Too Shockingly Stupid Not to Share

Via TPM, Bush declares Iraq will be a success when it looks like Israel. Like Josh said, "That should go over well."

Writing Headlines

The headline might as well read "Two-State Solution Dead; Bush's Mid-East Policies All Failures." Glenn Kessler takes a look at the newly redefined Palestinian Territories and what happens next.

From Moscow to Tehran to . . . Moscow?

On Monday I quoted Juan Cole on Iran: "But Tehran is a minor player on the world stage, and trying to build it up to replace the Soviet Union is just the worst sort of fear-mongering . . . ."

Today I read this, and wonder why we need to build Iran up to replace the Soviet Union, when we're doing just fine with Vladimir Putin's Russia.

War Crimes and Missteps

Let me see if I get this right. In 2006 the Bush Administration doesn't feel it has the latitude necessary to prosecute detainees of the "Global War on Terror" who are currently held at Guantanamo, and introduces the Military Commissions Act. This act effectively sidesteps questions of human rights and habeus corpus and gives the administration the go-ahead to try detainees outside the framework of the traditional military court-martial.

Yesterday, however, two military judges reviewing the cases of two detainees scheduled to appear on war crimes charges before military commissions dismissed those charges due to linguistic technicalities regarding the terms "enemy combatant" and "unlawful enemy combatant."

So even when the Bush Administration writes the rules it still can't seem to abide by them. Here's hoping there are more Americans who continue to see the failures of the Bush Administration's rhetoric and logic and who will act to restore credibility where much has been lost.

Sanctions on Sudan

In a speech today President Bush promised the people of Darfur that "The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world."

And I propose the transcript be amended to include the words "Any more."

Apples, Oranges and Congressional Oversight

When Tony Fratto calls the impending Senate no-confidence vote on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales a "political stunt," I read it as code for "We don't know what to say about this and wish it would just go away." The White House would frame this as little more than another symptom of an overzealous Congress run amok with petty inquisitors staging witch hunts in the name of oversight, and would caution Congress, I'm sure, to mind they don't "overreach" and alienate the American public they've pledged to serve.

This is all part of the only strategy left to the White House, that of painting its most earnest political opponents as sore losers yet over the 2000 and 2004 elections (which, credit where credit is due, is no doubt true) while going on to repeat, loudly and often, that the American public is tired of congressional hearings which only serve to advance partisan politics and do nothing to actually improve the governance of the nation. The latter has been a Bush camp line from day one. Doesn't matter if we're talking about apples; call them oranges enough times and nobody will doubt that the items in question are indeed oranges, unless the dissenters can live with being called unpatriotic.

Here's the thing, though. Congressional oversight has revealed that, lo and behold, plenty of these so-called oranges we've had shoved at us repeatedly by the Bush administration (links between al Qaeda and Iraq, WMD, "Mission Accomplished," warrantless wiretapping, Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch, and the US Attorney purge, to name a few) are turning out to be apples after all. So what do you do if you're trying to manage the fallout and spin the discoveries in your favor? Sell some more oranges. Tell the American people that the American people are tired of oversight run amok, that Henry Waxman, Patrick Leahy, Charles Schumer and more are simply milking this cow for all the political juice they can get, and that it's going to come back to bite them.

This strategy is no longer working, but the Bush White House cannot afford to abandon it. There are too many secrets, too many fabulous violations of constitutional precedent, for the Bush camp to open up now. The best they can do is hope to "gum this to death," as Kyle Sampson once suggested regarding the US attorney scandal, and run out the clock on the Bush presidency.

Unfortunately for the Bush camp, the truth just keeps slipping out. This is why Congress must continue to advance an agenda of accountability, and do so thoughtfully, strategically and carefully. There are two things to look for as the Senate votes on the Gonzales issue. The first is whether they get a two-thirds vote of no confidence, because that would lay the groundwork to impeach the AG. The second is to see which senators vote in favor of Gonzales and the White House line, because this issue is potentially just as damning to the GOP as the issue of impeachment. If I read the political scene correctly, Senate Dems are going to make sure to get their Republican counterparts on the record as many times as possible on as many difficult issues that arise between now and the 2008 congressional election. It will be difficult for any senator, no matter how entrenched, to weather the flurry of advertising that goes: "Senator Hatch voted in confidence of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales . . . six months before Gonzales was impeached and removed from office." Or something like that. (I'm not saying Senator Hatch is vulnerable, but you never know.)

The White House knows that a vote of no-confidence could lead to an impeachment of Gonzales, and this could open up any number of previously tightly sealed doors into the President's--and perhaps more importantly the Vice President's--closely guarded inner circle. That's why spokespeople like Fratto, like Tony Snow and Dana Perino, will repeat again and again and again and again that these are just the same old tired Democratic machinations that have jammed the country up and slowed the government down for the past forty years and shouldn't be taken with a grain of salt.

Watch, though. I don't think Americans are buying White House oranges anymore.

UPDATE: Emptywheel at Firedoglake offers a rundown on Senate Republicans and the no-confidence vote.

AQI: A Self Fulfilling Prophecy?

Kevin Drum takes on Andrew McCarthy in a recent post at Washington Monthly. In a nutshell, Kevin says that Andrew is crazy and wasting our time by suggesting that Dems know that the best way to defeat al-Qaeda is to stay in Iraq and fight the bad guys there. For the most part I agree with Kevin, although I take issue with this nugget:

In fact, there's a dirty little secret of the Iraq war that neither party is eager to acknowledge publicly: namely that the fastest way to defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is probably for us to leave and let the Iraqis do it themselves. Republicans don't want to acknowledge this for the obvious reason: they want to stay in Iraq and this doesn't help their cause.

(emphasis mine)

I'm not so quick to agree that Republicans, as a group, want to stay in Iraq. It sounds like the average Republican joe these days is ready to see the U.S. get out of Iraq. Republican politicians simply want to stay in power, and as Iraq drags on--indeed, grows bleaker by the day--they don't know how to do that now without doubling down on the bet and hoping to see this thing through to some sort of less-than-politically-disastrous outcome.

McCarthy suggests that Republicans ought to hit the American public over the head with the reminder that Dems criticize the Bush administration for not pursuing al-Qaeda aggressively enough after 9/11, yet lo and behold here we are fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq exactly like the Dems say we should. Just one problem with this: AQI flourishes to the extent that it does precisely because of the vacuum left behind after our "mission" was "accomplished" four years ago. The Bush administration did all it could to link al-Qaeda to Iraq, and now that prophecy has fulfilled itself.