mocking reference to the Chevy Chase character in National Lampoon's "Vacation" movies. With unemployment claims climbing again, the GOP was hoping its criticism would have a certain national resonance. And maybe it will.

One potential complication: Obama has spent far less time on vacation than his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, had at this point in his presidency.

On that point, the numbers are clear. Obama's nine "vacations" and 48 days away from the White House pale in comparison to George W. Bush's 14 visits to - and 115 days spent at - his Crawford, Texas ranch by the same point in his presidency. Perhaps important, Barack Obama has spent the first year and a half of his time in office cleaning up the messes left by his predecessor, disasters certainly not helped by Bush's dubious - and legendary - work ethic.

As it turns out, Bush easily eclipsed Ronald Reagan's previous record for presidential sloth. By March 2008, Bush had spent all or part of 879 days at his Crawford, Texas ranch or at Camp David, surpassing Reagan's mark of 866. By the time he left office, George W. Bush had made 149 trips to and spent 487 days at Camp David, with another 77 getaways to (and 490 days at) Crawford. Toss in 11 visits and 43 days at his folks' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine and President Bush spent 1020 days - 35% of his presidency - getting away from the White House.

And it's what President Bush missed during his down time that is all the more disturbing still.

Republican leaders and their amen corner may have forgotten what happened when the record-setting President Bush took his month-long summer vacation in 2001, but the American people haven't. While Bush spent weeks in Crawford fretting over the politics of stem cell research and brushing off CIA briefers he said "covered your ass," Bin Laden was indeed "determined to strike in U.S."

As Slate detailed five years ago, "while Bush vacationed, 9/11 warnings went unheard." Those missed alarms not only took the form of that bone-chilling August 6, 2001 presidential daily brief (PDB) but in CIA briefings that never occurred. While George Tenet, Richard Clarke and others told the 9/11 Commission they were running around that summer with their "hair on fire" about potential terrorist attacks from Al Qaeda, Tenet acknowledged that in August, "I was not in briefings at this time." President Bush, as he told Commissioner Tim Roemer, "was on vacation."

And what a vacation it was.

As USA Today told Americans on August 3, 2001:

"Six months after taking office, President Bush will begin a month-long vacation Saturday that is significantly longer than the average American's annual getaway. If Bush returns as scheduled on Labor Day, he'll tie the modern record for presidential absence from the White House."

For their part, Bush White House officials argued "the president is never off the clock," describing his journey to his Crawford, Texas ranch as a "working vacation." And more than anything else, what George W. Bush was working on was stem cell research.

As biographer Robert Draper details over several pages in his 2007 book, Dead Certain, Bush was preoccupied with the stem cell decision before and during his Crawford getaway. On July 9th, Bush told bio-ethicists Leon Kass and Daniel Callahan, "I am wrestling with a difficult decision." Wary of alienating the Republican Party's social conservative base, Bush and his advisers convened a series of meetings to plot a course on the stem cell issue. Their conclusion - harsh restrictions which limited federal funding to a handful of existing stem cell lines - was delivered by President Bush in a nationally televised address to the nation on August 9th, 2001.

The next day, Bush's counselor and long-time spin master Karen Hughes told CNN:

"Several people told him, 'This may be the most important decision of your presidency,' or, 'This is one of the most important decisions you will make. This has more ramifications than almost anything else you will do as president.' A number of people made that point to him."

Which, as Draper concluded, "said a lot about the state of the nation in August 2001."

Of course, at that same time, a host of other people frantic about American national security made another point to George W. Bush. On August 6th, 2001, Bush received and was briefed on the now notorious PDB which ominously warned just five weeks before the September 11 attacks that Osama Bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States. President Bush's response to the briefing, as Ron Suskind revealed in June 2006, was one for posterity:

"All right. You've covered your ass, now."

For all of Presideny Bush's vulgar cynicism, his administration's nonchalance about the growing threat from Bin Laden was perhaps best expressed by then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. Rice, who held the first principals meeting to discuss the Al Qaeda danger only on September 4, 2001, was asked about the PDB memo in April 2004 by Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste:

BEN-VENISTE: Isn't it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?

