Newsweek's Jonathan Alter has an article this week filled with all the standard anti-blogger "pajama" platitudes (along with some praise) and, along the way, Alter writes this:But we're finding [blogging] works better for keeping on top of daily flaps than for learning genuinely new information. Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It's a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.Leave aside the question of how much "real reporting" bloggers do as compared to newspapers. If one looks at most of the vital disclosures of the last seven years -- whereby concealed, legally dubious behavior of one of the most secretive administrations of the modern era is exposed -- one finds that such exposure comes overwhelmingly from two sources: (1) conscientious whistle-blowers inside the Government, and (2) advocacy groups such as the ACLU, which have tirelessly waged one litigation battle after the next in order to unearth the Bush administration's secret, improper conduct.

Today, the ACLU (with whom, as I've previously disclosed, I consult on various matters) released three formerly secret Bush administration memos -- two from the CIA to the Office of Legal Counsel inside the DOJ, and one from OLC to the CIA -- which set forth, in a revoltingly clinical tone that is by now all-too-familiar, extremely permissive standards for what constitutes (and what does not constitute) "torture." Raw Story's Nick Juliano has an excellent summary of the memos' lowlights, including the assertion that treatment of detainees does not constitute "torture" as long as there is no "specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering," and the claim that interrogators are free to inflict mental harm as long as it falls short of "harm lasting months or even years after the acts were inflicted upon the prisoners."

The August 4, 2004 CIA memo (.pdf) specifically noted that "the waterboard" (sic) is not "torture," and it further points out that the President ordered that the Geneva Conventions are not always to be complied with, but rather, only "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity." The same memo also pointedly notes that the Durbin Amendment -- which bars the use of torture and "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" in all circumstances -- "is not, as of now, law."

What's particularly notable here -- beyond the fact that this is further proof that our Government has engaged in deliberate, systematic and illegal torture -- is what a closed, secretive society we've become. Even the memos which the ACLU obtained -- between four to six years old -- are heavily redacted, with the vast bulk of the legal conclusions of our Government simply blacked out (.pdf). We just don't live in an open society, as most of the most consequential actions in which our Government engages are undertaken behind an increasingly impenetrable wall of secrecy.

The vast bulk of these memoranda consist of nothing more than legal arguments as to why the Bush administration claimed it had the authority -- as the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer put it -- "to permit interrogators to use barbaric methods that the U.S. once prosecuted as war crimes." There is absolutely no justification whatsoever for these Memoranda to be concealed from the public. All they do is set forth the Executive Branch's purported understanding of the law. How can legal arguments about the President's alleged authority possibly be secret?

And yet it was only because the ACLU relentlessly pursued protracted litigation that the CIA was ordered to turn over these documents and we learned about them. That's the same way we learned about the 81-page Memorandum authored in 2003 by John Yoo that provoked such disgust back in April (that's the Memo that calmly analyzed whether "'scalding water, corrosive acid or caustic substance' thrown on a prisoner" was legal and which noted that a prior, still-secret OLC Memorandum had concluded "that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations"). And the DOJ's memoranda justifying Bush's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program -- as well as other long-abandoned, patently illegal surveillance programs -- remain concealed.

It has been left to the ACLU and similar groups (such as the Center for Constitutional Rights and Electronic Frontier Foundation) to uncover what our Government is doing precisely because the institutions whose responsibility that is -- the "opposition party," the Congress, the Intelligence Committees, the press -- have failed miserably in those duties. And while Democrats in Congress passively ignore their oversight responsibility or do the opposite by helping to conceal Bush crimes, the Democratic Party establishment goes around repudiating and even demonizing the factions that have tried to step into the void that they've left, as illustrated by this cowardly "senior Democratic lawmaker" who anonymously told The Wall St. Journal this about Obama's recent FISA vote:"I applaud it," a senior Democratic lawmaker said. "By standing up to MoveOn.org and the ACLU, he's showing, I think, maybe the first example of demonstrating his ability to move to the center. He's got to make the center comfortable with him. He can't win if the center isn't comfortable.When Jesse Helms died last month, there was a discussion about Helms in an online email group of prominent liberal Beltway journalists, and one participant asked whether the Left has any equivalent to Jesse Helms, and a well-known "liberal" journalist responded: "Yes -- the ACLU extremists." Time's Joe Klein said last year that objections to the Senate's warrantless eavesdropping bill were merely "fodder for lawyers and civil liberties extremists" -- a phrase which GOP Rep. Pete Hoekstra then praised in National Review. The very same Beltway denizens who have so submissive enabled the radicalism of this administration simultaneously harbor and continuously spew contempt for those Shrill, Unserious "activists" -- such as the dreaded ACLU extremists -- who challenge and disrupt their little Beltway fiefdom.

Even in those rare instances of good investigative journalism -- Dana Priest's CIA black sites expos&eacute and the Risen/Lichtblau disclosure of the NSA program -- most of the disclosures are due primarily to brave whistle-blowers inside the administration who were willing to risk their careers and even their own freedom in order to expose serious government wrongdoing. In addition to Priest and the NYT, there is Charlie Savage and Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer and other actual journalists who have uncovered serious government wrongdoing, but those are the glaring exceptions.

Jonathan Alter can pat establishment journalists on the back as much as he wants, but the record of the establishment press over the last seven years is one characterized far more by failure and complicity than by real journalism. Alter laments that Americans "so distrust the mainstream media" that they "often prefer rumors to facts," but that's a natural and reasonable response to a media that gave us Iraqi mushroom clouds and Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight and Pat Tillman's dramatic confrontation with the Enemy and a whole slew of other government-dependent propaganda and government-promoting myths.

So much of the real journalism that is occurring isn't from TV and magazine stars but largely from severely under-paid advocates at public interest groups and anonymous government whistle-blowers who aren't even meant to be "journalists." The function of the ACLU and similar groups isn't really to uncover illegal behavior on the part of our Government. That is the intended function of the Congress, the media and the opposition party. But those institutions haven't done that -- with very rare exception, they don't do it (and in the case of Congress, one is hard-pressed to think of any real exceptions at all). As a result, the ACLU and similar groups -- with far fewer resources -- have been forced first to uncover what the Government does, to try methodically and incrementally to erode the government's wall of secrecy, to perform real journalism, in order then to engage in their real function of opposing Government encroachments and defending the Constitution, basic privacy rights and civil liberties.

(updated below - Update II - Update III)

After John McCain sought Pastor John Hagee's endorsement and then heaped praise on Hagee when he received it, a slew of publicity surrounding Hagee's extremist, offensive and outright crazed views forced McCain to repudiate Hagee and reject his endorsement. But not Joe Lieberman. Last year, the Connecticut neocon spoke at the annual convention for Hagee's group, Christians United for Israel, and in an indescribably obsequious speech. said this about the radical Pastor:I would describe Pastor Hagee with the words the Torah uses to describe Moses, he is an "Eesh Elo Kim," a man of God because those words fit him; and, like Moses he has become the leader of a mighty multitude in pursuit of and defense of Israel.That Hagee holds views that even John McCain eventually described as "deeply offensive and indefensible" isn't impeding Joe Lieberman's close association with Hagee. This week, Hagee's group is holding its Third Annual Convention in Washington, and here is the line-up for the final night, with the event's keynote speakers listed:


Hagee's bigoted comments against Catholics and gay people are well-documented, and this Jewish group has put together a new video documenting many of Hagee's most intensely anti-Semitic comments, including Hagee's false assertion that Hitler was partially Jewish, his insistence that the anti-Christ will be a Jew, and his claim that Jews believed that their spit contains magic healing powers and thus ran around rubbing it in the eyes of blind people in order to heal them.

As the controversy over Jeremiah Wright conclusively demonstrated, there is a glaring double standard applied to black Ministers such as Wright (who are quickly deemed scary, extremist anti-American radicals and therefore must be banished by all decent people) and white evangelical preachers such as Hagee (who can utter the most inflammatory and contemptible trash and still be treated with the utmost respect from Serious Centrists like Lieberman). More to the point, Democrats are continuously required to "repudiate" members of the so-called "Far Left" upon pain of being deemed un-Serious, while there is no such thing as "too extreme" on the Right, and Joe Lieberman is thus free to share a stage with a crazed extremist like John Hagee and depict him as a modern-day Moses and still be considered (and, at the GOP Convention, will be hailed as) a Serious, Responsible, Honorable, Centrist by our political and media elite.

