On Morsi, Democracy and the "Freedom Agenda"

What better day than the Fourth of July to discuss yesterday's events in Cairo, which saw Egypt's first elected president deposed.

I carry no water for the Muslim Brotherhood, but there's no shortage of supposedly conservative nonsense out there that begs responding to. Fox News Republicans and their moronic fellow travelers in the idiot blogosphere have managed over the last year, and especially in the last 24 hours, to be both hypocritical and hysterical. And like most bitches with the vapors, they need to be sent to their fainting couches for a good long time.

Although I thought it would have something to do with a change in foreign policy toward Israel, I predicted that the Egyptian military would depose Mohammed Morsi since he was first elected. Most of my freedom loving friends thought me a knave, a fool, or both. Y'know, because Obama.

The unmitigated balls of some of these people, talking about freedom in the Middle East! The simple fact is that the single greatest retarding factor for democracy in the Muslim world has been American foreign policy. But lets look at places where "freedom" has been imposed at gunpoint, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan. Are things looking good in either country? I think the consensus is that they are not. Any country that requires a massive foreign military presence to sustain its "freedom," absent third-party aggression, is ultimately doomed.

My friend Richard at Eye on a Crazy Planet wrote about this earlier today. Sadly, he was almost spectacularly wrong and wildly ahistorical on almost all of his points.

Richard does hint at a couple of things that I generally agree with, specifically that some dictatorships are better than others and that freedom just isn't for everyone, but he never actually comes out and says so. Instead, he seems to believe that the rest of the world should get a vote on the kind of government a given country should have, Israel excepted.

Here are some of his sillier points;

Though bolstered by support from the foolish and ineffectual administration of US President Obama,  Morsi's slip into acting like a democratically elected dictator made him more popular in The White House than it did in Cairo. Massive nightly demonstrations that exceeded those at the end of the reign of Hosni Mubarak were proof of the popular discontent in Egypt.

Um, not exactly. The U.S foreign aid under Obama changed not at all than that from Nixon through Bush 43, meaning that the overwhelming majority of it went to the military.  Oh, and that's the same military that deposed Morsi yesterday. Think that would happen with its money cut off? I don't. And didn't most of the Right go ape when Obama "abandoned" Mubarak, when it wasn't giving credit for the Arab Spring to President Bush?

Something to remember when considering that is that elections don't always lead to democracy. The other duly elected Muslim Brotherhood government, that of Hamas in Gaza, proves that once in power, Islamists, like fascists before them, will suspend democracy to retain their power for as long as they can hold on to it by force.

Though the so called "Arab Spring" in Egypt happened in the 21st Century, that country was less prepared for democracy than the American Colonies were more than two centuries earlier.

When was Hamas elected again? Oh right, in 2005, when the Bush White House ignored the protestations of both Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon as part of his idiotic "freedom agenda."

And why was Egypt "less prepared for democracy than the American colonies were more than two centuries earlier"?

Well, in part, that's because the American colonies didn't have the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA  constantly subverting the necessary conditions for democracy in the decades prior to 1776.

Furthermore, lets not pretend that the early days of the Republic, where anyone other than landowning white males were disenfranchised for decades was particularly Athenian.

But things are different now, right? They sure are. There are no shortage of people howling about a supposedly unreconstructed Kenyan Marxist routinely steal elections through the offices of the ACORN and the New Black Panther Party.

Jokes aside, history is sort of import here. And the history is chilling.

Institutions that are essential to democracy, like an educated population, a healthy system of rival political parties, a constitution that safeguards rights and an independent judiciary are all democratic facets Egypt had.  The only political organization that was organized was the Muslim Brotherhood, which used mosques and madrassas to force-feed subservience to the faithful and a country that is more than 95% Muslim.  Rural Egyptians welcomed Morsi's tyranny of devout Islamism that was a bludgeon to the cosmopolitan citizens of Cairo who have spent the last weeks protesting en masse.

The embarrassing fall-out of the Egyptian coup is that after decades of the west acting superior and lecturing the Muslim world about democracy, the reality is that both they and we are better off if, in Egypt, it takes a time-out.

Until the death of GamAl Nasser, Egypt was in the Soviet sphere of influence. When the United States took over as its patron, Nasser's designated successor, Anwar Sadat, was give the same free reign to suppress his people by Washington that Moscow had. In fact, the CIA had trained Egypt's secret police to crush any democratic alternatives to regimes of Sadat and Mubarak. That left only groups like the Muslim Brotherhood  as any kind of governing alternative.

Because of Cold War politics, America foreign aid was never predicated on Egypt's developing the kind of social conditions necessary for the kind of democracy that it took the United States 180 years to perfect. Successive American administrations - and especially traditionally conservative ones - wanted a police state in Egypt.

This is exactly what we saw in Iran, after the United States overthrew the only democratic government it ever had. As the great Dan Carlin has said, when you replace Mossedegh with the Shah, you wind up with Khomeini.

Richard's idea of a democratic "time-out" is as adorable to me as it is fascinating. After all, it's worked out so well in Pakistan, with its eight military coups in sixty years. On top of all their fantastic democracy, we also have their nuclear weapons and the Taliban, all subsidized - albeit indirectly - by the American taxpayer.

What Richard doesn't do is show us where a democratic time-out has worked in anybody's interests, particularly the country being put in the corner. That certainly wasn't true in Iran.

But, Richard tells us ... Hitler!

Morsi is a maniac who adheres to the murderous Muslim Brotherhood creed. Though we seem hypocrites to welcome his removal, what if the same had happened in Germany in 1934?

Adolf Hitler came to power the year before that in a fair election. The last fair election Germany was to have until after the Second World War and the millions of deaths to which the result of that election eventually led.

Certainly there would have been an outcry from some quarters in the west if the German Army, seeing Hitler's insanity, had chosen to remove him the year after he was elected. But millions of innocent lives and untold devastation would have been averted if the Wehrmacht had taken such a bold step.

There are a few problems with this theory.

First, Weimar Germany was an almost total democracy that didn't persecute democratic alternatives to the existing government, which was the case in Egypt.

Secondly, the rise of the Nazi Party was due entirely to economic conditions, not political ones. Absent hyperinflation and the Depression, it's unlikely that an Austrian misfit like Hitler would have ever come close to power in Berlin.

Third, the Treaty of Versailles made such a theoretical coup by the German military, which was limited to 100,000 troops, impossible. The army was actually outnumbered by Hitler's political army, the SA, which was three million strong.

It was only after Hitler's clandestine remilitarization of Germany that he disposed of the SA on the Night of the Long Knives, at which point, the SS was a professional military force sworn personally to him.

Lastly, there's no guarantee that if Hitler hadn't subverted Germany, the communists wouldn't have. The economic conditions in 1930s Germany made democracy all but impossible. And since remilitarization was the clearest path to economic recovery, as it was under the Nazis, it's difficult to see how a gutted army would revolt against that.

I really don't want to be a prick to Richard, who I actually like a lot, but history is sort of import in discussing matters like this.

Plowing Through More Republican Horseshit, IRS and NSA Edition

Most of you remember my old blog, dont'cha? I spent shitloads of time there from 2005-2008 bitching endlessly about the power of the US federal government and the potential abuse thereof.

And you know what I got for my fucking trouble? A endless amount of nonsense about the Unitary Executive Theory and the righteousness of George W. Bush. Most of those people would describe themselves as Tea Partiers today, and not readily admitting to knowing who Bush even was, let alone ever having supported him so throatily.

Then there's the Citizens United decision, which I've always had a mighty bug up my ass about.

I'm on the record as having said that political activity should get no preferential treatment under the tax code, from deducting lobbying costs right on down to deducting political contributions from your taxes. Shit, I don't even support the charitable deductions for charities that actually accomplish something other than shitty commercials.

If you're interested in knowing why, I'll tell you.

The more deductions you allow in the tax code, the higher the rates have to be to generate the revenue the government needs to operate. And if you want a government with the capability of both providing accessable health care to everyone and being prepared to bomb everyone from Jakarta to Winnipeg, we're talking about a fair bit of revenue.

Advocates of a flat tax have never been able to answer that basic fact. The more you deduct for yourself, the more everyone pays in higher rates. And this is what made the Ryan-Romney tax proposals last year such a bad fucking joke to anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic.

My personal hero, Velociman, has one of the most misguided things I've ever seen up here.

A Redress of Grievances
That was, and is, the crime of the Tea Party groups. They are loose, and unaffiliated. When anyone attempts to wrest control of the Tea Parties at any level above the community they are whipsawed, and lashed.
That was the fearful thing. That is what keeps Obama awake at night. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly and the right to redress grievances not as a sop of government, but as a natural right of man. From God, if you will. The Tea Parties were actually fomenting during the Bush bailout leading up to the 2008 election. They have never been specifically anti-Obama. Merely anti-spending. And yet they have been targeted and reviled as mutants, and racists.

There are any number of factual errors in those paragraphs, not least of which is that the Tea Party isn't almost wholly constituted by mutants.

Firstly, nothing calling itself the "Party Party" existed before Rick Santelli's retarded rant of February 2009, and that addressed relief to underwater homeowners under the thumb of the cocksucker banks, who themselves were just bailed out. And that Santelli said this from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade went almost completed unnoticed by everyone that isn't me.

Second, it's almost impossible to know if Tea Party groups are "loose, and unaffiliated" in light of Citizens United, which restricted disclosure of their donor base.

Thirdly, this isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment.

Let me repeat that. This isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment. The Obama administration never shut down the right of Tea Party groups to speak and, if they tried, they did a godawful job of it, since I couldn't escape those mutants last year.

It's actually about administrative tax law.

The Tea Parties weren't asserting a right, they were seeking a favour from the government in the form of non-profit tax status. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of the right to tax-exempt status for anyone but Indians in the Constitution. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant of lying.

My ultimate problem with these shithead Republicans is that they want other taxpayers to subsidize the cost of their bitching about how taxes are so high. Their right to free speech isn't inhibited as much their ability to get other people to pay for it is, so fuck them.

Now, do I think that that the administration specifically targeted conservative groups through the IRS? Sure I do.

Is that "Watergate," like so many idiots suggest it is? No, it is not.

President Nixon specifically targeted individuals for IRS harassment,  just as Johnson and Kennedy did before him. The difference is that they weren't organized groups seeking deductions in a post-Citizens United world, which begs such scrutiny. Nixon went after individual members of groups, journalists and sundry political enemies, which is a clear abuse of power and something no one has accused Obama of.

Then there's the recent NSA scandal, to which I ask ...... What did you think was going to happen? 

Most of you will remember that I went apeshit when I first heard about the Bush NSA program that was implemented in secret, without congressional authorization, after 9/11. I went on about it for years, actually.

But the people who were fine with it then - and in some cases demanded the prosecution of journalists that reported on it - are out of their tiny pinheads about it now. Of course, these are almost universally the same twats that want a secret war in Syria, so go figure.

However there are a couple of important distinctions.

First, Obama sought a FISA warrant for the records, which Bush never did, and Republicans insisted that he didn't have to under Unitary Executive Theory, the Authorization to Use Military Force Resolution of 2001 and the "Because ....Lincoln!" argument that they deploy whenever it fucking suits them.

Second, the GOP voted to change the law to to allow for exactly what Obama is doing today. Something I would advocate impeaching Obama for, Republicans legitimized way back when.

And that goes back to the tax case. Do you want to pay higher tax rates just because shiityy people with dishonest thinking don't wantto pay any at all?

Why I (Sort Of) Hope Romney Wins

Over the last few weeks we've seen what is perhaps the clearest example of just how full of shit Republicans are.

Remember how through September you couldn't avoid hearing about "skewed polls" that were part of a direct conspiracy to suppress Mitt Romney's vote? Whether you tuned in Fox News or read practically any blog, you heard about it 24-7. Not only was it wildly annoying, it was impossibly stupid.

Then Romney won the first debate (in as much as you can "win" one of those silly spectacles,) and viola, we're now in the third consecutive week of not hearing Republican whining. Instead, those assholes are doing victory laps because their guy is seen to be winning in the national polls. They're still wrong, but it beats the constant pissing and moaning like liberals.

As you'll see, I'm incredibly consistent. I said in public that the national polls mean shit in a presidential race when Obama was ahead and I'm still saying they mean shit. Because the presidency is decided in the Electoral College, the state polls are the only ones that matter. And the state polls aren't being overly kind to Mitt Romney, especially in Ohio.

The president has had a pretty consistent lead in Ohio's "poll of polls" and without the Buckeye State, Romney's path to 270 is incredibly difficult, whereas Obama's isn't. Without Ohio, Romney has to come from behind in a number of different states where he hasn't maintained leads or has been stubbornly tied throughout his national surge. The way I see it, Obama is still the heavy favourite to win. As a matter of fact, I'll go out on a long limb and predict that the president is reelected with roughly 300 electoral votes. It could be as low as 280, but it could be as high as 320.

There's been a lot of talk over the last week of Obama winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. I think that's unlikely to point of not seriously addressing because that only happens about once a century and has never happened to an incumbent president.

That's not to say that it wouldn't be hilarious. After listening to Republicans lecture everyone about the primacy of the Electoral College, I'd really like to see them marching in the streets like Al Sharpton. That would make me smile.

Of course, it doesn't really matter who wins because America is fucked either way. Even if Obama had a serious budget plan (which he doesn't,) he isn't going to have a Congress willing to pass it. And the Romney-Ryan plans are nothing short of a fantasy. There's no way that it'll accomplish what it's suppose to even if it was enacted, and there's no hope that it'll ever be enacted.

An Obama second term will look a lot like the last two years have, with nothing getting done until the United States finally defaults on its debt and the universe implodes. A Romney Administration, on the other hand, will be the funniest thing imaginable, at least until the United States finally defaults on its debt and the universe implodes.

Willard Mitt Romney hasn't exactly been a profile in courage through his life, given as he is to saying whatever whoever's in front of him wants to hear. That means that his chances of standing up to the vicious shitheads in the House Tea Party caucus and introducing a sane plan that could pass a Democratic Senate are virtually zero.

The plan that he's touting - major tax reform - isn't going to pass either house of Congress. The cuntish and evil lobbyists that control both parties aren't going to allow the elimination of high end tax loopholes which, by themselves, don't come close to paying for an across-the-board rate reduction; and nobody's going to vote for the four big middle class deductions that actually would.

If there's one universal rule about politicians, it's that they'll always vote for cotton candy for everybody. That being the case, I can see Romney peeling away the three or four Senate Democrats necessary to reverse the Byrd Rule and pass the enormous tax cuts through reconciliation, but not the deduction repeal that pays for the mess.

When Romney reinvented himself as "Moderate Mitt: King of the Reasonable Cats" on October 3rd, he specifically said several times that he "would not pass a tax cut that adds to the deficit." But like everything else about the Romney campaign, this is an example of almost majestic lying cocksuckery.

You see, Republicans generally and the Tea Party specifically don't believe that tax cuts ever "add to the deficit, despite decades of mathematical evidence to the contrary. Even though it's never actually happened before, they think that tax cuts will stimulate enough growth to not only pay for themselves, but the trillions in new spending that they'll also pass.

Not only has Romney promised $2 trillion in new military spending that no one's actually asking for, it's important that the Tea Partiers are actually becoming politicians. It's easy for them to take a stand on spending when the opposition controls the White House and their proposed cuts have no realistic chance of passing. But when they have a pliable puppet like Romney as president (and Grover Norquist has said in public that the GOP only needs a "rubber stamp" in the Oval Office,) it's more likely than not that they'll be exactly the same spending machine that Bush's Republican Congress was.

One of the iron laws of politics is that voters only like fiscal discipline in theory. That is to say when someone else's spending gets cut. So, yeah, the poor will probably get gutted but the big-ticket middle class entitlements will either stay as they are or actually expand, just as they did under Bush. If you think that the proposed Medicare and Social Security plans are going to pass, you're kidding yourself, especially when they're put in legislative language and the real transition costs are laid out in black and white.

The same goes for promise to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. If you think that's going to happen, you're either an idiot, you haven't been paying attention, or you hope Romney's lying. Mitt has said on numerous occasions that he'll keep the parts of the Affordable Care Act that everybody likes, which happens to be most of it. He only wants to get rid of the individual mandate that pays for it.

Simply put, if you elect Romney, the Tea Party effectively ceases to exist. A President Romney would presumably like to be reelected and the fucking Teapers lacked the balls to invent themselves before President Bush was safely exiled to Dallas. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that these idiots will stand up to a president of their own party.

Watching the self-declared "fiscal hawks" on Fox News and in the jerk-off blogosphere revert to form and justifying the deficit marathon that Romney and Tea Party House creates would be the funniest thing I've ever seen. Watching them  spend between two and four years blaming an underperforming economy on Obama, as calling Obama out for doing the same to Bush is going to make me smile.

Look, I get that well over half of my American readers are going to vote for Mitt Romney and I'm not delusional enough to pretend that I'm going to change anybody's mind. But I guarantee you that what I described above - or something very close to it - is going to happen in the event of a Romney presidency.

And watching that will be worth your voting for him.

Hammer to Fall: Why Conrad Black is Wrong About Tom DeLay

I have a certain amount of sympathy for Conrad Black. While I refuse to refer to him as Baron Black of Crossharbour because I think British royal titles are moronic unless you slay a fucking dragon or something, I do respect his intelligence and feel that a great injustice was done to him over the last decade.

I'm not going to argue Black's guilt or innocence, but I'll believe until the day I die that the United States didn't have jurisdiction to prosecute him, especially for the obstruction count that he was convicted of. All of the actions prosecuted in United States of America v. Black occurred in Canada, so fuck the United States.

The fact that Hollinger was a NYSE traded company are essentially meaningless. If that alone justifies the application of American criminal laws on foreign nationals foe actions outside the territorial U.S, then foreign nationals would do well to de-list their stock there. The Americans are out of control when it comes to the extraterritorial application of their fucking laws and that isn't going to change until it bites them in the pocketbook.

I also admire Mr. Black's advocacy of criminal defendants, which is something that all conservatives should engage in a lot more often.

If you believe that conservatism is predicated on a distrust of the power of the state and the competence of the state to wield that power responsibly, it only stands to reason that you would side with the most vulnerable potential victims of said power. Instead, too many conservatives have for too long advocated for increased government power against the individual in the criminal justice system. Worse, in arguing for that, they have insipidly put forth that the relevant parts of the Constitution don't mean what they actually say.

Sure, our friend Conrad had to feel the cold boot of the state himself before he came around to this view, but that shouldn't make his current writing any less worthy of your respect.

That's why I'm more than a little sad about this article of his.

In this context, Tom DeLay is, to use another hackneyed American media expression, an authentic American hero. I had hoped that after the chief of staff of the former vice president, Scooter Libby, had been convicted by a rabidly partisan jury when there was no conclusive evidence, only an uncorroborated difference of recollection with a journalist; and then six-term senator Ted Stevens was convicted on the basis of what was subsequently found to be wrongful withholding of exculpatory evidence, that the executive and legislative branches of the federal government might awaken to the threat that the rogue prosecutocracy poses to them. (Justice came too late for Senator Stevens; he lost his place in the Senate, very narrowly, a few days after the erroneous judgment, and died in an air crash after his conviction was reversed.) To paraphrase Scotland Yard in vintage murder cases, no man or woman in America is safe from this monster.

Yes, Ted Stevens was fucked over in a Kafka-esque nightmare. The fact that he was very probably guilty of something matters not a fucking whit. Justice demands that he be prosecuted with something specific and the government go out of its way to play fair. That didn't happen, and the fact that the prosecution team wasn't immediately sent before a firing dquad at dawn shows just how seriously the Justice Department takes justice.

On the other hand, there was no shortage of "conclusive evidence" regarding Scooter Libby's factual guilt. Libby lied to the FBI and perjured himself before a Grand Jury and there were several respected and disinterested eyewitnesses who testified to that effect. The only injustice in his case was that President Bush commuted his sentence, especially so shortly after the Clinton impeachment saga, which was essentially about the same thing.

And Tom DeLay is a two-legged fucking monster. To suggest that he's "an authentic American hero" is nothing short of laughable. DeLay is the undead, walking embodiment of everything that's wrong with politics generally and the Republican Party in particular.

During the Clinton impeachment, Speaker Newt Gingrich was finally kicked out of politics for well over a decade. DeLay and his fellow Texan and blood-enemy, the appropriately named Dick Armey were just below him, as Whip and Majority Leader respectively.

In simpler times, Armey would have become Speaker upon Gingrich's resignation and DeLay Majority Leader. But the Republican House conference was still somewhat sane back then. They knew that both of those twisted fucks would have been a public relations disaster. So they elected Robert Livingston Speaker.

Unfortunately, Livingston was also fabled for his love of strange pussy and was forced to resign just as the Articles of Impeachment against Clinton were being voted on. DeLay then essentially hand-picked the obscure and incompetent Dennis Hastert as a puppet Speaker. Armey was effectively bypassed and himself resigned in 2002, allowing DeLay to enable Bush to engage in the wildest spending spree in American history.

But absolute power was never quite absolute enough for young Tom. So he went out about using his influence with the Texas legislature and the state's mouth-breathing goof of a governor, Rick Perry, to engage in some unprecedented and probably unconstitutional redistricting in 2003, designed to increase the GOP's national House delegation at the expense of the Democrats.

Even that wasn't enough. Texas has an age-old law banning corporate contributions to state candidates. DeLay figured that he could work around that by funnelling the corporate contributions through the Republican National Committee, who would then launder them back to his preferred legislative candidates in Austin. That's money laundering and that's a fucking felony.

Conrad Black sees it differently.

Tom DeLay is fighting a good fight and has taken his tormentors most of the way toward the highest appeals court in the tenebrous thickets of Texas criminal justice, while denying them their almost inevitable moment of glee and self-satisfaction by avoiding imprisonment thus far as he pursues his appeal, which was heard Wednesday. The issue is $190,000 of contributions to his PAC, which were given to the Republican National Committee, which funneled them into seven Texas House races where the Republicans were successful, which allegedly facilitated a favorable redistribution of federal House of Representatives seats that durably advantaged the Republicans.

It has now come down to whether the state’s money-laundering law covers transfers made by check—like so much American legal skirmishing, serious points and the fate of human beings are gradually reduced, amidst mountainous enrichment of the rapacious American legal system, to arcana too absurd for any normal person to take seriously. PACs in Texas are allowed to support parties but not candidates, and the issue comes to whether this was a conversion of contributions gradually and by stages and without specific intent or a guilty mind, to a technically illegal end, or if it was an active and multilevel conspiracy to violate (ridiculous, vague, and unworkable) election-financing laws. The fact that the question even has to be put at this point, after it has been batted round and through various courts for over five years, should be enough to establish the reasonable doubt whose absence the law requires for criminal convictions, but which, by the miraculous operation of American criminal justice, is almost never found to exist.

Black's argument in this case is ridiculous on its face.

The fact that DeLay's PAC sent the donations through the RNC is evidence enough that he knew that sending them directly to his state candidates was illegal. That tends to demonstrate a consciousness of guilt and can lead reasonable people to conclude that he conspired to violate the state law on corporate contributions. I'm shocked that he wasn't convicted of conspiracy, too.

I'm inclined to agree with Black that most campaign finance laws are "ridiculous, vague, and unworkable" and I'd just as soon have them all done away with. But I very rarely get my way, and the law is the fucking law. Furthermore, "a conversion of contributions gradually and by stages" should make a reasonable person more inclined to believe that there was a "specific intent or a guilty mind," not less. A person who thought that their actions were lawful would have dumped all the converted contributions at once.

If this is the stuff that makes Tom DeLay a "hero in the martyrology being created by the antics of the American prosecutocracy," then Rod Blagojevich might properly be something akin to a saint.