RICE: I believe the title was, "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

Bush's exquisite timing for time off hardly ended there. As Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, Bush nevertheless decided to continue his vacation. As New Orleans was inundated, Bush strummed a guitar with country singer Mark Wills and shared a birthday cake with John McCain on an Arizona airport tarmac. Far worse than those images were President Bush's words, including his post-Katrina ode to "Brownie" that "you're doin' a heckuva job" or the dog-ate-my-homework claim, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." While Bush eventually cut short his trip, the damage to the nation - and his presidency - was done.

And so it goes. After the failed Shoe Bomber plot in December 2001, as the Boston Globe noted, "White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said that President Bush continued to monitor the situation and receive updates at Camp David. Bush has not issued any statements about the incident." As Israel and Hezbollah went to war in southern Lebanon in July 2006, President Bush managed to stay in Washington. But as the carnage escalated, Bush used the time in the office to welcome the finalists of American Idol to the White House.

And still, Republicans have, as Sarah Palin would doubtless suggest, the cajones to ask, "Does President Obama deserve a vacation?" After all, for George W. Bush, vacation is all he ever wanted.

—Perrspective 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

To be sure, there is plenty of reason for skepticism. Weakened at home and facing rejection of his preconditions, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas grudgingly accepted President Obama's invitation for direct talks in Washington with his Israeli counterpart starting next month. Meanwhile, as former Israeli parliamentarian Yossi Bellin put it, "Netanyahu did not come to power to divide Jerusalem or find a solution to the Palestinian refugees." It's no wonder, as Politico reported, deputy envoy David Hale downplayed the 12 month target for an agreement:

Hale also deferred on the question of how hard the one-year timeline set by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will be, describing it as a "goal" seen as "feasible" by both sides.

"Our hope and our plan [is] to work hard in order to achieve that goal," he said.

Given Israeli intransigence over the status of its West Bank settlements and Abbas' inability to secure a reference to the 1967 borders as the basis for final status negotiations, doubt on all sides about the 2011 target for a peace deal is justified.

But as the New York Times suggested, the Obama administration's 12 month deadline may be less about inking a pact than giving President Abbas political cover at home:

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said: "Abbas wanted a clear reference to the 1967 lines; instead he was given 12 months to continue making his case in the hopes that the Americans will intervene decisively." Arab diplomats offered a similar analysis.

But American diplomats, their European counterparts and Mr. Obama made the case to Mr. Abbas to return to the negotiating table without conditions, administration officials and Arab diplomats said. American officials argued that they could do more to help the Palestinian cause through direct negotiations. By setting a one-year deadline for the negotiations, Mr. Obama, who met with Mr. Abbas at the White House in June, is implicitly giving the Palestinian leader the assurance that if the two sides cannot make progress soon, the United States will step in with its own proposal outlining what a peace deal should look like.

As virtually all involved acknowledge, at this point a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a tall order, indeed. The same litany of thorny issues - borders, security, Jerusalem, the settlements, refugees and the right of return - remain on the table. As the Times characterized it:

There is a resigned fatalism in the air. Most analysts view the talks as pairing the unwilling with the unable -- a strong right-wing Israeli coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with no desire to reach an agreement against a relatively moderate Palestinian leadership that is too weak and divided to do so.

Nevertheless, President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton and Envoy George Mitchell believe the United States must try to break the logjam. For her part, Clinton acknowledged:

"Without a doubt, we will hit more obstacles. The enemies of peace will keep trying to defeat us and to derail these talks. But I ask the parties to persevere."

That is a far cry from Bush's bravado about his legacy building project in 2008. Throughout that spring, President Bush insisted, "I'm still hopeful we'll get an agreement by the end of my presidency." As late as May 2008, with Prime Minister Olmert facing a corruption scandal and after Israeli and Hamas forces battled in Gaza while Abbas's Fatah was locked in its own power struggle with Hamas, Bush was asked if he still thought he could achieve peace by the end of 2008. His answer? "I do, yes."

In contrast, President Barack Obama's one year deadline is not a promise to bring about the end of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But if all goes well (to be sure, a very big if), it may just represent the beginning of the end.

—Perrspective 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |