Is Syria next -- either by accident or on purpose?

(updated below)

I obviously don't know whether there is a clear plan in the Bush administration to have this Israel-Lebanon war escalate by (a) military deploying U.S. forces directly in the conflict and (b) expanding it to include Syria, but there certainly are some strong indications that this option is being seriously entertained. Rich Lowry lays out -- and appears to advocate -- the most likely rationale for such an escalation:

Perhaps the situation can still be saved, but it's hard to get around this calculation: Hezbollah is going to survive, and there's no way it is going to disarm voluntarily. A meaningful international force will enter southern Lebanon only if Hezbollah is disarmed, and since it won't be, there won't be a meaningful international force. That means one of the linchpins of the Israeli post-war strategy is not going to come about. So Hezbollah wins.

At this point, around the Middle East, the Bush administration seems to have two options: admit defeat, or continue to raise the stakes. Here is a good suggestion about how to do the latter with regard to Syria.

There are numerous other indicia floating around which suggest that U.S. involvement in some sort of offensive against Syria is possible, maybe likely. We have the report that the U.S. is privately encouraging an Israeli attack on Damascus even though the Israelis (understandably) don't appear eager to expand the conflict. And then there is the President's increasingly belligerent and self-consciously war-invoking rhetoric, both yesterday (when he made clear he considers this part of "our war") and today (in which the used very clear and deliberate ultimatum language to instruct Syria and Iran to cease funding and otherwise supporting Hezbollah, something they obviously will not do).

Then there is the fact that so many of the White House's most reliable allies are itching for further conflict. And we have the always parmount fact that this is an election year and the best hope, by far, for Republicans to avoid electoral disaster is a nice "war against the terrorists" to keep their only perceived strength front and center. Combine all that with the fact that the only proposed exit for the war -- an empty proposal to have an international force monitor Southern Lebanon (something which can't happen while Hezbollah is still armed) -- is entirely implausible, and it is therefore much easier to imagine the conflict escalating than it is ending.

Perhaps the most significant impediment to escalation is the fact that the Iraqi Shiites on whose good will we are dependent for preserving the small amounts of stability left in Iraq are making clear that the price for escalation -- or even for our continuing to stand in the way of a cease-fire -- would likely be far too high for us to accept. But escalation is more often than not unintentional, or at least the by-product of recklessness rather than a deliberate choice. We are already widely perceived in the Arab world to be an actual combatant in the bombing of Lebanon. With the increasing belligerence coming from the White House, combined with the disappearance of all other exits, it requires little imagination to see how we could easily and quickly become an actual combatant in a wider war.

Ultimately, it seems we are painting ourselves into a corner. We continue to block a cease-fire and attach ourselves to the Israeli military effort on every level. But, as even neoconservatives like Lowry are acknowledging, it seems increasingly clear that the Israeli offensive against Hezbollah is not going to produce anything resembling a victory. Neither the U.S. nor Israel can afford to simply have this war peter out without having a credible claim to victory. So what are the realistic options other than escalation?

UPDATE: The Syrians apparently think that their involvment in this war might be imminent:

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told the Syrian military on Monday to raise its readiness, pledging not to abandon support for Lebanese resistance against Israel. "We are facing international circumstances and regional challenges that require caution, alert, readiness and preparedness," Assad said.

And Haaretz reports: "Travelers from Syria have reported that some reservists have been called up for military duty - a sign that Syria is concerned the fighting in Lebanon could spill over." Perhaps this is the reason why: "Israeli air strikes have increasingly come closer, with repeated raids on the Beirut-Damascus highway that links Lebanon and Syria." I seriously doubt that Israel wants to expand its war to Syria, at least right now, but the combination of the anti-Syrian warmonger rhetoric combined with rising tensions can nonetheless trigger exactly such an expansion.

Speaking of an expanding war: "Israel's Security Cabinet has approved an expansion of the ground campaign against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office announced early Tuesday."

Is Bill Kristol writing George Bush's Middle East speeches?

George Bush's radio address yesterday on the Israel-Lebanon war preaches pure neoconservative gospel. Every point the President made would fit very comfortably into a Bill Kristol Weekly Standard column or a Michael Ledeen Corner item. This speech leaves no doubt that, at least rhetorically, the President is still a full-fledged adherent to the tenets of neoconservatism, and thus considers the Israel-Lebanon war to be "our war" in every sense, merely another front in the Epic Global War of Civilizations (a/k/a The Long War, World War III/IV, etc.):

As we work to resolve this current crisis, we must recognize that Lebanon is the latest flashpoint in a broader struggle between freedom and terror that is unfolding across the region. For decades, American policy sought to achieve peace in the Middle East by promoting stability in the Middle East, yet these policies gave us neither. The lack of freedom in that region created conditions where anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits. We saw the consequences on September the 11th, 2001, when terrorists brought death and destruction to our country, killing nearly 3,000 innocent Americans.

So, says the President, the Israel-Lebanon war is not about territorial conflicts or endless Israeli-Hezbollah disputes but, instead, is part of the glorious worldwide "struggle between freedom and terror." It is but the "latest flashpoint" in the "broader struggle," which includes the U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, and America's hostilities with Iran and Syria. All of these problems are part of the same War, and are all caused by the one big neoconservative sin -- stability. Exactly as Mark Levin pointed out yesterday -- Mark Levin -- the President claims that the reason 9/11 happened is because the foreign policy of both political parties for the last several decades was devoted to preserving stability (i.e., a state of peace, avoidance of war), and stability in the Middle East is our greatest enemy.

That, according to neoconservatives (apparently including the President), is what needs to be changed. Stability is our enemy because it breeds hatred and war. Only instability and war will breed a "lasting peace." Thus, the more instability and war in the Middle East, the better. That is the central neconservative warmongering tenet and it is what is coming out of the President's mouth as he discusses his views of the new war in the Middle East. The President continues with his Weekly Standard essay:

The experience of September the 11th made it clear that we could no longer tolerate the status quo in the Middle East. We saw that when an entire region simmers in violence, that violence will eventually reach our shores and spread across the entire world. The only way to secure our Nation is to change the course of the Middle East -- by fighting the ideology of terror and spreading the hope of freedom.

Leave aside for the moment all of the strategic and moral objections to the neoconservative thirst for endless war. And leave aside the unfathomable hubris necessary to assert that we will "change the course of the Middle East" by "spreading the hope of freedom" through invasions and air attacks. This view is, in addition to everything else, unbelievably incoherent and internally inconsistent.

According to the President, the 9/11 attacks and other acts of terrorism occur when the "entire region simmers in violence" because that is when resentment arises. So that's the state we want to avoid -- the "entire region simmer(ing) in violence." And yet it's hard to remember a time when the Middle East has been simmering in more violence than it is today, much of it authored by us, and the President and his neoconservative allies seem most eager to find still more Middle Eastern countries on which to wage war.

More confounding still is the President's claim that we must re-make the Middle East in our image because terrorism has been fueled by "conditions where anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits." Other than our ongoing occupation of Iraq, what could possibly breed more "anger and resentment" towards the U.S. among Middle Eastern Muslims than watching daily video of Lebanese civilians being blown to bits by U.S.-supplied bombs and fighter jets, while the U.S. eggs on the attacks and single-handedly blocks efforts to stop them?

That is the central incoherence which lays at the heart of the Bush administration's neoconservative mission -- one minute the objective is to win the "hearts and minds" of Muslims in the Middle East so that there will be less anti-American hatred for Al Qaeda to exploit when recruiting. The next minute the objective is to bomb as many of their countries as possible for their own good and hope that they are appreciative of all the carnage and destruction we are raining down on them in the name of warring against the evil of "stability." Peter Baker points out the obvious in The Washington Post this morning:

The Israeli bombs that slammed into the Lebanese village of Qana yesterday did more than kill three dozen children and a score of adults. They struck at the core of U.S. foreign policy in the region and illustrated in heart-breaking images the enormous risks for Washington in the current Middle East crisis.

With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials. . .

"The arrows are all pointing in the wrong direction," said Richard N. Haass, who was President Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director. "The biggest danger in the short run is it just increases frustration and alienation from the United States in the Arab world. Not just the Arab world, but in Europe and around the world. People will get a daily drumbeat of suffering in Lebanon and this will just drive up anti-Americanism to new heights."

We have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of human lives in Iraq with the claimed purpose of eliminating hatred and resentment towards the U.S. in that region, and yet we continuously signal to the world that our principal foreign policy instrument is to wage or encourage more and more war in the Middle East and kill more and more Muslims. Can any reasonable person deny that our actions are so plainly in conflict with our claimed objectives?

Simply juxtapose the President's explanation yesterday for why anti-U.S. terrorism occurs (because of "conditions where anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits") to the effects which are being spawned by our ongoing disastrous occupation in Iraq and our blatant support for, and participation in, Israel's bombardment of Lebanon. It's hard to imagine how we could be more efficiently aiding terrorist recruitment efforts if we tried.

Fittingly, the President ended his address with the neoconservative prayer -- that what appears to sane and civilized people as tragic and brutal wars in Iraq and in Lebanon are really glorious "opportunities" which we should celebrate and for which we should be grateful -- beautiful "birth pangs" on the road to a majestic transformation:

This moment of conflict in the Middle East is painful and tragic. Yet it is also a moment of opportunity for broader change in the region. Transforming countries that have suffered decades of tyranny and violence is difficult, and it will take time to achieve. But the consequences will be profound -- for our country and the world. When the Middle East grows in liberty and democracy, it will also grow in peace, and that will make America and all free nations more secure.

Again, aside from the genuinely repugnant and casual celebration of carnage, none of this makes even basic sense. The two countries on which Israel is waging war, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, both have democratically elected governments, as does, at least to some degree, the country on which we most want to wage war, Iran. By contrast, the closest and most reliable allies we have in that region -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan -- are the least democratic. The notion that we can bomb the Middle East into peace-loving, pro-U.S. democracies is painfully, self-evidently absurd by now, but the President believes it.

The neoconservative extremists are ridiculed on an almost daily basis, because the extent of their ever-increasing lunacy is truly difficult to fathom. But that mindset is not merely some fringe radicalism but, instead, has been driving our foreign policy for the last five years. And it still is, because the individual who happens to be the President, along with the omnipotent Vice President, are full-fledged adherents to this approach, and while scores of people marvel at how increasingly deranged the Bill Kristols and Richard Perles of the world seem to be, those who occupy the White House believe they speak great wisdom and are listening intently to (and outright echoing) what they have to say.

Quick notes

(updated below)

Several brief items:

(1) I have an article in tomorrow's edition of Salon regarding the Specter/FISA bill. The article is now available here.

For the reasons I explain in the article, I believe that blocking Congressional approval of the Specter bill is the single most important domestic political objective right now. Its enactment will do more to legitimize and institutionalize the Bush administration's radical theories of unlimited executive power than any other event in the last five years, not to mention will vest in this President the power to eavesdrop on Americans with no judicial oversight of any kind.

(2) Speaking of Salon, I will be guest-blogging there next week (which includes the Lieberman-Lamont primary on Wednesday Tuesday) at the War Room for Tim Grieve, who is on vacation for the next two weeks. I may begin guest-blogging there this upcoming week, but will definitely be there next week exclusively. I will have at least one guest blogger here while I'm blogging over there.

(3) I will be hosting two chats for the FireDogLake Book Club for John Dean's book, Conservatives Without Conscience, on August 27 and September 3. My review of the book is here. Dean will attend and participate in the second chat, on September 3.

Dean's book is doing exceptionally well -- it is #3 on the New York Times Best Seller List (last week it was at #2) -- and yet it has received a small sliver of the attention which, for instance, Ann Coulter's rantings have received. The book is highly worth reading in its own right, and the more it is supported, the more attention will be given to its important thesis about the true character of the so-called "conservative" movement. And reading the book and then being able to talk to Dean about it at the FDL Book Club is some added incentive read it.

UPDATE:

(4) As was discussed in the comments section over the weekend, I switched the commenting program here to Haloscan, as it provides much more flexibility for managing the comments section, eliminating deliberate disruptions, etc. The two principal problems are that (1) the commenting template for Haloscan is somewhat asthetically unappealing and, worse, (2) the comment threads from the prior posts do not transfer from Blogger to Halsocan, which means, for the moment, that the prior comment threads are not available online.

From what I understand, both problems can be addressed. The commenting format can be improved with HTML adjustments on Haloscan. The second problem is by far the more pressing one. I have often linked in my posts to comments here, and there are countless substantive contributions in comments that I'd prefer not to lose. Please e-mail me if you have any thoughts about how to restore or archive old comment sections and/or if you can help do that.

(5) The superb Anonymous Liberal will be guest blogging here next week when I am blogging at War Room.

The crazed face of neoconservatism

(updated below)

In two short posts at National Review, warmonger Mark Levin captures the essence of neoconservatism. First is his response to the news that Iran has rejected the proposal for an agreement whereby it would cease uranium enrichment:

Ok, let’s all say it together, shall we? Diplomacy doesn’t work with terrorists. Terrorists only understand fear. They don’t fear us yet because we have not punished them enough.

All of the bad countries in the Middle East (and elsewhere) are "terrorists" and we must treat them as such. Only weaklings and appeasers would try to negotiate with or contain "terrorists." The only thing one can do with "terrorists" is kill them all so that we can rule the world (or at least the Middle East) by fear. That's why incidents like the killing of 50 Lebanese civilians in Qana is something to be cheered, rather than either condemned as deliberate or reckless, or at least lamented as a tragic accident. To neoconservatives like Levin, we need more of these incidents, because it shows the "terrorists" that there are consequences -- bad, ugly, scary, brutal consequences -- for confronting us.

That really is the essence of neoconservativsm. It's nothing more noble or complex than a base belief that we have to wage as many wars as possible and kill as many people as possible until people are sufficiently fearful of the U.S. that they will comply with our mandates. It is psychopathic and deranged, and the fact that it is typically cheered on by the likes of Mark Levin -- people who plainly lack feelings of physical power themselves -- is not insignificant. The contrived chest-beating and transparent desire to feel like a feared warrior, with none of the risk, is manifest, and it is what has shaped our foreign policy for the last five years and, by all appearances, continues to do so.

Levin's second post spews contempt at this Op-Ed by Bush 41 National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Scowcroft commits the grave neoconservative sin of advocating the ultimate evil -- a peace plan for the Middle East. Levin's response demonstrates just how radical neoconservatives are:

Thank goodness Brent Scowcroft is no longer influencing U.S. foreign policy. He helped bring the Middle East to its current point, and should be dismissed as another failed diplomat. Scowcroft, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton — all failures ... which means the Big Media will continue to seek out their views.

To neconservatives, everything that made the U.S. a respected superpower over the last six decades is all obsolete and worthless. To them, foreign policy experts from both political parties are responsible for 9/11 and the rise of Islamic extremism because they believe too much in diplomacy and restraint. They didn't wage enough wars and the wars they did wage weren't ferocious enough. There weren't enough Qanas, and as a result, we aren't sufficiently feared. People around the world need to know that they either comply with our instructins or fire and brimstone will rain upon their heads.

I still consider Jonah Goldberg's explanation for why he favored the invasion of Iraq to be the Gold Standard for illustrating the impulses which lay at the heart of the neoconservative syndrome:

Q: If you're a kid and you've had enough of the school bullies pants-ing you in the cafeteria, what's one of the smartest things you can do?

A: Punch one of them in the nose as hard as you can and then stand your ground.

That is why we hear that the "people who are fighting this war" include Michael Ledeen, Cliff May, and Mark Steyn. It's why we hear someone like Jonah Goldberg -- who still has to move his nepotistic umbilical cord so that it doesn't get in the way when he types -- warn us in his best tough-guy, no-nonsense voice that we are becoming "A Nation of Wimps" because "Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children." This is all about a personal craving for feelings of power and superior strength, to be fulfilled through endless war waged on those who have not been placed in sufficient fear of our warrior greatness.

All of this is why George Will recently called neoconservatism a "spectacularly misnamed radicalism." It is opposed to every guiding principle of American foreign policy under both political parties, and seeks to transform the U.S. into a rogue state which operates with no moral limits or ethical constraints, and for which unrestrained war is always the preferred option. All failures can be and are explained away by the fact that we just haven't killed enough people yet. It is homicidal madness, real derangement, masquerading as some sort of serious philosophy, and it is a true indictment of our political life that its advocates are taken seriously at all, let alone often listened to at the highest levels of our government.

UPDATE: Mr. Montalban at Sadly, No uses the Mark Steyn column referenced above to explore some of the ideological antecedents, as it were, to neoconservatism, which have devolved into nothing more complex than this: "(Steyn's) main point is crystallized around the reference to John Podhoretz’s recent whine that the West may lack the stones to do what it really needs to do: commit genocide on the filthy wogs." As noted in the post below, John Hinderaker offered us this weekend the only-slightly-more-dignified corporate lawyer version of this homicidal theme. It is the sentiment that has been darkly lurking in our foreign policy for some time, and which -- mobilized by the excitement over the "Great Opportunity" in the Middle East -- is now parading itself around for all to see.

The "terrorist" trick

The most used and exploited word in our political dialogue, both domestic and foreign, is also the least clearly defined -- "terrorist." In the hands of the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters, it basically means "anyone who dislikes us or whom we want to kill."

Here is David Brooks in his New York Times column this morning discussing the Israel-Lebanon war:

There are victory markers strewn across southern Lebanon commemorating the last time Israel withdrew from that land. While reporting a piece for The New Yorker a few years ago, Jeffrey Goldberg would come upon them by the roads. It was like seeing the battle markers at Gettysburg or Antietam, he wrote.

One brightly colored sign, written in both Arabic and (rough) English, marked the spot where “On Oct. 19, 1988 at 1:25 p.m. a martyr car that was body trapped with 500 kilograms of highly exploding materials transformed two Israeli troops into masses of fire and limbs.”

Busloads of tourists would take victory tours and stop at the prominent sights. Before the current war, there were gift shops and, in at least one place, a poster showing a Hezbollah fighter lifting a severed Israeli head. It all testified to the magnetism of a successful idea: that Muslim greatness can be restored through terrorism.

If one country (Israel) invades and then occupies another (Lebanon), and people in the invaded country resist the invasion by killing some of the invading/occupying soldiers, is that really "terrorism"? Which countries would just allow other countries to invade and occupy with no resistance? Clearly, Hezbollah engages in acts of terrorism, whatever definition one wants to use for that term. But the killing of soldiers from an invading country cannot possibly constitute "terrorism" if that word is to have any value beyond its use as a political tool.

Throughout the 2004 presidential election, the Bush campaign endlessly wielded this rhetorical tactic, casting the war in Iraq as a war against "the terrorists" by defining the Iraqi insurgents not as Iraqis resisting invasion but as "terrorists." With that premise in place, those who favored the war in Iraq by definition favored fighting the "terrorists", while those who opposed the war by definition wanted to stop fighting the "terrorists" -- and as a result, real debate over the war, as intended, became impossible. After all, "terrorists" are the people who flew those planes into our buildings. Who could oppose waging war on them -- the "terrorists"?

But once safely re-elected, the President in 2005 gave one of his speeches designed to pass along to Americans one of the tutorials he received about what was going on in Iraq, and in doing so, he admitted that the vast, vast majority of people whom we are fighting in Iraq are not "terrorists" at all, but merely Sunni "rejectionists" who favor a system of government which preserves long-standing Sunni privileges in Iraq:

A clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein -- and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group.

This semantic deceit lays at the heart of virtually every Bush administration abuse and every warmongers' crazed dreams. Torture against allegedly suspected "terrorists" is fine because "terrorists don't deserve rights." Warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is fine because who doesn't want our government to listen in on the "conversations of the terrorists"? The bombing of all of Lebanon is justified because we have to kill "the terrorists." We can even openly entertain mass, indiscriminate bombings of civilians throughout the Middle East because we need to be brutal and merciless against the "terrorists". This tactic is, unsurprisingly, vividly illustrated by a John Hinderaker Powerline post from yesterday:

Anti-terror policy no doubt involves complexities at various points, but the fundamental principle, I think, is quite simple. There are two kinds of terrorists: live terrorists and dead ones. The basic object of anti-terror policy should be to turn the former into the latter. As long as that process is proceeding satisfactorily, it should continue. The time for a cease-fire, it seems to me, is when Hezbollah has more or less run out of live terrorists. I don't think that moment has yet arrived.

So that's our "simple" and "fundamental principle." The only thing we really need to know is that we need to kill as many "terrorists" as possible. In the abstract, most people won't consider that all that controversial; after all, who opposes the killing of the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks or other similar acts of slaughter of civilians? Somehow, though, this "kill-the-terrorists" mandate is endlessly expanded and then used to justify the Israeli bombing of all of Lebanon, presumably because all of the people who are dying there are "terrorists," even the Lebanese civilians.

Digby recently illustrated the dangers of using "terrorism" as the centerpiece of American policies all while keeping it as an elastic and infinitely expansive term, free of any real definitional limits:

I suspect one reason Newt Gingrich and his fellow nutballs are working overtime to get this WWIII business playing in people's heads is because to Americans the GWOT remains vague and ill-defined. They have yet to sign on to this existential struggle against well --- everybody, or at least a bunch of people they don't even know, forever. Are the French terrorists? They must be because we are supposed to hate them. How about the Mexicans who are invading our borders? Newt keeps bringing up Venezuela as part of our epic struggle against terrorism. And North Korea is a charter member of the Axis 'o Evil, so we know they are terrorists. Who are we fighting again?

If we are going accept fundamental changes to how our system of government operates in order to catch the "terrorists," and if we are going to wage one war after the next in order to kill all the "terrorists," shouldn't we at least know what that means? David Brooks clearly has no idea what it means, or at least recognizes that it is a term that is now impoverished of all meaning and exists only as a manipulative tool. Alan Dershowitz wants to disqualify human beings as counting as "civilians" if they are even near the "terrorists." Shouldn't those who want to use "terrorism" to justify all sorts of slaughter and war and abolition of basic constitutional protections at least say what they mean by that term?

Remember Iraq?

(updated below)

One of the most bizarre and disturbing media phenomena in some time is the very sudden, and virtually complete, disappearance of the war in Iraq from the media radar. That country is literally falling apart, engulfed by what even war proponents are acknowledging increasingly appears to be an inevitable civil war and growing anarchy. And yet for the last week, Iraq was barely discussed, save for a completely inconsequential gossipy sideshow about whether the Democrats did something which the Republicans would never, ever do -- namely, exploit a national security matter (Prime Minister Maliki's condemnation of Israel) for political gain.

For the media, new wars are always more exciting than old wars, but the Israel-Lebanon war is not (yet) "our war," despite the zealous dreams of American warmongers. What is very much our war is the true disaster taking place in Iraq. What is going on there is not just devastating for Iraqis -- although it is very much that -- but for American national security as well. And yet the proponents of this war seem to be eager to simply forget the whole thing and just move on to their next little project, blithely accepting the fact that Iraq is going to be engulfed by civil war and anarchy and that there is not much we can do about it.

But there is no greater danger to American national security than the complete mess which war proponents have made of Iraq, and to know that, one can just listen to what they themselves have been saying for the last several years. Let's use war proponent Joe Lieberman as an example.

Here is what Sen. Lieberman said in an October 7, 2002 speech when explaining why he was one of four sponsors in the Senate of the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq:

But we must understand that the ultimate measure of a war's success is the quality of the peace that follows. If, in the aftermath, we leave the Iraqi people to fend for themselves in chaos and squalor, without more freedom or opportunity, we will end up hindering, not advancing, the wider war against terrorism and slowing, not speeding, the world's march toward democracy and the rule of law.

And when Sen. Lieberman spoke at the Brookings Institute on April 26, 2004 -- when he, in essence, urged Democrats in an election year to stop being so critical of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq -- Sen. Lieberman warned that our national security depends upon what the outcome in Iraq will be, and made clear that a chaotic, violent Iraq would be devastating to American security:

I repeat, the outcome of this new war in Iraq will have enormous consequences for the people of Iraq, America and the world. If our enemies prevail and America retreats, Iraqis will face chaos, or a dictatorship, or both. The Iraqi domino could fall backwards as easily as it could fall forwards, and topple hopes for democracy throughout the Middle East. The region would be profoundly destabilized, which would gravely endanger American security, and the fanatical Islamic terrorists will be emboldened to take more aggressive actions against people in America, Europe and the Islamic world. The safety of our children’s future would be greatly endangered.

In March of 2004 on the Senate floor, Sen. Lieberman similarly warned: "If we fail to stop these insurgents and lose the peace in Iraq, we will condemn the Iraqi people to relentless violence, the Middle East will be destabilized, and we will give the forces of worldwide terrorism new confidence, new energy and new resources to attack us."

For exactly those reasons, the proponents of the destruction of Iraq have single-handedly done more damage to American national security than all other groups combined. And having insisted for years that the fate of the free world and American security hangs in the balance in Iraq, they now just want to forget about the whole thing, pretend it never happened, and shut their eyes to the disaster they created and which they so plainly cannot control.

It isn't just that our occupation of this imploding country is being ignored by the media. What is so striking is the way which Iraq is now being talked about. It is purely surreal how the primary challenge to Sen. Lieberman is described -- in a way that is intended to be dismissive, to belittle it -- as all stemming from just one little, tiny disagreement: Iraq. Gosh, Sen. Lieberman is such a great Senator -- he votes the right way on the environment and everything -- and all he did was make one little mistake -- Iraq -- and now everyone is turning on him. That is so irrational and mean and unfair.

It is the proponents of this invasion who have insisted that Iraq is the centerpiece of American national security, that it is the primary front in the war on terror, that failure is not an option, etc. etc. They used their militaristic posture in Iraq -- and the "appeasing weakness" of opponents of the invasion -- to win two consecutive national elections. And now that the extent of the damage they created is too glaring to be denied, they want to walk away from it all, insist that it's unfair to hold them accountable for it, and hope that the media moves on to more interesting and exciting adventures than the plodding, depressing collapse of Iraq.

But along with the assault being waged on the rule of law domestically, Iraq is the political issue of our time. Our preemptive, disastrous invasion of that country has fundamentally changed not just the perception of America's character around the world, but America's national character itself. We spawned chaos, militia rule, and a sectarian civil war in the middle of the most inflammable region on the planet, and did so while knowing that chaos and lawlessness are exactly the conditions in which terrorists groups thrive.

And we have no idea of how far things will unravel, of how far and wide this violence and instability will spread. But there is no greater danger to American national security -- no more potent ally of terrorism -- than the implosion of Iraq that our invasion created. And to know that, one can simply look at what the war proponents have been saying for the last four years.

What rationale exists for not holding accountable the architects and authors and advocates of this debacle? It is not irrational that political challenges are being made against war proponents. What would be irrational is if there were no such challenges. Those who advocated this invasion -- and, worse, those who continued to insist that things were going well long past the time when it was clear that such claims were false -- have revealed themselves to be completely lacking in judgment if not integrity and honesty. It is self-evident that removing that faction from political power is a critical goal, arguably the most critical.

It really seems as though the "plan" now in Iraq is just to step back and allow the whole country to collapse. That impression is strongly bolstered by the fact that war proponents seem eager to ignore Iraq and focus on other matters just as the civil war and destruction of that country seems to be reaching the point of no return. War proponents continuously argued that chaos, violence and instability in Iraq would be a grave threat to American security and a great ally of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. And yet exactly that situation has resulted from our invasion, and now the proponents of the war -- and apparently much of the media -- want to just forget about all of that.

UPDATE: Via Atrios, it seems that Lieberman himself yesterday "suggested that he wanted to move the debate away from the war. 'We’re going to try hard to focus this back on the issues that I think really are ultimately more important to the future of families in Connecticut: jobs, health care, education,'" he said.

Somehow, the war went from having "enormous consequences for the people of Iraq, America and the world" to being something that isn't really all that important to talk about.

Why is being right or wrong on Iraq so irrelevant?

(updated below)

With more and more prominent administration supporters now admitting that our invasion of Iraq has turned out to be a disaster, and acknowledging that a vicious and tragic religious civil war is rapidly unfolding, it is worth recalling what Howard Dean was saying prior to the invasion about why he thought it was ill-advised based on the evidence that we knew then.

Dean was pilloried by virtually all Republicans, by many Democrats and by the national media -- not only for his opposition to the war but also for the rationale on which he predicated that opposition. As a result of his belief that we ought to at least wait until we knew for sure if Saddam had WMDs before we started a war, Dean was relentlessly depicted as a fringe, irresponsible, appeasing lunatic who knew nothing about foreign policy or the grave dangers we face in the world.

Here are excerpts from a speech Dean gave on February 17, 2003 -- just over a month before we invaded -- at Drake University:

I believe it is my patriotic duty to urge a different path to protecting America's security: To focus on al Qaeda, which is an imminent threat, and to use our resources to improve and strengthen the security and safety of our home front and our people while working with the other nations of the world to contain Saddam Hussein. . . .

Had I been a member of the Senate, I would have voted against the resolution that authorized the President to use unilateral force against Iraq - unlike others in that body now seeking the presidency.

To this day, the President has not made a case that war against Iraq, now, is necessary to defend American territory, our citizens, our allies, or our essential interests.

The Administration has not explained how a lasting peace, and lasting security, will be achieved in Iraq once Saddam Hussein is toppled.

I, for one, am not ready to abandon the search for better answers.

As a doctor, I was trained to treat illness, and to examine a variety of options before deciding which to prescribe. I worried about side effects and took the time to see what else might work before proceeding to high-risk measures. . . .

We have been told over and over again what the risks will be if we do not go to war.

We have been told little about what the risks will be if we do go to war.

If we go to war, I certainly hope the Administration's assumptions are realized, and the conflict is swift, successful and clean. I certainly hope our armed forces will be welcomed like heroes and liberators in the streets of Baghdad. I certainly hope Iraq emerges from the war stable, united and democratic. I certainly hope terrorists around the world conclude it is a mistake to defy America and cease, thereafter, to be terrorists.

It is possible, however, that events could go differently, and that the Iraqi Republican Guard will not sit out in the desert where they can be destroyed easily from the air.

It is possible that Iraq will try to force our troops to fight house to house in the middle of cities - on its turf, not ours - where precision-guided missiles are of little use. . . .

There are other risks. Iraq is a divided country, with Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions that share both bitter rivalries and access to large quantities of arms.

Iran and Turkey each have interests in Iraq they will be tempted to protect with or without our approval. . . .

Some people simply brush aside these concerns, saying there were also a lot of dire predictions before the first Gulf War, and that those didn't come true.

We have learned through experience to have confidence in our armed forces - and that confidence is very well deserved.

But if you talk to military leaders, they will tell you there is a big difference between pushing back the Iraqi armed forces in Kuwait and trying to defeat them on their home ground.

There are limits to what even our military can do. Technology is not the solution to every problem.

Dean also warned that getting mired and distracted in Iraq would enable Kim Il Jong to build up North Korea's nuclear threat, and that "North Korea is a far greater danger to world peace than Iraq." And this is what Dean said about Colin Powell's oh-so-convincing effort at the U.N. to convince the world that Saddam had WMDs: " I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness. . ."

Was there anything Dean was wrong about or his critics right about? And that was just all in one speech. But it sure was fun to ridicule Howard Dean and all the pacifistic, American-hating losers who supported him. Apparently, the fun of doing that hasn't subsided one bit, despite the fact that Dean was not just right, but prescient in almost everything he said about Iraq.

The real geniuses in the national media and both political parties back then knew that Saddam had WMD's, that it would be so very easy for us to invade and get rid of the weapons and set up the country we wanted. Anyone who said otherwise was just an appeasing hysteric. All that depressing talk about civil wars and insurgencies was just the defeatist paranoia of weaklings who were the new Neville Chamberlains.

And this went on even after the invasion. In December, 2003, Dean's questioning of whether the capture of Saddam really made American safer subjected him to great ridicule from most corners. And when Dean, in December 2005, compared Iraq to Vietnam by pointing out that there was no reason to stay any longer if we couldn't fulfill our objectives, he was again widely ridiculed and attacked, and labelled a coward and a traitor.

This is worth noting not because all of that was conventional wisdom back then, but because -- unfathomably -- it is still the conventional wisdom. Howard Dean is still considered a far left extremist who is completely "unserious" about national security and whose party -- all together now -- can't be trusted with national security.

If you want to know what the U.S. should do about the new Middle East war and any other complex, grave national security matter, you have to talk to Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes and Stephen Hadley and Peter Beinart and Joe Lieberman and John McCain and Tom Friedman and Rich Lowry and Newt Gingrich and all the other "serious" tough guys who might have been wrong about every single thing they said about Iraq but, for some reason that is impossible to discern, are supposed to be the only ones with any credibility on these questions -- still. But whatever you do, just don't listen to Howard Dean or anyone of his ilk, no matter how right he might have been about Iraq.

UPDATE: Billmon reminds us of the type of tough guy, know-everything rhetoric to which the Howard Deans of the world were subjected -- this from, appropriately enough, David Frum and Richard Perle in their crazed war-mongering book: "Now the pessimists are quivering because the remnants of the Baath Party have launched a guerrilla war against the allied forces in Iraq." Guys like Frum and Perle were way too smart and tough to do anything so weak and scared like "quiver" over something as meaningless and irrelevant as the Iraqi insurgency, which barely even existed.

And just compare Dean's pre-war predictions to those of serious military genius Paul Wolfowitz, testifying before Congress in February, 2003 -- the same time Dean gave his speech quoted above:

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

And then there's Peter Beinart, who, despite being wrong about virtually everything with Iraq, continues to run around lecturing those who were right about how dumb, frivolous and unprincipled they are when it comes to foreign policy. It's almost like being completely wrong is some sort of badge of intellectual and moral honor, while being right is a sign of "unseriousness."

Even neoconservatives now accepting defeat in Iraq

David Frum was one of the leading neoconservative advocates of the invasion of Iraq. The former Bush speechwriter is a true believer, having co-authored a radical neoconservative book with Richard Perle entitled An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, which -- according to its publisher -- "calls for the United States to overthrow the government of Iran, abandon support of a Palestinian state, blockade North Korea, use strong-arm tactics with Syria and China, disregard much of Europe as allies, and sever ties with Saudi Arabia."

But in a strikingly candid essay on his National Review blog yesterday, Frum all but admits that the U.S. invasion of Iraq has been a failure, and says that the only realistic goal we can hope to achieve is preventing Iraq from becoming a training ground for Al Qaeda -- a goal which was already achieved, of course, prior to our invasion:

Hands up, everybody who believes that the "hundreds" of troops that the Pentagon plans to move from the rest of Iraq into Baghdad will suffice to secure the capital against the sectarian militias now waging war upon the civilian populations of the city? Anybody? No, I didn't think so.

To take back the capital from the militias that now terrorize it will take thousands, not hundreds, of American plus tens of thousands of Iraqis. . . . So a real plan for success in Baghdad will have to be built upon additional troops from out of area, potentially raising US troop levels back up to the 150,000 or so of late 2005.

Manifestly, neither the administration nor the Congress will contemplate such a move. Which means, most likely, continuing violence in Iraq and a continuing rise in the power of the militias, especially the Iranian-backed Shiite militias: the Hezbollah of Iraq.

Frum has been arguing for the last five years, at least, that Iran is an evil supporter of international terrorism and a monumental threat to the U.S. Indeed, Frum is credited with creating the phrase "axis of evil" when he was at the Bush White House, which famously included Iran, and even now is agitating for confrontation with Iran. And yet, by Frum's own admission, the invasion of Iraq which he and his comrades so desperately wanted, has delivered control of Iraq into the hands of our arch Iranian enemies, and Frum admits that the U.S. has no realistic hope of doing anything to reverse that result.

Frum now admits that the sectarian civil war will rage on until Shiites assert total dominion over Baghdad and all of Southern Iraq, at which point "Baghdad - and therefore central Iraq - will in such a case slide after Basra and the south into the unofficial new Iranian empire." About this result, Frum admits: "The consequences for the region and the world will be grim."

Admitting that the Bush administration, in an election year, will not deploy additional troops to Iraq, Frum says that the best we can hope for in Iraq is the essentially defeatist plan urged in a New York Times Op-Ed by Bill Clinton's Ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith. Galbriath points out that the Iraqi government actually governs nothing beyond the Green Zone in Baghdad and that -- as Frum accepts -- it is impossible for the U.S. to stop the civil war or re-take control from Shiite militias without substantially increasing our troop presence there.

With those premises in place, Galbriath advocates -- and, notably, Frum accepts -- that the U.S. military should withdraw entirely from the Sunni region and re-deploy as a small “over the horizon” force in Kurdistan. The rationale for Galbraith's plan is this:

Seeing as we cannot maintain the peace in Iraq, we have but one overriding interest there today — to keep Al Qaeda from creating a base from which it can plot attacks on the United States. Thus we need to have troops nearby prepared to re-engage in case the Sunni Arabs prove unable to provide for their own security against the foreign jihadists. . . .

Yes, a United States withdrawal from the Shiite and Sunni Arab regions of Iraq would leave behind sectarian conflict and militia rule. But staying with the current force and mission will produce the same result. Continuing a military strategy where the ends far exceed the means is a formula for war without end.

So that's what our mission in Iraq has been reduced to -- ceding most of Iraq to Iranian control and acknowledging that a civil war is now inevitable and we can do nothing to stop it. Worse, the only thing we can possibly hope to accomplish is to prevent Al Qaeda from turning Iraq into its new terrorist training ground, something it was entirely incapable of doing prior to our invasion.

Put another way, in exchange for the thousands of lives lost, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, and destruction of U.S. credibility as a result of our invasion, the best we can hope for is what we already had -- a situation where Al Qaeda cannot run free in Iraq -- along with a vicious civil war and control by Iranian mullahs over most of Iraq. And that is what one of the leading neconservative advocates of the war is saying.

Americans have long ago recognized what even David Frum (though, notably, not Joe Lieberman) now admits -- that our invasion of Iraq will produce no real benefits and that our continued presence there can achieve nothing. The newly released NYT-CBS poll shows that a solid majority of Americans favor "a timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq" -- precisely what the President most steadfastly refuses to accept. With even David Frum endorsing a close permutation of the "over the horizon" re-deployment which Jack Murtha months ago advocated, Democrats should have no trouble unifying on this issue and advocating that Republicans should be turned out of office for stubbornly and destructively clinging to the prosecution of a war which cannot possibly achieve any good.

When Howard Dean, in the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture, questioned whether the invasion of Iraq would make the U.S. "safer," he was ridiculed by virtually everyone as a radical and a lunatic, with the ridicule led by Joe Lieberman. But reality has become too overwhelming for all but the most manipulative political figures to deny. As a result, there are very few people left willing to defend the invasion and occupation as anything other than a disaster, but the remaining holdouts happen to be sitting in the White House (and in one of Connecticut's Senate seats). That discrepency is disastrous for American interests, but is an excellent opportunity for Democrats to finally make the case that this administration has been a failure on every level, not just including -- but especially -- in the area of national security.

Celebrating UN deaths - acknowledging civil wars - blocking judicial review

(updated below - updated again - and updated again)

Several items of note:

(1) Here's another item to discuss in the next newspaper article about the "Angry Left": members of the Little Green Footballs community last night celebrate the death by Israeli bombing of four UN peacekeepers (UPDATE - the proprieter of LGF is apparently (and understandably) embarrassed by the comments appearing on his site and has therefore re-directed the link I had to that page to another blog. He has not, however, removed the comments from his blog).

5- I would not put it against the Israelites, nor hold it against them, to have targeted this position based on the revelation, yesterday, that Indian UN 'peacekeepers' were complicent in the kidnapping/murder of Israelites, earlier.

20 - Too bad Kofi wasn't there, too.

22 - So what is Koffi going to do about it even if they did? I understand the paper cuts from a strongly worded letter can really hurt if desert sand gets in them. We are all at war with the UN, time to admit it.

37- I'm finding it hard to feel bad for these so-called peacekeepers. Most of them blindly shilled for Hezbollah while attacking Israel.

I do not believe that Israel intentionally targeted them, but even if they did, their anti-Israeli propaganda made them a fair target in this war. Much like the trial and execution of people like Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose. Anything that would help bolster Hezobllah's morale has to be seen as a weapon.

38 - I know it sounds a bit harsh, but I wish that it were deliberate, and that Israel came right out and said so.

All the UN seems to do is rape children, enable terrorists and act openly hostile towards Israel, If I'm Israel, I say any UN 'Peacekeeping' teams in the region will also be subject to attack.

63 - On the other hand, who could blame Israel for not shedding great big tears for the blue-helmeted terror enablers?

70 - I never wish death on anybody (well, most anybody) and it is a tragedy that two people died but...

I be laughing my ass off if somebody launched one right in Kofi's office while he was groping his secretary.

That was just from the first 100 comments (more here). Consider the mindest required to celebrate the death of U.N. peacekeepers. It's time for another news article on the Angry Left.

(2) Don Rumsfeld gave a little noticed press briefing yesterday after meeting with the Iraqi Prime Minister and, rather remarkably, refused to deny that Iraq is in the midst of a "civil war" (but he explained that whatever one wants to call it, it's not all that bad, because it's only raging wildly and uncontrollably in 3 of 17 Iraqi provinces):

Q. Is the country closer to a civil war?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Oh, I don't know. You know, I thought about that last night, and just musing over the words, the phrase, and what constitutes it. If you think of our Civil War, this is really very different. If you think of civil wars in other countries, this is really quite different. There is -- there is a good deal of violence in Baghdad and two or three other provinces, and yet in 14 other provinces there's very little violence or numbers of incidents. So it's a -- it's a highly concentrated thing. It clearly is being stimulated by people who would like to have what could be characterized as a civil war and win it, but I'm not going to be the one to decide if, when or at all.

If even Don Rumsfeld acknowledges the possibility that Iraq now has a civil war, that is a rather potent indication of what is going on in that country.

(3) The significance of the Bush administration's defeat last week in the EFF/AT&T federal court case was illustrated by yesterday's dismissal by a federal court in Chicago of a different lawsuit brought by the ACLU against AT&T, this one challenging the legality of AT&T's cooperation with the Bush administration's domestic telephone data-collection program. The Bush administration, as always, invoked the "state secrets" doctrine in this case to claim that the federal court could not litigate the claims without risking disclosure of state secrets, and the federal judge accepted -- as federal judges almost always do -- the administration's assertion that "state secrets" would be revealed merely by AT&T's confirmation or denial of their participation in this program. That is why it was so remarkable when the EFF/AT&T judge outright rejected that claim last week -- because it was such a rare departure from the federal courts' deference to the executive's invocation of this doctrine.

This Chicago case presented a more difficult challenge than did the EFF case for the plaintiffs to overcome the "state secrets" assertion. Whereas the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program has been confirmed by the administration (thereby making it hard to argue that its existence is a "state secret"), the administration has never confirmed the existence of the data-collection program. Nonetheless, well-sourced news reports, along with Republicans in Congress, have confirmed the existence of this likely illegal effort to chronicle all domestic calls made or received by all Americans. But the administration has, yet again, prevented a judicial determination as to whether its behavior is legal.

The administration plainly believes that it is entitled to engage in conduct which violates the law while blocking courts from ruling on the legality that behavior. What is the point of having laws if political officials can violate them and then immunize themselves from being held accountable in a court of law -- as the Bush administration, at least thus far, has successfully done?

(4) It is difficult to chronicle at once all of the dangers and abuses of the Specter FISA bill because they are so numerous. One of the more pernicious aspects of it that has been overlooked is that, as Bill Weaver points out, it mandates that all legal questions surrounding warrantless eavesdropping -- including the question of its constitutionality -- be decided by the FISA court, which means that (a) only one side will be present in court to argue these issues (the Bush administration) and (b) all proceedings, including the decision itself, may very well be secret.

It is one thing for specific warrant applications to be conducted in secret, with only one side present, and with even the decision itself always sealed from the public -- the standard operating procedures for the FISA court. But those procedures are so plainly inappropriate for deciding critical questions of constitutional law which determine the protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights to all Americans against the Government. The parameters of the Fourth Amendment and decisions as to whether our highest government officials have been continuously violating it cannot possibly be determined in secret and then kept secret from American citizens.

But that is what would likely happen with the Specter bill. Add that to the list of reasons as to why defeat of the Specter bill is so urgent.

UPDATE:

(5) Oddly, the very pro-Israel New York Sun says that the Israel-U.N. incident "could prove a turning point in Israel's war to rid its northern border of Hezbollah." I don't see why that would be the case. Almost every war has incidents of this sort. The U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killed a group of Canadian troops in Afghanistan in an F-16 strike, and shot missiles at media offices in Baghdad. Incidents of this type are not uncommon.

Additionally, it was somewhat surprising that Kofi Annan would so quickly and impulsively make such serious accusations against Israel -- namely, that the bombing of the U.N. observation post was "deliberate," rather than accidental. That may well be the case, but it may very well not be, and it is hard to see how Annan could know that already.

Either way, I don't see how this incident will have much of an effect on what Israel is doing. Those who were already opposed to Israel's conduct will use this incident to confirm their views, and those who defend Israel's conduct will simply dismiss its importance as an unfortunate and inevitable part of war, and they'll blame Hezbollah (and the ambitious ones will blame Syrian and Iran). Israel and the U.S. have already decided that world opinion will not impede what they are doing here, rendering this incident inconsequential, at least in terms of the effect it will have on the war.

UPDATE II:

(6) As Steve Benen notes, the The Washington Post this morning has published an editorial responding to Arlen Specter's frivolous Op-Ed on Monday. The whole editorial is devoted to explaining basic constitutional law principles to Specter and warns: "would thereby legitimize not only whatever the NSA may now be doing but lots of other surveillance it might dream up." For whatever reasons, Democratic Senators listen to the Post editorial page, and if the Post is going to be serious and devoted in its opposition to that bill, that would unquestionably be helpful in inducing the Senate Democrats to consider a filibuster.

UPDATE III:

(7) I wouldn't say that this factual account of the Israeli bombing from the Guardian justifies Kofi Annan's accusation that the bombing was "deliberate" -- that is an accusation which ought not to be made absent definitive proof, especially in such volatile circumstances -- but if the facts in the Guardian story are accurate, it would certainly lend support to the claim that the Israelis were, at the very least, completely reckless with regard to the lives of the U.N. peacekeepers.

What makes someone a "chicken hawk"?

Jeff Jacoby launched an impassioned attack in The Boston Globe on Sunday against what he calls "the chicken hawk slur," an attack which was widely hailed by many who apparently feel they've been unfairly smeared with the term. But in order to attack the "chicken hawk" argument, Jacoby completely distorted what it actually means:

"Chicken hawk" isn't an argument. It is a slur -- a dishonest and incoherent slur. It is dishonest because those who invoke it don't really mean what they imply -- that only those with combat experience have the moral authority or the necessary understanding to advocate military force.

That is simply not what "chicken hawk" means, and it is less than forthright of Jacoby to mis-define the concept in order to argue against it. Although there is no formal definition for it, the "chicken hawk" criticism is not typically made against someone who merely (a) advocates a war but (b) will not fight in that war and/or has never fought in any war (although, admittedly, there are those who mis-use the term that way). After all, the vast majority of Americans in both political parties meet that definition. The war in Afghanistan was supported by roughly 90% of Americans, as was the first Persian Gulf War, even though only a tiny fraction of war supporters would actually fight in those wars which they advocated.

Something more than mere support for a war without fighting in it is required to earn the "chicken hawk" label. Chicken-hawkism is the belief that advocating a war from afar is a sign of personal courage and strength, and that opposing a war from afar is a sign of personal cowardice and weakness. A "chicken hawk" is someone who not merely advocates a war, but believes that their advocacy is proof of the courage which those who will actually fight the war in combat require.

Just this week, Bill Kristol, writing in the Weekly Standard in order to urge U.S. intervention in the Israeli war, argued that those who want the U.S. to intervene in that war are "strong horses" and those who oppose such intervention are "weak horses." Accordingly, to Kristol, E.J. Dionne, Richard Cohen, and George Will are all "weak horses," because they wrote columns arguing against increased U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern wars. By contrast, Kristol is a "strong horse" because he wants to send other people off to fight in more wars.

Kristol believes that his desire for other people to go fight more wars in the Middle East makes him not only wise (which it might), but also courageous, resolute and "strong" (which it most certainly does not). The flaw in Kristol's perception is not that he wants the U.S. to fight a war which he does not plan to fight himself, but rather, that he assigns to himself the courage and strength of those who will actually fight the war, simply because he sits in his office, protected and safe, and advocates that the war be fought.

Over and over again, those who simply advocate a war in which the lives of other people will be risked label themselves strong and courageous. National Review's Cliff May this week argued that those who advocate wars are warriors every bit as much as those who actually fight them. Conversely, pro-war advocates frequently ascribe qualities of weakness, spinelessness, cowardice, hysteria, and anti-American subversiveness -- not to mention being “small hollow men [who] are the equivalent of those grubby little Nazis” -- to anyone who is against the war in Iraq or who favors an end to our occupation there sooner rather than later.

This dynamic requires criticism because it is so irrational, false and manipulative. There is nothing courageous or strong about wanting to send other people to war or to keep them in wars that have already been started. And there is nothing weak or cowardly about opposing the commencement of a war in which others will bear the risks. To the extent courage and cowardice play a role in war advocacy at all, one could argue that those who blithely want to send other people off to war in order to protect themselves against every potential risk are driven by fear and weakness. And those who are less fearful will require a much higher level of personal threat before believing that it is desirable and just to send other people off to risk their lives.

It is certainly true, as Jacoby argues, that whether someone has fought previously in a war neither proves nor disproves the wisdom of their foreign policy views, nor is prior military service a prerequisite for participating in debates over whether the U.S. should go to war. But one's views about whether the U.S. should fight a war that will bring little or no risk to the advocate has nothing to do with personal courage or strength. The term "101st Keyboard Brigade" mocks not those who merely support wars, but who strut around as though their support for the war means that they are fighting it, and who consequently apply the warrior attributes to themselves (and the coward/deserter attributes to war opponents).

A "chicken hawk" is one who strikes the pose of a warrior, who imputes the personal courage of a soldier in combat to themselves by virtue of the fact that they are in favor of sending that soldier off to war, or who parades around with the pretense of personal courage and resolve while assuming none of the risks. And a "chicken hawk" will, conversely, attempt to depict those who oppose such wars as being weak, spineless and cowardly even though the war opponents are not seeking to avoid any personal risk to themselves, but instead, are arguing against subjecting their fellow citizens to what they perceive are unnecessary dangers.

There certainly is an argument to make that those who will incur the risks of war are more likely to think carefully and soberly about whether to start one than those who can urge on wars without risks. It is, for instance, much more difficult for Israelis to urge war with Lebanon than it is for Americans sitting comfortably out of reach of Hezbollah rockets to do so. And it was much more difficult for European monarchs to choose war when their own children would fight on the front lines than it is for American Senators and administration officials whose family members won't fight to make the same choice. And indeed, the Founders mandated in the Constitution that only Congress could declare war because they knew war would be less likely if those who bore the burden (which they assumed would be the nation's citizens) were required to approve of any wars. Despite all of that, one can still advocate a war in a risk-free position without being a "chicken hawk."

A "chicken hawk" is one who fails to recognize these logical principles by desperately equating advocacy of wars with fighting a war itself, or opposition to wars with running away from risks. "Chicken hawks" are not those who simply urge war without fighting in it, but who urge war and then pretend that doing so makes them courageous, powerful and strong. They are the ones who use dichotomies such as strong/weak, resolute/spineless, and courageous/cowardly to describe not those who fight or run away from wars, but those who encourage or oppose wars from a safe distance.

Time for a new war yet?

(updated below)

The new war in the Middle East has almost completely eclipsed the old war in Iraq, at precisely the time that Iraq appears to be on the verge of total collapse. How are things going in Iraq? Here is yesterday's article by The Independent's Patrick Cockburn, the Middle East correspondent who has been reporting from Iraq for several years (h/t Billmon):

The Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, meets Tony Blair in London today as violence in Iraq reaches a new crescendo and senior Iraqi officials say the break up of the country is inevitable.

"Iraq as a political project is finished," a senior government official was quoted as saying, adding: "The parties have moved to plan B." He said that the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties were now looking at ways to divide Iraq between them and to decide the future of Baghdad, where there is a mixed population. "There is serious talk of Baghdad being divided into [Shia] east and [Sunni] west," he said. . . .

But he painted a picture of a deeply divided administration in which senior Sunni members praised anti-government insurgents as "the heroic resistance".

Granted, the sources on whom Cockburn is relying likely have an interest in promoting a picture of chaos, but whatever else might be true, it is clear that the situation in Iraq is growing increasingly desperate and all sides are undoubtedly seriously considering every option, including partition along sectarian lines. Independently, news report leave no doubt that the security situation has worsened considerably, and Cockburn reports that this is because the Maliki Government is incapable of doing much of anything outside of the Green Zone:

Mr Maliki, who is said to be increasingly isolated, has failed to prevent the violence. Other Iraqi leaders claim he lacks experience in dealing with security, is personally very isolated without a kitchen cabinet and is highly dependent on 30-40 Americans in unofficial advisory positions around him.

"The government is all in the Green Zone like the previous one and they have left the streets to the terrorists," said Mahmoud Othman, a veteran Iraqi politician. He said the situation would be made worse by the war in Lebanon because it would intensify the struggle between Iran and the US being staged in Iraq. The Iraqi crisis would now receive much reduced international attention.

Maliki's current trip to Washington will, of course, be exploited for political benefit by the administration -- as has happened every time the latest "new, strong Iraqi leader" visits with great fanfare -- but this is part of what Maliki is saying during his trip, according to this morning's NY Times:

When Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki visits the White House on Tuesday for the first time, he is expected to make requests that clash sharply with President Bush’s foreign policy, Iraqi officials say, signaling a widening gap between the Iraqis and the Americans on crucial issues.

The requests will include asking President Bush to allow American-led troops in Iraq to be tried under Iraqi law, and to call for a halt to Israeli attacks on Lebanon,
according to several Iraqi politicians, and to a senior member of Mr. Maliki’s party who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak for the prime minister.

The Times also reports that "sectarian violence has soared despite the presence of the Americans," that Iraqis are growing increasingly furious over the alleged behavior of American troops, and that Maliki and his top allies "want to maintain strong ties to Iran." And he is insisting that there be no immunity for trying American troops for criminal acts.

So, to recap as dispassionately as possible -- Iraq is falling apart. There is apparently serious talk of dividing Baghdad, or even the country as a whole, along sectarian lines. Sectarian tension is at an all-time high, with continuous reprisal mass murders, and the government appears incapable of enforcing the law or maintaining even basic security, and worse, relies upon the good will of powerful, well-armed lawless militias and death squads just to maintain the level of chaos currently engulfing the country.

Meanwhile, for the very first serious crisis which arises in the Middle East, the Iraqi Government is on the opposite side of the U.S., condemning Israel's actions with increasing fervor. All the while, the government does not hide its intent to maintain strong alliances with Iran, the country we are told is now the worst threat to American interests and world peace. And all of this is occurring while we have 140,000 troops occupying the country and the Iraqi government is dependent upon them. Imagine what will happen in terms of Iraq's allegiances if we ever actually leave that country and that dependence no longer exists.

Our invasion of Iraq certainly ousted Saddam Hussein from power, but in his place will be a government that is a close ally of Iran, our new arch enemy, and which appears incapable of maintaining even basic stability for a long time to come, if it ever can. And we are told that Al Qaeda-type terrorists thrive in environments where there is a weak government and chaos, which happens to be exactly what we created in Iraq for the foreseeable future -- at the cost of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, and counting. Is there even a single theoretical benefit to American security that we derived from our invasion and occupation of that country in exchange for the immeasurable damage we created and are enduring?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan today publishes an e-mail from an American solider in Iraq, reporting that "Baghdad has descended into complete anarchy" and that Iraqi police officers are afraid even to drive to Baghdad. Sullivan calls our invasion of Iraq, which he vocally supported, "one of the the biggest military fiascoes in American history." I realize there is always controversy generated when supporters of the war end up acknowledging that it was a mistake, but between someone who acknowledges error and those who continue to insist in the face of undeniable reality that things are going well in Iraq and that our invasion was the right thing to do, I will take the former over the latter every time.

Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman points out that Moqtada Sadr appears to be sending his Mahdi Army militia to Lebanon to fight with Hezbollah against Israel -- a move which not only risks direct Iraqi Shiite-Israel conflict, but which also puts great pressure on the Maliki government to oppose Israel even more actively so as to avoid appearing controlled by the U.S. The possibilities for the U.S. to be dragged into a wider war in the Middle East are too numerous to count.

Specter instructs us to be grateful to the President

Sen. Arlen Specter has an Op-Ed in this morning's Washington Post which attempts to justify his proposed FISA legislation -- legislation which, at its core, renders legal the President's lawbreaking and cedes to the President the right to eavesdrop on Americans with no judicial oversight. The bill would also all but kill pending litigation challenging the legality of the President's eavesdropping conduct, and endorse a theory of presidential power so extreme that even the President's own Attorney General rejects it. Despite all of this, Specter claims, apparently with a straight face, that "negotiations with administration officials and the president himself were fierce" and that the bill is "a preeminently fair compromise."

What Specter's Op-Ed actually does is provide a powerful reflection of the extent to which the Congress has been reduced to an empty, symbolic vessel which is permitted to act only to the extent it retroactively endorses the President's conduct. The outright debasement of the Congress by the administration is additionally reflected by the fact that Specter is actually expressing gratitude for the President's willingness to allow courts to adjudicate the constitutionality of his conduct, as though that is something the President has the power to prohibit. Here is Specter explaining what he considers to be the grand concession he won from the White House:

President Bush's record of seeking to expand Article II power has been a hallmark of his administration. The president and vice president have vociferously argued that the administration had the authority for the program without any judicial review. Bush's personal commitment to submit his program to FISC is therefore a major breakthrough.

This is as incoherent as it is alarming. With the Specter legislation, Bush has not agreed to allow the FISA court, or any other court, to adjudicate the legality of his eavesdropping program (meaning whether he has been violating the law for the last five years by ordering warrantless eavesdropping). To the contrary, the Specter bill would all but kill pending litigations around the country which allege that the President acted criminally by violating FISA. Nor would the Specter bill require the President to submit eavesdropping requests to courts for approval. To the contrary, the bill expressly allows the President to eavesdrop on Americans with no judicial oversight.

The sole question which a court will decide under this claimed oral agreement between Specter and the President is whether warrantless eavesdropping violates the Fourth Amendment. Thus, what Specter is celebrating here is that the President courteously agreed to "allow" a federal court to decide whether the eavesdropping he has ordered on Americans violates the Constitution's prohibition on searches and seizures in the absence of probable cause warrants. Since when does a President have the option to prohibit judicial determinations as to whether his conduct violates the Constitutional rights of American citizens? In what conceivable way can it be said to be a "concession" that George Bush has deigned to permit a federal court to rule on the constitutionality of the eavesdropping he ordered?

The Bush administration, as is well known by now, believes that the President has the power to violate laws enacted by Congress. But not even George Bush, Dick Cheney or John Yoo have argued that he can override specific constitutional protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. All Bush has "agreed to" is to conditionally "allow" a court to decide if his eavesdropping violates the 4th Amendment. Expressing gratitude for that or acting as though it is some sort of concession is to now vest the President not merely with the power to violate Congressional law, but also the Bill of Rights.

Worse still, Specter endorses a theory of radical presidential power which (a) has been rejected for 50 years in this country (since Youngstown); (b) the Supreme Court just again emphatically rejected in Hamdan; and (c) even Alberto Gonzales acknowledges is simply wrong. Specifically, Specter argues as follows:

Critics complain that the bill acknowledges the president's inherent Article II power and does not insist on FISA's being the exclusive procedure for the authorization of wiretapping. They are wrong. The president's constitutional power either exists or does not exist, no matter what any statute may say. . . . If the president's assertion of inherent executive authority meets the Fourth Amendment's "reasonableness" test, it provides an alternative legal basis for surveillance, however FISA may purport to limit presidential power. The bill does not accede to the president's claims of inherent presidential power; that is for the courts either to affirm or reject. It merely acknowledges them, to whatever extent they may exist.

Specter here echoes the central myth which the President's most disingenuous followers have been disseminating ever since the NSA scandal began -- that because the President has the "inherent authority" under the Constitution to eavesdrop, Congress cannot restrict, regulate or limit that power in any way. That is just plainly wrong. The whole point of our system of Government is that the three branches share power in all areas. That is what "checks and balances" means. Congress has every right to regulate even those powers which the President possesses. That is beyond dispute at this point.

The Supreme Court in Hamdan just ruled not more than three weeks ago that even though the President has the Constitutional power to create military tribunals for war detainees (just as he has the Constitutional power to eavesdrop), he is required to do so in accordance with the laws enacted by Congress. That was the whole point of Hamdan -- that the President is required to abide by the law even with regard to the exercise of his Constitutional powers. And just to make certain that this point was not lost on the Arlen Specters of the world, the Court (f. 23; emphasis added) explained :

Whether or not the President has independent power, absent congressional authorization, to convene military commissions, he may not disregard limitations that Congress has, in proper exercise of its own war powers, placed on his powers. See Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579, 637 (1952) (Jackson, J., concurring).

Justice Kennedy, in his Concurring Opinion, emphasized that this has been the law since at least Youngstown, which he quotes to make that point (emphasis added): "If the President has exceeded these [Congressional] limits, this becomes a case of conflict between Presidential and congressional action . . . And '[w]hen the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.'"

Most amazingly, when Alberto Gonzales testified before Specter's own Judiciary Committee, had told Specter that it is false to claim -- as Specter just did -- that Congress lacks the power to regulate or restrict "inherent Constitutional powers" of the President:

GONZALES: Well, the fact that the president, again, may have inherent authority doesn't mean that Congress has no authority in a particular area. And when we look at the words of the Constitution, and there are clear grants of authority to the Congress in a time of war. And so if we're talking about competing constitutional interests, that's when you get into, sort of, the third part of the Jackson analysis.

The whole premise of Specter's defense of the President and his bill is just indisputably false. It has been unambiguously rejected by Youngstown, Hamdan, and even Alberto Gonzales. Both Marty Lederman and Anonymous Liberal add their astonishment that Specter could articulate such a plainly false legal argument. And it is not some obscure legal error, but a principle that lays at the core of how our system of government works. The President does not have the power to operate outside of the laws of our country, and that's particularly true when it comes to actions he takes against American citizens on U.S. soil.

This is what we have been reduced to. A Senator actually celebrates as some sort of victory or "concession" the fact that the President will allow the constitutionality of his actions to be decided by a court. And we are told that although the President has been breaking the law for the last five years, that is all perfectly "understandable" and we should just all be grateful that the President is allowing us to pass a law which makes that conduct legal.

John Dean and Authoritarian Cultism - a Review

(cross-posted at C&L)

The full extent and irreversibility of the damage to our country wrought by the Bush administration will likely not be known until well after George Bush finally disappears from our political life. But understanding the dynamics and impulses of the movement which have enabled these abuses is a critically important task, and that is the project undertaken by John Dean's new best-selling book, Conservatives Without Conscience (selected excerpt is here). Fortuitously for Dean, this examination of what has become the so-called "conservative" movement (composed of Bush followers, neoconservatives and hard-core religious conservatives) comes at the perfect time.

With 2 1/2 years still left for this administration, the true radicalism of the administration and its followers has becoming unavoidably, depressingly clear, and it is equally clear that this movement has not reached anywhere near the peak of its extremism. Dean's central thesis explains why that is so.

Dean contends, and amply documents, that the "conservative" movement has become, at its core, an authoritarian movement composed of those with a psychological and emotional need to follow a strong authority figure which provides them a sense of moral clarity and a feeling of individual power, the absence of which creates fear and insecurity in the individuals who crave it. By definition, its followers' devotion to authority and the movement's own power is supreme, thereby overriding the consciences of its individual members and removing any intellectual and moral limits on what will be justified in defense of their movement.

Dean relies on substantial social science data to illustrate the personality type that seeks out authoritarian movements. But his case is made much more persuasively by what one can visibly see unfolding before one's own eyes.

As Iraq collapses into all-out civil war and new, tragic levels of violence, Bush supporters continue to insist that things are going well there and our invasion was a success. As the Middle East spirals into all-out regional war, Bush supporters insist that this repulsive violence is actually good for the region -- wars are encouraging "birth pangs" on the road to progress, as the Secretary of State put it yesterday -- and they are now actively involving the U.S. in this escalated conflict, even while Iraq rapidly falls apart.

And there is seemingly no limit -- literally -- on the willingness, even eagerness, of Bush supporters to defend and justify even the most morally repugnant abuses -- from constantly expanding spying on American citizens, to a President who claims and aggressively exercises the "right" to break the law, to torturing suspects, imprisoning journalists, and turning the United States into the most feared and hated country on the planet.

And as radical as the administration has become, it is clear that the administration has not even come close to reaching the level of extremism which would be necessary for its supporters to object -- if such a limit exists at all. If anything, on those exceedingly few occasions over six years when his followers have dissented from the Presidents's decisions -- illegal immigration, Harriet Miers, Dubai ports -- it has been not because the administration was too radical, extremist, militaristic and uncompromising -- but insufficiently so.

Bush supporters want more spying, much more aggressive actions against investigative journalists and even domestic political opposition, more death and violence brought to the Middle East, more wars, and still fewer restraints on the President's powers, to the extent there are any real limits left. To them, the Bush administration has not been nearly as extremist and aggressive as it ought to be in dealing with the Enemies. And that is to say nothing of the measures that would be urged, and almost certainly imposed, in the event of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil or in the increasingly likely event that our limited war in Iraq expands into the Epic War of Civilizations which so many of them crave.

Ultimately, as Dean convincingly demonstrates, the characteristic which defines the Bush movement, the glue which binds it together and enables and fuels all of the abuses, is the vicious, limitless methods used to attack and demonize the "Enemy," which encompasses anyone -- foreign or domestic -- threatening to their movement. What defines and motivates this movement are not any political ideas or strategic objectives, but instead, it is the bloodthirsty, ritualistic attacks on the Enemy de jour -- the Terrorist, the Communist, the Illegal Immigrant, the Secularist, and most of all, the "Liberal."

What excites, enlivens, and drives Bush followers is the identification of the Enemy followed by swarming, rabid attacks on it. It is a movement that defines itself not by identifiable ideas but by that which it is not. Its foreign policy objectives are identifiable by one overriding goal -- destroy and kill the Enemy, potential or suspected enemies, and everyone nearby. And it increasingly views its domestic goals through the same lens. It is a movement in a permanent state of war, which views all matters, foreign and domestic, only in terms of this permanent war.

Supreme Court justices who rule against the President on national security matters are tyrants, traitors and pro-terrorist. Journalists who uncover legally dubious government conduct carried out in secret are criminals who should be imprisoned for life or hanged. Virtually every political opponent of the administration's of any significance -- Howard Dean, Al Gore, John Kerry, the Clintons -- is relentlessly branded as a liar, mentally unstable, corrupt, seditious, and sympathetic to the Enemy.

And even those who devoted much of their adult lives to military service to their country (often in ways far more courageous and impressive than most Bush supporters), or even those who have been longtime Republicans and conservatives, have their characters relentlessly smeared and motives and integrity impugned as soon as they criticize the administration in any way that could embarrass the President -- Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, the war critic Generals, Joe Wilson, Scott Ritter, Wesley Clark, John Murtha, John Paul Stevens, and on and on and on.

It is a movement devoted to the destruction of its enemies wherever they might be found. And it finds new ones, in every corner and seemingly on a daily basis, because it must. That is the food which sustains it.

* * * * *
In many ways, John Dean is the ideal person to examine this dynamic because he has seen and experienced both sides of it up close and personal. Attracted to the political conservatism of Barry Goldwater, Dean joined the Nixon administration and, at the age of 32, became Nixon's aggressive White House counsel, deeply involved in helping to perpetrate many of the Watergate abuses. Morton Halperin, who was a standing member of Nixon's "enemy list," claimed in an Op-Ed in Friday's Los Angeles Times that Dean authored a 1971 memo setting forth a plan to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."

But in 1973, Dean became the first high-level Nixon official to turn against the administration, famously testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee that the President (as well as Dean himself) was personally involved in the Watergate cover-up. As a result of his refusal to copy the example of blindly loyal authoritarian followers such as G. Gordon Liddy and Charles Colson -- who lied and covered-up for their leader -- Dean became one of the most hated enemies of Nixon followers, a hatred which, he later discovered, would make him the target of the right-wing authoritarian tactics which he previously wielded against Nixon's enemies.

In 1991, as Dean recounts at length, he learned that 60 Minutes and Time Magazine were preparing to feature a new book, entitled Silent Coup, which claimed that Dean himself was the one who ordered the Watergate break-in. The book alleged that Dean's motive was that his wife, Maureen, had a connection to a Washington, DC call-girl operation and thus had knowledge of various sex scandals involving Democrats, and Dean sought to obtain documentation to use against them.

The very idea that Dean himself had ordered the Watergate break-in because of his wife's connection to a call-girl service, and that these secrets were somehow kept for 20 years, was completely absurd on its face. And once Dean vehemently denied these allegations, both 60 Minutes and Time investigated the claims and both decided not to run the story -- a noble decision which, in Time's case, led to the loss of the $50,000 it had paid for the rights to run an excerpt of the book.

But using right-wing smear techniques which, back then, were still new, but which are now a staple of the "conservative" movement, these patently false allegations against Dean were aggressively promoted by right-wing ideologues and then accepted and given great attention by the mainstream media. The book's publishers enlisted both right-wing follower G. Gordon Liddy and by-then-born-again Christian activist Charles Colson -- both of whom still hated Dean for his blasphemy in testifying truthfully against the President -- to promote the book and push its allegations against Dean.

More and more right-wing groups and personalities jumped on board this smear campaign, until it received full-fledged support from mainstream right-wing media personalities. That, in turn, induced many mainstream media programs -- from Good Morning America to CNN's Larry King Live -- to invite the authors on to discuss the book. Out of this now all-too-familiar process, this defamatory book ended up on the New York Times' Best Seller List. As Dean recounts:

Despite most of the news media’s fitting dismissal of Silent Coup’s baseless claims, the protracted litigation provided time for the book to gather a following, including an almost cultlike collection of highprofile right-wingers. Among them, for example, is Monica Crowley, a former aide to Richard Nixon after his presidency, and now a conservative personality on MSNBC, cohosting Connected: Coast to Coast with Ron Reagan. Other prominent media-based conservatives who have joined the glee club are James Rosen and Brit Hume of Fox News. How these seemingly intelligent people embraced this false account mystified me, and I wanted to know. . . .

As for Colson, his reason for promotion of Silent Coup remained a complete mystery for me, as did the motives of people like Monica Crowley, James Rosen, Brit Hume, and all the other hard-core conservatives who embraced this spurious history and made it a best seller. The only thing I could see that these people had in common was their conservatism.

That is how the "conservative" movement works to this day, although its methods have become even more efficient and less scrupulous. Petty allegations and character attacks begin percolating in the smear sewers of the right wing -- through insinuations by talk-radio dirt-mongerers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, speculation by Matt Drudge, smear campaigns by shadowy groups and organizations, and now by attention-desperate and glory-seeking right-wing blogs. From there, the attacks are reported by the right-wing media and then fed into the mainstream media.

A lynch mob is created which seeks not the truth of what happened, but the destruction of the movement's enemies. "Conservative" rank-and-file, confining themselves to an echo chamber, embrace the allegations instinctively, because they are made by the movement's defenders against the movement's enemies. And their allegiance to their movement and a desire to destroy their opponents overrides any concern for proportionality or truth. As Dean documents, it is what the contemporary, so-called "conservative" movement feeds on more than anything else -- a limitless and bloodthirsty attack on the character of its opponents and enemies.

* * * * *

Dean advances and then amply documents (both with his own analysis and social science data, the former being far more persuasive than the latter) what I consider to be the book's two central points:

First, that what is currently described as the "conservative movement" bears virtually no resemblance to Goldwater's conservatism, and has nothing to do with restraining government power or preserving historical values. Instead, it has transformed into an authoritarian movement which largely attracts personality types characterized by a desire and need to submit to and follow authority.

Second, because those who submit to authority necessarily relinquish their own conscience (in favor of serving the conscience of their leader and/or their movement), those who are part of this movement are capable of acts which a healthy and normal conscience ought to preclude. They can use torture, break laws, wage unnecessary wars based on false pretenses, and attempt to destroy the reputation of plainly patriotic and honest Americans -- provided that they are convinced that doing so advances the interests of the authority they serve and the movement of which they are a part.

The central premise of Dean's argument is that the current "conservative" movement shares none of the core principles of the political conservatism which attracted Dean to its movement -- those espoused by Dean's longtime friend, Barry Goldwater (whose 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, is the source for Dean's title). That the Bush movement bears no resemblance to traditional conservatism is a view shared by scores of the country's most prominent conservatives, such as Pat Buchanan and increasingly George Will. The Father of Modern Conservatism, Bill Buckely, just yesterday pronounced that Bush's "singular problem" is "the absence of effective conservative ideology." And before his death, Barry Goldwater himself frequently accused the religious right of assaulting core conservative principles.

Relatedly, Dean documents that the "conservative" movement is composed of various factions who actually share very little in common in the way of political beliefs and could not come close to agreeing on a core set of political principles and ideals which define their movement. In the absence of a set of core, shared beliefs, what, then, binds them and maintains their allegiance to this political movement?

The answer Dean provides is the shared hatred of common enemies. And their collective attacks on those enemies have become the consevative movement's defining attribute. And that is sufficient to maintain allegiance because, argues Dean, what Bush followers crave more than anything else is submission to a powerful authority as a means of alleviating their fears of ambiguity, uncertainty and complexity -- the same attributes which are common to all followers of authoritarian movements on both the right and the left:

Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. . . .

Important conservative opinion journals, like the National Review and Human Events, see the world as bipolar: conservative versus liberal. Right-wing talk radio could not survive without its endless bloviating about the horrors of liberalism. Trashing liberals is nothing short of a cottage industry for conservative authors. . . .

The exaggerated hostility also apparently satisfies a psychological need for antagonism toward the “out group,” reinforces the self-esteem of the conservative base, and increases solidarity within the ranks.

The heart of [New York University Professor John] Jost and his collaborators’ findings was that people become or remain political conservatives because they have a “heightened psychological need to manage uncertainty and threat.” More specifically, the study established that the various psychological factors associated with political conservatives included (and here I am paraphrasing) fear, intolerance of ambiguity, need for certainty or structure in life, overreaction to threats, and a disposition to dominate others.

This data was collected from conservatives willing to explain their beliefs and have their related psychological dynamics studied through various objective testing techniques. These characteristics, Dr. Jost said, typically cannot be ascribed to liberals.

A healthy skepticism is warranted with regard to the ability of social science data to reveal truths about political movements. But ultimately, the ability of that data to persuade is dependent upon the extent to which it comports with one's own observations. And when Dean cites and applies the conclusions of the famous study by Stanley Milgram, in which subject participants administered what seemed to be excruciatingly painful electric shock because they were instructed by authority figures in white coats to do so, its applicability to the Bush movement becomes self-evident:

When "a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate his standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense," Milgram concluded. Rather, that person simply places his moral views aside. His "moral concern shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations of the authority figure."

The Bush administration's ability to engage in extraordinary and radical behavior has not occurred in a vacuum. The administration is radical and can act seemingly without limits because its supporters and followers are radical and limitless in their allegiance to its abuses. Understanding the disturbing and dangerous human dynamic which fuels that movement is critical to understanding the movement itself, and ultimately, to defeating it. Dean's book is a uniquely valuable tool for understanding what the so-called "conservative" movement has become.

UPDATE: It is difficult to select a 1,000 word excerpt from the book, as most of Dean's arguments are lengthier and can't be contained within that limit, but I've selected a somewhat representative sample from a different part of the book than that which is highlighted in the review. The excerpt is here.

Neoconservatism and the White House -- Still Married

(updated below)

Apparently, it isn't enough that the U.S. has been defending without reservation the wisdom of the Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon. Nor is it enough that we have been unilaterally blocking a cease-fire and other diplomatic solutions. Nor is it enough that the American taxpayer pays for enormous amounts of Israel's military equipment -- from the planes flying over Lebanon to the tanks entering it. Now we are handing Israel the very bombs that they drop in order to flatten more and more of Lebanon, on a bomb-by-bomb basis:

The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The debate over whether the Israeli war should be "our war" is becoming increasingly academic. Once one country starts supplying another country with bombs in the middle of a war, both are participants -- much the way it is said, as imperfect as the comparison is, that Iran is "behind" the actions of Hezbollah. Whatever else might be true, the bombs that will be blowing up all sorts of things and people (beginning) in Lebanon over the next weeks, likely months and perhaps longer will have come directly from the U.S. And everyone, including the Muslims whose "hearts and minds" were ostensibly the object of our invasion of Iraq, will know that. That doesn't exactly seem like a sound strategy for diffusing Muslim animosity towards the U.S. -- which happens to be the Bush administration's stated goal.

There is palpable and quite unseemly excitement gripping neoconservatives over what the world sees as a horrible and tragic war, but which they glowingly call a "great opportunity." They have an extraordinary goal that they intend to fulfill -- to somehow induce the U.S. to vastly expand its Middle East war to include yet more countries which have not attacked us, and more amazingly, to do so notwithstanding the fact that our current little experiment in Iraq is, arguably, in the worst shape it has been in some time, perhaps since we invaded.

The boldness of their objective, its sheer audacity, is requiring neoconservatives to throw all caution to the wind, to really put all of their rhetorical cards on the table and be open about what they really think and want, unburdened by all of the lofty pretenses about the virtues of spreading democracy and winning hearts and minds. The real underlying premises and impulses of neoconservatism are being laid bare for all to see. And what they really want is more war and destruction -- lots and lots and lots of it -- to rain down mercilessly on their enemies and anyone nearby.

The terms they are using to describe their grand war visions are "annihilation" and "cleaning out." They have had enough with restraint and limited strikes and a war that has been depressingly and weakly confined just to Iraq and Afghanistan. They want full-scale, unrestrained Middle Eastern war -- they always have -- and they see this as their big chance to have it.

And the more one reads and listens to neoconservatives in their full-throated war calls, the more disturbing and repellent these ideas become. So many of them seem to be driven not even any longer by a pretense of a strategic goal, but by a naked, bloodthirsty craving for destruction and killing itself, almost as the end in itself. They urge massive military attacks on Lebanon, Syria, Iran -- and before that, Iraq -- knowing that it will kill huge numbers of innocent people, but never knowing, or seemingly caring, what comes after that. And the disregard for the lives of innocent people in those countries is so cavalier and even scornful that it is truly unfathomable, at times just plain disgusting. From a safe distance, they continuously call for -- and casually dismiss the importance of -- the deaths of enormous numbers of people without batting an eye. And for what?

What is Lebanon going to look like -- let alone Syria and Iran -- once we decimate large parts of their infrastructure, kill, maim and render homeless thousands upon thousands of their citizens, and bring down their governments? Who cares. Let's just stop whining and appeasing and get on with the action. They're bored with Iraq because the killing and destruction part are done with, so they want to move on. It's the war and bombing that interests and excites them. At least for the neoconservatives I've been reading and hearing -- and they have been among the most influential -- the "arguments" aren't much more substantive or complex than that. More on that in a moment.

Ever since neoconservatives began openly salivating over this "great opportunity" -- beginning, I'd say, with Bill Kristol's soon-to-be infamous "Our War" column, followed by Newt Gingrich's declaration that World War III has begun -- there has been a sense that their war-mongering stance is too extreme, too transparently irrational, to really influence the Bush administration's decisions. After the disaster in Iraq, Bush is in no mood to be led by the same people into more wars, that line of thought goes. Cheney and Rumsfeld have been beaten and even humbled by Iraq, and are too preoccupied with it, to entertain thoughts about Syria and Iran. Because of everything from limited resources to electoral concerns, it's been assumed and suggested that it is simply not plausible that the White House will take the crazed neoconservative path with regard to Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

That line of thought seems, at this point, to be more wishful thinking than reality. The administration is still composed largely of adherents to neoconservatism. John Bolton is at the U.N. for a reason. Richard Perle protegee Elliot Abrams is still running Middle East policy out of the White House. And, most importantly, anyone who thinks that Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld or George Bush have changed their mind about anything -- let alone about their biggest signature decision, the invasion of Iraq -- is attributing to them far more flexibility than they have ever before demonstrated. They see Iraq as a success and the rationale that led us there to be the right approach to the Middle East generally.

Neoconservatism is what brought us into Iraq, and there is no persuasive evidence that its influence in the administration has diminished. To the contrary, this article from the Washington Post yesterday reports that Bush and Cheney's working premises and assumptions with regard to the Middle East are indistinguishable from those evangelized by the likes of Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, Kristol and Gingrich:

Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, said Bush's statements reflect an unambiguous view of the situation. "He doesn't seem to allow his vision to be clouded in any way," said Rosen, a Democrat who has come to admire Bush's Middle East policy. "It follows suit. Israel is in the right. Hezbollah is in the wrong. Terrorists have to be eliminated, and he sees Israel fighting the war he would fight against terrorism."

George Bush is still on board with every neoconservative premise. And as Atrios put it yesterday:

Each crisis is an opportunity to wage a war they wanted to wage. The president believes Iraq is a success story. No one will tell him anything else.

Given what neoconservatism has revealed itself to be, that the administration continues to be driven by its "principles" is nothing short of alarming. The opportunities for even unintentional American involvement and escalation in this new war -- through miscalculation, deliberate provocation or simple accident -- are manifold. Add to that the warmongering rhetoric, our perceived proxy fighting through Israel, and the fact that we have 140,000 soldiers sitting in the middle of a virtual Shiite-Sunni civil war in Iraq, and it is not hyperbole to say that it would be miraculous if we did not become involved in expanded hostilities.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are now seeking full-on unrestrained war, to be fought more aggressively and less "delicately" than the prior and current wars. The neoconservatives are expressly saying so.

When we last heard from Shelby Steele, for instance, he was arguing in a column widely trumpeted by neoconservatives that America's problem is that it suffers from too much "white guilt," which prevents us from fighting wars such as the one in Iraq with the unrestrained "ferocity" we ought to be using, i.e., that we fail to use "the full measure of our military power." In his Townhall column yesterday, Thomas Sowell takes that a step further and, in the context of Israel's bombing of Lebanon, identifies the real problem as being that we don't "annihilate" our enemies -- using that word twice within two paragraphs:

Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. . .

There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated. . . .

One can find this sentiment everywhere among neoconservatives, who have now really released their war-loving id. The true enemy are those who stand in the way of all-out war, and all-out war is the only way to achieve peace. Peace is War and War is Peace. Listen to Sowell:

"Peace" movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called "peace" movements -- that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.

An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.

In the neoconservative mind, wars happen because we don't annihilate enough people, because we are insufficiently "ferocious," because we place limits on the "the full measure of our military power." Those who oppose such unrestrained destruction are, to use Bill Kristol's description from his new column yesterday, "weak horses" (quoting Osama bin Laden). In the Jerusalem Post yesterday, Daniel Pipes complained that each time it excitingly looks like Israel will finally wipe out the evil-doers, we instead get "an orgy of Israeli remorse and reconsideration, followed by a quiet return to appeasement and retreat." Victor Davis Hanson celebrates how great it is that "Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists."

Most striking is the casualness, even the self-satisfied joy, with which they regard the suffering, maiming, and slaughter of other people -- not "The Terrorists," but people whom even they acknowledge are innocent of wrongdoing. Here is National Review's Cliff May almost bored with having to acknowledge the irrelevant fact that hundreds, more likely thousands, of Lebanese are likely to be killed by the campaign which he urges from a safe distance:

Yes, innocent Lebanese are suffering in this conflict. That suffering at least should produce some good results. Lebanon’s liberation from the suffocating embrace of Hezbollah and its foreign sponsors would qualify.

I am almost done reading John Dean's now #2 NYT best-selling new book, Conservatives Without Conscience, and will likely have a review up tomorrow. But one of the central points he makes is highly relevant here -- that what is called the "conservative movement" these days has no real unifying or cohesive ideas, but instead, what binds it and defines it is an authoritarian impulse to identify the Enemy (the Terrorist, the Liberal, the Communist, the illegal immigrant), followed by a swarming, hateful, rage-fueled desire to destroy it:

Given the rather distinct beliefs of the various conservative factions, which have only grown more complex with time, how have conservatives succeeded in coalescing as a political force? The simple answer is through the power of negative thinking, and specifically, the ability to find common enemies. . . . Today's conservatives. . . define themselves by what they oppose.

That is clearly not only the Republican electoral strategy again, but more disturbingly, it appears to be the full extent of the neoconservative foreign policy. There are bad people over there. The Enemy. And we need to attack and kill them without restraint, regardless of the cost or consequences or alternatives or what might come after that. And anyone who doesn't agree, or who wants to negotiate with the Enemy, is weak, an appeaser, someone who likely is even on the side of the Enemy. That is the crux of our foreign policy at this point.

Beyond all of that, our neoconservative policy in the Middle East has become as incoherent as it is bloodthirsty. The President argued in December of last year that "by helping Iraqis to build a democracy, we will gain an ally in the war on terror." But the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iraq, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has "forcefully denounced" Israel for the bombing campaign which we are defending and supplying -- a fact which led a confused and enraged Laura Ingraham last night on Bill O'Reilly's show to protest the unfairness that the person she called "our guy in Iraq" was supporting the other side.

What is the Iraqi Government's position going to be if we wage war on its Iranian ally? I doubt it will be what we would want from an "ally in the war on terror." So what are we hoping to achieve in Iraq? The whole project makes no sense because there really never was anything that came after the invasion and destruction part.

And the supposed Middle Eastern allies we do have -- the ones who issued the terse anti-Hezbollah statements which neoconservatives have been parading around -- are not democracies, but instead, are the tyrants, dictators, and emirates whom we support and prop up. Conversely, the democratically elected governments in the Middle East beyond Iraq -- such as Lebanon, the Palestinians, and one could even add Iran -- are on the other side of this conflict. And two Middle Eastern democracies, Israel and Lebanon, are at war with one another.

All of this is the exact opposite of the glorious neoconservative promises that invading and bombing countries and bringing democracy to the Middle East will foster pro-U.S. alliances and ensure peace. And literally, the only thing which neoconservatives seem to want to do in response to all of this patent failure is bomb and invade more and more countries because that's worked so well so far.

One can easily lose sight of how bizarre it is that we now so frequently debate whether we should attack countries who have not attacked us nor pose any real threat to attack us. As was true for the "debates" over whether we should use torture (or even "debates" over whether the President can break the law), when something is advocated openly and frequently enough, even the most reprehensible and previously insane ideas can become acceptable and mainstream. We have become a country that now casually and without much trauma debates which countries we should preemptively invade next.

Neoconservatism in its basest and most unadorned form very well may be dangerous, morally repugnant, and completely irrational. But it has also been a leading influence in our country's foreign policy decisions over the last five years, and there is no sign that that has changed. Quite the contrary. The White House seems to be operating in accordance with the neoconservative script as much as ever, and it is hard to imagine why that would stop any time soon.

UPDATE: Anonymous Liberal argues that this event will be seen as the moment when neoconservatives lost all credibility by abandoning any pretenses of rationality or reasonableness. That might be, but he also quotes Paul Krugman today as pointing out:

Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a policymaker.But there's every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol saying public is what Mr. Cheney says in private.

If the neoconservatives are articulating crazed and extremist ideas publicly, it is highly likely that it reflects what the Vice President and Defense Secretary are saying privately.

A.L. also links to this excellent video, where Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan angrily highlight the intellecutal and moral bankruptcy of neoconservatives in a way that ought to be much more common. I don't recall Matthews doing anything of the sort prior to the invasion (although he did question its rationale more than most national journalists), but better late than never. By contrast, Buchanan, whatever else one might think of him, has been among the most prescient and insightful commentators on Bush administration foreign policy in the Middle East for several years now.

Defeating the Specter bill

(updated below)

Yesterday's significant judicial defeat of the Bush administration in the EFF/AT&T NSA case underscores just how pernicious the Specter FISA bill is, and how urgent it is that it not be enacted. It has been clear for some time that both the federal district judge in the EFF case, as well as the judge in the ACLU case pending in the Eastern District of Michigan, are unwilling to simply roll over and offer the administration the type of blind deference which the Congress and even other courts have been willing to extend in the area of national security. As a result, these cases threaten to subject the administration to that which it fears most: judicial review of its behavior.

The Specter bill -- in addition to its other multiple flaws -- would solve this problem almost entirely for the administration. Section 702(b) of the bill (entitled "Mandatory Transfer for Review") protects the administration in numerous ways from meaningful judicial review:

First, it requires (if the Attorney General requests it, which he will) that all pending cases challenging the legality of the NSA program (which includes the EFF and ACLU cases) be transferred to the secret FISA court. Thus, the insufficiently deferential federal judges would have these cases taken away from them. Second, it would make judicial review of the administration's behavior virtually impossible, as it specifically prohibits (Sec. 702(b)(2)) the FISA court from "requir(ing) the disclosure of national security information . . . without the approval of the Director of National Intelligence of the Attorney General." That all but prevents any discovery in these lawsuits. Third, it quite oddly authorizes (Sec. 702(b)(6)) the FISA court to "dismiss a challenge to the legality of an electronic surveillance program for any reason" (emphasis added). Arguably, that provision broadens the authority of the court to dismiss any such lawsuit for the most discretionary of reasons, even beyond the already wide parameters of the "state secrets" doctrine.

When the Specter bill was first announced last week, it appeared it would be politically difficult to block its enactment. The only real impediment to a legislative resolution of the NSA scandal has been Specter's inability to induce the White House to agree to any proposal. Once Specter obligingly crafted a bill which gives the White House everything it could possibly want and then some, the White House finally agreed to allow Specter to legalize its program, and it was hard to see how a bill which has the support both of the White House (and therefore all White House Senate allies) and Specter could be derailed.

But this article this morning from the Washington Post's Dan Eggen (one of the best journalists on this story) suggests that the Specter bill may already be experiencing some significant problems. It begins by noting that the Specter bill was one "personally negotiated by President Bush and Vice President Cheney" -- a fact that I had not seen reported previously and which reflects just how important it is for the President to have a legislative solution which protects his from the consequences of his illegal eavesdropping behavior.

Eggen also clearly recognizes that the claim by the Post and other newspapers last week that the Specter bill is a "compromise" is false, and was merely the self-serving characterization peddled by the parties involved (which, thanks to Eggen's gullible colleagues, became the lens through which the Specter bill was described):

The proposal was billed as a rare and noteworthy compromise by the administration when unveiled last week. But the legislation quickly came under attack from Democrats and many national security experts, who said it would actually give the government greater powers to spy on Americans without court oversight.

Eggen reports today that the Specter bill "ran into immediate trouble this week, as Democrats and other critics attacked the proposal while key GOP leaders in the House endorsed a different bill on the same topic." The plan of both Specter and the White House appeared to be to push a quick vote by the full Senate on this bill. Barbara O'Brien was on a conference call with the ACLU this week and reported that Specter "is determined to bring his bogus bill . . . to a vote this week." But according to Eggen, that plan is now derailed:

Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, canceled a markup session for his proposal that had been scheduled for yesterday. He announced instead plans instead (sic) for a full committee hearing Wednesday on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 1978 statute at the center of the debate.

One problem, according to Eggen, is that key House Republicans who either are facing tough re-election campaigns or who are looking for fights with the White House -- including Heather Wilson, Pete Hoekstra, and Jim Sensenbrenner -- have introduced mildly less deferential legislation than Specter's bill (virtually everything, by definition, is less deferential), and have made some noises that they would not support Specter's bill. Additionally, even generally accommodating Democrats such as Jane Harman have, at least thus far, expressed relatively steadfast opposition to the Specter bill, although it is unclear whether any Democratic support would be necessary to enact this bill (Senate Democrats, however, could and should filibuster this legislation).

There is still a real chance to derail the Specter bill. When it was announced, the shining "concession" which Specter touted was the White House's verbal, highly conditional "promise" to submit the question of the constitutionality (not the legality, but only the constitutionality under the Fourth Amendment) of warrantless eavesdropping to the FISA court (something which the bill does not actually require). But the White House's agreement to submit this question to the FISA court was conditioned upon there not being any changes at all to the Specter bill in its current form -- something that seems unlikely if House Republicans continue to push their own legislative solution and key Democrats continue to object to the Specter bill. As the Post put it on the day the agreement was announced:

If Congress amends the bill in any way that Bush disapproves, he will not be obligated to submit the wiretap program to the FISA court for review, Specter said.

More significantly, there is far more media attention being paid to executive power abuses than ever before. Not only the editorial page of the New York Times, but also the much more pro-administration Washington Post editorial page, have urged defeat of the Specter bill in unusually emphatic terms. Articles decrying the administration's executive power abuses are now common. Even David Broder yesterday took notice of the Bush administration's radical executive power theories and the total Congressional abdication of any oversight role, but he proclaimed: this "is beginning to change."

In terms of the political climate for these issues, today is a much different -- and better -- world even as compared to three months ago. Discussions of Bush's executive power abuses are no longer confined to blogs, the Boston Globe, and the office of a Senator from Wisconsin. That there is a pressing need for checks to be imposed on the Bush administration's limitless claims to power is now a mainstream and widely recognized view. Media elites finally understand it and political officials can discuss these matters with much less resistance than before.

Many Republicans who are facing tough re-election battles, such as Rep. McDonald, need to demonstrate that they do not simply roll over for the White House. Democrats have an opportunity to impose a serious defeat on the White House by taking a real stand against this truly destructive Specter bill. It is not difficult to make clear that opposition to the Specter bill is not an anti-eavesdropping position, but simply a desire to preserve the safeguards and checks and balances which our country has had for the last 25 years and with which all Presidents before the current one -- Republican and Democrat alike -- easily complied without complaint while defending the nation.

The Specter bill is a true menace to checks and balances on the executive branch, to the restoration of the rule of law, to the critical constitutional principles re-affirmed by the Supreme Court in Hamdan, and to the fundamental principle that political officials who break the law must be held accountable. It would also return the country to the pre-FISA era when the executive branch could eavesdrop on Americans with no meaningful oversight or limits, a situation which led to widespread abuse. It is critical that this bill be blocked and, surprisingly, there seems to be real opportunities to do just that. The question now is whether Congressional Democrats, and/or key Republicans, will seize that opportunity.

UPDATE: I have an article regarding many of these issues in the current issue of In These Times -- entitled "Rechecking the Balance of Powers" -- and it is now available online. The article discusses the Bush administration's manipulation of the "state secrets" doctrine, its general efforts to block all methods for judicial review of its actions, and the effect which Hamdan will have on these tactics as well as on the administration's radical theories of executive power generally.

Huge news - Judge refuses to dismiss NSA lawsuit

(updated below)

The Bush adminstration suffered an enormous defeat today, as a federal district court denied its motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, which alleges that the administration's NSA warrantless eavesdropping program (and AT&T's cooperation with it) is illegal. Most significantly, the district court, which is in the Northern District of California, rejected the administration's claim that allowing the litigation to proceed would jeopardize the disclosure of "state secrets," a doctrine which the administration has repeatedly exploited to prevent judicial review of its conduct. Traditionally, courts almost always defer to the executive's invocation of that claim and accept the President's claim that national security requires dismissal of the case. But this time, the court rejected that claim.

The court's decision is 72 pages long and is online here (.pdf). Underscoring how courts virtually always accept the government's claim of state secrets, the court began by discussing the long line of cases in which, in almost every instance, courts deferred to the Government's assertion that state secrets would be jeopardized by ongoing litigation. Indeed, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the appellate court which is above this district court -- previously directed that "utmost deference" be given to the government's invocation of this claim. Dec. at p. 14.

Here, the Bush administration argued that vital state secrets would be disclosed even by virtue of AT&T's mere confirmation or denial of the existence of the warrantless eavesdropping program, as well as if they confirmed or denied that it has cooperated with that program. Plaintiffs' position was that the administration itself has already confirmed the existence of the program; that a former AT&T employee has already confirmed that AT&T has fully cooperated in allowing the administration full eavesdropping access without warrants; and that press accounts independently describe details of the program. As a result, argued plaintiff, the court can adjudicate its claims without the disclosure of any "state secrets."

The court first ruled that -- in order to determine whether the existence of the program was a "state secret" -- it would rely upon only the Bush administration's public statements, and not any statements from the press or former AT&T employees. Based solely on those statements from the administration itself, the court explained (Dec. at 34):

"the very subject matter of this action is hardly a secret. As described above, public disclosures by the government and AT&T indicate that A&T is assisting the government to implement some kind of surveillance program" . . . [and] "significant amounts of information about the government's monitoring of communication content and AT&T's intelligence relationship with the government are arleady non-classified on in the public record."

Based on this reasoning, the court rejected the Bush administration's argument that litigating the claims against AT&T would jeopardize state secrets, since the administration itself has already confirmed the existence of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.

Most critical of all was the court's ultimate reasoning, which, relying on the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, served as yet another reminder that the Bush administration's claims of unlimited presidential power have no place in our system of government (Dec. at 36):

"Even the state secrets privilege has its limit. While the court recognizes and respects the executive's constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to adjudicate the disputes that come before it. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 US 507, 536 (2004) (plurality opinion) ("Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake").

To defer to a blanket assertion of secrecy here would be to abdiate that duty, particularly because the very subject matter of this litigation has been so publicly aired. The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security."

The court not only denied the Bush administration's motion to dismiss, but also AT&T's motion to dismiss on the grounds that, among other things, the plaintiffs lack standing to bring the lawsuit. The court thus ordered that some discovery -- i.e., the exchange of information between the parties -- proceed.

There are a few caveats to note here. First, the court certified the decision for immediate appeal, which means the decision can and will be directly challenged in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if the Bush administration loses again, could very likely end up in the Supreme Court. Second, the dreaded, pending Specter legislation contains a provision for all of the cases challenging the NSA program (including this one) to be consolidated (transferred) to the secret FISA court, which would remove jurisdiction altogether from this court or the Ninth Circuit. Third, a similar motion is pending in the Eastern District of Michigan in the case brought by the ACLU against the administration itself. The judge there has already indicated that she will not blindly defer to the administration, and this decision can only enhance the likelihood that she, too, will deny the administration's motion.

Those caveats to the side, the importance of this victory cannot be overstated. The Bush administration has been exploiting what was a rarely used doctrine to, in essence, immunize its conduct from judicial review of any kind. Because courts have been willing to assume in the past that the doctrine was invoked in good faith by the President, they have almost always deferred to it. But this court scrutinized the claim quite thoroughly, and expressed real skepticism over the administration's assertions that national security prevents any court from determining if the law is being violated as a result of warrantless eavesdropping.

Most importantly of all, the court re-affirmed one of the most basic and important principles of our system of government. That even with regard to national security, there is no such thing as a President who acts alone without interference from the other branches of government. Instead, quoting Hamdi: "Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake." That is the very opposite of the Yoo theory of executive power which has been inflicted on this country for the last five years.

UPDATE: The district court judge distinguished all of the other prior cases which accepted the government's claim of state secrets by reasoning as follows (Dec. at 33):

"[N]o case dismissed because its 'very subject matter' was a state secret involved ongoing, widespread violations of individual constitutional rights, as plaintiffs allege here. Indeed, most cases in which the 'very subject matter' was a state secret involved classified details about either a highly technical invention or a covert espionage relationship."

Because the claims in lawsuits such as this involve the alleged violations of constitutional rights on the part of countless Americans, the justification for refusing to allow the claim to proceed on the "state secrets" ground certainly does seem weaker. If accepted, the doctrine would not merely prevent adjudication of a single individual's specific claim, but would immunize the President from being held accountable for his conduct with regard to widespread constitutional violations and illegal behavior affecting countless Americans. Courts certainly should be more skeptical of assertions by the government in those circumstances, and this court seems to suggest exactly that.

UPDATE II: John Amato has obtained documents relevant to the controversy arising out of President Bush's refusal to provide classification clearances necessary for the DoJ investigation into whether its lawyers acted ethically with regard to the NSA program (as a result of his personal refusal to authorize such clearances, the investigation never occurred).

According to John, the documents he posted show that -- in rather stark contrast to the President's refusal to issue clearances to enable the DoJ lawyers to be investigated -- the clearances necessary to enable the criminal investigation into The New York Times and the leak itself were given almost immediately. The common theme among that behavior and the administration's exploitation of the "state secrets" doctrine is that the administration uses concepts of national security as a game, as a selective weapon, to promote its political objectives. That is likely the primary reason why courts have decided that far more skepticism is required when it comes to this administration's assertions than was warranted for any prior administration.

Blogs and media narratives

(updated below)

From Newsweek's BlogWatch item this week (emphasis added; h/t McJoan via e-mail):

Angered by the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, prominent right-wing blogger nicedoggie.net calls for "Five ropes, five robes, five trees. Some assembly required." Classy.

I wouldn't say that the principal problem with right-wing calls for Supreme Court justices to be hanged is that they lack "class," but this is certainly better than nothing. Projects get accomplished by baby steps. As treason accusations and calls for the imprisonment of journalists become ever more common among Bush supporters, I think journalists are going to have a hard time continuing to ignore these sentiments.

This is as important an election issue as any other. One of the primary reasons why checks and balances are so vital is because they are a unique safeguard against extremism. They force compromise and ensure that no political faction can operate without limits. By contrast, the type of one-party rule to which we've been subjected for the past four years -- and it's really been rule by the most radical strain of that party -- breeds extremism and corruption.

Precisely because of this lack of checks and restraints, the Bush movement has become nothing if not extremist. They have violated multiple laws because they claim that the President has the right to do so. While they have our military sitting in the middle of a true disaster in the Middle East, they're toying with the idea of still more wars in that region. They have spent the country into extraordinary deficits. And they have come to equate political opposition with treason, including open discussions about -- and the laying of the groundwork for -- imprisoning journalists because of stories they write about the Bush administration's legally dubious behavior carried out in secret.

The more that extremism is discussed and publicized, the better off the country is in multiple ways, including with respect to the November elections and the glaring need for some balance and limits to be imposed finally on this administration. George Bush campaigned as a "compassionate conservative" in 2000 precisely because GOP strategists know that the country recoils from the type of hate-mongering rhetoric and radical impulses that exist in many of the most extremist precincts on the right. Bill Clinton's most potent weapon was the sheer ugliness of the fanatics who most obsessively opposed him.

But those fanatics haven't gone anywhere. They are the backbone of the Bush movement. Karl Rove has successfully engineered a face lift of the Bush-led Republicans to obscure many of the sentiments which truly fuel it, but its real heart and soul is this radical underbelly - the type who believes that the Leader has the right to act above the law because he is good; that journalists who publish stories embarrassing to the Commander-in-Chief are criminals; that those who are opposed to the war in Iraq are seditious extremists, even though most Americans hold that view; and whose rage and inadequacies drive them to seek more and more war as the only solution they desire or recognize to every external and even domestic conflict.

Bloggers and others spend a lot of time discussing the influence of the blogosphere. I think that the real impact blogs can have is to affect what Peter Daou refers to as media narratives -- how issues are discussed not by blogs but by media outlets, which issues they emphasize, how they understand the matters on which they are reporting. Very few (if any) blogs yet have enough readers, by themselves, to have a meaningful impact on that basis alone. The cumulative number of blog readers makes blogs a real collective force, but what matters beyond the number of people who are reading blogs is who is reading them.

Blogs have become a primary source of information, analysis and original stories for many reporters, pundits, news producers, congressional staffers, even high-level political officials. The influence of blogs is, in many ways, more indirect than direct. Blogs increasingly influence the way in which stories are reported, what stories are emphasized and what issues are given political attention.

Several months ago, blogs were one of the very few venues where discussion could be found of the radical theories of executive power, and the outright lawlessness, which characterize the Bush administration. Now, those issues are discussed prominently on an almost daily basis in the most prominent media outlets. Either directly (through their own readership) or indirectly (by those in the media and political power circles), blogs played at least a significant role, if not the predominant role, in forcing those issues into the open. Blogs have had a similar effect with regard to a host of other issues, because that is one of the things which blogs do best: relentlessly compile evidence and document claims so that they cannot be ignored or dismissed any longer.

The extremism and dangerous rhetoric on which the Bush movement so heavily relies is quite blatant and easy to see. The more it is documented and highlighted, the more it will seep into the narratives promoted by the national media. The reason the Bush presidency has become so extreme is because those who compose it and support it, in large part, are themselves extremists. Far greater media examination of that dynamic is warranted, and one thing which blogs can do is force those issues to be examined.

UPDATE: Tom Tomorrow writes an open letter to a contact of his at The New York Times, reporter David Carr, explaining why media coverage of the extremism in the right-wing blogosphere is long overdue:

The thing is, David, that while your colleagues focus on the occasional swear word or internecine pissing match on left wing blogs, they mostly ignore what’s happening on the right half of the blogosphere. And it’s a fever swamp over there, it really is. Accusations of treason, made in utter seriousness, are routinely levelled against journalists who have the audacity to report the facts, and against Democratic Senators who have the temerity to oppose the president.

To their credit, Newsweek’s Blogwatch column this week notes a prominent right-wing blogger responding to the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision with the comment “Five ropes, five robes, five trees. Some assembly required.” (A similar sentiment, aimed at journalists, can be found on the site of a t-shirt company that frequently advertises on right-wing blogs.) Here’s one question: if such rhetoric can be laughed off by your colleagues as mere hyperbole — particularly when they are frequently the suggested target — why on earth do they get so worked up over a few allegedly foul-mouthed liberals?

Tom's whole letter is highly worth reading, particularly if you are a journalist.

Response to right-wing personal attacks

As I've noted several times in the last couple of weeks, my focus on the lawlessness, extremist rhetoric and violence-inciting tactics of the Bush movement and its followers in the blogosphere has triggered a slew of posts on multiple blogs devoted to childish ad hominem attacks, efforts to investigate my personal and professional background, and all sorts of wild accusations of every type, aimed at everything from my bar status to my sexual orientation to where I spend my time.

Numerous blogs have made such posts literally their primary topic for more than a week. Many of the most repeated claims are just factually false, while others are petty and adolescent. But because the principal targets of my arguments -- such as Instapundit and Little Green Footballs -- have taken to promoting virtually every post which contains such attacks, no matter how juvenile or false, they continue to be churned out by attention-seeking bloggers, and the attacks have received relatively wide dissemination.

None of this is unexpected, nor is it unusual. Anyone who enters the political process on any level has to expect such attacks. My posts aren't demure and are often devoted to aggressive criticism and exposure of others, albeit confined to the substantive rather than the personal. But I'm well-aware that engaging in those activities will provoke responses of this sort. And the more circulated and effective the criticism is, the more intense and limitless will be the attacks. That is just how things work, and it's true for everyone. As I wrote a few days ago:

Shining light on the extremist impulses and authoritarian mindset of the pro-Bush movement is, for reasons I've explained here, one of the most important (and effective) weapons against it. . . . And just as anyone who criticizes their ultimate Leader, the Commander-in-Chief, is attacked with full force, so, too, will criticizing their online leaders subject one to all sorts of bitter personal invective, impotent attempts to research one's background, juvenile name-calling -- all of which is promoted and encouraged on an almost daily basis by their wounded leader. [John]Dean's preface is devoted to detailing some of the most amazing personal assaults aimed at him once he spoke out against the new "conservative" movement.

But that is how all bullies and authoritarian movements behave -- by collectively swarming to demonize anyone who criticizes it as the Enemy, a mentally ill liar, etc.
etc. Ask Richard Clarke, or Joe Wilson, or Howard Dean, or Jack Murtha, or Al Gore, or the anti-war Generals -- or any of the other mentally ill, seditious traitors and liars who have criticized the Commander-in-Chief and who oppose his movement. It is simply par for the course. And the more wounded and threatened they feel from the criticisms, the more intense will be their insults and name-calling tantrums and efforts to attack personally. It is one of the hallmarks of a dying movement that knows it is dying an ignominious death, and it is grounded in great weakness.

Nonetheless, as much as one might like to, I don't believe in the wisdom of ignoring personal attacks, particularly false ones. I know there is a line of thought that counsels that one should ignore these things but I don't ultimately agree with that. Doing so allows those claims to solidify as truth. Readers of this blog are aware that I rarely discuss anything about my background or legal work or anything else personal, simply because I don't think it's interesting or relevant to the issues to which my blog is devoted. The last thing I want to do is address these things by writing about myself, and that is particularly so because the issues they have raised are unbelievably petty, even quite boring.

But since there are those who apparently find it so interesting, and who have spent the better part of the last couple of weeks devoted to making all sorts of false claims about those matters, I am going to respond in as comprehensive a way as possible, in the sure-to-be-futile hope that I don't need to do so again:

My law practice

These are some of the claims I've read repeatedly: Contrary to my claim, I never practiced law at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz (the first firm at which I practiced). I was only an intern there. I was fired by that firm before I was admitted to the bar. I encountered ethical problems during my litigation practice. I'm an "unemployed" lawyer with a delinquent law license.

Wachtell, Lipton is known to be the most prestigious and selective law firm in the country. It hires its associates during their second year of law school to be Summer Associates, which is how one becomes a full-time lawyer at the firm. I had an offer from Wachtell, Lipton (along with 15 or so of the top law firms in the country) to be a Summer Associate in my second year of law school at NYU, and I was a Summer Associate at Wachtell the following summer. I then received an offer to be a full-time lawyer upon graduation in 1994, which I accepted. I worked at that firm throughout my third year of law school, and then upon graduating. I continued to work there once I was admitted to the Bar in 1995.

All of the performance reviews I received there of my work were uniformly and enthusiastically positive. At the end of 1995, I left the firm voluntarily to begin my own firm, because I wanted to litigate constitutional issues and cases that I found interesting rather than represent investment banks in securities fraud cases and large corporations in commercial contract disputes. When I advised the firm I was leaving, they attempted to persuade me to stay.

I began my own firm as a sole practitioner at the beginning of 1996 and practiced law for the next ten years in Manhattan at my own firm, which eventually grew to six lawyers and had a nationwide litigation practice specializing in constitutional issues and the other matters which I list in my profile. I was never sanctioned or disciplined by any bar, court, or anyone else. I decided voluntarily to wind down my practice in 2005 because I could, and because, after ten years, I was bored with litigating full-time and wanted to do other things which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing.

None of this is a secret. Right at the top of my blog, I wrote: "For the past 10 years, I was a litigator in NYC. . . . " I talked extensively on my book tour about why I stopped practicing law in order to engage in political advocacy. The success of my first book has led to a second book contract with a large publishing company and my time is devoted, among other things, to my blog, to the political writing I do outside of the blog, and to the book I am working on. I don't claim to actively practice law now and I never have claimed that since I wound down my practice.

My sexual orientation

I've read repeatedly that I'm a closeted homosexual and even that I sued to keep my sexual orientation a secret. And needless to say, a central part of the ad hominem attacks from pro-Bush bloggers has now become a homophobic concentration on such matters.

I've been openly gay for 20 years. Despite the claims that I have tried to hide this and even sued to keep it a secret, the way the investigative geniuses of the right-wing blogosphere "discovered" that I was gay was that my partner and I commenced a lawsuit in 1996 which, among other things, sought a ruling that the "spousal communication" privilege statute in New York -- which bars compelled disclosure of the marital communications between spouses in litigation -- applied equally to gay spousal couples, on the ground that the plain language of the statute compelled that meaning and, alternatively, that it is unconstitutional to deny gay couples the same right heterosexual couples have to not disclose their marital communications in lawsuits. As a result, there are online judicial decisions from that case detailing that we commenced the litigation based upon claims of equivalency between our spousal relationship and those recognized by law.

I just did my multiple-city book tour with my partner on every stop and there are newspaper stories about the book which reference that. I don't believe the state has the right to use its coercive power to promote heterosexual relationships over homosexual ones, and I've consequently done substantial gay rights work in the past, primarily in law school, and there was ample media coverage of some of that work. I don't write much about gay issues because I don't really have a lot to say that I think is particularly unique -- although I have written about gay issues on my blog several times before -- but the last thing I have done is tried to conceal my sexual orientation.

Having said all of that, I have been surprised -- although I probably shouldn't be -- at how quick and pervasive is the attempt to make all sorts of gay slurs when responding to my posts now that they "discovered" these facts. Despite all the lip service that is paid by Bush supporters to not subscribing to anti-gay bigotry, it is striking how widely acceptable those sorts of attacks are.

Comments left in blogs

A new accusation is that I've been engaging in so-called "sock puppetry" by leaving comments in response to posts that attack me under other names., i.e., that I use multiple names to comment and the same comment was left at several blogs by the same IP address under different names.

Not frequently, I leave comments at blogs which criticize or respond to something I have written. I always, in every single instance, use my own name when doing so. I have never left a single comment at any other blog using any name other than my own, at least not since I began blogging. IP addresses signify the Internet account one uses, not any one individual. Those in the same household have the same IP address. In response to the personal attacks that have been oozing forth these last couple of weeks, others have left comments responding to them and correcting the factual inaccuracies, as have I. In each case when I did, I have used my own name.

Where I live

A recent and now-widespread claim is that I don't live in the United States, but in Brazil. I'm an expatriate. My book should be called "How Would an Expatriate Act"?

Other than a 9 month period after college when I lived in Europe, I've lived in the United States my entire life. My partner is Brazilian and is a citizen of Brazil. Revealingly, American law prevents the recognition of our relationship as a ground for him to live in the United States, while Brazilian law recognizes same-sex relationships for visa and immigration purposes. As a result, for the past year, I have spent substantial time in Brazil while also having a residence in New York. Spending substantial time in another country does not make one an "expatriate." And even those American citizens who do give up American residence and live abroad retain full rights of citizenship, including voting rights. But I have not done so.

Contrary to the celebratory claims that this fact was uncovered as part of some sort of probing investigation, they were able to "discover" this because I openly talked about it. It was part of my blog profile; was published in the front page article in the San Fransisco Chronicle; and is something I talk about with anyone who asks and even with those who do not. As a result of my partner being Brazilian and American law prohibiting our relationship from enabling him to reside in the United States, I spent roughly half my time last year in the United States and half in Brazil, and I can't imagine what meaning anyone could find in that.

* * *

Writing a blog post about myself is pretty much the last thing I want to be doing. But I also know that it is necessary to prevent false accusations from being accepted as true. I'm well-aware that these attacks are triggered by the efficacy of the work I have been doing. If what I were doing were ineffective, it would be ignored, rather than catalyzing unusually obsessive and highly emotional personal attacks of this nature.

Various items

(1) In response to my post the other day regarding the failure of the media to report on the extremist rhetoric and tactics that are now commonplace among the most prominent right-wing bloggers, Terry Welch urged readers to pose questions about this failure to Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz during the online chat Kurtz hosts each week. Several readers did so, and I have a post up at C&L this morning regarding Kurtz's responses.

(2) For those interested, the Editors at Poor Man Institute have a post documenting the "quality" of responses to my posts this week from the right-wing blogosphere. The discussion which ensues in the Comment section regarding that matter is instructive. And as the Editors document, as does this post, this truly adolescent and enraged level of rhetoric is being promoted and encouraged by those who most frequently lament the allegedly lowly state of discourse among "the Left."

(3) As has been widely discussed, Alberto Gonzales admitted during testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was due to President Bush's personal denial of necessary security clearances that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility was unable to investigate the role played by DoJ lawyers in authorizing the President's warrantless eavesdropping program. Back in May, Jeralyn Merritt posted some of the revealing correspondence regarding these efforts.

Undoubtedly, Bush followers will argue -- as Tony Snow lamely did yesterday -- that the Commander-in-Chief was simply trying to limit knowledge of this critical, illegal program to as few people as possible, but this paragraph from the Associated Press, by itself, dispenses with that excuse:

Yet, according to OPR chief Marshall Jarrett, "a large team" of prosecutors and FBI agents were granted security clearances to pursue an investigation into leaks of information that resulted in the program's disclosure in December. Justice Department inspector general Glenn A. Fine and two of his aides were among other department officials who were granted clearances, Jarrett said in an April memo explaining the end of his probe. That memo was released by the Justice Department Tuesday.

When it comes to criminally prosecuting those who alerted Americans to the existence of this illegal eavesdropping, these alleged security concerns disappear, and all sorts of investigators are given full access to the details of the program to enable them to conduct an aggressive investigation. But when it comes to investigating whether the President and his legal advisors acted properly with regard to the same program, the President blocks any such investigation from occurring on the grounds that not even DoJ lawyers can be trusted to investigate.

As I have noted many times before, the critical point is not merely that the President broke the law, but that he knew he was acting illegally, as evidenced by the White House's repeated and ongoing attempts to block any judicial review of the President's behavior and, now, the President's personal efforts to block even DoJ investigations of the propriety of his conduct. The President not only blatantly breaks the law in eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, but then attempts to block all courts from reviewing the legality of his conduct and block all investigations (by Congress and now even by the executive branch) into what occurred by invoking frivolous and inconsistent claims about national security.

Is there any grounds for reasonable dispute about whether our system of Government was intended to allow the President to violate a Congressional statute in secret and then block all courts from ruling on the legality of his conduct, and block all investigations into what occurred? If those circumstances do not reflect a President who believes he is above the law, what would?

Various thoughts on the Israeli/"our" war

(1) As others have noted, it can be dispiriting and tiresome to debate Middle Eastern conflicts between Israel and its enemies because extremists almost always tend to dominate the discussions. Israel is either the angelic victim surrounded by pure evil, or else is pure evil itself sadistically inflicting violence on its poor, angelic neighbors. In general, those who become most knowledgeable about these conflicts do so because they zealously believe in one Manichean view or the other, rendering it quite difficult to sort out competing claims.

That is why I find Juan Cole one of the more balanced commentators on the Middle East. Although he's routinely accused of being some sort of Israel-hater -- and he certainly does fall on the side of criticizing Israel more so than those of its enemies -- he is one of the few commentators who both criticizes and defends each side at various times, raising his credibility level, at least in my view, considerably (which is not to say that I don't often find grounds for disagreeing with his views). After quoting at length a couple of days ago from a speech by Hezbollah's leader, Hasan Nasrallah, Cole said this (emphasis in original):

[Nasrallah] said people were always putting down the Arabs and saying they could not accomplish anything, but, he said, look at the Israeli warship in flames. That was an Arab accomplishment.

Uh, wouldn't an Arab accomplishment be more like, oh, inventing something or building up something nice? Destroying things and killing people is not an accomplishment.

I watched in horror as this maniacal speech unfolded in which Nasrallah actually threatened the Israelis with releasing chemical gas from local factories on civilians in Haifa. Despite fighting them for all those years, he clearly does not understand the Israelis' psyche or the trauma of the Holocaust. A threat like that. The Israelis don't like being caught in a quagmire any more than the next person, which is why Nasrallah could get them to leave southern Lebanon. But his victory appears to have given him megalomania, and he has now gone too far.

Hizbullah's attacks on Israeli civilians are war crimes. The killing of the civilians in Haifa at the train station was a war crime. And threatening to release chemicals from factories on civilian populations is probably a war crime in itself, much less the doing of it.

Obviously, I do not accept that Hizbullah's actions justify the wholesale indiscriminate destruction and slaughter in which the Israelis have been engaged against the Lebanese in general. But they do have every right to defend themselves against Nasrallah and his mad bombers.

What pro-Israeli commentators on the right ever offer such balanced assessments? They will criticize Israel for making strategic mistakes, or for being insufficiently hard-line (just as they are willing to criticize Bush for being strategically misguided or insufficiently hard-line), but never for engaging in wrongful behavior. In their view, balance is a sign of moral depravity, and Cole -- who frequently condemns what is allegedly "his side" -- is hated not because he's too biased, but because he isn't biased enough.

(2) During the protests several months ago against proposed anti-immigration legislation, there were all sorts of angry denunciations over the protestors' waving of Mexican flags. As I noted at the time, there are numerous self-identified ethnic or nationalistic groups within the U.S. who routinely wave the flags of other countries at events, parades and protests -- including Israel, Ireland, Italy -- and yet that does not invoke the same objections. To the contrary, many of the same individuals who condemn the waving of Mexican flags praise and celebrate the waving of these other flags.

Yesterday, in the middle of New York City, protestors clogged the streets of Manhattan for a large rally called the "Stand with Israel" rally. As the photographs taken by one of the attendees reflect, there seem to have been many Israeli flags but, at least in these photographs, no American flags. Despite that, one of the most vocal commentators who lambasted the waving of Mexican flags on U.S. soil lauded the pro-Israeli protest.

With the immigration protests, some criticized the waving of Mexican flags on strategic grounds -- isn't it dumb of the protestors, they argued, to signal that their allegiance is to Mexico rather than to the U.S. Shouldn't they therefore be waiving U.S. flags? As Mickey Kaus put it (emphasis in original): "flaunting allegiance to a neighboring country was not a good way to make most Americans want to let in more people who share your attachment!"

Shouldn't the same thing be said about the pro-Israeli protestors yesterday? If Americans are going to be persuaded to join this war, it ought to be because doing so is in the interests of the United States, not of Israel. Wouldn't it make more sense, then, to wave American flags in order to illustrate the point that intervention is in America's interests, rather than waving the flag of another country in order to persuade Americans to enter a war on its behalf? And what, exactly, is the difference -- moral or etiquette-based or otherwise -- between the heinous act of waving Mexican flags and the inspiring act of waving Israelis flags, both on U.S. soil?

(3) One of the things I dislike about those who venerate U.N. Resolutions and international law is that it always seems so selectively emphasized by whoever is wielding them. Whatever else one wants to say about Israel -- meaning, leave aside the long list of alleged sins -- it is simply the case that there is a U.N. Resolution, 1559 (.pdf), which calls for the Lebanese government to exert full control over all of its territory, and independently, for the disbandment of Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah.

Neither the Lebanese Government nor Hezbollah are in compliance with that Resolution. And since its enactment, Hezbollah has used its position near the Israeli border to fly drones over Israel and to shoot rockets into Israel (before the outbreak of the current conflict). Shouldn't those on the Left who believe in the supremacy of international law and U.N. resolutions be unequivocally condemning Hezbollah, which ought to be disbanded if U.N. Resolutions are complied with and who, by definition, are guilty of war crimes for engaging in these acts in violation of those resolutions? Regardless of the acts of Israel, how can anyone who claims to be a believer in the supremacy of international law in any way justify the acts, or even the existence, of Hezbollah?

(4) Add Andy McCarthy to the list of commentators overtly advocating immediate intervention in this war and waging war on a long list of enemies, including Syria and Iraq. I saw some blogger somewhere mocking my claim the other day that National Review is a neoconservative publication. With McCarthy, Michael Ledeen, Victor Davis Hanson, John Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg and a whole host of others who blindly and unfailingly defend Israel and who believe the Bush administration needs to wage more war as quickly as possible in the Middle East, it's hard to see how any serious person could contest that view.

Speaking of neoconservativsm, George Will excoriates it today as, among other things, a "spectacularly misnamed radicalism," and asks: "And if Bashar Assad's regime does not fall after the Weekly Standard's hoped-for third war, with Iran, does the magazine hope for a fourth?"

Openly debating U.S. involvement in Israel's war

The bluntness and candor which characterized the war cries of neoconservatives this weekend was quite striking. Newt Gingrich declared that "World War III" has begun and chided the meek, war-averse Bush administration for "not responding fast enough" because "we don’t have the right attitude." The tough, resolute guys at National Review -- showing the gruff Churchillian bravery that is the hallmark of all Great Warriors -- courageously debated whether we should refer to this conflict as World War III or World War IV. And although the U.S. hasn't yet involved itself in a direct military way in this conflict, the administration is not shy about the fact that not only does it intend to do nothing to stop it, it is willing to take active steps to ensure its continuance.

But the most audacious argument for new and expanded war was advanced on Sunday by Bill Kristol, on Fox News, where he said this:

And indeed, this is a great opportunity. I think our weakness, unfortunately, invited this aggression, but this aggression is a great opportunity to begin resuming the offensive against the terrorist groups. Israel is fighting four of our five enemies in the Middle East, in a sense. Iran, Syria, sponsors of terror; Hezbollah and Hamas. Al Qaeda doesn’t seem to be involved. We have to take care of them in Iraq. This is an opportunity to begin to reverse the unfortunate direction of the last six to nine months and get the terrorists and the jihadists back on the defensive.

So, "Israel is fighting four of our five enemies in the Middle East" -- the only small exception being Al-Qaeda, which, as Cenk Uygur pointed out in this excellent post, happens to be the only group which actually attacked us. As I noted on Saturday, Kristol is now arguing that the Israeli war is really "our war," and on Sunday he took that a step further by claiming that groups devoted exclusively to fighting Israel are somehow also among our "five enemies in the Middle East." (Interestingly, Kristol doesn't appear to count among our five Middle Eastern enemies the insurgents whom we are actually fighting in Iraq; he only counts as our enemies those whom Israel is currently attacking or threatening to attack).

In what conceivable way are Hamas and Hezbollah enemies of the United States? They are unquestionably enemies of Israel, but what grounds exist even for arguing that they are our enemies? And while Syria undoubtedly is no fan of the U.S., what actions has it engaged in that would make it a threat to the U.S. even remotely sufficient to wage war on it? Plainly, Kristol, like so many neoconservatives, recognizes no difference of any kind between U.S. and Israeli interests, and is thus salivating at the opportunity to finally induce the U.S. to wage war on Israel's enemies.

For that reason, I think this article in this weekend's Washington Post is groundbreaking and critically important. It extensively and fairly addresses a question which most mainstream media outlets have fearfully avoided -- namely, the effect of the domestic Israeli lobby on U.S. foreign policy. With our military action in Iraq, that question was declared all but off limits, as war advocates, from the President on down, claimed that there was something malignant about questioning to what extent our urgent need to get rid of Saddam Hussein was influenced by a desire to bolster Israeli, rather than American, security.

George Bush himself instructed us that discussions of the role Israel plays in our Middle East policy is off limits when he told us that we must engage only in responsible debate over Iraq, not irresponsible debate, which he defined to include discussions of the extent to which a desire to protect Israel (or a desire to preserve oil supplies) influenced our invasion of Iraq:

Yet we must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate -- and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas.

The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right.

And consistent with the Commander-in-Chief's decree, anyone who has argued that a desire to protect Israeli interests plays too large of a role in our foreign policy has been subjected to some of the most vicious and relentless smears. Ask Juan Cole about that, or John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. Those tactics have, as intended, prevented a substantive debate on this question, as most people have feared even approaching the topic.

But that tactic isn't likely to work any longer. If neoconservatives are now going to argue openly and explicitly that we should intervene in this war because we have to fight with Israel against our common Islamic opponents, surely it now must be considered "responsible debate" to question to what extent the U.S.'s willingness to act in the Middle East is motivated by an excessive or unwise commitment to Israeli security. Bill Kristol and friends are again advocating an extraordinary measure -- that the U.S. join Israel in this war. A full and open debate on that topic is vital.

It is undoubtedly true that some people who object to what they claim ís Israel's excessive influence over American actions, or who argue that Israel is to blame for all of the conflict in the Middle East, are acting with less than noble sentiments (or worse), just as it is the case that some who urge greater American aggression in the Middle East are doing so out of loyalty to Israeli interests far more than to American interests.

But it is also the case that there are many who object to excessive Israeli allegiance because they believe in perfectly good faith that it is harmful to American interests or otherwise immoral, just as there are many people who believe in good faith that it really is in America's interests to stand by Israel because it is a close and democratic ally in the Middle East. The existence of extremists in a debate, or the fact that some on both sides are motivated by bad faith, hardly means the debate should be off-limits. And this debate is far too important to allow smear tactics and manipulative accusations of anti-semitism to prevent its full and vigorous airing.

Many people are arguing now that the influence of neoconservatives is less than what is was and so, too, is the administration's appetite for more war. Perhaps. But history is suffuse with examples of countries which found themselves in new wars or escalated wars not because they chose to be, but because circumstances, or miscalculation, or uncontrollable hostilities, dragged them into it.

We have 140,000 soldiers sitting in the center of the Middle East, and we have had multiple skirmishes in the past with both the Syrians and Iranians as a result of our activities in Iraq. In a climate where the administration's most prominent and loyal followers are urging that we wage war on those two countries, and with the administration itself at least sounding as though they are tempted by the idea, the likelihood of unintentional escalation, or reckless expansion of our war, is extremely high. If that is really a risk which our country wants to take after a full and open debate on the topic, so be it.

But the last thing that ought to happen is a repeat of our invasion of Iraq, where we began an extremely risky and misguided war against a country that wasn't threatening us without meaningful media scrutiny and therefore without a meaningful debate. The debate was not meaningful because objections to the war were stigmatized as seditious or even anti-semitic. That is a mistake that the U.S. cannot afford to make again.

The fact that the administration does not intend to wage war on Iran and/or Syria doesn't mean that such a war won't occur. And if the administration has not committed itself yet to causing such a war, they sure don't appear to be shying away from it either. They surely know full well that they are playing with gasoline near a raging fire, and they appear to be indifferent to the risks, if not actively seeking them. Why that is the case, and whether it is wise, must be topics that are fully open to examination.

UPDATE: Arthur Silber has some trenchant observations about how these debate-squelching tactics work in this context.

Extremism in the right-wing blogosphere - con't

Following up on my post from yesterday regarding the extremism and violence-inciting rhetoric among the "mainstream" right-wing blogs, I want to highlight two superb posts today on this topic. This one is from Dave Neiwert, who explores some of the reasons why they have come to rely so heavily on this such rhetoric and the broader purposes it serves.

This post, from the Great Society, elaborates on the media's obsession with, and incessant criticism of, petty attributes of the liberal blogosphere, as contrasted with their studious efforts to ignore the authoritarian impulses, and extremist and dangerous rhetoric -- much of it directed at them -- emanating literally on a daily basis from right-wing blogs.

Shining light on the extremist impulses and authoritarian mindset of the pro-Bush movement is, for reasons I've explained here, one of the most important (and effective) weapons against it. John Dean's new book is resonating so well, I believe, because it documents these authoritarian attributes and describes just how un-conservative, pro-government-power, and follower-dependent the Bush movement is. And just as anyone who criticizes their ultimate Leader, the Commander-in-Chief, is attacked with full force, so, too, will criticizing their online leaders subject one to all sorts of bitter personal invective, impotent attempts to research one's background, juvenile name-calling -- all of which is promoted and encouraged on an almost daily basis by their wounded leader. Dean's preface is devoted to detailing some of the most amazing personal assaults aimed at him once he spoke out against the new "conservative" movement.

But that is how all bullies and authoritarian movements behave -- by collectively swarming to demonize anyone who criticizes it as the Enemy, a mentally ill liar, etc. etc. Ask Richard Clarke, or Joe Wilson, or Howard Dean, or Jack Murtha, or Al Gore, or the anti-war Generals -- or any of the other mentally ill, seditious traitors and liars who have criticized the Commander-in-Chief and who oppose his movement. It is simply par for the course. And the more wounded and threatened they feel from the criticisms, the more intense will be their insults and name-calling tantrums and efforts to attack personally. It is one of the hallmarks of a dying movement that knows it is dying an ignominious death, and it is grounded in great weakness.

Journalists: It's time for some articles on the pro-Bush blogosphere

(updated below - updated again)

Media Matters has compiled a long list of just some of the violence-inciting rhetoric and hate-mongering which has become a staple of the right-wing blogosphere. It cites examples from bloggers such as Dean Esmay, Misha, Megan McCardle (a/k/a Jane Galt), and Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, along with the pundits and bloggers, led by David Horowitz, who were responsible for the recent publication of the addresses, telephone numbers, and satellite photographs of the homes of employees of The New York Times.

The important point here is that the liberal blogosphere has received substantial -- really, endless -- media attention over the past few months, coverage which has included everything from the upsetting use of bad words to petty bickering to rank Internet gossip. But the pro-Bush blogosphere is all but ignored by the media, and it is long past time for a substantive, thorough examination of the extremist rhetoric and violence-drenched imagery which composes the backbone of their dialogue.

In addition to the Media Matters items, there are numerous unreported stories regarding the right-wing blogosphere that are of great significance. Let's read about what goes on as part of the daily "discussions" at Little Green Footballs (whose daily readership numbers place it very near the top 100 daily newspapers in terms of circulation figures), and in similar venues of derangement such as Free Republic.

What type of rhetoric is one of the leaders of the pro-Bush blogosphere, Glenn Reynolds a/k/a Instapundit, a University of Tennessee law professor, promoting with his links, and himself disseminating on a regular basis? What sentiments motivate publication by Michelle Malkin of some of the most disturbing and hateful propaganda posters which can be imagined? And what causes three bland, corporate Minnesota lawyers at Powerline to routinely accuse political opponents and journalists of treason, urge their imprisonment, and engage in "rhetorical excesses too frequent to list"?

One of the pro-Bush blogs most heavily promoted by Instapundit currently displays satellite photographs of the home of the NYT Publisher, along with his home address -- isn't that thuggish tactic worth an article by itself? And virtually every mainstream Democrat, along with journalists who publish articles embarrassing to the Bush administration, are routinely accused in the pro-Bush blogosphere of being traitors and adjudged to be guilty of treason -- not by obscure pro-Bush blogs but by the most significant and well-read ones. As a result, as the Media Matters post documents, many pro-Bush bloggers have a virtual obsession with vivid demands for hanging political opponents and journalists.

John Dean's superb new book, Conservatives Without Conscience (which has been #1 on Amazon for most of the week), analyzes the transformation of American "conservatism" from a political ideology based on the imperatives of limiting government power into a movement predominated by authoritarian impulses and personalities -- a transformation I have also written about extensively. On his book tour, Dean -- who spent his life as such a mainstream Republican that he worked in the highest levels of the Nixon White House -- has been observing that his political views have really not changed over the past 30 years, but he now finds himself accused by pro-Bush conservatives of standing on the "left" side of the political spectrum.

That is because the political spectrum itself has shifted radically, and the movement which now most loudly describes itself as "conservative" bears little resemblance to the political movement of which Dean, for his entire life, considered himself a part. As its leading bloggers vividly illustrate, pro-Bush "conservatism" is a highly authoritarian movement which seeks to vest unlimited and unrestrained power in their Leader, views garden-variety political dissent as blasphemy and treason, and glorifies violence as a justifiable tool to achieve their glorious political ends. The standard language and argumentation of these pro-Bush bloggers reflect those attributes on a daily basis, which is why it is long past time for some journalistic examinations of what is being said and done by pro-Bush blogs.

The extremism of the right-wing blogosphere is so blatant that it is acknowledged and lamented by some conservative bloggers. Two well-read bloggers who advocated for the invasion of Iraq and who are generally quite conservative in their political views, Andrew Sullivan and Gregory Djerejian, both wrote recently about how this political shift has made much of the right-wing blogosphere unrecognizable to them as anything "conservative." Sullivan was long the most celebrated pro-war, conservative blogger, while Djerejian's blog was called a "must-read" by The Washington Times for his pro-war blogging. Yet both have become almost entirely alienated by what the pro-Bush blogosphere, epitomized by Reynolds, has become.

Sullivan wrote recently of how previously independent and libertarian-minded blogosphere leaders such as Reynolds "never challenged in any serious way the abuses of power in this administration nor the extremism of the Malkinesque blogosphere," and as a result, much of the right-wing/pro-Bush blogosphere has largely abandoned any allegiance to restrained-government conservatism:

But his appeasement of the Malkin right is truly dispiriting. He's not alone in this respect, unable to break with the illegal, arguably un-conservative and certainly anti-libertarian aspects of the current administration.

Djerejian documented the continuous and enthusiastic promotion by Reynolds of extremist foreign policy rhetoric and "outrageously looney, laughable fare" which, if followed, would generate "a series of 100 year religious wars." Djerejian also laments the smear tactics routinely invoked by the Reynolds-led blogosphere against anyone who criticizes the administration's war efforts, including those who have spent their lives loyally serving this country. He notes that this:

is the only reason I waste time writing about it this morning--because I care about the future of the Republican party's foreign policy, and if people seriously believe this utter claptrap and horseshit in too great numbers, we're gonna have some serious problems on our hands beyond where we're already at. . . . When you get over 100,000 readers a day, and are a very intelligent Yale-trained lawyer, there should be some responsibility shown.

To underscore the point, Djerejian, in a separate post this week, publishes a letter from a U.S. solider serving in the Middle East who laments that "the shocking intelligence/ reasonability/ credibility free-fall at Instapundit is closely mirrored" by Bush followers everywhere, who refuse to believe reality about the war, who ascribe blame for all failures to a treasonous media or anti-American liberals rather than to the administration, and who place blind faith in the infallibility of Bush's actions, a syndrome which the solider describes as "a very common disease."

The extremist and increasingly deranged rhetoric and tactics found in the right-wing blogosphere -- not only among obscure bloggers but promoted and disseminated by its most-read and influential bloggers -- is, indeed, "a very common disease." When it becomes commonplace to hurl accusations of treason against domestic political opponents, or when calls for imprisonment and/or hanging of journalists and political leaders become the daily fare -- all of which is true for the pro-Bush blogosphere -- those are serious developments. And they merit discussion and examination by the media.

Instead of yet another story on whether Kos diarists are arguing with each other more than before or whether liberal bloggers curse too much, let us read about the extremist rhetoric, vicious character smears, and deliberate incitement to violence that has become the staple of the largest pro-Bush blogs --Malkin, Powerline, Instapundit and LGF -- along with the bloggers whom they tirelessly promote. Hundreds of thousands of people each day, including pundits and television news producers, are reading this material. The journalistic value in examining it and reporting on it ought to be self-evident.

UPDATE: Helpfully right on cue, LGF has a post today entitled "The Media are the Enemy" -- a title which really summarizes one of the principal points made on a daily basis by the blogs maintained by Powerline, Instapundit, and Malkin. Today's treasonous act is that a NYT photographer took photographs of a member of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army engaged in combat with American forces. Apparently, taking a photograph of someone engaged in a war is the same as aiding and abetting them and being on their side and rooting for them to win. Hence, photographers who take photographs of the enemy are themselves "the enemy."

LGF then links to Jeff Goldstein, who -- in a post entitled "Sleeping with the Enemy" -- declares: "Looks like the NYT has decided to go with neutrality over objectivity—essentially severing ties with their own country in the service of what they believe is a higher journalistic good: Pulitzer Prizes." He then thanks Michelle Malkin for the tip. Goldstein's post is then predictably followed by comments such as this:

It is clear (as it has been) that the NYT’s has chosen their side. They should suffer the consequences thereof. I just hope they do.

And this:

Talk of treason is out of fashion for some reason, but I could see some photographer hanged without losing too much sleep over it.

And this:

As i said over at LGF, pity the reporter didn’t catch any return fire.

That's just from the first few comments I looked at following Goldstein's Treason Accusation of The Day against the NYT. Undoubtedly, there are scores more like them as his comment thread "evolves."

Another day, another treason accusation, new traitors found in the American media and the Democratic Party, more calls for them to be killed or declarations that they deserve death. These are the sentiments fueling the pro-Bush right wing -- day after day after day. I realize that the use of bad words in e-mails sent by readers of left-wing blogs reflect such horrible meanness and hatred and should be covered by hundreds of newspaper articles. But doesn't this dynamic also merit some discussion?

UPDATE II: Michelle Malkin's post today is entitled "In the Company of the Enemy" and she pointedly says: "Which side are they on? The New York Times settles the question definitively" -- both with an editorial that criticizes the Leader and with the photographs found by LGF. She then links to John Hinderaker at Powerline, who cleverly observes that there was nothing courageous about the photographer taking those photographs because there was no "likelihood that a member of the Iraqi "insurgency" would regard a representative of the New York Times as an enemy."

This photographer-as-traitor lunacy spreading among them like wildfire may make it seem like I fortuitously picked a good day to highlight the extremism and treason-obsession of the pro-Bush blogosphere. But today is nothing new. This goes on every day with the right's largest blogs. Every day, a new traitor, more treason, more journalists and Democrats who deserve to be hanged.

UPDATE III: Those American patriots at Blogs for Bush stand up today for core American values by urging that those responsible for the Plame scandal -- meaning not Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, but instead, Joe Wilson and others at "the DNC and Kerry campaign" -- be imprisoned because they tried to make the Commaner-in-Chief look bad -- in an election year no less (h/t Hume's Ghost):

We really do need to prosecute Joe Wilson and others (likely at the DNC and Kerry campaign) who cooked up this whole, bogus story in an election year ploy to try and slander the President in to defeat in November of 2004. That it didn't work just shows the innate wisdom of the American people - but the people guilty of this con job need to see the inside of a jail cell.

Is there anybody who voted against the Commander-in-Chief who can remain free? As amazing as that Blogs for Bush post is, and as amazing as the photographer-as-traitor rants are today, my favorite all-time defense of American values is Townhall's Ben Shapiro, who emphatically advocated -- literally -- that Al Gore, Howard Dean, and John Kerry all be imprisoned for sedition. He could never have guessed when he penned that screed that the pro-Bush blogosphere would end up making him look mild.

Is Israel's war also "our war"?

(updated below - updated again)

A very significant development is occurring in how neoconservatives are discussing America's responsibilities in the Middle East: they are now expressly advocating, far more openly than ever before, that Israel's enemies are America's enemies, and that the war which Israel is now fighting is also America's war -- one in which America should immediately intervene. I will write my own reactions to this view later, but for now, I want to simply document the emergence of this argument in very influential circles.

In the past, neoconservatives have danced delicately around the notion that Israel's conflicts should be viewed by the U.S. as its own conflicts. But, to his credit, Bill Kristol yesterday came right out and candidly put his views on the table. In the Weekly Standard, Kristol's column -- entitled "This is Our War" (by "Our" he means the U.S.) -- argues explicitly what many have contended for some time is an unstated belief of neoconservatives: that the U.S. should view the threats to Israel as threats to the U.S., because the enemy is the same, and should join Israel in the destruction of these enemies. Kristol actually argues that President Bush should immediately abandon the G-8 summit in Russia and fly to Jerusalem in order to stand by Israel, in "our" new war, which should be waged against Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, for starters. This article is very significant and I am quoting from it at length:

What's happening in the Middle East, then, isn't just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What's happening is an Islamist-Israeli war. You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West--but is India part of the West? Better to say that what's under attack is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States. . . .

The war against radical Islamism is likely to be a long one. Radical Islamism isn't going away anytime soon. But it will make a big difference how strong the state sponsors, harborers, and financiers of radical Islamism are. Thus, our focus should be less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders--Syria and Iran. And our focus should be not only on the regional war in the Middle East, but also on the global struggle against radical Islamism.

For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak. . . .

The right response is renewed strength--in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?

But such a military strike would take a while to organize. In the meantime, perhaps President Bush can fly from the silly G8 summit in St. Petersburg--a summit that will most likely convey a message of moral confusion and political indecision--to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies. This is our war, too.

Bill Kristol is one of the most influential neonconservative pundits in the country, if not the most influential, and the fact that he is openly advocating this world-view means that we will be seeing much more of it from the neoconservative precincts which led us into the invasion of Iraq. Already, John Podhoretz in National Review is excitedly celebrating Kristol's argument, and Michael Ledeen is already complaining that the Administration hasn't yet thrown the U.S. militarily into this new war, where we have whole new enemies -- Iran and Syria -- waiting to be attacked:

But we have not heard anything about "seizing the moment." We hear lawyer talk and diplotalk, surrender talk and appeasement talk, and there is no action whatsoever. Is this not the time to go after the terrorist training camps in Syria and Iran? What in the world are we waiting for?

And finally, if we dither through this one, the next one will be worse. Maybe much worse. It's not going away. Stability is a mirage. Chamberlain had a choice between dishonor and war. He chose war and got dishonor. You too, Mr. President. It's the way it works.

And then, from John Hinderaker at Powerline, where the excitement over this conflict is palpable -- they really think this is, finally, our big chance to expand our war beyond Iraq, where things are going really well, into Syria and Iran -- we find this:

Robert Satloff's analysis in the new issue of the Weekly Standard anticipates the direct Iranian involvement in the conflict: . . . .

Defeat for Israel--either on the battlefield or via coerced compromises to achieve flawed cease-fires--is a defeat for U.S. interests; it will inspire radicals of every stripe, release Iran and Syria to spread more mayhem inside Iraq, and make more likely our own eventual confrontation with this emboldened alliance of extremists.

It should go without saying that one can believe that Israel is within its rights to defend itself against Hezbollah without also believing that the U.S. should become involved in this extraordinarily flammable conflict. But these neoconservatives don't recognize that distinction. As they are now expressly arguing, Israel's enemies are America's enemies, and this war being waged by Israel ought to become America's war -- and the sooner the better.

I believe it is obvious to most Americans, who have turned completely on the war in Iraq, that it is sheer lunacy to expand that failed war effort to now include American war on even more countries -- including more powerful ones with more powerful allies, such as Iran -- let alone to do so as part of, and in the middle of, an Arab-Israeli war. But if there is one lesson that we ought to have learned over the past several years, it is that there is no militaristic proposal too crazed or extremist to be undertaken by this administration. And anyone who thinks that these neoconservatives now lack real influence within the Bush administration is sorely mistaken.

UPDATE: At Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy has a thoughtful and lengthy analysis of the new war in the Middle East. Without endorsing all of its particulars, she presents a balanced and rational view of what is motivating each party, something which is quite difficult to do for most people when writing about that region.

UPDATE II: I also read this analysis of the Middle East conflict by Billmon yesterday and meant to link to it, because it is superb (again, without necessarily agreeing with each of its claims), and was just reminded to do so by someone who mentioned it in Comments. And I equally recommend Billmon's second post from yesterday on the surprising military adeptness of Hezbollah thus far and what that means for Israel and the region.

UPDATE III: Nobody should take comfort in thinking that a desire for the U.S. to intervene in Israel's war is confined to extremist neoconservative circles. Here is Bush 41 Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger -- generally considered a grown-up foreign policy adult -- with Wolf Blitzer yesterday (h/t Elton Beard via e-mail):

EAGLEBURGER: Finally, I would say so long as the Iranians can put arms into -- into Hezbollah through Syria, I think we have a continuing problem. And I, for a long time have felt we had to get much tougher with the Syrians than we are now. It may be that the Iraq issue has made it more difficult for us to get tough. But the Syrians...

BLITZER: What does that mean, Mr. Secretary...

EAGLEBURGER: Well, what it means to me is that we, for one thing, ought to be putting real pressure on their border with Iraq more than we are, and I think putting economic pressure on them. And frankly, I don't care as well, if we go in along with the Israelis and drop a few bombs on them.

The mindless casualness with which such people blithely advocate starting a new war -- like it's no different that deciding what one will eat for dinner tomorrow -- is breathtaking. There is an influential and determined minority out there craving U.S. intervention in this war. They are searching for any means to expand the war in Iraq to additional countries, all as part of our Epic War of Civilizations, and given their past success in inducing the U.S. to invade Iraq, I think it's a mistake to assume that what they are advocating is too extreme and self-evidently disastrous to become a reality.

The NYT, WP and Time all report the Specter bill as the opposite of what it is

The moderate-to-conservative Editorial Page of The Washington Post today appears to directly criticize the Post's own news article from yesterday, by Charles Babington and Peter Baker, which ludicrously reported that the Specter bill constituted a "concession" and a "clear retreat" by the Bush administration. The Post's Op-Ed points out:

SENATE JUDICIARY Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) has cast his agreement with the White House on legislation concerning the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance as a compromise -- one in which President Bush accepts judicial review of the program. It isn't a compromise, except quite dramatically on the senator's part. Mr. Specter's bill began as a flawed but well-intentioned effort to get the program in front of the courts, but it has been turned into a green light for domestic spying. It must not pass. . . .

This bill is not a compromise but a full-fledged capitulation on the part of the legislative branch to executive claims of power. Mr. Specter has not been briefed on the NSA's program. Yet he's proposing revolutionary changes to the very fiber of the law of domestic surveillance -- changes not advocated by key legislators who have detailed knowledge of the program. This week a remarkable congressional debate began on how terrorists should face trial, with Congress finally asserting its role in reining in overbroad assertions of presidential power. What a tragedy it would be if at the same time, it acceded to those powers on the fundamental rights of Americans.

It wasn't just the Post which fundamentally misled its readers about this bill. So, too, did Eric Lichtblau in his article in The New York Times ("The proposed legislation represents a middle-ground approach among the myriad proposals in Congress for dealing with the wiretapping controversy"). But in the department of factually false stories, both the NYT and the Post were completely outdone by this indescribably ridiculous Time Magazine article (h/t A.L.), which depicts Arlen Specter as a crusading warrior who resolutely refused to back down and who thereby forced the White House to accede to his demands (his "demands" apparently being that the White House allow him to write a law that would render the President's illegal eavesdropping program legal, and which would remove any and all Congressional limitations in the future on the President's power to eavesdrop on Americans -- boy, that Specter drives a hard bargain).

By contrast, conservative bloggers and liberal bloggers alike immediately recognized that the Specter bill is a complete capitulation to the Bush administration, something which gives the White House everything it could possibly want and more. And yet journalists who write for the nation's most influential newspapers and magazines reported the bill as being the opposite of what it really is, and in the process, completely skewed the public debate over this critically important matter -- perhaps irreversibly -- by hopelessly clouding the real issues it raises.

I'm not one of those who believe that blogs have replaced or can replace major journalistic outlets for the gathering of news. The vast resources of those organizations are still necessary for news gathering. But when it comes to understanding, analyzing and interpreting political and world events, there is very little competition, in my view, between the blogosphere and traditional media outlets. Most celebrated journalists yesterday were spewing the plainly false view that the Specter bill constituted a capitulation by the White House, while bloggers immediately recognized that the opposite was true.

That is why, with rare exception, if I read only blogs but no established media outlets for news analysis, I feel I would be missing nothing. But if I read only established media outlets but no blogs, I would feel that I was operating in the dark.

A reader of this blog sent an e-mail yesterday to the Post's Charles Babington pointing out the grossly misleading nature of his article, and Babington petulantly replied as follows:

From: Chuck Babington <xxxxxxxx@washpost.com>

To: XXXXXX <xxxxxxx@mac.com>

Date: Fri Jul 14, 2006 10:48:26 AM CDT

Subject: Re: Message via washingtonpost.com: Specter Bill

I read the bill. Can you cite a single inaccuracy? Here's my guess: You read neither the bill nor the entire story.

That's how Babington -- after writing a story which conveyed the opposite of reality -- responded to a reader who complained. He condescendingly accused the reader of not having read the bill and/or the article. I was going to e-mail Babington today to highlight for him the patent inaccuracies in his article, but his own newspaper's Editorial Page today already did so.

Our democracy relies upon the media to inform Americans as to what their Government is doing, most particularly to inform them of inaccuracies in claims made by political officials. When, instead, journalists are manipulated by self-interested politicians into conveying fantasy and propaganda rather than reality ("the White House makes major compromises on eavesdropping!"), the damage to our democracy's ability to have meaningful public debates really is immeasurable.

What will Democrats do in the wake of the Specter cave-in?

(updated below)

Following up on yesterday's post regarding Arlen Specter's complete (and hardly unexpected) cave-in to the administration on the NSA scandal, it is now clear that the bill does not have an express amnesty provision in it (see Update II). But every other possible bad thing can and should be said about this bill. Marty Lederman has an excellent and very thorough statutory analysis of the whole travesty, explaining that Specter "introduces a bill, with Administration blessing, that gives the Administration everything it ever wanted, and much, much more."

Jack Balkin's post is also very much worth reading, in which he concludes: "Barely two weeks after Hamdan, which appeared to be the most important separation of powers decision in our generation, the Executive is about to get back everything it lost in that decision, and more."

In essence, Specter's bill repeals each and every restriction on the President's ability to eavesdrop, all but forecloses judicial challenges, and endorses the very theory of unlimited executive power which Hamdan just days ago rejected (and in the process, rendered the administration's FISA-prohibited eavesdropping on Americans a clear violation of the criminal law). With this bill, Specter -- the self-proclaimed defender of Congressional power -- did more to bolster the administration's radical executive power theories than anything the administration could have dreamed of doing on their own, especially in the wake of Hamdan (permit me here to apologize for all of those times I tepidly defended Specter by characterizing as unduly pessimistic and cynical predictions that he could cave completely; the humiliations he is willing, even eager, to publicly endure are without limits).

The question now is what Democrats (who, by the way, still have filibuster power) are willing to do about this. Here is Lederman's suggestion:

I hope this bill is the non-starter that it deserves to be. If so, allow me to make one more plea here: Everyone behind the Schumer bill, please! Let's get the question of NSA legality before the Supreme Court right now, and after that we can worry about how to amend FISA in a responsible manner sensitive to changing needs, such as perhaps along the lines of the models suggested by David Kris or in Jane Harman's bill.

More important than the legislative question, in my view, is what the Democrats are willing to do about this politically. It should not be hard, even for them, to make the case that everyone is in favor of eavesdropping. The only question is whether (a) George Bush should be able to eavesdrop on Americans in secret and with no oversight, or (b) George Bush can eavesdrop on Americans, but only with a requirement of judicial oversight - a requirement which every President, without complaint, has complied with for the last 30 years, including Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War.

With just the smallest amount of resolve and message discipline, they can easily convey that this is not a debate about whether to eavesdrop on Al Qaeda -- everyone is for that -- but is about whether George Bush should have the power to eavesdrop on Americans with no oversight, an awesome power which this country overwhelmingly decided 30 years ago, in the wake of decades of abuses, that we do not trust the President -- any President -- to have. This is yet another long-standing safeguard against abuses of executive power which the Bush administration is uprooting -- in the process, changing the kind of nation we are.

Polls uniformly show that Americans are concerned about unchecked one-party rule and want a restoration of accountability and balance. This is the perfect debate for Democrats to have, to finally articulate why this country should turn over one or both of the houses of Congress to them. The case needs to be made that what is needed in this country is a counterweight to the corruption and excesses which come from having the President's party control all parts of government and thereby allow the President to exercise power without limits. Providing that balance, that check on one-party rule, is what Democrats can do best and even reach agreement on amongst themselves. They can provide oversight and limits on the Government's conduct and on the Republicans' unchecked abuses of power.

Isn't that what Democrats want to convince Americans they will do if they win in November? And what better issue to illustrate that intention than this Republican effort to radically change how our Government spies on us? The genius Democratic consultants, joined by the genius Beltway journalists at The New Republic and on cable shows, will, of course, counsel oh-so-knowingly, and oh-so-worriedly, that Democrats should stay away from opposing this bill because (as always) they'll be doing Karl Rove such a big favor by allowing him to portray Democrats as opposing eavesdropping on terrorists, by shifting the debate to the Republican's strongest ground of terrorism, and every other prong of conventional wisdom that gets trotted out during these discussions to urge Democrats not to stand in the way of what the President wants. And Republican pundits and strategists will, as always, echo this theme, boasting that they are eager for Democrats to oppose them on this because nothing could help Republicans more than if they do, etc. etc.

But all of that can happen only if Democrats fail to resolutely stand up for themselves and articulate what is really at stake here. If they do, they can make this issue about what it really, in fact, is about: (a) do we want the President to be able spy on us in secret and with no limits or safeguards, as we had before 1978 with great abuse?; and (b) do we really need to abolish the long-standing safeguards which, as a country, we imposed on our Government in order to prevent abuses, all because George Bush claims he can't defeat Al Qaeda unless we fundamentally change how our government works, allow him to spy on us without oversight, and give him unchecked power?

It is critical to note that the radical change here is the one the Republicans are advocating. They want to abolish long-standing limits -- which were supported by a consensus of Republicans and Democrats alike (FISA was approved by a Senate vote of 95-1) -- on how our Government spies on us. This is yet another fundamental change to our Government designed to give more unchecked power to George Bush, this time in how he spies on our conversations. Most Democrats haven't been able to get themselves to engage that debate as of yet (see, for instance, the extremely short list of co-sponsors for Russ Feingold's Censure Resolution), but if they aren't willing to do that now, when will they? And if they aren't willing to convince Americans that some safeguards and checks are needed on Republican power, what reason do they plan on giving Americans as to why they should win in November?

UPDATE: The media's reports on this travesty illustrate, yet again, that the single greatest problem our country faces -- the principal reason the Bush administration has been able to get away with the abuses it has perpetrated -- is because our national media is indescribably lazy, inept, dysfunctional and just plain stupid, for reasons discussed in this comment from Jao and my response.

The reporters who write on these matters literally don't understand the issues they are reporting, even though the issues are not all that complicated. Notwithstanding the fact that this bill expressly removes all limits on the President's eavesdropping powers -- and returns the state of the law regarding presidential eavesdropping to the pre-FISA era, when there were no limits on presidential eavesdropping of any kind -- Charles Babington and Peter Baker told their readers in The Washington Post -- in an article hilariously entitled: "Bush Compromises On Spying Program" -- that "the deal represented a clear retreat by Bush" and that "the accord is a reversal of Bush's position that he would not submit his program to court review."

Anyone with a basic understanding of what FISA was and of the conflicts in play could read the Specter bill and see that the last thing it does is entail "compromises" on the part of the White House. Nobody who knows how to read could read that bill and think that. At this point, I believe they don't even read the bill. It's hard to see how they could read the bill and then write that article. Instead, it seems that they just call their standard sources on each side, go with the White House-Specter assessment that this is some grand "compromise" on the ground that it is a joint view of both warring sides, and then throw in a cursory ACLU quote somewhere at the end just to be able to say that they included some opposing views. But the reporters who are writing about this - and I mean the ones writing in the pages of our country's most important newspapers - don't actually have any idea what they're talking about.

Babington is the same reporter who falsely told his readers on the front page of the Post in March that the Republican "compromise" bill from the Senate Intelligence Committee (offered in lieu of an actual investigation into the NSA program) entailed substantial Congressional oversight of the program, even though a quick reading of the actual bill would have revealed that it entailed no such oversight. Representatives from Sen. DeWine and Snowe's office apparently told him what great oversight their bill provided and so he printed as fact what he was told.

After bloggers pointed out this error, the Post, several days later, was forced to issue a correction (appended to the top of the original article). But the same thing that happened there is happening here - Republican Senators and White House representatives with a vested interest in how the story gets reported characterize the bill in a certain way, and then lazy, uninformed reporters like Babington uncritically regurgitate that version as fact in the newspaper.

As Jao observed in his comment, the damage here is that it becomes conventional wisdom that this bill is now some sort of "compromise" on the part of the White House, such that beltway journalists and other types will simply assume that it's some sort of moderate, middle-of-the-road result which only extremists and obstructionists would oppose. The reality, of course, is the opposite: this bill bolsters the President's theories of unlimited executive power beyond Dick Cheney's wildest dreams. But the media, as is so often the case, fails in its duty to inform Americans as to what the Government is actually doing, which then prevents anything from actually being done about it. For every instance of presidential abuse of power or profound policy failure over the last five years, that dynamic is a major cause.

The Specter-White House FISA agreement

(updated below - updated again)

The Associated Press is reporting that Sen. Arlen Specter has reached agreement with the White House on a bill acceptable to both of them to render legal the currently illegal warrantless eavesdropping program. I am writing something today on a deadline -- actually past a deadline -- which I promised would be done today, so I may not have time to post on this (or the Hamdan developments from yesterday) until tomorrow. But I am certain that many people will have things to say about this in Comments, so I am posting this to enable that discussion. If I can post more later, I will.

I haven't seen the legislation, but based on the reports of it I've read, the biggest question, in my view, is whether it contains the amnesty -- the retroactive shield from prosecution -- which Specter's last proposed FISA-related bill (.pdf) provided (the existence of which he dishonestly denied on national television). If anyone has a link to the bill itself, please post it in comments (or e-mail it).

UPDATE: The Specter bill is here and here (the first link is the bill he proposed several weeks ago, and the second link contains the amendments to that bill as of July 11) (h/t la'ikoa). From my preliminary read, the bill as it exists today would not only legalize warrantless eavesdropping going forward, but would also purport to retroactively legalize the administration's warrantless eavesdropping back through 1978 - meaning that the criminal behavior which the administration has engaged in for the last five years would suddenly and magically become legal.

I say this because the provisions of the Specter bill which, as I explained here, provide such retroactive de-criminalization (Section 801), are not changed in any meaningful way through the July 11 amendments. If that is the case, enactment of this bill into law would be a travesty of unparalleled proportions, for reasons I explained here:

The idea that the President's allies in Congress would enact legislation which expressly shields government officials, including the President, from criminal liability for past lawbreaking is so reprehensible that it is difficult to describe. To my knowledge, none of the other proposed bills -- including those from the most loyal Bush followers in the Senate -- contained this protective provision. And without knowing anywhere near as much as I would need to know in order to form a definitive opinion, the legality of this provision seems questionable at best. It's really the equivalent of a pardon, a power which the Constitutional preserves for the President. Can Congress act as a court and simply exonerate citizens from criminal conduct?

The Supreme Court in Hamdan just made clear that the President's legal defenses for eavesdropping on Americans in violation of FISA are baseless. That means that the President has been violating the criminal law, and continues to do so. What possible rationale is there for Congress to immunize him from liability by retroactively rendering legal his criminal conduct? If political officials can violate the law, and then have their Congressional allies enact new laws to magically turn their crimes into legal acts, then the rule of law, by definition, does not exist.

UPDATE II: As always with these proposed bills, there is now some confusion as to exactly what the latest version does provide.

The July 11 amendments which I linked to above do not alter the retroactive legalization provisions from Specter's last version -- which would mean this bill does provide amnesty. But the ACLU just e-mailed me what they are calling the "Final Specter bill" -- meaning the bill described by news reports today -- and the version they sent to me (which is not yet available online) does not contain the retroactive provision. It does amend the penalty provisions of FISA so that it would now be permissible -- going forward -- to eavesdrop either under FISA or "under the constitutional authority of the executive." But at least from what I can tell, it does not contain that pernicious provision making that amendment retroactive to the 1978 enactment of FISA, the way the prior Specter bill did.

Nonetheless, the ACLU has issued a letter (also not yet available online) in which they say this (emphasis in original):

For the following primary reasons, the ACLU urges all Senators to vote against the substitute for S. 2453 and speak out against it:

Congress Should Not Pardon the President for Violating Criminal Laws against Government Wiretapping without a Court Order.

The bill would amend section 109 of FISA, 50 USC § 1809, which imposes a criminal penalty of up to five years in jail and a $10,000 fine for wiretapping Americans without a court order. It would accomplish this by allowing wiretapping at the direction of the president outside of FISA, accepting the theory that the president has inherent constitutional authority to wiretap without judicial oversight. It would also amend the criminal code, 18 USC §§ 2711(2)(e) and (f), to make it legal to
wiretap outside of FISA at the direction of the president.

In so doing, Senator Specter’s bill would expressly create a retroactive exception to criminal liability when warrantless wiretapping is done at the president’s discretion, acquiescing to the president’s claim of inherent constitutional power, unless and until a court intervenes. Little could be more damaging to the rule of law than effectively pardoning President Bush and his aides, and in the process returning our nation to the dark days before Watergate when President Nixon spied at will on journalists, government employees, and ordinary Americans.

Although the ACLU accuses the Specter bill of providing a "pardon" for the President's prior criminal conduct -- and also of "expressly create(ing) a retroactive exception to criminal liability when warrantless wiretapping is done at the president’s discretion" -- it seems they are criticizing the bill's recognition of the President's inherent authority to eavesdrop going forward. There is no reference to any express provision providing for retroactive de-criminalization of past violations of FISA, which leads me to believe that it is not, in fact, in this bill, or else the ACLU would emphasize it in their opposition.

I know this is all less than clear, but between figuring out which version of the bill is the current one, and which provisions it contains, the matter itself is unclear. But it seems to me now that although there is a (weak) argument to make that this bill provides retroactive legalization, it does not do so in the explicit sense that the prior Specter bill did. Instead, it merely enables the administration to claim that Congress is now recognizing the administration's inherent authority to eavesdrop -- a point which, even if true, would not (as Hamdan and Youngstown made clear) excuse the administration's exercise of that power in the face of a Congressional statute which imposes limitations on the power.

Right-wing tempter tantrums - Hamdan and illegal eavesdropping

(updated below)

Two matters to note:

(1) My post yesterday concerning the hypocrisy and inconsistency of those right-wing bloggers who self-righteously milked the Epic "Deb Frisch" Controversy for all it was worth this weekend doesn't seem to have been very well-received by the Right Blogosphere. In less than 24 hours, they swarmed together to spit out the most petulant wave of childish insults and substance-free foot-stomping that I have seen in quite some time -- a frenzied wave of ad hominems and bitter personal insults which were then promoted, linked to and celebrated by the Chief Defender and Arbiter of Civil Discourse, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds.

Right-wing bloggers who spent the weekend lamenting the state of discourse on the Internet responded to my post as follows: Patterico's post was entitled "Glenn Greenwald: Douchebag" and he began by arguing: "Glenn Greenwald is a douchebag"; he ended his post by saying: "You douchebag." When I responded to his post in his comment section, he added a postscript to his post threatening to ban me from commenting on his blog.

Dan Riehl's post, entitled "Enough Of Greenwald, Already," quickly refused to condemn Misha's calls for the hanging of journalists and Supreme Court Justices, but spent the bulk of the post hurling ad hominems at me, calling me "the most annoying little twit of the Left" and "an average, unemployed lawyer." He also recommended that I "opt for actual masturbation," and then investigated my bar status and reported that I was guilty of the grave sin of filing my attorney registration renewal form late.

Little Green Footballs observed that I had written "another idiotic post" and that I was "the left’s most dishonest blogger." Sister Toldjah accused me of having a "peculiar fascination with slamming all things conservative." Confederate Yankee's post was entitled "Lord of the Dunce" and began: "Poor Glenn Greenwald" and ended with: "I'd tell him to take a long walk off a short pier, but I don't know that the poor man would survive the rhetorical drop."

And then, appropriately enough, they all linked to each other, with short little cliched bursts of praise ("Slam!"). So that's your star-studded line-up of right-wing moralizing crusaders who spent the weekend solemnly lamenting the lack of civility in political discourse in the blogosphere.

With those brilliant and elevated responses assembled before him, Instapundit -- who endlessly parades himself around as a righteous advocate of civil discourse, and who was one of those who spent the weekend lamenting the terrible language directed at Jeff Goldstein -- also weighed in on my post. He did so by approvingly linking to the very high-level responses from Dan Riehl, Sister Toldjah, and Patterico, and then shared with us: "I'm no fan of Greenwald." (Incidentally, Instapundit, who claims with great self-satisfaction to be an adherent to the privacy-protecting "Online Integrity" concept, links to Riehl, who currently has posted on his blog satellite photographs of Punch Salzburger's home along with his home address).

So that's the level of discourse that comes from right-wing bloggers, every one of whom cited here -- each and every one -- doled out solemn lectures this weekend about how terrible it is for people to write mean personal insults on the Internet, only to respond to my post today with the above-excerpted tantrums. And all of that leaves to the side the fact that they were unable to comprehend the actual arguments that were made in the post -- most of them responded to the opposite of the argument that was actually made -- an embarrassing fact which QandO's Jon Henke had to explain to them here and here. But ultimately, their whiny, ad hominem tantrums seem more notable than the lack of comprehension.

(2) I will write more about this topic tomorrow, but Anonymous Liberal summarizes some important events from yesterday with regard to the implications of Hamdan for the President's radical executive power theories generally, as well as its impact on the warrantless NSA program specifically. I have been arguing since Hamdan was issued that that decision squarely forecloses both of the legal defenses which the administration has raised to justify its violations of FISA, and as A.L. notes, even National Review's Andrew McCarthy -- one of the administration's most stalwart legal defenders -- now agrees. He wrote in NRO yesterday:

Hamdan is a disaster because it sounds the death knell forthe National Security Agency's Terrorist SurveillanceProgram (TSP) . . . . Logically, albeit very unfortunately,the court has simultaneously brushed aside both administration justifications for the TSP.

That seems to be an emerging consensus, even among Bush supporters -- that Hamdan removes any potential justification for the Bush administration to continue to eavesdrop outside of FISA or disregard other Congressional laws in the area of national security. But, as A.L. documents, the administration -- at least for now -- seems intent on defending its illegal program even in the face of Hamdan, i.e., even though it has no good faith legal justification left. I will write more on this tomorrow.

UPDATE: In a post on NRO's Bench Memos (h/t Jao), Andrew McCarthy says that the majority in Hamdan based its reasoning on the anti-warrantless-eavesdropping legal letter (.pdf) signed by 14 former government lawyers and professors (including Marty Lederman) which argued that the NSA program is illegal, and McCarthy is therefore convinced that the majority decision in Hamdan precludes the administration's legal defenses in the NSA matter. He thus concludes:

Finally, not to go on much longer in this already lengthy response, I have spent a great deal of time and energy studying and trying to explain what I understand to be the legal basis for the NSA program. . . . My own rule of thumb is to try to fight hard but fight fair, and admit when I’ve lost. I’ve lost.

Too bad the Bush administration -- at least as of now -- can't be as forthright about these matters as McCarthy is, and simply admit that the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan has rendered their warrantless eavesdropping program illegal. The administration's continuation of the program now means not only that they are breaking the law, but that they are doing so knowingly and with no good faith defenses.

(3) Chris Bowers' post, highly worth reading, explores the way in which "the media establishment ignores the increasingly frequent calls to violence within the right-wing blogosphere," even as it is obsessed with petty conflicts and gossip in the left-wing blogosphere.

Given that journalists have become the favorite target for this incendiary and violence-inciting rhetoric from the Right, it is high time that we begin reading articles exploring the extremist and dangerous tactics coming from increasingly mainstream segments of the right-wing blogosphere. An examination of those trends would be a lot more valuable (and a lot more interesting) than yet another tiresome and shallow article about whether liberal bloggers curse too much or whether Kos dictates what liberal bloggers will write.

Prominent right-wing blogger today calls for the murder of Supreme Court Justices - the Right fails to condemn it

If your only source for news was reading right-wing blogs, you would have thought that the most significant world event in the last few days was that some crazy woman who nobody ever heard of before (someone by the name of "Deb Frisch") left some vile comments on Jeff Goldstein's blog, a venue which itself is devoted to some of the most vile, deranged and psychosexually disturbed commentary that can be found on the Internet. Virtually every right-wing blogger spent the weekend focused on this solemn and grave matter, milking it for all it was worth. Many implied that this unknown commenter was some sort of towering figure of great significance among liberals, and exploited the drama to argue that the "Left" must approve of these comments because they didn't denounce the comments enough times or with enough vigor.

The blogger Misha of the blog Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler is one of the most linked-to and popular bloggers in the right-wing blogosphere. He's the 42nd most linked-to blogger on the Internet, and he is in the blogroll of scores of right-wing bloggers, such as Michelle Malkin and Captian's Quarters Blog. He wrote a post today discussing the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan and here is what he said:

Of course, this is the same Supreme Court that earlier decided in Kelo that private property rights only matter as long as a private company doesn’t offer a better deal, above or below the table, to local authorities, so one shouldn’t really be surprised. The unelected, black-robed tyrants have a long history of not giving a fig about the Constitution if they don’t like what it says, not to mention a long tradition of usurping the powers of the legislative and executive branch by ruling by judicial fiat. . . .

Try doing anything to those mutilating darlings of the Supremes in order to extract life-saving intel from them, and then wait for the Supreme Whores to decide that you were “humiliating” them in doing so.

Five ropes, five robes, five trees.

Some assembly required.

He's advocating that the five Supreme Court Justices in the Hamdan majority be hanged from the neck until they're dead. His homicidal formulation is a play on the more standard call of the Right for American journalists to be hanged -- "Journalists. Rope. Tree. Some assembly required" -- another death call which, it just so happens, Misha also issued just a few days ago.

Misha's deranged pleas that journalists and Supreme Court Justices be murdered extends to his comment section, where one finds things such as this:

I said shortly after 9/11, NCLivingBrit, that the only way we would win this war was to turn the entirety of the islamic territories into a radioactive glass parking lot. I’d just as soon not see us do that, however. I just can’t sanguinely write off a few billion people that way, even if the world would be a better place afterwards. But unless the traitors within are eliminated, they will eventually bring us down.

And this:

Why has Bush been such a mighty disappointment (at least to me) in regards to this sort of action by the terrorist towel heads? . . . I think we could help the terrorist towel heads shed a few excess pounds via head removal system instead of Jenny Craig…

And this:

Winning the hearts and minds of muslims to democracy and capitalism is like separating the stink from shit. Good luck with that.

But what's so very confounding is that of all the countless right-wing bloggers who spent the weekend so very horrified about the comments of that influential political leader of liberalism, Deb Frisch, or who lamented that she wasn't condemned aggressively enough for her idiotic comments to Jeff Goldstein, none of them has condemned these calls by their fellow prominent right-wing blogger for American journalists and Supreme Court justices to be hung by trees until their neck snaps (indeed, one of the right-wing bloggers joining in the weekend sermons against this mean Deb Frisch rhetoric was that Beacon of Right-wing propriety, Misha himself).

What happened? They all seemed to find such disturbing rhetoric so upsetting, such cause for great alarm this weekend, when it came from an obscure person in some comment section, but they have not said a word of condemnation about these death calls from a prominent blogger on the Right. Nor have any of them condemned the calls by Misha's readers for Islamic countries to be turned into radioactive parking lots or for the death of the towel heads by other means. Why not?

Nor did they condemn another prominent right-wing blogger, Dean Esmay, when he presciently called for the hanging of NYT reporters way back in December, long before the johnny-came-lately noose advocates like Misha did so. Nor did they condemn right-wing radio host (and guest host for Sean Hannity) Michael Reagan's call for Howard Dean to be hanged. Nor, for that matter, have any of them condemned the calls by David Horowitz for the names, home addresses and security systems of NYT editors and reporters to be published on the Internet, nor have any of them condemned publication by right-wing blogger Dan Riehl of the satellite photographs of the home of the NYT Publisher (unsurprisingly, Riehl himself, along with Misha, was among the right-wing bloggers sermonizing this weekend about the terrible comments made to Goldstein). Nor have they condemned comments from the Grand Victim himself, Jeff Goldstein, that are reprehensible and revolting by any measure.

Let us stipulate that there are crazed, insane lunatics and repugnant individuals on both the Right and the Left. Any honest person would readily acknowledge that.

But while right-wing bloggers have to dig under rocks to find obscure commenters making reprehensible comments, many of the most prominent bloggers and opinion leaders on the Right routinely and blithely call for people's deaths, and some even post their home addresses on the Internet for anyone who wants help making those recommendations turn into a reality. The most popular right-wing authors sell millions of books by attacking their political opponents as treasonous and mentally ill.

Nobody needs to wade through the depths of comment sections to find this rhetoric on the Right, nor does anyone need to seize on totally obscure individuals and -- a la Ward Churchill or Deb Frisch -- absurdly try to transform them into some sort of political leader in order to impose responsibility for their moronic statements on people who never even heard of them before. One need only peruse the routine hate-mongering of the Right's opinion leaders and their prominent bloggers -- the Malkins and the Mishas and the David Horowitzs and the Ann Coulters -- and one will find more hateful and deranged rhetoric than one can stomach. And it is almost never condemned, including by those who self-righteously parade themselves around as Defenders of Civility and have the audacity to demand that others condemn such rhetoric when it comes from far less significant and influential corners.

Based on the grieving rituals we had to endure this weekend over Jeff Goldstein's sensibilities, I presume it's fair to infer that the silence from right-wing bloggers over Misha's calls for the deaths of journalists and Supreme Court Justices means -- as one of the most-cited sermons put it -- that "one might be tempted to think that this absolute lack of condemnation was a tacit acceptance of these tactics." One might be particularly tempted to think that given that such rhetoric flows not merely from obscure commenters on right-wing blogs, but also from the Right's leading bloggers and pundits, with virtually no condemnation of any kind.

The paramountcy of neoconservatism and Joe Lieberman

American political conflicts are usually described in terms of "liberal versus conservative," but that is really no longer the division which drives our most important political debates. The predominant political conflicts over the last five years have been driven by a different dichotomy -- those who believe in neoconservatism versus those who do not. Neoconservatism is responsible for virtually every significant political controversy during the Bush administration -- from our invasion of Iraq to the array constitutional abuses perpetrated in the name of fighting terrorism -- and that ideological dispute is even what is driving the war over Joe Lieberman's Senate seat. It is not traditional conservatism or liberalism, but rather one's views on neoconservativsm, which have become the single most important factor in where one falls on the political spectrum.

Like a bad satire of The First Two Rules of The Fight Club, neoconservatives used to vehemently deny that there even was such thing as "neoconservatism," even going so far as to smear anyone who used the term as being anti-semitic. But with every aspect of their foreign policy in shambles, and due to (an understandable) fear that they will be blamed for these disasters, neoconservatives are assertively coming out of the closet -- for self-defense reasons if no other. They are insisting that neoconservatism hasn't failed, but rather, it has been failed, by those who lack the necessary resolve, courage and brutality to do the dirty work that has to be done. In short, they are demanding more war, more militarism, and more barbarism, and are claiming that the reason for our foreign policy failures is because -- thanks to the Chamberlian-like cowardice of virtually everyone other than them -- we don't have nearly enough of all of that.

Bill Kristol yesterday complained in The Weekly Standard that the Bush administration is getting pushed around by Iran, Syria, North Korea and even that dove-ish General Casey, who wants slowly to withdraw from Iraq. Because of this collective weakness, our enemies "must be feeling even less intimidated," and as a result, the lines drawn by American foreign policy are no longer drawn in warrior red, but instead are weak, effeminate "pink lines and mauve lines." Kristol has a long roster of other countries on whom we have to wage war, or at least credibly threaten to wage war, and our cowardice and lack of resolve is responsible for every failure, from Bush's political collapse at home to anti-American animosity around the world:

But hey, we're in sync with the EU-3 and the U.N.-192. And our secretary of state--really, the whole State Department--is more popular abroad than ever. Too bad the cost has been so high: a decline in the president's credibility around the world and sinking support for his foreign policy at home.

A few weeks ago, Michael Rubin lamented in this magazine that Bush's second term foreign policy had taken a Clintonian turn. But to be Clintonian in a post-9/11 world is to invite even more danger than Clinton's policies did in the 1990s.

To neoconservatives like Kristol, Americans have abandoned the President and the U.S. has lost credibility around the world because we have been insufficiently militaristic and belligerent. We haven't threatened and invaded enough countries, and we are too eager to leave Iraq. To underscore the claim that the Bush administration's failure is a lack of commitment to neoconservative principles, Kristol even hurls the ultimate insult: Bush has become "Clintonian" in his foreign policy because he is too weak and eager to negotiate with the long list of countries on whom we need to wage more war.

Whether coordinated or not, neoconservatives are swarming in droves to voice this same blame-assigning complaint -- that their policies are failing not because they were so misguided, but because the country, and even President Bush, lack the spine and the heroic neoconservative-warrior courage necessary to see them through. In a despicable column widely hailed by neoconservatives -- John Hinderaker, for instance, admitted that it "says out loud what many have been thinking about 'our prisoner problem' in the wake of Hamdan, Abu Ghraib" -- Ralph Peters argued in The New York Post that our biggest mistake has been detaining people rather than putting bullets in their heads. The column, headlined "Kill, Don't Capture," argues that the detainees we capture are "living vermin" who should be "executed promptly, without trial":

No more Guantanamos! Every terrorist mission should be a suicide mission. With our help.

We need to clarify the rules of conflict. But integrity and courage have fled Washington. Nobody will state bluntly that we're in a fight for our lives, that war is hell, and that we must do what it takes to win.

Our enemies will remind us of what's necessary, though. When we've been punished horribly enough, we'll come to our senses and do what must be done. . . . The ultimate act of humanity in the War on Terror is to win. To do so, we must kill our enemies wherever we encounter them.

Only tough neoconservatives like Peters and Hinderaker are strong and courageous enough to do what needs to be done. The real problem of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is not that we are mistreating terrorist suspects, including many who have been proven to be innocent. It's that we allow our Muslim enemies to live at all. The only real way to end all of these irritating, whiny controversies about whether the U.S. is violating the core ideals which it has long advocated is to stop taking prisoners and just summarily execute them all instead.

Pushing this theme of excess American weakness even further, The New York Sun yesterday published an admirably honest editorial entitled "Bring Back the Neocons," which argues that American foreign policy is failing becasue we stopped listening to warrior-genuises like Richard Perle, Doug Feith and Scooter Libby. As a result of America's failures to live up to the demands of neoconservatism, we have become weak and ineffectual:

So look where President Bush's decision to sideline the neoconservatives has gotten him. Instead of worrying about America, Iran now holds the upper hand, choosing which U.N. officials will inspect it as America begs Tehran to accept an offer of negotiations and "incentives" that include civilian airline parts. North Korea is as belligerent as ever, test-firing medium range missiles. Iraq's capital is a bloodbath of sectarian violence. Israel is under fire from a Hamas state in Gaza. Russia and Communist China are blocking American action at the U.N. Security Council. . . .

The Sun complains that we are working too closely with the United Nations, that we have caved into the "softer line" urged by the State Department, and that we have been too cowardly in confronting the evil nations of the world. But there is still time to rectify those errors by returning to the glorious neoconservative aggression which has served this nation so well:

But time makes it ever more clear that the right strategies going forward are those offered by the neoconservative camp. Mr. Bush has time to turn things around, and, if he truly has the freedom agenda ingrained on his soul, he'll know where to turn to rectify the errors of the "softer line" . . . .

Writing in New Republic, Lawrence Kaplan similarly laments that the real cause of the disaster and failure in Iraq isn't that we embarked upon the invasion and war which Kaplan so urgently craved, but that we now lack the resolve to do the hard, dirty work to get the job done.

Neoconservativsm is rarely defined but its central tenets are, by now, quite clear. At its core, neoconservatism maintains that the greatest threat to America is hostile Muslims in the Middle East, and the only real solution to that problem is increased militarism and belligerence, usually with war as the necessary course of action. Our mistake has been excessive restraint, a lack of courage, and a naive and cowardly belief that measures short of war and all-out aggression are effective in dealing with this problem. This threat is not just uniquely dangerous, but unprecedentedly so, such that Islamic extremists render prior American ideals and principles -- both foreign and domestic -- obsolete, and only radically more militaristic approaches have any chance of saving us from destruction at their hands.

This is the neoconservative mentality -- the bloodthirsty, militaristic, largely authoritarian world-view -- which has been driving not only our foreign policy since the September 11 attacks, but also the bulk of our most controversial domestic policies undertaken in the name of fighting terrorists. Over the last five years, neoconservatism has been the central force of American political life, and it has resulted in a fundamental ideological realignment. Far more important than one's views on traditional matters of political controversy is the extent to which one supports or opposes neoconservative theories.

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. That is why so many traditional conservatives who reject neoconservatism-- the Pat Buchanans and Bob Barrs and George Wills and a long roster of military generals -- have broken with the Bush administration. And it is also why so many so-called traditional liberals -- the Ed Kochs, The New Republic, and Joe Lieberman -- have become some of the administration's most vocal supporters and reliable allies. Individuals who have traditionally conservative views on those 1990s issues are considered "liberals" by virtue of their opposition to the administration's neoconservative agenda.

More than anything else, this ideological realignment is what accounts for the intense passions ignited by the Joe Lieberman Senate seat. Despite his history as a life-long Democrat and a "liberal"on the predominant 1990s issues, Joe Lieberman is a pure neoconservative, which now matters much more. On the predominant issues of the day, his political comrades are Bill Kristol, Lawrence Kaplan, National Review, The New York Sun, and Dick Cheney.

Those who are most supportive of Lieberman and angry about the challenge he faces are people like David Frum and David Brooks. Why would hard-core Republican neoconservatives be so emotionally attached to defending Democrat Joe Lieberman? Why do pro-Bush, highly conservative Republicans such as blogger Mark Coffey proclaim themselves to be "huge fans" of Lieberman? Because far more than he is a Democrat or a "liberal," Joe Lieberman is a neoconservative and therefore -- on the issues that matter most -- is their ideological and political compatriot. In the 1990s, Joe Lieberman's positions on the dominant issues of the day may have rendered him "moderate to conservative," but on the issues that matter most now -- in light of the ideological realignment we have had in the wake of 9/11 -- he is nothing of the sort. He is a neoconservative, and therefore the political enemy of those who oppose that philosophy. Why would opponents of neoconservatism possibly support the re-election of a neconservative?

Much of the criticism directed at the challenge to Joe Lieberman is based on the premise that dissatisfaction with Lieberman is driven merely by one little issue - Iraq. But that argument is at once both factually false and absurd. Lieberman is supportive of the neonconservative agenda almost across the board. And this ideological conflict, far from being one little issue, is really the issue, and Joe Lieberman is on the other side, politically and ideologically, from those who are opposing his re-election. He has even adopted the neoconservative rhetoric of equating criticisms of George Bush with undermining American interests and national security. What could be more legitimate than urging the defeat of an elected official who has enthusiastically embraced and promoted a disastrous and destructive philosophical approach to the most significant foreign and domestic issues our country faces?

Whether the U.S. will continue to follow the increasingly militaristic and authoritarian approach advocated by neoconservates is the predominant political question we face. More than anything else, one's views on that question are the primary determinant of one's political orientation. And anything which fuels a political resolution to that fundamental ideological conflict, such as the Lieberman challenge is doing, is something which ought to be encouraged by anyone who believes in democratic debate.

Real dangers face Bush officials post-Hamdan, and they know it

(updated below)

One of the most deceitful though commonly used tactics of Bush followers is to characterize positions which they dislike as something that is espoused only by the fringe Left, even though the position is held by people across the ideological spectrum. Thus, only the Far Left opposes the war in Iraq, even though scores of retired generals, life-long conservatives, and a majority of Americans have long been against it. And only the Far Left opposes the President's warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, even though some of the most eloquent and forceful opponents of warrantless eavesdropping are long-time conservatives who believe in the rule of law and a restrained federal government. And only the Far Left dislikes President Bush, even though his approval ratings are at near historic lows.

The latest application of this tiresome tactic is the claim that only terrorist-loving Leftists (like John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy) believe that all detainees in United States custody are entitled to the most basic standards of humane treatment guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. In fact, that principle has been accepted and tacitly assumed to be true for decades by foreign policy experts of both parties, and the idea that there was a group of prisoners whom the U.S. could subject to any treatment it wanted without any limitations of any kind was considered a fringe, crackpot idea -- as dangerous as it is deranged.

That's why, as this new Newsweek article from Michael Isikoff and Stuart Taylor reports, senior Bush administration officials were horrified by the demands from Dick Cheney and associates that administration lawyers find a way to create a zone of lawlessness -- an "outer space" -- where the U.S. could subject detainees to even the most barbaric treatment without any restraints:

White House hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his uncompromising lawyer, David Addington, made it clear that there was only one acceptable answer. One day, Bowker recalls, a colleague explained the goal: to "find the legal equivalent of outer space"—a "lawless" universe. As Bowker understood it, the idea was to create a system where detainees would have no legal rights and U.S courts would have no power to intervene.

After seeing a Justice Department memo arguing that Qaeda and Taliban prisoners did not even deserve basic protections under the Geneva Conventions, they warned that the administration was inviting an enormous backlash, both from U.S. courts and foreign allies. It would also, they feared, jeopardize President George W. Bush's plans to try such prisoners in specially created military courts.

"Even those terrorists captured in Afghanistan ... are entitled to the fundamental humane treatment standards of ... the Geneva Conventions," William Howard Taft IV, the State Department legal counselor and Bowker's boss, wrote in a Jan. 23, 2002, memo obtained by NEWSWEEK. In particular, Taft argued, the United States has always followed one provision of the Geneva Conventions—known as Common Article 3—which "provides the minimal standards" of treatment that even "terrorists captured in Afghanistan" deserve.

The principle that the Geneva Conventions set a minimum standard of treatment for all human beings in the custody of civilized countries is not some new pacifist theory cooked up last year by Ward Churchill. Instead, that principle is the consensus understanding that has long existed in this country, as understood by Democrats and Republicans alike. The fringe, radical theory is the insistence that the U.S. can and should operate beyond the law, and that nothing, and certainly no effete human rights treaty, can restrict the omnipotent will of the President when it comes to defending the nation.

As the Newsweek article notes, even senior Bush officials now fear that the Hamdan decision -- exactly as I argued yesterday -- will not only have far-reaching implications for limiting presidential power in all areas (far beyond just military commissions), but will also doom the administration's legal defenses to accusations that it has broken the law with its warrantless surveillance activities, among other extremist and lawless programs:

Administration officials and Washington lawyers are still digesting the text of the ruling, but it is already becoming clear that it could have ripple effects that extend far beyond the trial of Hamdan and other Guantánamo prisoners. . . . .

Some legal scholars and current and former administration officials believe the case could undermine the secret foreign detention centers and the NSA eavesdropping program, two cornerstones of the terror war. "This is an extremely damaging decision for presidential power," says a former senior administration lawyer, who asked for anonymity owing to his intimate involvement in the legal wrangling over prisoner treatment. "And it was largely a self-inflicted wound." The bitter irony: an administration determined to expand executive power may have caused a serious contraction.

The tough guys in the administration who scoffed at legal limits were warned that, by ignoring the long-standing mandates of the Geneva Conventions, they could be subjecting U.S. personnel to prosecution for war crimes, a threat which they apparently failed to take seriously. They're taking it seriously now:

"This has opened up a can of worms," says Sen. Lindsay Graham, a South Carolina Republican. "You could have a situation if we don't bring some restraint where anybody who has done anything to an Al Qaeda suspect that's harsh could be prosecuted." Bowker says he and other State Department lawyers specifically warned about just such a scenario during the early debates. "The implications of this—for potentially being arrested and tried in other countries—is certainly a little scary," says Ted Olson, the former solicitor general.

There seems to be a common perception among many Bush critics -- one which is a not-very-distant relative of all-out defeatism -- that something as weak and unmuscular as a lofty Supreme Court ruling isn't going to have any effect on the Bush administration, and that they are just laughing at the idea that what the Supreme Court says matters. But that is simply not what senior Justice Department lawyers and senior administration officials are doing in the wake of Hamdan.

The Supreme Court unquestionably rejected the very theories which the Bush administration has been using to defend themselves from accusations of criminal conduct. The ruling in Hamdan stripped those defenses away and the lawbreakers in the administration are left standing exposed. There is simply no question that the five-Justice majority in Hamdan would reject with equal vigor, at least, the administration's claim that the AUMF authorized them to eavesdrop in violation of FISA and/or that the President has the inherent authority to violate Congressional law in the area of national security.

That means that the administration has no defenses to fend off charges that they deliberately violated the criminal law -- and continue to do so -- by eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, or torturing people in violation of the Geneva Conventions and/or the McCain Amendment, or violating the National Security Act of 1947 by concealing major intelligence activities from Congress. Those are criminal offenses. And the Supreme Court just expressed unbridled hostility towards their only defenses they have to those crimes. Anyone who suggests that that is a meaningless development and that Bush officials are unaffected by them has embraced a cartoon super-villain version of the administration which is just not real.

Beyond that, the Supreme Court in Hamdan deliberately laid at least the theoretical foundation for high officials in the Bush administration to be charged with war crimes. They expressly ruled that the military commissions violate those Conventions, and if any prisoners were to be executed by virtue of commissions which violated Common Article 3, or if detainees are deliberately and systematically mistreated in violation of that provision, that would be a war crime, by definition. I simply don't believe that there are government officials who are subjected to those sorts of suggestions from the U.S. Supreme Court who are not taking them seriously.

No government is invulnerable. Far greater and more powerful political leaders than George Bush have met very ignominious ends after flying very high and appearing invulnerable for a long time. For every extremist action undertaken by the radicals in the administration, there were high-level conservative political appointees telling them that what they were doing was illegal, that it was dangerous and radical, and that it could have serious consequences for them. But they opted to believe that might makes right, and that their superior might entitled them to act without limits of any kind, including those imposed by the law, because nobody was powerful enough to hold them accountable. That was true then, but it likely will not always be true.

They long ago lost the shield of popularity. The Supreme Court just ruled against them, and in the process, strongly insinuated that they may be war criminals and without any valid defenses to accusations of repeated criminal acts. Even their Congressional allies smell blood and are making threats and demanding concessions. And behind their unprecedentedly fortified walls of secrecy undoubtedly lurk the most incriminating, still-concealed revelations yet, and it is only a matter of time before we learn of those. Bush critics seems to assume that Bush officials are almost divinely protected from any meaningful consequences from their behavior, but it's a very good bet, at this point, that that comforting assumption is not shared by Bush officials.

UPDATE: This Digby post from today analyzes political strategies based upon polling data, and it bolsters the point that the positions which are most frequently demonized as being part of the "fringe Left" are, in fact, mainstream views which Democrats ought to be embracing much more enthusiastically. Many Democrats have internalized the false Republican accusation that their views are seen as radical and rejected by most Americans, and they consequently run away from aggressively espousing any view -- and particularly run away from any criticism of the administration's abuses of power. Just ask Russ Feingold about that.

But as Digby persuasively argues based on this data, it is precisely that fear of articulating a clear and principled position, and the related fear of standing up aggressively to the administration's abuses, that is the Democrats' greatest problem. That's because most Americans know this that administration has gone terribly awry. But quite sensibly, before they put in Democrats in power, they want to know what Democrats are going to do about it, what they will do differently. Holding Republicans accountable for their corruption and excesses is, Digby documents, something which most Americans want.

The NSA scandal in a post-Hamdan world

(updated below - updated again)

I have a post up today at C&L this morning regarding the impact of Hamdan on the administration's warrantless eavesdropping program. Following up on Anonymous Liberal's excellent point that no Justice Department lawyer could now certify the legality of the program in light of Hamdan (certification which the program supposedly requires every 45 days), it is clear that the administration would be engaged in a whole new level of lawlessness if it continues to eavesdrop in violation of FISA even now that its only two legal justifications for doing so have been squarely rejected by the Supreme Court.

Beyond the legal implications, there ought to be clear political implications as well. As I document in the C&L post, the principal excuse invoked by Democratic Senators (such as Barack Obama) for refusing to support Sen. Feingold's Censure Resolution was that the President at least had a good faith basis (i.e., the advice of administration lawyers) for violating FISA. Therefore, they argued, even if the President has been breaking the law, there was at least a plausible (albeit wrong) legal "justification" for his doing so, thus rendering censure inappropriate.

But in the aftermath of Hamdan, that cannot possibly be maintained any longer. Post-Hamdan warrantless eavesdropping on the part of the administration requires a brazen defiance of the law -- even more brazen than before -- which not only has obvious implications in the realm of the criminal law, but also removes the Democrats' primary excuse for failing to stand with Sen. Feingold in support of the rule of law. Assuming that warrantless eavesdropping continues even in the wake of Hamdan, inaction on the part of the Senate now would be to endorse the President's power not only to violate Congressional law, but to act in defiance of the Supreme Court as well.

UPDATE: Mike Stark e-mailed me a recording of my debate with David Horowitz on Friday night's Alan Colmes Show. (SEE BELOW - UPDATE III). If there is someone to whom I can forward this file who knows how to upload it so that I can link to it, please e-mail me (if you read this after 7 p.m. on Sunday, please assume that I already found someone to whom I can send it. Thanks).

UPDATE II: Until now, I hadn't had time to really examine this potentially interesting report from the NYT that Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra wrote an ostensibly scathing letter to President Bush complaining "that the administration might have violated the law by failing to inform Congress of some secret intelligence programs and risked losing Republican support on national security matters."

When I first read the article, it struck me as very odd, because Hoekstra is essentially the House version of Pat Roberts -- someone who, with unseemly eagerness, wants to rubber-stamp everything the administration does and is an ardent opponent of meaningful Congressional oversight. There had to be something else going on besides a sudden and quite uncharacteristic desire on the part of Hoekstra to force the administration to comply with their legal obligations to brief Congress on intelligence matters. After all, Hoekstra has been one of the leading defenders of the administration's illegal programs, including warrantless eavesdropping.

This analysis from Marcy Wheeler explains what is really going on here and is highly worth reading. As suspected, this outburst of feigned independence from Hoekstra has nothing to do with a sudden awakening on his part that Congress is supposed to play a role in our government and that the President is required to abide by the law. Like most of his colleagues, he could not care any less about such matters. Hokestra's letter to the President is here (.pdf).

UPDATE III: My debate with David Horowitz on Friday's Alan Colmes Show can be heard here. The tape is imperfect because it begins about 30 seconds into the segment, cuts off the last two minutes or so, and contains commercials (through which you can easily fast foward), but the bulk of it is there.

Horowitz lost control of his emotions very early on -- literally. As a result, he was unable to speak coherently or even stop speaking at all -- both when it was his turn and mine, and his contributions were typically composed of screaming "LIAR!" and "LEFTIST!" over and over with a shriek so hysterical it has to be heard to be believed. As a result, part of the debate, especially as it progresses, has a crass Jerry Springer feel to it, but I am satisfied that between myself and Colmes, the points that needed to be made were made. Horowitz -- like most of the tough guy neoconservatives do when confronted -- backed down, at one point saying that he was wrong to promote publication of the NYT photographer's home address, but then insisting that others at the NYT are waging "war" and are thus "fair game."

Why are Bush supporters celebrating today's leak of classified information?

(updated below)

John Amato astutely asks an excellent question: why are all of the Bush supporters celebrating the unauthorized leak to the Daily News of the FBI's arrests of alleged terrorists who were talking in Internet chat rooms about blowing up the Holland Tunnel (later news reports indicated that the plot was really aimed at the PATH commuter train)?

One Bush follower after the next who has been furiously protesting the publication of leaks by the NYT and other newspapers -- almost all of whom has accused the NYT of treason, of providing aid and comfort to their Al Qaeda friends, etc. for reporting leaked classified information -- have written today about this leaked story. But all of them are ecstatic over this story, celebrating it as a great and heroic blow for the Bush administration and as proof that The Terrorists really are the Epic Threat they've been claiming. And almost none of them are protesting the unauthorized leak, let alone calling for the reporters and editors at the Daily News to be sent to gas chambers or put in federal prison for the rest of their lives.

Their celebratory reaction to this leak is particularly noteworthy given that the Daily News article itself acknowledged that its source told it that the leaked law enforcement investigation "is an ongoing operation." And the FBI claims that this leak has jeopardized foreign intelligence sources:

Disclosure of the bomb plot coincided with the one-year anniversary of a terrorist bomb attack on London subways and a bus that killed 52 and injured about 700. Authorities said they hadn't intended to release details about the plot this early and that whoever leaked the information had compromised the FBI's relationship with some foreign intelligence services.

The person who leaked the details is clearly someone who doesn't understand the fragility of international relations,'' Mershon said. "We've had a number of uncomfortable questions and some upsetment (sic) with these foreign intelligence services that had been working with us on a daily basis.''

It is not, of course, merely the leaker who "compromised the FBI's relationship with some foreign intelligence services," but also the Daily News for publishing the story. And yet those who claim to be so offended by leaks from the NYT, along with USA Today and The Washington Post, aren't decrying this leak at all. Instead, they are celebrating it.

The only discernible difference between the leaks of the NYT and this leak is that the NYT leaks (as well as those of USA Today and The Washington Post) resulted in political embarrassment for the President. Those leaks resulted in reports that the President was breaking the law when eavesdropping on American citizens, or creating secret, lawless gulags in Eastern Europe, or compiling massive data bases of all domestic calls placed and received by Americans with no oversight or Congressional authorization. None of those leaked stories depicted the President as a Hero or glorified the administration. They were thus attacked as treasonous by the President's followers.

But this leak to the Daily News glorifies the administration and depicts them as caped crusaders protecting us from evil terrorism. And thus, the President's followers love this leak and their rage towards journalists who publish classified information -- along with their demands that they be imprisoned, or worse -- sure do seem to have evaporated into thin air.

This is not the first time this has happened. There have been plenty of leaks of classified information in the past which reflect well on the administration -- which depict them as our heroic protectors -- and which therefore provoke no protest at all from Bush followers. It is only the leaks which result in political embarrassment for the President that provoke their ire. Their accusations of treason against American journalists and their demands that they be prosecuted and imprisoned have nothing to do with concerns over national security and everything to do with punishing anyone and anything which harms the administration's political interests.

What other proof is required to demonstrate what is really motivating these extremely selective attacks on leaks? Unlike the other leaks (the bad ones which ended up in the treasonous NYT and Washington Post) which resulted in no demonstrable security damage of any kind, this leak to the Daily News at least preliminarily seems to have harmed national security. Yet it also results in potential political benefits for Republicans (and any doubt about tjat will be quickly dispelled by reading the posts linked to above, where this leaked story is immediately exploited to claim that Republicans are right and Democrats wrong about all national security and terrorism matters). Given the political benefits which Bush supporters believe come from this leak, the leak is celebrated -- and exploited -- rather than condemnend by those who relentlessly claim to detest leaks not for any partisan reason but only out of solemn devotion to the security of the United States.

One last point: Anyone arguing that this story is somehow proof that the President was right to engage in illegal eavesdropping or oversight-less monitoring of domestic calls and banking transactions -- and virtually all Bush followers are making that very point -- is indulging rank illogic. The President is fully empowered to eavesdrop on the conversations of terrorists or monitor their banking transactions while complying with the law and with oversight, and nobody argues that he should not be allowed to do that. Thus, anyone arguing that this story illustrates the need for surveillance is fighting a strawman, since nobody is against surveillance.

Nobody is complaining that the President is eavesdropping or monitoring terrorists, only that he refusing to abide by the law and submit to oversight when doing so. Isn't that point well-established enough by now that people ought to be embarrassed to pretend not to know it, and instead to act on the blatantly false premise that Bush critics are opposed to surveillance itself?

UPDATE: The blogger Catnip chronicles more reaction by Bush supporters to this leak, reactions which are conspicuously free of venom towards the Daily News, but which take the opportunity to claim that this constitutes further proof that the ultimate evil lies in the New York Times.

Libertarians and the Republican Party -- Irreconcilable Differences

(updated below - updated again re: radio debate with David Horowitz)

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds responded yesterday to my post regarding the increasingly common tactic of the mainstream Right of accusing particular individuals of treason and then publishing their home address along with the accusations. Several mainstream right-wing blogs, including David Horowitz's and StopTheACLU.com, have begun advocating the publication of the home addresses of private individuals whom they accuse of various sins. And as I noted yesterday, Reynolds minimized and implicitly defended this practice in a post by claiming that it is no different than a whole slew of garden-variety privacy invasions, and even equated it to what the NYT did in publishing its Travel Section story featuring the vacation homes of Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Furthering his justifications for publishing the home addresses of the Enemy de jour, Reynolds added an Update to his original post and said this:

As usual, Glenn Greenwald is clueless . . . . why is your publishing of my email different, exactly, from the "thuggish" tactics you condemn? Grow up.

Reynolds is referring here to two posts I have written in the past regarding blatant falsehoods or hypocricies contained in posts of his which he refused to address, and I therefore encouraged readers to e-mail him asking him to respond. The reason I know his e-mail address is because he publishes it prominently on his blog. The last time I did this was to point out that Reynolds' post on the Virginia Democratic Senate primary contained multiple factual errors, and by encouraging readers to e-mail him, he was finally forced to respond, and did so by retracting two separate false statements he made in his posts.

Reynolds' "point" here is that what I "did to him" in including his e-mail address in my post is no different than what Horowitz and StopTheACLU did in publishing, respectively, the home addresses and telephone numbers of the NYT photographer and the plaintiff-family in the Delaware lawsuit. Listing someone's email address and their home address are, argues Reynolds, indistinguishable and equally "thuggish." Is it really possible that Reynolds is incapable of seeing why this argument is nothing short of laughable? Is there really anyone incapable of understanding the profound difference between these two acts without having it explained to them?

Reynolds lists his own e-mail address on his blog. But he doesn't list his home address. Why might that be? Perhaps if he asks himself that question, he will be able to see the distinction, one that is glaringly visible to any rational person, between publishing someone's email address and publishing their home address. If he really believes that there is no difference between the two, then he ought to publish his home address on his blog right under his e-mail address, just to really drive the point home that they are the same.

What is going on here is transparently clear. Reynolds long ago used to emphasize the libertarian aspects of his belief system, by, for instance, writing for Reason Magazine. But this weekend, he attacked Reason's Dave Weigel for criticizing publication of the home address of the NYT photographer so that Reynolds could justify and defend the actions of Michelle Malkin, David Horowitz and Rocco DiPippo with regard to the Travel Section murder plot. That is a clear reflection of what Reynolds is -- he has long ago dispensed with his libertarianism beyond the most cursory and decorative uses, and he has no meaningful differences with the most extreme elements of the Republican Malkin/Coulter right wing.

Reynolds' transformation is illustrative of a broader and much more significant dynamic. There are no more vibrant libertarian components left of the Bush movement. Libertarians (in the small "l" sense of that word) have either abandoned the Bush-led Republicans based on the recognition -- catalyzed by the Schiavo travesty -- that there are no movements more antithetical to a restrained government than an unchecked Republican Party in its current composition. Or, like Reynolds, they have relinquished their libertarian impulses and beliefs completely as the price for being embraced as a full-fledged, unfailingly loyal member of the Bush-led Republican Party.

Despite the bespectacled professorial costumes of respectability and moderation, Reynolds ceased being different than the Michelle Malkins and David Horowitzs of the world some time ago. That is the camp he has chosen, and any residual doubts about that ought to be resolved by the fact that he will always find ways to defend them even when it comes to blatant garbage like the treason accusations against the NYT and the subsequent, home-address-publishing right-wing lynch mobs which they foreseeably inspired.

The current Republican Party has become the party of the Michelle Malkins, Ann Coulters, James Dobsons, and David Horowitzs -- people who scorn libertarian principles and could not be any more hostile to them. Arguably, there are few conflicts more critical to national electoral battles than this one. As Cato Institute's Brink Lindsey recently observed: "libertarians are in the center of the American political debate as it is currently framed." But nothing has undermined libertarian principles more than Republican rule of the last five years.

For this reason, intellectually honest believers in liberty and restrained government have chosen to abandon the Republican Party because it is devoted to an endlessly intrusive, unrestrained and even lawless government, precepts which could not be any more antithetical to core libertarian principles. But there is a sizeable group of individuals, empitomized by Reynolds, who claimed adherence to libertarianism but who have now fully embraced the most extremist elements of the Bush movement and the Republican Party. In doing so, they have rendered their claimed libertarianism nothing but a hollow symbol, to be trotted out -- when at all -- purely as a manipulative instrument to maintain an image of rationality and moderation ("Extremist? Me? I'm for gay marriage").

That is the choice which national political figures with some degree of libertarian impulses, such as John McCain and Rudy Guiliani, are confronting. With Reynolds -- again and again -- invoking the most frivolous rationale imaginable in order to side with the most crazed schemes of Malkin, StopTheACLU and Horowitz (what's the difference, he bewilderingly asks, between publishing someone's e-mail address and their home address?), it's long past time to stop pretending that he is anything other than one of them.

UPDATE: I will be on the Alan Colmes Show tonight at 10:15 p.m. EST (possibly along with David Horowitz or Rocco DiPippo, if they're willing -- with David Horowitz, who is now confirmed) to discuss issues of privacy versus media freedom, with a focus on the publication of the home addresses of the NYT photographer and the plaintiff-family in Delaware.

Before that, I will be on Air America's Majority Report at 9:30 p.m. EST to discuss How Would a Patriot Act? and recent issues relating to executive power abuses.

The thug and intimidation tactics of the Far Right go mainstream

As is true for many lawyers who have defended First Amendment free speech rights, I have represented several groups and individuals with extremist and even despicable viewpoints (in general, and for obvious reasons, it is only groups and individuals who espouse ideas considered repugnant by the majority which have their free speech rights threatened). Included among this group were several White Supremacist groups and their leaders, including one such group -- the World Church of the Creator -- whose individual members had periodically engaged in violence against those whom they considered to be the enemy (comprised of racial and religious minorities along with the "race traitors" who were perceived to defend them).

One of the favorite tactics used by such groups is to find the home address and telephone number of the latest enemy and then publish it on the Internet, accompanied by impassioned condemnations of that person as a Grave Enemy, a race traitor, someone who threatens all that is good in the world. A handful of the most extremist pro-life groups have used the same tactic. It has happened in the past that those who were the target of these sorts of demonization campaigns that included publication of their home address were attacked and even killed.

But these intimidation tactics work even when nothing happens. Indeed, these groups often publish the enemy's home address along with some cursory caveat that they are not encouraging violence. The real objective is the same one shared by all terrorists -- to place the person in paralyzing fear. The goal is to force the individual, as they lay in bed at night, to be preoccupied with worry that there is some deranged individual who read one of the websites identifying them as the enemy and which provided their address and who believes that they can strike some blow for their Just Cause by visiting their home and harming or killing them. The fear that they are vulnerable in their own home lurks so prominently and relentlessly in a person's mind that it can be as effective as a physical attack in punishing someone or intimidating them.

This thuggish tactic of intimidation -- publicly railing against someone's grave crimes and then publishing their home address -- has been creeping out of the most extremist precincts on the Right and is becoming increasingly common among mainstream right-wing individuals and organizations.

This weekend, prominent neoconservative David Horowitz proclaimed that the United States is fighting a war and "the aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists." In particular, he cited the now infamous NYT Travel section article on Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's vacation homes as evidence that the employees of the NYT are among the enemies in this war, and he then linked to and recommended as a "proposal for action" this post from his associate, Front Page contributor Rocco DiPippo. The post which Horowitz recommended was entitled "Where Does Punch Sulzberger Live?" and this is what it said:

I issue a call to the blogosphere to begin finding and publicly listing the addresses of all New York Times reporters and editors. Posting pictures of their residences, along with details of any security measures in place to protect the properties and their owners (such as location of security cameras and on-site security details) should also be published.

DiPippo published the home address of NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, along with directions to his home, and linked to a post by right-wing blogger Dan Riehl which contained directions to Sulzberger's home along with photographers of it. In a now-deleted post, DiPippo also published the home address of Linda Spillers, the NYT photographer who took the photograph of Don Rumsfeld's vacation home (with Rumsfeld's express permission), and he urged everyone to go (presumably to the home address he provided) and confront Spillers about her actions.

That was not an isolated incident. This week, Bartholomew's Official Notes on Religion reported on the new "project" implemented by the group StopTheACLU.org. As that group describes it, the project is called "Expose the ACLU Plaintiffs," and promises to publish the home addresses of all individuals who are "using the ACLU" in any First Amendment lawsuit based on the Establishment clause which challenges the constitutionality of governmental promotion of Christianity. The first such enemy targeted for this treatment is a Jewish family in Delaware who sued their local school district over its alleged promotion of Christianity in the public schools. StopTheACLU published their home address and telephone number on its website, and the family -- due to all sorts of recriminations and fear of escalating attacks -- was forced to leave their home and move to another town, which was one of the apparent goals of StopTheACLU in publishing their home address.

Stop the ACLU is not some fringe, isolated group. To the contrary, the "official blog" of StopTheACLU.org is StopTheACLU.com (h/t Hunter), a very prominent player in the right-wing blogosphere. That blog is the 14th most-linked-to blog on the Internet, and is often promoted and approvingly cited to as a source by numerous right-wing bloggers such as Instapundit and Michelle Malkin. The blog Expose the Left (which aspires to be the C&L of the Right), yesterday condemned the "nutcases on the left side of the blososphere" who "are sending unfounded attacks" against StopTheACLU for this plainly despicable thug behavior.

These self-evidently dangerous tactics are merely a natural outgrowth of the hate-mongering bullying sessions which have become the staple of right-wing television shows such as Bill O'Reilly's and websites such as Michelle Malkin's (who, unsurprisingly, has become one of O'Reilly's favorite guests). One of the most constant features of these hate fests is the singling out of some unprotected, private individual -- a public school teacher here, a university administrator there -- who is dragged before hundreds of thousands of readers (or millions of viewers), accused of committing some grave cultural crime or identified as a subversive and an enemy, and then held out as the daily target of unbridled contempt, a symbol of all that is Evil.

Malkin frequently includes contact information for the identified Enemies, and O'Reilly often shows photographs or video of them on multiple programs. These bullying tactics of intimidation -- whereby people who are often just private individuals and who have no defenses (as opposed to, say, prominent politicians or media figures) are singled out for widespread public rituals of contempt -- have quite foreseeable consequences, chief among them placing those targets in fear of retribution. Publishing the home addresses of such individuals is not some wholly different approach, but is merely the next small and foreseeable step, an obvious outgrowth of the hate sessions on which many leading representatives of the Right now heavily rely.

And it is not only those who engage in the tactics themselves who bear responsibility for the consequences, but also those who offer coldly bureaucratic indifference towards these tactics, or even an implicit defense of them. While numerous right-wing bloggers commented this weekend on the truly inane attacks against the NYT Travel article, none (at least that I read) condemned Horowitz for promoting the campaign to publish the home addresses of editors and reporters of the Times. They had much to say about the Evil that is the NYT, but nothing to say about this extraordinary and despicable campaign perfected by extremist groups on the Right and now promoted by Horowitz and groups such as StopTheACLU, to intimidate and endanger journalists and private individuals by collecting and publishing their home addresses.

Beyond merely failing to condemn these tactics, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds yesterday deliberately defended them by arguing that they are no different than what the NYT did in its Travel article. Reynolds attacked a post written this weekend by Reason's Dave Weigel, in which Weigel condemned publication of the home address of the NYT photographer. Reynolds -- who pointedly avoided condemning Horowitz and publication of Spiller's home address -- quoted and then attacked Weigel's condemnation as "incoherent":

As so often happens with these things, angry bloggers have struck back and posted the addresses and phone numbers of the Times' photogs. (No link.)

No link? Why not? By Weigel's standards, a link wouldn't contribute to invasion of privacy. Anybody can find that stuff, right?

And if anybody can find that stuff, why's he so upset about publishing office phone numbers of public officials?

In order to avoid criticizing his comrades on the Right who are engaging in thug tactics, Reynolds actually equates discussion of the vacation homes of top government officials (who enjoy the most extensive and high-level security on the planet) with publication of the home addresses of private individuals and journalists (who have no security of any kind). By his reasoning, mentioning that the Vice President has a vacation home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland is no different than publishing the home address of private individuals who are publicly identified as traitors.

And, lo and behold, the Right's tactics of intimidation against private individuals are reduced by the conniving Reynolds into nothing more than a common and innocuous invasion of privacy of which the NYT and many others are also guilty. And with that corrupt equivalency established, Reynolds is able to posts on these matters without condemning the Right's thug tactics, and in fact, implicitly defends them by suggesting that they are rather innocuous and common and nothing to get excited about.

And revealingly, in choosing which villains to criticize from this weekend's treason accusations against the NYT and the thug tactics they inspired, Reynolds chooses Weigel for attack. But he has nothing to say about Horowitz and company for their newly announced campaign "to begin finding and publicly listing the addresses of all New York Times reporters and editors."

As people like Horowitz, Malkin and Reynolds well know -- and just as my most extremist former White Supremacist clients well knew -- if you throw burning matches at gasoline enough times, an explosion is inevitable. The rhetoric of treason -- accusing individuals and organizations of aiding and abetting our nation's enemies and even waging war on this country -- is a lit match. After all, the widely accepted penalty for traitors is execution, which is why it is such an inflammatory yet increasingly common accusation being hurled by the Right against their domestic "enemies" (for precisely the same reason, the favorite accusation of the World Church of the Creator was to label someone a "race traitor," since everyone knows what should be done with traitors).

Openly speculating about whether journalists and politicians are guilty of treason has become unbelievably common of late. And when those accusations are paired with publication of the traitor's home address, the intended result is both obvious and inevitable. Anyone who endorses those tactics in any way -- or who plays cute, coy games in finding ways to justify or minimize them -- knows exactly what they are doing.

As the Bush movement collapses, it is only to be expected that its more fevered adherents will resort to increasingly extremist rhetoric and tactics, out of frustration and anger, if for no other reason. The penetration of these thug tactics into increasingly mainstream venues on the Right is one of the more glaring, and more disturbing, developments of late.

UPDATE: In response to several comments here, let me be clear that I do not believe that the despicable statements referenced in this post can or should be grounds for criminal or civil liability. For reasons I set forth in comments here, here and here, the First Amendment should bar (and the Supreme Court has held it does bar) the imposition of liability based on the consequences flowing from the expression of protected political speech. The point is that these statements are despicable and dangerous, not illegal. The persons who engage in such tactics, or who defend them, bear the ethical and moral responsibilites -- but not legal liability -- for what they spawn.

Legalizing torture - distorting Hamdan

(updated below re: "retraction" by RedState - updated again)

I don't have a great deal of time today to post, so I will note a couple of matters for the moment, and may add to them throughout the day:

(1) Alan Dershowitz has a new and completely misguided article in The Independent in which he argues, in essence, that we ought to scrap all of the existing frameworks for the treatment of prisoners and detainees, including the Geneva Conventions, as well as the laws of war generally, because those laws are obsolete and not meant for this never-before-known evil embodied by the international terrorist. We should replace those now obsolete laws, he argues, with new laws which expressly permit the killing of civilians in order to kill terrorists, and which also permit the use of torture.

This new article is deliberately vague (he seems almost embarrassed by what he is arguing). For instance, while he claims he agrees that waterboarding constitutes "torture," he emphasizes when describing it that it causes "no physical after-effects" -- the same argument used by those who claim that this practice falls outside the bounds of torture. It is also worth noting how, as is so often the case, arguments which begin as an ostensible recommendation for American action morph almost immediately into a defense of Israeli actions.

Dershowitz's new article should be read in the context of his much more explicit prior advocacy of new American policies whereby our Government is expressly permitted to torture people, and whereby courts issue what he calls "torture warrants" to authorize the torture. The idea that we should simply abrogate the Geneva Conventions altogether so that we can act without restraints is something that we are going to hear more of from Bush followers. Beyond Dershowitz's article, it's already beginning.

The pretty justifying rationale Dershowitz uses to decorate his desire for torture is that torture -- along with the killing of innocent civilians -- are inevitable, and it is therefore better not to be hypocrites about it -- i.e., it's better to have the law endorse our conduct rather than act contrary to the law. But having the law expressly allow torture, along with attacks which knowingly result in the death of innocent civilians, is to legitimize and endorse that conduct as part of our value system. It is hard to overstate the consequences on every level of repudiating the values which have long defined who we are as a country. And that is to say nothing of the fact that such "legal authority" to torture and kill civilians -- as Dershowitz must know -- will never be confined to the circumstances in which Dershowitz sees them as justifiable.

This country already debated last year whether we want to be a country that tortures people, and we resoundingly rejected that proposition when the Senate passed the anti-torture McCain amendment by a vote of 90-9. But that is not going to stop the neoconservative prong of Bush followers (which includes Dershowitz) from doing everything possible, particularly in the wake of Hamdan, to not only continue using torture, but also to have American law expressly legalize it. Steven Poole at Crooked Timber has a good analysis of the new Dershowitz article, and Kieran Healy, also at CT, wrote an appropriately impassioned argument back when Dershowitz originally proposed the notion of "torture warrants." It is well worth reading again.

(2) Marty Lederman has a characteristically thorough and important post rebutting the most common myths being perpetrated about the Hamdan decision. There are reasonable grounds on which to disagree with multiple aspects of that decision, but as Marty demonstrates, Bush followers are simply distorting what the Court says in order to dispute it. The editorial by National Review purporting to "explain" why Hamdan was wrongly decided is probably the most egregious written example I've seen, as almost every one of their characterizations of the majority's reasoning is just factually false.

UPDATE:

(3) After I harangued them in an e-mail exchange (which I agreed not to disclose), RedState today finally issued what it apparently considers to be a "correction" to the post by Robert Hahn, published on Saturday (three days ago), which accused The New York Times of "warn(ing) would-be assassins" of security measures at Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's vacation homes and thereby helping those who "have kidnapping on (their) agenda." It took them three days to issue a correction, so the original post already scrolled off the front page and had become a dead post. Rather than write a new post correcting their error, they simply tacked on the "retraction" to that old post where nobody would read it, and it said this:

[editor's note, by Erick] It appears that since this piece was posted, a spokesman for Donald Rumsfeld confirms that he did not object to the New York Times' story and apparently did give permission for his home to appear. There is no word on whether the permission involved pointing out security cameras.

As so many of these false accusers have done, RedState is acknowledging (some of) the subsequent evidence but still clinging to their insinuations that the NYT did something wrong ("There is no word on whether the permission involved pointing out security cameras"). But this "correction" is almost as misleading as the original false accusation itself, since the newly emerged evidence is not merely that Rumsfeld authorized the photograph, but much more importantly, that Rumsfeld's office and the Secret Service both said that there was no security threat as a result of the article (not to mention that multiple other media outlets, including NewsMax and Fox, had already published articles revealing the whereabout of their homes). To pretend that there is still the possibility that the NYT endangered their safety is simply to deny facts -- facts which they continue to conceal from their readers.

Beyond that, a "retraction" which is casually tacked onto a post three days after the fact -- when nobody will see it -- is worse than no retraction at all. That behavior is designed to allow the false accuser to claim that a retraction was issued while ensuring that nobody actually saw it. It is has the distinction of compounding the original reckless error with a deliberate dose of deceit. Unsurprisingly, Jeff Goldstein did the same thing, tacking a non-retraction retraction to the end of some old post that had already scrolled off his first page and which, as intended, only a small fraction of the people (if that) who read his original erroneous post would ever see.

These are the same people who rail on virtually a daily basis about the supposed lack of ethics and integrity among the "MSM," and yet they do not comply with even a fraction of the standards about which they so self-righteously sermonize (speaking of which, that glorified Crusader for Journalistic Ethics, John Hinderaker, has still failed to tell his readers about any of these facts despite hyping Malkin's accusations back on Saturday).

It is truly difficult to describe the lack of integrity and overwhelming propensity to deceive which is reflected by their inability to simply say: "I wrote a post the other day accusing the NYT of (intentionally and/or recklessly) endangering the lives of the Vice President and Secretary of Defense, but facts have now emerged (which I could have and should have obtained myself before making the accusation) which clearly demonstrate that that accusation is false." What does it say about someone who is incapable of doing that? And what does it say about the right-wing blogosphere that so many of their leading lights would rather cling to blatantly false accusations than admit in a forthright and clear way that they were wrong?

UPDATE II:

(4) I've been receiving an increasing number of e-mails telling me that my blog can't be read with the Firefox browser because it translates the color scheme in a way that makes it unreadable (it translates the background as dark brown rather than beige). I used to receive the same complaint from a small number of Mac users, but now it seems it's extended to Firefox as well. If you know anything helpful about this - why it is, how it can be fixed without switching templates, etc. - please e-mail me.

NOTE: Thanks for the responses, but there's no need to let me know if you use Firefox and have no problem. I realize the problem exists only for a small percentage of Mac and/or Firefox users and was hoping to find a solution to the quirk, though the consensus seems to be that it's probably just a slow-loading/congestion/dial-up problem at their end.

Light holiday fare

(updated below - updated again)

A few (perversely) humorous holiday items:

(1) On this weekend's Meet the Press, Bill Bennett ominously warned the panel of journalists that Americans were growing extremely angry over the disclosures of classified information by The New York Times and other newspapers. Riding this wave of massive public rage towards the NYT, a protest was organized for yesterday by Cliff Kinkaid of Accuracy in Media along with FreeRepublic.com. The protest was heavily promoted by Michelle Malkin (who announced that she would personally attend) and other pro-Bush bloggers, who urged all patriotic Americans to attend and make their anger at the NYT heard loudly and clearly.

The protest was scheduled to take place in front of the Times' Washington Bureau, where the Al Qaeda-lovers/traitors Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau work. The protest was over the fact that the NYT has, of course, been "giving aid and comfort to al Qaeda." The protest occurred yesterday and, on a beautiful July day in Washington, a grand total of 20 outraged Americans showed up (including Cliff Kinkaid, Michelle, one of her Hot Air workers, and Matt Stoller, who filed a photographic report of the historic event -- which means that 16 protestors actually showed up).

Michelle linked to this report from Aaron, a blogger who attended and reported on the event. His whole report is highly worth reading, but I found this observation of his to be particularly incisive:

Halfway during [AIM's Cliff] Kinkaid's speech, three muslim tourists stopped to watch and began speaking in their foreign tongue. I thought it was a bit ironic.

Just "a bit ironic?" Is anyone surprised that when Muslims want to gather to speak in their foreign tongue, they choose the front of The New York Times building as their meeting place? And if there is anything that powerfully illustrates the true threats we face from terrorism -- threats which the NYT is intent on aiding and abetting -- it's the sudden appearance of 3 Muslim tourists speaking in their foreign tongue. I'd say that's much more than "a bit ironic." If anyone believes that those sentiments were the exception rather than the rule for this protest, just look at a few of the photographs from Matt Stoller's report.

Michelle also announced that "a second protest at the main NYC offices of the Times is scheduled for July 10, 5pm Eastern, 229 West 43rd Street." One commenter here, who apparently attended yesterday's event and filed his own report, had this to say:

The streets of Washington D.C. were brought to a standstill today by massive protests over recent treasonous actions by the New York Times. As the massive crowds gathered in front offices of the newspaper’s Washington D.C. offices, employees inside cringed with fear and pretended not to notice.

They did a good job. When asked for estimate on the overwhelming crowds, a D.C Parks Dept. a spokesperson responded, “huh, what are you talking about?”

Obviously left speechless and overwhelmed by his crowd control duties, no other comments were forthcoming, and no other spokespersons made themselves available - too much work to do to keep the crowds under control. Of course, the traitorous hate-America mainstream media refused to covered the event, which left only Bryan from Hot Air to try and capture the feel of the event, fortunately he was joined by award-winning veteran reporter Michelle Malkin to cover the event as it deserved to be covered.

New York City is trembling with fear, because the Free Republic has organized another protest July 10.

Bush followers obviously believe that hate-mongering against the NYT is going to be the key to their electoral strategy, as it will motivate their "base." John Podhoretz argued exactly this in his Op-Ed yesterday in the New York Post, entitled "Uniting the Right -- Thank you, New York Times." But Americans have abandoned this administration due to a long list of intense grievances with the President, and relentless, hysterical attacks on newspapers are highly unlikely to make them forget about those grievances.

Ultimately, any institution or group which commits the Greatest Sin of opposing the President and imposing any limits on his powers will be subjected to this same treatment. The media, the Supreme Court, whistleblowers, Senate Democrats are all depicted as treasonous swine and allies of Al Qaeda because they oppose the President and believe that he should not have unlimited power. The war they are waging on the NYT is simply one front in the war they wage on anyone or anything which impedes or "hampers" the President's will in any way.

(2) Speaking of hysterical attacks on newspapers, several rather similar bloggers who pumped the "Hidden-Murder-Scheme-in-the-NYT-Travel-Section" plot -- Michelle Malkin, Tom Maguire, David Horowitz, and Pamela at Atlas Shrugs -- have now responded to the fact that: (a) the photograph of Rumsfeld's house was taken with his permission; (b) all of the information published by the NYT has long ago appeared in numerous other media outlets, including NewsMax and Fox; and (c) both Rumsfeld's representative and the Secret Service scoffed at their claim that this article endangered anyone's security. How did the accusers respond? By dismissing the Secret Service's views and re-affirming their original accusations even in light of these facts:


Michelle Malkin: "What news value and journalistic end was served by publishing the Cheney/Rumsfeld vacation home piece and the accompanying photo? 'Because Rumsfeld gave permission' may cut it with the moonbats and fairweather privocrats. Not with me."


Tom Maguire: "Greg Sargent of TAPPED follows up on the security issues, and is pleased to conclude there are none . . . . Well, as I said in my post, I had no doubt a determined terrorist or protest group could have found this info without the help of the Times. Coming as it does a week after President Bush called the conduct of the Times "disgraceful", I remain dubious of the timing."


David Horowitz: "It is in the context of this hatred directed among others at Rumsfeld and Cheney that the Times action has to be assessed. . . . The casual (and unnecessary) publication of the pictures of Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s homes seemed to me of a piece with this ongoing recklessness and lack of care for the safety of Americans. . . .

Finally, the fact that Rumsfeld responded to the Times request to take the pictures means what? What else could he say? He lives under conditions of danger that go with waging a war in behalf of this country, intensified by what magnitude one can only guess th the (sic) divisive and hate-filled propaganda of the left and antiwar liberals. . . . Does this mean that when the Rumsfeld family goes to town now its risks are not heightened? Hardly."


Pamela at Atlas Shrugs: "A number of readers have advised me that Rumsfeld gave his permission for the photos to be used. I am sure he was thrilled. IMAO, I think it stinks."


So they accused the NYT of deliberately endangering the security of Rumsfeld and Cheney by printing that travel article. If you wanted to debunk that accusation and had the power to have the best possible evidence magically materialize, you would wish for it turn out that the photographs were taken with the permission of Rumsfeld himself, that right-wing media outlets previously published the same information, and that the Secret Service would make clear how ludicrous the accusations are. And, lo and behold, that's exactly what materialized here. And yet the accusers, even in the face of that dream evidence, still insist that they were right all along and that this Travel article is highly suspicious.

There are no facts which matter. Literally, virtually every political controversy we have is generated by this fact-impervious mindset, this refusal to accept that what one wishes is true is not, in fact, true. As one commenter here observed about Malkin's "response":

So....both Cheney and Rumsfeld confirm that the puff piece constituted no security threat . . . But their mere permission isn't enough for her, no. Only a "moonbat" or some entity known as a "fairweather privocrat" would accept that the Times did nothing wrong just because the Vice President and Defense Secretary themselves say so.

The woman claims liberals are "unhinged." If Rumsfeld and Cheney could make hay criticizing the Times in this instance, they most assuredly would, but even they would be too embarrassed to do so in this context. Malkin is clearly exempt from such normal emotional inhibitions.

Literally nothing could convince her that the NYT did no wrong. Nothing.

For a similar, highly amusing response to Horowitz's ongoing insistence that he was right, see this comment here. These sentiments apply to each of the accuser-bloggers who are refusing to repudiate their extremely serious accusations against the NYT even in the face of the most conclusive facts one could imagine. And that syndrome repeats itself over and over again. Things are going great in Iraq. Saddam really did have WMDs when we invaded. Bush is a popular president. His policies are beloved and supported by regular Americans. The NYT disclosure that the administration eavesdrops without warrants rather than in compliance with the law helped The Terrorists to evade surveillance. Nothing matters less than facts.

(3) For pure holiday entertainment value, I cannot recommend this video highly enough. It contains five minutes of political commentary by Pamela of Atlas Shrugs while she watches CNN. Pamela was one of the four bloggers selected by John Bolton for an exclusive blog interview he gave a couple of weeks ago.

I confess that I sat, literally transfixed, watching the entire video, and then watched it a second time immediately thereafter, in full. I fear that I will be unable to resist watching again today, at least once. It defies belief, is truly riveting, and yet, at the same time, is depressingly instructive. It's really everything at once, all packed into a jaw-dropping, action-packed 5 minutes.

UPDATE: Two additional worthwhile items regarding the attacks from Bush followers on a free press:

(4) This is from last week, but I only saw it yesterday and it is truly amazing - Fox's Brian Kilmeade and E.D. Hill both overtly advocating the creation of an Office of Censorship to suppress any news articles which are deemed harmful to the country.

(5) As I suggested yesterday, I believe that the media is beginning, finally, to recognize the serious threats posed to it by the Bush administration. Atrios has a long excerpt of a Nicholas Kristof column from today which bolsters that belief.

UPDATE II: Scott Lemieux has a persuasive and thorough explanation as to why the fanatical accusers of the NYT still refuse to back down from their inane-from-the-very-beginning accusations of treachery and treason hidden in the NYT weekend Travel Section, even now that the most conclusive evidence possible has emerged demonstrating how false those accusations are. In sum, Lemieux points out: "Given that the attempts to gin up a scandal started at the absolute ground zero of idiocy and paranoia, additional evidence of the idiocy of the non-story is beside the point."

That's all true, but humiliations like this -- events that demonstrably and undeniably expose their complete lack of credibility -- ought to at least influence how they are perceived. It's unsurprising that John Hinderaker, Michelle Malkin and David Horowitz et al. are unmoved even by evidence that's this conclusive, but why do Howard Kurtz and Time Magazine and CNN continue to treat people like this -- people who are entirely unburdened by even minimal amounts of rationality and integrity -- as though they are serious pundits deserving of respect and large media platforms?

UPDATE III: Several additional posts worth reading in the wake of the exposure of these sham accusations:

(a) The generally reasonable Kevin Aylward at Wizbang acknowledges the obvious -- that the NYT vacation home article was merely a "puff piece" rather than a secret coded plot to send hit squads from their Al Qaeda allies to murder the Vice President and Defense Secretary -- and he therefore commendably added a corrective update to the post by his co-blogger, Lorie Byrd, which originally helped spread the false accusations.

Byrd, however, is much more tenacious, as she clings pitifully to the possibility that she really was right all along. As I pointed out in a comment in response to Kevin's post, Byrd evidently believes that she knows more than both Rumsfeld himself and the Secret Service about security issues surrounding Cheney and Rumsfeld, as she continues to insinuate that the NYT story really did pose a security threat even though both Rumsfeld's office and the Secret Service said that it did not. Just pause for a moment to contemplate the level of denseness and imperviousness to reason which that reaction requires -- and then consider that Malkin, Horowitz and Maguire are levels beyond (or, as it were, below) that, given that they continue not merely to insinuate, but to insist, that they were right all along.

(b) Greg Sargent, who (unlike those spewing the false accusations against the NYT) thought to pick up the phone and call Rumsefeld's office and the Secret Service to ask if the article really did pose any threat, analyzes the political reasons motivating these attacks on the NYT-- reasons which continue to drive the accusers still to insist that their disproven accusations are true.

(c) Despite all the ink now spilled over this matter, the Editors remind us of just how straightforward this issue was all along.

What is left of Malkin, Hinderaker and Horowitz's credibility?

(updated below - updated again with Secret Service confirmation)

As I documented at length this weekend, Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Red State, David Horowitz and many others of that sort spent the weekend engaged in the most vicious and self-evidently misguided attacks on The New York Times based on a puff piece in this weekend's "Escapes" section. Because the article contained a photograph of Don Rumsfeld's vacation home, they insisted that this was reckless and even retaliatory-- i.e., done with the intent to enable Al Qaeda operatives and other assassins to murder Rumsfeld (as well as Dick Cheney), and that it was further evidence of the war being waged by the NYT and its employees on the Bush administration and the U.S.

For so many obvious reasons, based on easily obtainable information -- including the fact that multiple right-wing news outlets such as NewsMax and Fox and others had previously disclosed this same information months earlier, that this information is commonly reported about government leaders in both parties, and the fact that we always know where our top government officials live and spend their weekends because they have Secret Service protection -- these accusations were as false as they were hysterical.

But in addition to those known reasons, I strongly suspected that the Times would not have published those photographs unless they had made certain in advance that doing so would not conflict with Rumsfeld and Cheney's security concerns. But I did not make this argument because I was not sure that it was true, and unlike Michelle Malkin and John Hinderaker, I'd rather wait to obtain the relevant evidence before running around asserting "facts" based on nothing. As a result, I wrote e-mails yesterday to Linda Spillers (the photographer) and Peter Kilborn (the reporter) bringing these accusations to their attention and asking for a response.

Although I haven't heard yet from Kilborn, I received an e-mail from Spillers this morning, in which she said:

Ironically, photos were taken with Secretary Rumsfeld's permission.

The reprehensible lynch mob hysterics - Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Red State, David Horowitz - spent the weekend screaming that the Times was guilty of gross recklessness and/or a deliberate intent to have Rumsfeld killed, by virtue of publication of this article. That bloodthirsty frenzy caused other bloggers to publish the home address and telephone number of Spillers and urged that other NYT editors and reporters be "hunted down." Other followers of Malkin and Hinderaker suggested to their readers that this was yet more evidence of the unpatriotic recklessness of the NYT.

All along, Don Rumsfeld gave his express permission to the NYT for these photographs to be taken. How can anything other than complete scorn be heaped on Malkin, Hinderaker, Horowitz, Red State, and all of the uber-patriotic copycat accusers who spent the weekend spewing the most dangerous accusations possible based on completely false premises? Who would think that any of them have a shred of credibility after seeing how irresponsible and impervious to facts they are -- even when knowingly catalyzing lynch mobs against people?

Once they read the NYT article, was there any reason why they could not have simply inquired with Rumsfeld's office, or Cheney's, or with the demonic NYT itself, as to whether there really were any security threats posed by that article? Why couldn't they have searched to see if other media outlets -- such as Fox or NewsMax -- had previously made this information known? Before accusing the NYT of deliberately enabling Terrorists to murder government officials, isn't there at least the most minimal obligations to verify if those accusations are actually true? But they don't care whether their accusations are true. They are in pure hate-mongering mode against the NYT, and all they want is to whip up as much unbridled rage and contempt for the NYT and its employees as possible.

So, they read a blatantly innocuous vacation home fluff piece this weekend, and without bothering to pause for even a split second to conduct a shred of research or engage in even a moment of reflection -- activities which would have led them to prior, much more revealing articles about the Clintons' Chappaqua home, or prior articles revealing the same information about Rumsfeld and Cheney's home -- they instead launch into their reflexive, mouth-watering attacks on people whom they hate, completely indifferent to the consequences of their conduct and equally indifferent to the truth of what they are saying.

Howard Kurtz puts Hinderaker on CNN virtually every weekend. Malkin and Horowitz are treated like respectable pundits on Fox and other stations. And yet their standards for what they assert are no different than Star Magazine or the lowest, bottom-feeding liars who literally invent facts at will. They spent the whole weekend trying to inflame hatred against the NYT by telling their readers that the NYT article deliberately endangered Don Rumsfeld's security in order to retaliate against him - even though that could not possibly have been true based on known facts, and even though Don Rumsfeld himself authorized the use of those photographs. What possible defense is there for this behavior, and what rational person would consider Malkin, Hinderaker, Horowitz, Red State -- all of them -- even the slightest bit credible in the future?

UPDATE: According to Jonah Goldberg, Bill Bennett also complained on his radio show this morning that the NYT "alerted readers where one of Don Rumsfeld's hidden security cameras is at his home." The always insightful Jonah added: "I bet they wouldn't do that to Barbra Streisand." This is the sort of commentary to which we are subjected on a daily basis. The only difference is that, in this case, there is irrefutable evidence of just how twisted and false it is.

UPDATE II: Greg Sargent of The American Prospect puts the final nail in what ought to be the coffin of whatever vestiges of credibility were left for Malkin, Horowitz, Red State, et al. He confirmed with the Secret Service what I reported earlier (that the NYT photographer had Rumsfeld's permission to take those photographs) and what was obvious all along (that the article did not pose any remote threat as Cheney and Rumsfeld's own spokespeople acknowledge):

But I just got through talking with Hollen Wheeler, director of public affairs for Rumsfeld's office.

She confirmed what Glenn Greenwald has reported -- that the photographer, Linda Spillers, had been granted permission to photograph Rumsfeld's house by Rumsfeld himself.

"She got approval to take a picture," Wheeler told me. "She called, we said fine, go take the picture. And that's it."

Wheeler also added of the picture: "It's already out in the public domain. I'm a little confused about why this has caused such an uproar."

Mr. Wheeler is obviously not a reader of Malkin, Powerline or David Horowitz, because if he were, he wouldn't be at all confused to learn that they created an "uproar" over nothing, over completely invented "facts". It's what they do.

The most minimal standards of integrity compel retractions along with apologies to the NYT and the reporter and photographer of this article from the following accusers:

• Michelle Malkin (writemalkin@gmail.com);
  
  
• David Horowitz (Dhorowitz@earthlink.net);

• John Hinderaker (powerlinefeedback@gmail.com) (for linking to, promoting and fuelling the accusations even after admitting that it "strikes [him] as over-the-top to believe that even the Times wants Rumsfeld and Cheney assassinated")
  
  
• Red State's Robert A. Hahn (nickdanger@null.net);

• Bill Bennett and Jonah Goldberg;

• Countless other Malkin and Powerline followers too numerous to list who dutifully repeated the false accusations.

In a subsequent e-mail to me, Spillers -- the NYT photographer who had her home address and telephone number published in the right-wing blogosphere (by an associate of David Horowitz's) this weekend because of these false accusations -- said this: "Unbelievable how many folks jump to conclusions without having the facts." She also obviously hasn't spent much time reading Malkin and Powerline before, or else such behavior would be anything but "unbelievable."

Hunter has much more on the retraction and apology obligations.

Exemplary Americans - The Press asserts itself - Abrogating the Geneva Conventions

Several related issues of note:

(1) One of the most eloquent and forceful opponents of the Bush administration's abuses of executive power has been Bruce Fein, life-long doctrinaire conservative and former Reagan administration Justice Department official. Blogger Andrew Bard Schmookler has posted an e-mail interview he conducted with Fein which is highly worth reading. If I could force every self-proclaimed conservative to read one interview, it would be this one.

Fein is particularly persuasive when it comes to imparting the depressingly difficult-to-convey point that critiques of the Bush administration's theories of executive power have nothing to do with liberal or conservative ideology, except to the extent that unlimited executive power is squarely at odds with ostensible conservative principles:

I have never perceived our magnificent constitutional dispensation as a partisan issue. As Thomas Jefferson explained in his first inaugural, we are all Federalists, we are all Republicans when it comes to the rule of law and the Constitution’s sacred architecture. The Founding Fathers built on a profound understanding of human nature and the propensity of absolute power to deteriorate into absolute corruption and abuses.

My convictions about the signature features of the United States that occasioned its blossoming from a tiny nation into a global superpower made my criticisms of Bush’s usurpations natural and spontaneous, even though I voted for him twice and praised many of his measures or appointments, e.g., Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sam Alito. . . . Bush’s precedents are dangerous, and will lie around like loaded weapons readily unleashed by any incumbent in times of strife or conflict, e.g., a second edition of 9/11.

At the risk of invoking a heinous -- and tragically soiled -- blogger cliche, permit me to recommend that you read the entire interview with Bruce Fein.

(2) Journalists are the frequent target of criticism in the blogosphere, and my blog is no different. The failure of journalists to perform their central function of acting as an adversarial watchdog against the Government is one of the most significant factors -- if not the most significant -- in why the Bush administration has been able to perpetrate abuse after abuse.

But if one is going to criticize journalists for not doing their job, one should give credit to journalists when they do. Just as I wish that every self-proclaimed conservative would read the Bruce Fein interview, I wish every journalist would watch this clip of Dana Priest on Meet the Press this weekend, in which she very forcefully and clearly explains the intended purpose and function of the media in our system of government.

With Bill Bennett, that odious advocate of imprisoning journalists, sitting next to her, the comment which Priest made about casino gambling has received most of the attention (and for those Beacons of Civil Discourse hand-wringing about the impropriety of her comment, I'd like to know how many of them could exercise the civility they oh-so-solemnly urge when sitting next to someone who has been publicly advocating their life-long imprisonment). But Priest's casino gambling comment is really just an insignificant distraction compared to the extremely critical and substantive points she made about the role of journalism and why these attacks on journalists are so misguided and dangerous.

Priest, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for her story informing Americans that our government has created secret gulags in Eastern Europe to "interrogate" terrorist suspects beyond the reach of the law, is extremely smart and, more importantly, understands her role as a journalist and is courageous enough to fulfill that role regardless of the attacks to which she knows she will be subjected. Her boldness even inspired the other panelists, and the moderator, to be quite combative against Bennett's insistence that journalists who expose government secrets belong in prison.

As fundamentally flawed as the national media has been over the last five years -- and their journalistic crimes could fill a book (actually, they have filled a very good book) -- they are a vital and irreplaceable check on the government. We would not know about warrantless eavesdropping if the NYT and Jim Risen hadn't written about them, or secret European gulags if Priest and the WP hadn't uncovered them, or the domestic call monitoring program had USA Today not learned of it and courageously published an article about it. And the NYT just published reports of the administration's massive banking monitoring program and defied the pleas of the administration when doing so, knowing it would be subjected to exactly the whirlwind of vicious and dangerous accusations of