UPDATE: The debate I had this morning on Democracy Now with University of Chicago Law Professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein (regarding his remarks this weekend concerning criminal prosecutions for Bush officials, torture, FISA and the like) can be seen and heard here. The prior segment in which I participated, regarding corporate lobbyists and the Democratic Party's Convention, can be heard here.

UPDATE II: As Atrios notes, a recent poll from a new Jewish political group found that Barack Obama is far more popular among American Jews than is Joe Lieberman:Only 37 percent of Jews view the Connecticut Independent in a favorable light compared to 48 percent who have a negative perception. As for Obama, 60 percent of Jews view him favorably while 34 percent view him unfavorably.As is so often the case, the dominant media narrative -- Obama has a problem with Jewish voters! Lieberman's support for McCain is vital to McCain's attracting Jewish voters! -- is baseless and wrong.

UPDATE III: The Good Barack Obama made an appearance today in Amman, Jordan as he delivered some unusually balanced, even-handed remarks about the Israel-Palestinian conflict. In reporting those comments, Politico's Ben Smith wrote that Obama's suggestion "that the fault in the region is not the Palestinians' alone [is] something you'll rarely hear from Republicans." That's true, but it's a view that is rarely heard from most Democrats as well. It's good to hear that view from Obama.

(updated below)

In England, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons has just issued its Human Rights Annual Report (.pdf). It concluded that America's word can no longer be trusted when it comes to claims about torture, rendition and human rights abuses. From The Guardian yesterday:Britain can no longer believe what Americans tell us about torture, an MPs' report to be published today claims. . . .

In a damning criticism of US integrity, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said ministers should no longer take at face value statements from senior politicians, including George Bush, that America does not resort to torture in the light of the CIA admitting it used "waterboarding". The interrogation technique was unreservedly condemned by Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who said it amounted to torture.

A change in approach would have implications for extradition of prisoners to the US, especially in terror or security cases, as the UK has signed the UN convention which bars sending individuals to nations where they are at risk of being tortured. . . .

Today's committee report said there were "serious implications" of the striking inconsistencies between British ministers continuing to believe the Bush administration when it denies using torture. "The UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future," said the committee. "We also recommend that the government should immediately carry out an exhaustive analysis of current US interrogation techniques on the basis of such information as is publicly available or which can be supplied by the US."The BBC noted that the report also concluded that the British Government must not trust the word of the U.S. Government in light of prior deceit with regard to rendition:The MPs also challenged the government to check more actively that Britain had not been used by the Americans for so called "rendition" flights -- when detainees are taken to countries where bans on torture may not apply.

The UK had repeatedly accepted assurances that it had not, but it was discovered earlier this year that two rendition planes refuelled on the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.Earlier this year, the British Government suffered substantial embarrassment as a result of this:Britain's denials that its territories have been used for "extraordinary rendition" were dramatically undermined last night after the United Nations claimed that Diego Garcia has been used as a detention centre to hold US suspects. . . .

The revelations raise fresh questions about the island's role in the process of extraordinary rendition -- moving suspects to interrogation centres in third-party countries where they are held outside the law -- and why the UK government was apparently unaware that its ally was operating a prison on Diego Garcia to house so-called "high-value detainees".If Britian -- one of America's closest allies during the Bush era -- is openly proclaiming that it cannot trust the word of our government, then who can? Moreover, Britain has hardly been a standard-bearer of human rights itself over the last seven years. Indeed, while our political class in the U.S. is busy covering-up and immunizing our Government's lawbreaking and human rights abuses, members of both the British Left and Right are joining together to demand investigations into what appears to be compelling evidence that their own intelligence officials abducted British citizens and turned them over to Pakistani security services in order to be interrogated and tortured:MPs are calling for an investigation into allegations that British intelligence has "outsourced" the torture of British citizens to Pakistani security agencies after hearing accounts of people being abducted and subjected to mistreatment and, in some cases, released without charge.

John McDonnell, the Labour member for Hayes and Harlington, and Andrew Tyrie, Conservative member for Chichester, say the allegations should be examined by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), the Westminster body that oversees the Security Service, MI5, and the Intelligence Service, MI6. . . .

However, details of three new cases have raised concerns among MPs.

McDonnell says he wants to know whether British officials colluded in the abuse of one of his constituents.

The man, a medical student, said he was abducted at gunpoint in August 2005 and held for two months at the offices of Pakistan's Intelligence Bureau opposite the British Deputy High Commission in Karachi. The student, who has not spoken out before, has described how he was whipped, beaten, deprived of sleep, threatened with execution and witnessed other inmates being tortured.

He was questioned about the suicide attacks on London's transport network in July of that year, and says that after being tortured by Pakistani agents he was questioned by British intelligence officers. He was released to his father, who says he received a personal apology from the director of the Intelligence Bureau.For the British, of all countries, to conclude in a formal Report that the U.S. is essentially an untrustworthy rogue nation when it comes to human rights abuses -- "The committee's conclusions amount to saying we can no longer rely on assurances from a US administration that purports to uphold the civil and political standards of behaviour," as MP Andrew Tyrie put it -- is about as potent an indictment of how far we've fallen as one can imagine.

UPDATE: I'll be on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman tomorrow morning, along with University of Chicago Law Professor (and Obama adviser) Cass Sunstein, to debate Sunstein's views on matters such as torture, FISA, and whether Bush lawbreakers should be prosecuted (I referenced some of his recent comments on those topics here). Our segment will be between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m. EST tomorrow and I'll post the exact time once I know it. Local listings and live audio or video feed are here.

When I wrote over the weekend about Sunstein's remarks urging that Bush officials not be investigated or prosecuted for their crimes, I was relying on Ari Melber's (accurate) report in The Nation about Sunstein's Netroots Nation panel. As amazing as I found Sunstein's remarks based on Melber's summary, they're even more amazing when heard in their entirety, which one can listen to here (the whole Q-and-A session, beginning at 38:00, is what is so instructive -- John Dean is seated on the left and Sunstein is in the middle. The first several questions from the audience are superb and the answers from the panel, from Sunstein in particular, are . . . not superb).

(updated below)

One of the hallmarks of events at which George Bush appeared was the complete elimination of any dissent. In one of the most notorious cases, three individuals who arrived at a 2005 Bush town hall meeting in Denver with an anti-war bumper sticker on their car and anti-Bush t-shirts underneath their clothing were first threatened with removal before they sat down and then, 20 minutes later, were forcibly removed despite not having uttered a word. Numerous other cases of that kind have been documented, where perfectly well-behaved individuals were barred, removed and even arrested at Bush speeches, including taxpayer-funded events, exclusively for holding signs or wearing clothing that were critical of the Leader or his policies.

At the center of this dissent-suppressive policy was Gregory Jenkins, the former deputy assistant to President Bush and White House director of advance, as well as a former Fox News producer. Jenkins was sued by the ACLU for his role in the removal of the Denver attendees and in several other cases. Bush officials originally denied any role in this conduct, but a Presidential Advance Manual for which Jenkins was responsible uncovered by the ACLU explicitly instructed event workers on when and how "to stop a demonstrator from getting into the event" and "calls for Bush volunteers to distribute tickets in a manner to deter protesters and to stop demonstrators from entering." As the ACLU put it:The American Civil Liberties Union national office today filed a federal lawsuit against a former high-level White House staffer for enacting a policy that unlawfully excluded individuals perceived to be critical of the administration from public events where President Bush was present. The policy is laid out in an October 2002 "Presidential Advance Manual" obtained by the ACLU. . . .

The ACLU is suing Gregory Jenkins, former Director of the White House Office of Presidential Advance and a Deputy Assistant to President Bush for setting the policy in the manual. Jenkins' policies have led to the removal and, in some cases, arrest of innocent people from taxpayer-funded events.One of the lawsuits brought against Jenkins -- Rank v. Jenkins, brought by the ACLU on behalf of two Texas citizens who "were arrested for trespassing, handcuffed, and hauled away in a police van" on the West Virginia State Capitol ground when trying to attend a Bush July 4 speech wearing anti-war and anti-Bush t-shirts -- ended with a settlement under which the Government paid them $80,000.

Earlier this month, the same Greg Jenkins joined the McCain campaign to oversee the campaign's advance planning:Perhaps most important for the campaign's image is the addition of Greg Jenkins, a veteran advance man who ran presidential advance in the Bush White House. Jenkins, also an aide on Bush's 2000 campaign, is working to ensure better stagecraft of McCain's events and to avoid a reprisal of the much-mocked green background behind McCain at a high-profile speech last month.That move was part of what The New York Times called "the elevation of Steve Schmidt -- who worked closely with Karl Rove," and noted that Jenkins is "another veteran of Mr. Rove's operation."

The placement of Jenkins in charge of McCain campaign events is already producing exactly the heavy-handed, dissent-suppressing tactics that were the ugly hallmark of Bush events. Shortly after Jenkins joined the McCain campaign, this is what happened at a McCain speech, billed as being "open to the public" -- an event which, ironically, also took place in Denver:A 60-year-old librarian received a trespassing ticket today after a liberal group's protest outside a John McCain town hall meeting Monday.

Clutching a sign that read "McCain = Bush," Carol Kreck was removed from the atrium at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts by four Denver police officers.

Kreck, a former Denver Post reporter who works part-time as a librarian for an education think tank, said she was removed as she quizzed a police officer about whether he could deny her free speech "on city property" by taking away her sign, while McCain supporters wore buttons inside.Video of this episode was recorded:



Most significantly, the McCain campaign engaged in exactly the same sort of dishonesty about this episode as characterized similar Bush ejections. Originally, the campaign claimed it had no involvement with her removal, and that it was done at the behest of the Secret Service. But the Secret Service denied that, thus forcing the truth to be revealed:It was Sen. John McCain's staff who asked security at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts to remove people holding protest signs at the venue -- not U.S. Secret Service agents, who were not involved in Carol Kreck's ouster from the galleria. . . .

But Thursday, after two days of being vilified by bloggers, letter writers and others, the Secret Service emphatically denied involvement.

"Contrary to some recent reporting, the Secret Service had no involvement in Ms. Kreck being removed from the area," said Malcolm D. Wiley Sr., spokesman for the Secret Service. "It was not done at our request or suggestion. Any assertion to the contrary is inaccurate and inconsistent with our established policies and procedures."Because the McCain campaign's ejection of a dissenter was at a private campaign event rather than a publicly-funded speech, many of the legal and Constitutional issues that rendered Bush's similar behavior illegal are likely inapplicable. Nonetheless, the dissent-intolerant spirit of the behavior is exactly the same, and the decision by the McCain campaign to hire a Rove operative like Greg Jenkins -- who was at the center of similar actions on behalf of George Bush -- is clearly a conscious attempt to import those same policies. Regardless of what one thinks of McCain, a McCain administration would clearly maintain in power the same people who have been running the country for the last eight years and, with them, much of the same noxious behavior.

UPDATE: The New Republic's Jonathan Chait -- in very close competition with Bill Kristol for the title of Beltway Pundit Who is Wrong About Everything -- last week wrote an article entitled "Old Flame: Why I still kinda like John McCain," in which he explains that he "still feel[s] some pangs of affinity for the old codger. Where Bush is peevish, entitled, and insecure, McCain's charming, ironic, and self-deprecating" (h/t BarbinMD). The former war supporter and Lieberman lover continues:The best aspect of a McCain presidency is that, while it would probably follow the policies of George W. Bush, it would put an end to the politics of Karl Rove . . . . A McCain presidency would promise to dismantle the whole Rovian method that has torn open such a deep wound in the national psyche.In light of the above -- and there is much more here -- it's not really worth saying much about Chait's specific claim. Nonetheless, it never ceases to amaze that no matter how many embarrassing errors Chait and his TNR comrades produce with their quest to show how Smart and Serious they are by being the Reasonable Liberals who praise and defend the Right, they just keep eagerly offering themselves up for that role.

One of the most striking aspects of our political discourse, particularly during election time, is how efficiently certain views that deviate from the elite consensus are banished from sight -- simply prohibited -- even when those views are held by the vast majority of citizens. The University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes -- the premiere organization for surveying international public opinion -- released a new survey a couple of weeks ago regarding public opinion on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including opinion among American citizens, and this is what it found:A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian side (Egypt, Iran, and Turkey) and one is divided (India). No country favors taking Israel's side, including the United States, where 71 percent favor taking neither side.The worldwide consensus is crystal clear -- citizens want their Governments to be neutral and even-handed in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, not tilted towards either side. And that consensus is shared not just by a majority of American citizens, but by the overwhelming majority. Few political views, particularly on controversial issues, attract more than 70% support among American citizens. But the proposition that the U.S. Government should be even-handed -- rather than tilting towards Israel -- attracts that much support. That's not an "anti-Israeli" view -- to the contrary, it's a position that America can and should resolve that violent, four-decades-long dispute by being even-handed rather than one-sided.

Similarly, when asked "How well do you think Israel is doing its part in the effort to resolve the Israel-Palestinian conflict," citizens around the world, by a large margin, believe that Israel is doing either "not very well" or "not well at all" (54% -- compared to 23% that say it's doing "very well" or "somewhat well"). And there, too, that worldwide view corresponds to American public opinion as well. 59% of Americans say Israel is doing either "not very well" or "not well at all" -- compared to only 30% that say it's doing "very well" or "somewhat well." And Palestinians don't fare much better worldwide (38-49%) and fare worse in the U.S. (15-75%).

Yet not only is the view of "even-handedness" completely unrepresented among mainstream political figures in the U.S., it's deemed political death to go anywhere near expressing that view. Back in 2003, then-presidential-candidate Howard Dean expressed the exact position favored by an overwhelming majority of Americans, yet triggered an intense and even ugly controversy by doing so:Dean's Israel troubles began at a Sept. 3 campaign event in Santa Fe, N.M. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said that day, "It's not our place to take sides." Then, on Sept. 9, he told the Washington Post that America should be "evenhanded" in its approach to the region.That's all Dean said. It's a view held by more than 70% of Americans. It ought to be completely uncontroversial -- if anything, it ought to be that view that is deemed a political piety. But what happened? This, according to an excellent account of that "controversy" in Salon by Michelle Goldberg:The media and the Democratic establishment reacted as if Dean had called Yasser Arafat a man of peace. On Sept. 10, 34 Democratic members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, wrote Dean an open letter. "American foreign policy has been -- and must continue to be -- based on unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist and to be free from terror . . ." they wrote. "It is unacceptable for the U.S. to be 'evenhanded' on these fundamental issues . . . This is not a time to be sending mixed messages; on the contrary, in these difficult times we must reaffirm our unyielding commitment to Israel's survival and raise our voices against all forms of terrorism and incitement."

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that Dean had badly damaged his own campaign. "Sources in the Jewish community say that Dean has wrecked his chances of getting significant contributions from Jews . . ." the paper wrote. "Many believe Dean's statement will drive more Jews toward Lieberman and Kerry, enabling Kerry to take the lead again."Dean was roundly attacked by the political elite for uttering "anti-Israel" comments, notwithstanding the fact that Dean is married to a Jewish woman, raised his children as Jews, and, most amazingly of all, had a campaign that was managed by Steve Grossman, a former President of AIPAC. But no matter: Dean had uttered a Forbidden Thought -- forbidden even though it is embraced by the vast majority of Americans -- and thus Grossman and Dean had to subject themselves to abject Apology Rituals:According to the Dean campaign, the uproar involved semantics, not substance. "Here's what I think happened," says Grossman, Dean's campaign co-chair. "Howard made some comments in someone's backyard in New Mexico that were shorthand, if you will, for some of his Middle East views. In the course of those remarks and some others in the subsequent days, he used some language that gave people consternation, and it was immediately jumped on by Joe Lieberman and John Kerry that somehow Howard Dean was breaking faith with this 55-year tradition of the United States' special relationship with Israel, which is patently absurd". . . .

If Dean's Israel position really puts him far out on the left, it proves that not showing unequivocal support for the Jewish state remains a political poison pill -- for members of either political party. . . .

After all, according to Grossman, the candidate remains in sync with the goals of Bush's Israel policy. . . . No serious candidate took a position to the left of Bush. Indeed, it's precisely because there's no real leftist alternative that Dean's been cast in that role. . . . . But a campaign is always more about images and impressions than carefully formulated positions, and that's where Dean has blundered.It was conventional wisdom that that Dean had committed some grave mistake even though, as The Nation's John Nichols highlighted at the time, Dean was expressing the overwhelming majority view even back in 2003:More troubling is the condemnation by Pelosi and other party leaders of even a hint of "evenhandedness." That smacks of the old game of positioning Democrats to the right of the Republicans on Middle East policy -- in a perceived contest for Jewish-American votes and contributions. The problem with this approach, as Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes points out, is that "this suggests you cannot be firmly committed to Israel and question [Israel's hawkish Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon's policies. If that's where Democrats put themselves, they don't leave room to debate Bush on the issue." They'll also have a tougher time appealing to American voters -- 73 percent of whom, according to a recent University of Maryland poll, prefer that the United States not take sides.It's pretty extraordinary that in a democracy, the political elite is able to render completely off-limits a view that the vast majority of Americans support. They actually render majority-held views unspeakable and then remove the issue entirely from what is debated. No matter what one's views are, there is no denying that our policy towards Israel is immensely consequential for our country. Yet, by virtue of the fact that presidential candidates are required to affirm essentially the same orthodoxies, there's very little difference in their positions towards Israel and therefore our current policy approach towards Israel will simply not be part of anything that is debated, even though most Americans overwhelmingly oppose that course.

Indeed, as soon as he secured the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama made a pilgrimage to AIPAC in order to avoid the "Howard Dean mistake" and to vow that there would be no such debate over Israel in this election:I have been proud to be a part of a strong, bi-partisan consensus that has stood by Israel in the face of all threats. That is a commitment that both John McCain and I share, because support for Israel in this country goes beyond party. . . .

And then there are those who would lay all of the problems of the Middle East at the doorstep of Israel and its supporters, as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root of all trouble in the region. These voices blame the Middle East's only democracy for the region's extremism. They offer the false promise that abandoning a stalwart ally is somehow the path to strength. It is not, it never has been, and it never will be.

Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel's security.

That starts with ensuring Israel's qualitative military advantage. I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat -- from Gaza to Tehran. Defense cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As President, I will implement a Memorandum of Understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade -- investments to Israel's security that will not be tied to any other nation.In fairness, Obama did attack what he called the "failed status quo"; disputed that "America's recent foreign policy has made Israel more secure"; and pointed to "eight years of accumulated evidence that our foreign policy is dangerously flawed." Moreover, Obama -- to his great credit -- spent the primary season making some important and unorthodox points about Palestinian suffering and pointing out that the President should not be blindly supportive of everything Israel's right-wing does, that being "pro-Israel" doesn't mean a refusal to oppose Israeli actions.

But by uttering such Forbidden (though quite mainstream) thoughts, Obama was mercilessly attacked as anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic, and with the nomination secured, the crux of his June AIPAC speech was an affirmation of our political establishment's mandated Israel orthodoxy: the continuation of America's one-sided alliance with Israel, as highlighted by commitments such as this:Finally, let there be no doubt: I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation. . . . That is the change we need in our foreign policy. Change that restores American power and influence. Change accompanied by a pledge that I will make known to allies and adversaries alike: that America maintains an unwavering friendship with Israel, and an unshakeable commitment to its security. . . .

As members of AIPAC, you have helped advance this bipartisan consensus to support and defend our ally Israel. And I am sure that today on Capitol Hill you will be meeting with members of Congress and spreading the word. But we are here because of more than policy. We are here because the values we hold dear are deeply embedded in the story of Israel.Again, the point has nothing to do with one's views of the best policy towards Israel. The point is that a position which the vast majority of Americans embrace is one that, simultaneously, is forbidden to be expressed, and the election consequently will involve no debate over that issue.

That profoundly anti-democratic dynamic is by no means confined to Israel. That's just an example. A different University of Maryland poll was released in April of this year, which surveyed public opinion in Iran and the U.S. regarding the disputes between those two countries. The populations of both countries have strikingly similar views with regard to those matters, with large majorities favoring the same deal to resolve the dispute (Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy accompanied by IAEA inspections to prevent weaponization), and large majorities also favor the NPT's goal of "eliminating all nuclear weapons." More strikingly, the citizens of both countries overwhelmingly favor the same policies of rapproachment and cooperation, rather than the bluster, threats, and ongoing provocative acts engaged in by both of their governments:



Remarkably, this desire for cooperation rather than confrontation is the view of most Americans despite the Iraq-level misinformation and propaganda which our political elite has disseminated about Iran:


And while Iranian President Ahmadinejad is depicted by our political class as the Equivalent of Adolph Hitler, savagely oppressing Iranians as some sort of insane, vicious tyrant, that isn't how they see it:


Iranian public opinion distinguishes between the U.S. Government and the American people -- holding favorable views towards the latter and unfavorable views towards the former ("some portrayed the American people, like the Muslim people, as victims of the American government") -- and to the extent there is "anti-Americanism" in Iran, it is based on this widespread assessment:


That, too, is a belief widely held in many places in the world, yet is one that no mainstream politician in the U.S. could express.

There are all sorts of reasons why our presidential elections center on personality-based sideshows (even Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said as much about her own paper's coverage today). Those gossipy matters are easier for our slothful, vapid media stars to digest and spout. They require very few resources to cover. The campaign consultants who run national political campaigns are experts in P.R. strategies for packaging personalities and indifferent to policy debates, etc. etc.

But one principal reason is that so many of the Government's most consequential actions are concealed behind a wall of secrecy and thus not subject to public debate. Meanwhile, those policies which are publicly disclosed are kept off-limits from any real debate and, even when they are debated, public opinion is almost completely marginalized in favor of the minority elite consensus (see, for instance, the endless Iraq war even in the face of long-standing, overwhelming support for its end).

That remarkable dynamic of debate-suppression is most conspicuous -- and most urgent -- when the policies favored by the political establishment are ones that are vigorously rejected by the citizenry. Thus we have the extraordinary fact that a policy that has long been favored by the vast majority of Americans -- even-handedness in the Israel-Palestinian conflict -- is one that no mainstream American politician of any national significance can espouse without triggering an immediate end to their political career. That discrepancy is a rather potent commentary on how our democracy functions.

This blogger has obtained an image of the very handsome welcome bag that every delegate and member of the media will receive upon arrival at the Democratic National Convention next month in Denver. Here is one side (in my view, the prettier side) of the bag:



He has the other side here, and notes that there's "no word on what will be in the bags yet." If AT&T's parents taught it any manners at all, that bag will runneth over with all sorts of fine items, as AT&T has much to be grateful for, both to the Party whose convention it is generously sponsoring and to the media stars who will be attending. How far are we away from both parties selling naming rights to the companies on whose behalf they so assiduously labor?

What's most striking about the Convention bag -- aside, of course, from its stunning design -- is how the parties no longer bother even trying to hide who it is who funds and sponsors them. But -- an earnest citizen might object -- just because AT&T is helping to pay for the Democrats' convention and having its logo plastered all over it the way a ranch owner brands his cattle doesn't mean that they will receive any special consideration when it comes time for Congress to debate and pass our nation's laws.

With regard to the important question, let's hear from financier and lobbyist Steve Farber, the Chief Fundraiser for the Democratic National Convention:Mr. Farber's vast contact list could prove crucial in raising the millions of dollars needed by the Denver host committee to showcase Senator Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in August in Denver. But Mr. Farber's activities are a public display of how corporate connections fuel politics -- exactly the type of special influence that Mr. Obama had pledged to expunge from politics when he said he would not accept donations from lobbyists. . . .

Yet, as Mr. Farber hops on planes, hosts breakfasts and pulls out the stops, he at least can draw on the resources of his law firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, one of the fastest-growing lobbying shops in Washington and one of the most powerful firms in the West, thanks to some recent strategic mergers that have only fattened his roster of blue-chip corporate clients.

"Steve Farber is involved with a lot of high-level candidates and ones who have won," said Floyd Ciruli, head of Ciruli Associates, a Denver political consulting firm. "He's famous for hiring ex-politicians, their children and ex-judges. He's very good at making connections with people who have access to politicians" . . . .

As a result of Mr. Farber's efforts, dozens of organizations have signed up as corporate sponsors of the Denver convention, including six that are lobbying clients of his firm: UnitedHealth Group, AT&T, Comcast, the National Association of Home Builders, Western Union and Google. In return for these donations, which can go up to $1 million or more, sponsors are promised prominent display space for corporate marketing and access to elected officials and Democratic leaders at a large number of parties and receptions.

Mr. Farber is now going through his client list -- and also approaching nonclients -- in his search for cash. Conventions are one of the last remaining ways for corporations to put big money into politics, since they are banned from giving directly to candidates and parties.

Even more, corporations can give unlimited amounts of money to host committees, in contrast to individuals who are restricted in the size of their political donations. Corporations can also take a tax deduction on their donations to the host committee, but individuals are barred from deducting political contributions.

"Farber has a dual role," said Steve Weissman, a policy analyst at the Campaign Finance Institute who has studied convention finances. "He is a businessman and a community activist, and yet he is connected to a law firm that is one of the biggest in Washington. When any of Steve Farber's clients have a problem, federal elected officials will feel obligated to listen to him if he approaches them later on federal policy interests."

Although he is a Democrat, Mr. Farber's firm draws political talent from both sides of the aisle. Its lobbyists include Jim Nicholson, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee; former Senator Hank Brown, Republican of Colorado; and Judy Black, wife of Charlie Black, Senator John McCain's chief adviser, and a major bundler of donations for Mr. McCain.But then there's this: "In raising money for the convention, Mr. Farber said he was not selling access to the many politicians attending the event, but promoting regional pride and the chance to participate in a historical event." Everyone can decide for themselves which scenario they find more plausible.

None of this is new, of course. And it should be emphasized that the McCain campaign is shamelessly drowning in lobbyist influence, while the Obama campaign -- to its credit -- has been applying its ban on associating with lobbyists so meticulously that it actually disinvited Obama loyalist Max Cleland from an Obama fundraising event last week merely because Cleland is a registered lobbyist for a company that designs products for soldiers recovering from war injuries. As symbolic and hedged as it might be, Obama's policy -- along with Obama's pledge to ban any lobbyists from working in the Obama White House -- is at least a very mild step towards acknowledging how tawdry all of this is.

* * * * *

In fairness, it's important to note that some telecoms are more modest than AT&T and aren't always eager to have their logo plastered all over the place. For instance, Comcast -- another client of Farber's lobbying firm that is a DNC sponsor -- refused last month to accept the television ads which the Blue America PAC submitted to run on Comcast stations in Rep. Chris Carney's Pennsylvania district criticizing Carney's support for telecom amnesty. When rejecting it, Comcast demanded that a whole slew of changes be made to the ad.

Once all those changes were made and the ad was re-submitted, Comcast again rejected the ad, but indicated that they would accept the ad on the condition that one last change was made: namely, they demanded that the Comcast logo be removed from the screen shot in the ad which showed the logos of the telecoms which (a) contributed to Carney's campaign and (b) benefited from the amnesty Carney then supported as a result of having the telecom lawsuits against them dismissed. Thus, the ad originally contained the following screen shot accompanying this narrated line: "[Carney] even wants to give amnesty to phone companies accused of breaking the law -- and which gave thousands to his campaign":


Comcast had, indeed, given close to $20,000 to Carney and had been a defendant in some of the lawsuits to be dismissed under the telecom amnesty which Carney vocally supported. Nonetheless, once the Comcast logo was removed from that shot, Comcast accepted the ad and has been running it on its cable stations ever since. So it's important to acknowledge that not every mammoth corporation is as eager as AT&T is to splash its logo all over our political debates. Some, like Comcast, are much more humble.

(updated below)

Former Congressman Harold Ford appeared at the Netroots Nation conference yesterday, argued that Bush officials shouldn't be held accountable for crimes they committed while in office, and then insisted that Democrats shouldn't be expected to defend civil liberties and Constitutional rights because "the Constitution doesn't poll very well." In arguing against prosecutions for Bush lawbreaking, Ford said that Bush officials already have been subjected to accountability for their lawbreaking: "'I think that accountability was brought in 2006 when [the GOP] lost in the House and the Senate,' Ford said. 'And we have only eight more months of George W. Bush . . .'"

Regarding Ford's argument, casual_observer says in comments:I think this is it, in crystallized form. "Accountability" equals loss of majority for one's party. Majority -- power -- is all that matters. 'Law' comes in a distant second, if it is considered at all.

Ford proudly terms himself a 'centrist' in the Democratic Party, but this position is radically un-democratic, and when viewed logically, is every bit as bad as the logic of Rove, Yoo, or Addington. It is anathema to a truly functioning democratic government.That's certainly true, but it's hardly an uncommon view. Quite the contrary. I'd say that Ford's view is as much a shared, Bipartisan Article of Faith among our political class as any other single idea. Here's what The New Yorker's Jane Mayer reported last week during her Washington Post chat:Albany New York: I've already ordered your book from Amazon, but am very interested in your take on why there's been no little effective political opposition to any of this Administration's initiatives. Is it a question of limited public awareness or interest, or a more political calculation that one shouldn't appear to be soft on terrorism?

Jane Mayer: Since you're in New York, let me tell you about a conversation I had with one of your senators, Chuck Schumer. When I asked him why, given his safe seat, and ostensible concern for civil liberties, he didn't speak out more against the Bush Administration's detention and interrogation programs, he said in essence that voters don't care about these issues. So, he said, he wasn't going to talk about them.Writing from the Netroots Nation conference, The Nation's Ari Melber detailed what he calls "Bipartisan Attacks on the Rule of Law," and specifically highlighted the fact that close Obama adviser, Professor Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago, "cautioned against prosecuting criminal conduct from the current Administration" during a Conference panel. As Melber wrote:Prosecuting government officials risks a "cycle" of criminalizing public service, [Sunstein] argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton -- or even the "slight appearance" of it.As I documented last week, the idea that the Rule of Law is only for common people, but not for our political leaders and Washington elite, is pervasive among the political and pundit class, in both parties. While common Americans should be imprisoned in record numbers when they break the law, the worst that should happen to the political elite when they commit crimes is that they should be voted out of office. That's the dominant mentality governing how our political system works.

For all the talk about how radical and lawless the Bush administration has been, this widely-shared view that our political leaders should be immune from consequences for lawbreaking is the administration's defining belief. After the 2004 election, President Bush held a news conference and was asked about the failures in Iraq, and this is what he said:QUESTION: Why hasn't anyone been held accountable, either through firings or demotions, for what some people see as mistakes or misjudgments?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election.On December 16, 2005 -- the day after the NYT revealed that Bush was breaking the law in spying on Americans without warrants -- Digby noted that exchange and wrote:He, like Nixon, believes that the president has only one "accountability moment" while he is president. His re-election. Beyond that, he has been given a blank check. And that includes breaking the law since if the president does it, it's not illegal, the president being the executive branch which is not subject to any other branch of government.But it isn't only the Bush administration that believes that. That was why Gerald Ford was widely praised for pardoning Nixon (Ford said "he acted to restore harmony and move on"). That's the same argument used by Bush 41 to pardon Iran-contra lawbreakers, and it's what the Washington Establishment said when -- liberal and conservative pundits alike -- they defended those pardons of Casper Weinberger and the other Iran-contra lawbreakers:Another favored Republican was Reagan's Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who like Shultz earned his insider spurs during the Nixon administration. Weinberger's false Iran-contra testimony was even more blatant than Shultz's, causing Walsh to indict Weinberger for perjury in 1992.

The Washington elites rallied to Weinberger's defense. In the salons of Georgetown, there was palpable relief in December 1992 when President Bush pardoned Weinberger and five other Iran-contra defendants, effectively ending the Iran-contra investigation.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen spoke for many insiders. In a column, Cohen described how impressed he was that Weinberger would push his own shopping cart at the Georgetown Safeway, often called the "social Safeway" because so many members of Washington's Establishment shopped there.

"Based on my Safeway encounters, I came to think of Weinberger as a basic sort of guy, candid and no nonsense -- which is the way much of official Washington saw him," Cohen wrote in praise of the pardon. "Cap, my Safeway buddy, walks, and that's all right with me." [WP, Dec. 30, 1992.]As Atrios pointed out and documented, "This was the basic view of much of the establishment 'liberal' commentariat."

And this is exactly what we are now hearing from the likes of Harold Ford, Chuck Schumer, Cass Sunstein, David Broder, Tim Rutten, and on and on and on -- criminal prosecutions for government lawbreakers are far too disruptive and politically untenable and unfair. The only fair reaction is just to vote them out of office or wait until they leave on their own accord. All of the Beltway platitudes are trotted out -- we can't look backwards, or "criminalize policy disputes," or get caught up in unpleasant battles over prosecutions when we have too many other important problems too solve -- all in order to argue that, no matter what happens, our glorious political leaders should never be held accountable in a court of law, like everyone else is, when they break the law.

Why would we expect political officials to do anything other than break the law if we continuously tell them -- as we've been doing -- that they are exempt from consequences? And how can Bush -- or Nixon -- be criticized for conceiving of the Presidency as being above the law when that's how our political establishment, including many Democrats, explicitly conceive of it as well?

In today's The New York Times, Charlie Savage reports that right-wing activists have already begun agitating for full-scale pardons for all parties involved in Bush's illegal surveillance and torture programs: As the administration wrestles with the cascade of petitions, some lawyers and law professors are raising a related question: Will Mr. Bush grant pre-emptive pardons to officials involved in controversial counterterrorism programs?

Such a pardon would reduce the risk that a future administration might undertake a criminal investigation of operatives or policy makers involved in programs that administration lawyers have said were legal but that critics say violated laws regarding torture and surveillance. Some legal analysts said Mr. Bush might be reluctant to issue such pardons because they could be construed as an implicit admission of guilt.

But several members of the conservative legal community in Washington said in interviews that they hoped Mr. Bush would issue such pardons -- whether or not anyone made a specific request for one. They said people who carried out the president's orders should not be exposed even to the risk of an investigation and expensive legal bills.

"The president should pre-empt any long-term investigations," said Victoria Toensing, who was a Justice Department counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration. "If we don't protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances."

Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman, would not say whether the administration was considering pre-emptive pardons, nor whether it would rule them out.Given the widespread consensus in our political class that criminal investigations and prosecutions for the crimes of political leaders are terribly uncouth and disruptive, it seems as though few things are more unnecessary than issuing pardons of this sort. But if Bush does end up issuing full-scale pardons for anyone involved in his illegal torture and surveillance programs, how can the Democratic leadership and pundit class object? They're busy arguing now that the rule of law isn't applicable to high government officials and that we should -- once again -- just overlook and forget about the rampant lawbreaking by our Government.

Full-scale pardons are just the natural extension of this view -- as is future presidential lawbreaking. We can pretend that Bush and Nixon had radical and fringe views of presidential lawbreaking but those views are far more accepted than such pretenses suggest.

UPDATE: About Harold Ford's appearance at Netroots Nation, Ezra Klein says that because the netroots is so much more powerful and influential within the Democratic Party than the DLC is, it's unnecessary for the netroots to battle against the likes of Harold Ford. It's truly baffling how anyone could have watched the Bush-enabling Democrats over the last two years and claim that the DLC mentality is marginalized and the netroots mentality is predominant. If anything, the fading away of the DLC is a function of the fact that its worldview predominates in the Democratic Party and there's thus no need for an organization like that to try to "reform" the Democrats by making them "centrist." At Talk Left, Armando elaborates on that point.

Yesterday, Bob Barr -- former GOP Congressman, ACLU privacy consultant, and current Libertarian Party presidential candidate -- endorsed the Accountability Now and Strange Bedfellows coalition. On his campaign website, this statement was issued:A lot of media attention has been focused on our privacy or, more appropriately, the invasion of our privacy by the government. The recent law that allows the government to intercept our phone calls and emails without any legitimate probable cause is the most glaring example. Ultimately we lose some freedom with virtually every new law or government regulation, but this particular law, FISA, is the granddaddy of all invasions of our privacy.

For the last several years Bob Barr has been fighting the government’s intrusion into our privacy at every step. There have been other organizations standing shoulder to shoulder with Bob. But, the recent focus on the invasion of our privacy has motivated a whole new group of concerned activists to join together in an effort to stop the government’s encroachment into our lives.

Some of the names of the organizers of this new group, AccountabilityNowPac, may be familiar to you. They come from a large variety of backgrounds and political beliefs joined in the common interest of protecting our privacy.

If you get a chance please take a look at their web site to learn more about them.

We welcome the leaders and supporters of Accontability Now Pac to the fight to protect our freedom and liberties.We hope and expect that this will be but the first of many prominent endorsements from both the left and civil-liberties-minded libertarian right of our campaign against the political establishment's assault on core Constitutional liberties, privacy rights and the rule of law. Just to get a sense for how like-minded Bob Barr and many progressives are with regard to these vital issues, here is a 45-minute Bloggingheads discussion between liberal blogger (and Strange Bedfellow member) Jane Hamsher and Rep. Barr that was a virtual festival of harmony (they discuss the FISA bill here, and they discuss the left-right civil liberties coalition in Britain here).

As I've been writing about for some time, the radicalism of the last seven years -- represented by the Bush-led GOP and enabled by large parts of the Democratic Party -- is engendering a real political re-alignment in the U.S.:Throughout the 1990s, one's political orientation was determined by a finite set of primarily domestic issues -- social spending, affirmative action, government regulation, gun control, welfare reform, abortion, gay rights. One's position on those issues determined whether one was conservative, liberal, moderate, etc. But those issues have become entirely secondary, at most, in our political debates. They are barely discussed any longer.

Instead, what has dominated our political conflicts over the last five years are terrorism-related issues -- Iraq, U.S. treatment of detainees, domestic surveillance, attacks on press freedoms, executive power abuses, Iran, the equating of dissent with treason. It is one's positions on those issues -- and, more specifically, whether one agrees with the neoconservative approach which has dominated the Bush administration's approach to those issues -- which now determines one's political orientation.There are literally countless examples demonstrating this realignment. Just yesterday, former Reagan official Larry Hunter wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Daily News explaining why he's voting for Barack Obama despite intense disagreement with Obama's likely domestic/economic agenda:I'm a lifelong Republican -- a supply-side conservative. I worked in the Reagan White House. I was the chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for five years. In 1994, I helped write the Republican Contract with America. I served on Bob Dole's presidential campaign team and was chief economist for Jack Kemp's Empower America.

This November, I'm voting for Barack Obama.

When I first made this decision, many colleagues were shocked. How could I support a candidate with a domestic policy platform that's antithetical to almost everything I believe in?

The answer is simple: Unjustified war and unconstitutional abridgment of individual rights vs. ill-conceived tax and economic policies -- this is the difference between venial and mortal sins. . . .

But here's the thing: Even if my hopes on domestic policy are dashed and Obama reveals himself as an unreconstructed, dyed-in-the-wool, big-government liberal, I'm still voting for him.

These past eight years, we have spent over a trillion dollars on foreign soil -- and lost countless lives -- and done what I consider irreparable damage to our Constitution.

If economic damage from well-intentioned but misbegotten Obama economic schemes is the ransom we must pay him to clean up this foreign policy mess, then so be it. It's not nearly as costly as enduring four more years of what we suffered the last eight years. People can debate -- and obviously are debating -- the extent to which Obama is actually devoted to doing something meaningfully different on those issues (though on many vital issues, when compared to McCain, it's hardly a close call). But what's not reasonably debatable is that these issues simply can't be addressed by looking at our political establishment through a simplistic Democratic v. GOP prism. That just isn't the dividing line that shapes Government action with regard to these matters.

When writing about the Strange Bedfellows coalition last week, I examined the sleazy operating methods of Steve Farber, the chief financier of the Democratic National Convention who is a partner in his lobbying firm with scores of the most well-connected GOP lobbyists, including the former Chairman of the RNC as well as the Republican wife of Charlie Black, John McCain's leading lobbyist-adviser. This week, Matt Stoller noted that long-time Democratic incumbent Rep. Ed Towns is having a fund-raiser hosted for him by former GOP Rep. and current Beltway lobbyist J.C. Watts, who sent around this invitation to corporations' "public affairs officers" to induce them to attend and contribute to the Towns fundraiser:


The political establishment doesn't even try any longer to hide how they function. To induce corporate lobbyists to attend the event, Watts just shamelessly advertises the Committees and Subcommittees on which Towns sits like it's a menu of products that are available for purchase.

That's very redolent of the tawdry fundraiser which the nation's telecoms hosted for now-defeated Democratic Rep. Al Wynn; of the way in which telecoms began pouring money into Sen. Jay Rockefeller's coffers immediately prior to his serving as their most vocal advocate; and how a long-time Obama confidante recently featured his influence with an Obama administration in order to procure corporate clients for his lobbying firm. And the entire McCain campaign is virtually nothing but lobbyist influence.

That both parties at the leadership level -- in terms how they act as collective entities -- are controlled by so many of the same factions and operate by so many of the same "principles" is just undeniable. As the most recent, astonishing piece of evidence, look at House Resolution 362, a resolution sponsored by Democratic Rep. Gary Ackerman which spouts every neoconservative accusation against Iran and then demands -- literally -- that the Bush administration order a naval blockade against Iran (see clause 3), an act of war. That Resolution now has over 200 co-sponsors, roughly half of whom are Democrats (including Rep. Ed Towns -- see all of them here). A similar resolution in the Senate -- sponsored by Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh -- now has 32 sponsors, a list that includes, in addition to Joe Lieberman and some of the most extremist GOP warmongers in the Senate, 13 Democrats as well.

As I've written many times (see here), there are important differences between Democrats and Republicans generally and specifically between an Obama presidency and a McCain presidency. But blindly devoting oneself to "electing Democrats" will do nothing but perpetuate the status quo. As I wrote earlier this week:Critical political debates are at least as often driven not by the GOP/Democrat dichotomy, but by the split between the Beltway political establishment and the rest of the country. As the above-chronicled events demonstrate, all of these assaults on our core civil liberties and the rule of law are not Republican attacks with Democrats fighting against them. They are attacks launched by the political establishment against the citizenry, and they ought to be responded to as such.The endorsement of our Accountability Now/Strange Bedfellows coalition by Bob Barr -- who, to a 1990s liberal, was as close to Satan as one could get -- illustrates that dynamic rather potently, as does the broad agreement on these issues among people from across the political spectrum and in opposition to our corroded political establishment.

Brad Blakeman is a former Deputy Assistant to President Bush and is currently the CEO of Freedom's Watch, the group formed last year at the American Enterprise Institute by some of the nation's largest GOP donors (and Ari Fleisher), devoted to advocating the neoconservative agenda. On Wednesday night, Blakeman was on the Dan Abrams Show discussing the White House's refusal to turn over to Congress FBI interviews with Bush and Cheney in the Plame investigation, based on a brand new form of executive privilege invented by Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Here's how Blakeman justified Mukasey's obstructionist actions:Look, what you have is a very smart attorney general who's trying to protect his client and that's the president of the United States, an executive privilege.That is about as warped a view of how our Government is supposed to work as one can imagine. The core attribute of the Justice Department is independence, not allegiance to the President as "client." The President has his own lawyers in the White House Counsel's Office. The Attorney General is not and never was one of those lawyers. To the contrary, the Attorney General represents the people of the United States -- if he has any "client," that's who it is -- and is often required to take positions and actions adverse to the President. Few things could subvert -- and have subverted -- the American justice system more than thinking of the President as being the "client" of the Attorney General.

This all used to be so basic. But the belief that the DOJ exists to advance the interests and wishes of the President has become a central premise of how our Government now works. The Justice Department has been transformed into but another cog in the instruments of Government that protect and serve the President. And that transformation isn't unique to Alberto Gonzales (who, during a CNN interview while Attorney General, actually referred to Bush as "my client"), as The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin pointed out yesterday:Michael Mukasey has President Bush's back.

Mukasey succeeded toady Alberto Gonzales as attorney general last fall. But the notion that he would restore independence to that post took a big hit yesterday when he refused to turn over to a House committee key documents related to the CIA leak investigation.

Mukasey may have a better reputation than Gonzales, but it turns out he is just as willing to use his power to protect the White House from embarrassing revelations.That's why a former White House official and top right-wing activist like Blakeman can go on television and simply proclaim (without anyone contradicting him) that the President is the Attorney General's "client" and that whatever the Attorney General does to protect the President is accordingly justified in the same way that a standard lawyer's duty is to protect "his client's" interests. Obviously, Blakeman's understanding of the most basic aspects of how our Government works is painfully ignorant, but -- thanks not only to the Bush administration but also to one of the most derelict Congresses in history -- that view also now accurately reflects the reality of how the Government actually functions.

Of all the constitutionally threatening and extremist powers the Bush administration has asserted over the last seven years, the most radical -- and the most dangerous -- has been its claim that the President has the power to arrest U.S. citizens and legal residents inside the U.S., and imprison them indefinitely in a military prison, without charging them with any crime, based on his assertion that the imprisoned individual is an "enemy combatant." Beginning with U.S. citizen Yasser Esam Hamdi (detained in Afghanistan), followed by U.S. citizen Jose Padilla (detained at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport), followed by Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri (in the U.S. on a student visa and detained at his home in Peoria, Illinois), the Bush administration has not only claimed that power in theory but has aggressively exercised and defended it in practice.

The Bush administration's strategy of imprisoning these "enemy combatants" in a South Carolina military brig has (by design) ensured that subsequent legal challenges are heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most right-wing judicial circuit in the country. In September, 2005, a three-judge panel from that circuit issued a ruling in the Jose Padilla case (.pdf) that actually upheld the President's power to arrest and indefinitely detain even U.S. citizens arrested on U.S. soil without charging them with any crime -- a decision which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review (because the Bush administration, after 3 1/2 years of lawless imprisonment, avoided that review by finally charging Padilla with a crime), thus leaving that Padilla decision as still-valid law in this country.

Citing the allegation that Jose Padilla had "served as an armed guard at what he understood to be a Taliban outpost" in Afghanistan (Dec. at 7), the 2005 Padilla decision held that "the President is authorized by the AUMF to detain Padilla as a fundamental incident to the conduct of war." The court rejected Padilla's claim that -- as a U.S. citizen who was "captured" on U.S. soil -- he was entitled under the Constitution to be charged with a crime and tried in a civilian court. Under Padilla, the President thus has the power to imprison even U.S. citizens in a military brig indefinitely, merely be alleging that they are "enemy combatants" who have "taken up arms against the U.S."

Yesterday, the full Fourth Circuit appellate court, in a 5-4 ruling (.pdf), expanded that Draconian power even further. This ruling was issued in al-Marri's case, whose extraordinary plight I've previously written about in detail. Al-Marri is a citizen of Qatar who, in 2001, was in the United States legally, on a student visa. He was a computer science graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where he had earned an undergraduate degree a decade earlier. In Peoria, he lived with his wife and five children. Shortly after the 9/11 attack, al-Marri was detained as a material witness and subsequently charged in a civilian court with a variety of crimes relating to credit card fraud and making false statements as part of the 9/11 investigation. He vehemently denied those accusations, and -- in June, 2003 -- he was preparing for his criminal trial, scheduled to begin the following month.

Suddenly -- a month before his trial was to begin -- George Bush declared him to be an "enemy combatant" and ordered the U.S. military to seize him from civilian officials and transfer him to military custody. There -- in a South Carolina military brig -- al-Marri has remained for the last five years, with no criminal charges having been brought against him and no meaningful opportunity to contest his guilt in a court of law. He has been kept in solitary confinement and denied any contact with the outside world other than his lawyers.

The Fourth Circuit's 5-4 ruling yesterday upheld the President's authority to detain al-Marri in a military prison as an "enemy combatant." What makes the ruling so striking is that -- unlike Hamdi and Padilla -- not even the Bush administration claims that al-Marri fought alongside the Taliban, fought against U.S. forces, or had even been to Afghanistan. He's simply a civilian accused by the President of being involved in a terrorist plot. As one of the seven separate opinions issued as part of the court's ruling yesterday noted [p. 28]:


The Judge who was the swing vote in this ruling (Judge Traxler) -- whose opinion became the court's binding decision -- described, with remarkable casualness, the power that the al-Marri court was therefore vesting in the President [Dec. at 70]:


Thus, the President can order anyone in the U.S. imprisoned in a military brig as an "enemy combatant" -- even if they have never fought on a battlefield or with a foreign power against the U.S. Rather, mere accusations by the President of "terrorism" are sufficient to justify the indefinite incarceration of such an individual as an "enemy combatant," who is then denied basic Constitutional guarantees.

To say that such individuals can be held "for the duration of relevant hostilities" means, of course, that such individuals can be imprisoned by the President in a military brig not just for years but for decades [Dec. at 62]:


Most critically of all -- as two of the opinions separately recognized, including the one from the swing Judge (Traxler) whose opinion was the only one to attract five votes and is therefore the court's opinion -- this decision applies every bit as much, and to exactly the same extent, to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil as it does to non-citizens (such as al-Marri) who are in the U.S. legally. From Judge Traxler's opinion [Dec. at 98]:


And from Judge Gregory's [Dec. at 100]:


So, then, the President has the power to imprison in a military prison even U.S. citizens inside the U.S. -- who are pure civilians, having not been anywhere near a battlefield -- indefinitely and without having to charge them with any crime.

The same court yesterday, also by a 5-4 decision (with Judge Traxler switching sides), went on to rule that, following the Supreme Court's Hamdi decision, even so-called "enemy combatants" are entitled to some minimal, indeterminate amount of "due process" to contest their "enemy combatant" designation (the Bush administration had contended in Hamdi that U.S. citizens designated as "enemy combatants" were entitled to no process at all). The court ruled yesterday that al-Marri -- despite being imprisoned for almost seven years -- has thus far been denied even the minimal process he was due under Hamdi.

Under this ruling, the minimal process due to al-Marri (and, by extension, to any U.S. citizen arrested as an "enemy combatant") is effectively the same as what the Hamdi court accorded to actual combatants captured on a foreign battlefield, and what the Supreme Court in Boumediene recently accorded to non-citizens held at Guantanamo. Thus, while ruling that individuals in al-Marri's position are entitled to some basic procedures to view the evidence against them and offer counter-evidence, the court ruled that those rights are far, far less than the Constitution guarantees generally before the Government can imprison people inside the U.S. The basic Constitutional rights of a citizen against executive imprisonment can therefore effectively be circumvented simply by having the President declare someone an "enemy combatant."

At least with regard to individuals detained on U.S. soil, the Bush administration has exercised these definitively tyrannical powers in only a handful of cases -- two U.S. citizens (Hamdi and Padilla) and one non-citizen in the U.S. legally (al-Marri). But what the administration has done is asserted those powers generally, and embarked upon a strategy to ensure that they are institutionalized. Yesterday's ruling -- likely (though not certain) to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court -- is but another step down the path of un-American radicalism we've been traversing.

The dangers of empowering the President to order the U.S. military to arrest U.S. citizens inside the U.S. and indefinitely imprison them as "enemy combatants" -- and thereby deny them core Constitutional protections -- is manifest. It's literally hard to imagine a more un-American power than that. Even Justice Scalia, dissenting in Hamdi, warned that allowing the President to hold U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants" is to vest the President with the ultimate power of tyranny, exactly what the Founders most wanted to prevent:The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.George Bush will likely leave office with this particular tyrannical power infrequently exercised but nonetheless vigorously asserted, defended, and close to established. This is yet another step in the creeping extremism of the last seven years -- like torture and warrantless eavesdropping, this power (allowing the President to imprison U.S. citizens in military brigs with no charges) is one that was until quite recently inconceivable, but is now a defining part of how our Government operates.

Tom Friedman is befuddled. He cannot understand "the decline in American popularity around the world under President Bush" and is specifically upset about the fact that "China is now more popular in Asia than America and how few Europeans say they identify with the United States." Friedman generously allows that "[a]n America that presides over Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay deserves a thumbs-down" -- a "thumbs-down": what a playful movie critic says about a boring film. In listing America's small imperfections that have caused this worldwide unpopularity, Friedman forgot to mention America's invasion and occupation of Iraq, which Friedman himself cheered on.

Despite that list of America's "mistakes" ("Abu Ghraib, torture and Guantánamo Bay"), Friedman nonetheless pronounces that worldwide disapproval of America is "self-indulgent, knee-jerk and borderline silly." Why? Because Zimbabwe is worse (its dictator stole the last election and represses the country's citizens), as is China and Russia (they vetoed U.N. sanctions against Zimbabwe this week). Friedman thus lectures the world as follows:Perfect we are not, but America still has some moral backbone. There are travesties we will not tolerate. . . . So, yes, we're not so popular in Europe and Asia anymore. I guess they would prefer a world in which America was weaker, where leaders with the values of Vladimir Putin and Thabo Mbeki had a greater say, and where the desperate voices for change in Zimbabwe would, well, just shut up.Friedman pronounces Russia and China's opposition to anti-Mugabe sanctions as "truly filthy," and says that "when it comes to pure, rancid moral corruption, no one can top South Africa’s president, Thabo Mbeki."

There's no question that Robert Mugabe is a brutal and murderous tyrant, a true menace to those within his limited reach. And there are ample grounds for disputing Russia and China's claim that international sanctions -- by derailing South-African-led negotiations with conflicting Zimbabwean factions -- would inflame rather than improve Mugabe's repression (though the track record of U.N. sanctions in relieving repression and suffering isn't exactly inspiring).

But whatever else is true, when it comes to morally reprehensible and threatening behavior -- to use Friedman's righteous terms: "pure, rancid moral corruption" that is "truly filthy" -- is there anything that remotely compares with what Tom Friedman and his like-minded comrades have said and done over the last seven years? If you're a citizen of just about any country in the world, what would you find more threatening -- the repressive dictator of a small African country, or the world's sole military superpower that continues to listen to and honor a Foreign Policy Expert who utters disgusting sentiments such as this, to justify a war that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people and the displacement of millions more:



What other country in the world has leading members of its political class who justify unprovoked attacks on other countries -- who casually justify the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people -- in such depraved and sadistic terms? And, for that matter, what other country has a leading presidential candidate who sings songs about bombing another country and who continues to joke openly about killing its citizens?

If there were a powerful nation (besides the U.S.) that had a leading foreign policy analyst unapologetically justifying the brutal destruction of another country by explaining that its citizens needed to "Suck On This," and had a leading presidential candidate who sung songs about dropping bombs on the U.S. and who told jokes about killing Americans (while his leading ally demands that that country attack even more countries), we would be subjected to an endless array of Op-Eds from Fred Hiatt and Charles Krauthammer condemning them and demanding that "meaningful action" be taken against such a "rogue nation." And Tom Friedman would be righteously and darkly insisting that such a country be "compelled to change its behavior."

In light of that, just ponder the self-delusion required for Tom "Suck-On-This" Friedman and the political establishment he leads to express befuddlement -- confusion -- over our extreme unpopularity in the world over the last seven years. How would a rational person expect our country to be perceived when the face we present to the world is the face that appears on that grotesque You Tube clip -- the same face that, to this day, giddily boasts that "sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head" to get our message across and that we need high-ranking foreign policy officials "quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm"? When it comes to violent behavior that is disruptive to the world order and threatening to people around the world, what has a two-bit dictator like Robert Mugabe done -- what could he ever do -- that can even compete with the savagery that George Bush has unleashed, that Tom Friedman has justified, and that John McCain jovially threatens?

Critically, the unpopularity of our country that has Friedman deeply confused and angry is not the by-product of some sort of reflexive anti-Americanism, nor is it due to the fact that America is inherently a destructive force in the world. Prior to the brutal radicalism of the last seven years as embodied by that Tom Friedman video, America was viewed quite favorably throughout the world. That is just a fact. Those who want to claim that the U.S., in the post-World-War-II era, has been the root of most evil are (whether they're right or wrong) in the distinct minority of worldwide opinion. That just is not how much of the world viewed the U.S. -- not until the era of George Bush and Tom Friedman's "Suck On This" neoconservative depravity.

To blithely justify unprovoked wars and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, as Tom Friedman did and does, is bad enough. To dismiss matters such as government-sponsored torture and lawless detention camps with nothing more than an acknowledgment in passing that perhaps they deserve a "thumbs-down" is almost as bad. That the same people who do that are then surprised and even offended that the rest of the world finds them repellent and dangerous -- that they actually expect that the world should view them as honorable moral arbiters -- is probably the most revealing aspect of all. The casual embrace of widespread, unparalleled aggression and violence by the Tom Friedmans of the world is exceeded only by their complete inability to see themselves for what they are. How should a country be perceived in the world when it honors the likes of Tom Friedman as a revered Foreign Policy guru, or when it strongly considers electing a brand new, reckless war-lover as President even after the last seven years?

Harper's Scott Horton yesterday interviewed Jane Mayer about her new book, The Dark Side. The first question he asked was about the Bush administration's fear that they would be criminally prosecuted for implementing what the International Red Cross had categorically described as "torture."

Mayer responded "that inside the White House there [had] been growing fear of criminal prosecution, particularly after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the Geneva Conventions applied to the treatment of the detainees," and that it was this fear that led the White House to demand (and, of course, receive) immunity for past interrogation crimes as part of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. But Mayer noted one important political impediment to holding Bush officials accountable for their illegal torture program:An additional complicating factor is that key members of Congress sanctioned this program, so many of those who might ordinarily be counted on to lead the charge are themselves compromised.As we witness not just Republicans, but also Democrats in Congress, acting repeatedly to immunize executive branch lawbreaking and to obstruct investigations, it's vital to keep that fact in mind. With regard to illegal Bush programs of torture and eavesdropping, key Congressional Democrats were contemporaneously briefed on what the administration was doing (albeit, in fairness, often in unspecific ways). The fact that they did nothing to stop that illegality, and often explicitly approved of it, obviously incentivizes them to block any investigations or judicial proceedings into those illegal programs. </