As I mentioned earlier, I support Conrad Black's scrutiny of American justice. It's long overdue and he could bring serious conservatives to where they should have been decades ago. Too many people are essentially losing their lives because the government is more powerful than they are and richer in resources.

Having said that, sometimes a motherfucker is just guilty beyond words. And Tom DeLay is such a motherfucker.


Neat Editorial Note: None of the above should suggest that Tom DeLay isn't a clever little cocksucker. You see that photo at the top of the post? That's his booking photo.

DeLay was indicted in Travis County, which is Austin. He turned himself in after a warrant was issued in Harris County, which surrounds Houston. Apparently Harris County is the single Texas jurisdiction that doesn't include anything that indicates that you've been charged with a crime in their booking photos.

That allowed DeLay to make his arrest look like a campaign photo. Which was genius!

OPSEC Hypocrisy

There's nothing more adorable than partisan Republicans running around screaming about leaking classified national security information at this late date. You really just want to ruffle the hair on their little pin heads and congraulate them for learning to lie like adults.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that you have to like these kinds of political leaks, although I often do approve of unauthorized leaks. For example, I have yet to write anything condemning Wikileaks or classified operations (such as the NSA's then-illegal domestic surveillance) winding up in The New York Times.

I'm not a big believer in the idea that you can have a secret government in a democracy. I recognize that some things need to be classified, but those instances should be few and very far between. If the government can't proudly admit that it has done something, it should almost always avoid doing it.

Republicans were horrified when President Obama publicly acknowledged that the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossedegh in 1953. Of course, any American who was interested already knew that the CIA had done it, and it did sort of shape the history of the region from that day forward, but it made the United States look bad.

And that's where one of the primary dangers of the classification culture lies. Did you know that, for just one example, the American government continues to classify documents from the First World War? I somehow doubt that there's any real danger of the Kaiser or the Austro-Hungarians using that information to the detriment of America's national security, but try convincing Washington of that. Not long before his retirement, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal book on the tens of millions of documents that have been unnecessarily classified and the culture that breeds.

When something can be easily classified, you find that everything can be. In November of 2001, President Bush amended the Presidential Records Act with Executive Order 13233, which made access to records by historians (begininng with the Reagan Administration's) virtually impossible. 13233 extended the same protection to vice-presidential records, as well. In a directive to the US Archivist, Bush explained that he might "may claim a constitutionally based privilege" over the records. And Executive Orer 13233 was above and beyond the usual classification process.

Classification can also be a gateway to criminal behaviour by presidents. The aforementioned NSA program was clearly illegal under both the Foreign Surveillance Act of 1978 and the National Security Act of 1948. But it was classified, so there wasn't much anyone could do about it. Even referring the matter to the House Judicary Committee for impeachment proceedings could very well have constituted a federal crime.

Operation Stellar Wind almost created a constitutional crisis of another kind in 2004.

There were internal disputes within the Justice Department about the legality of the program, because data is collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants. In March 2004, the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled that the program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed, where Ashcroft lay semiconscious, to request that he sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling. However, Ashcroft was incapable of signing the document. Bush then reauthorized the operation, over formal Justice Department objections. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller, Acting Attorney General James Comey, and many prominent members of the Justice Department were prepared to resign over the matter. Valerie Caproni the FBI general counsel, said, "From my perspective, there was a very real likelihood of a collapse of government." Bush subsequently reversed the authorization.

Simply put, the entire top echelon of American law enforcement could have resigned overnight and not been able to tell the public why. That would have made the Saturday Night Massacre seem mild in comparison and would have crippled the government in the middle of two wars.

You can even argue that Watergate itself was a result of extensive secrecy within the Executive Branch.

Most scholars believe that the scandal began with the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. But the memoirs of both President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, show that Nixon wasn't concerned about it. Nixon had nothing to do with the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of the Vietnam War through the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. The material Ellsberg leaked, Nixon thought, would only embarrass his lifelong enemies in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

But Kissinger pointed out to Nixon that they were involved in sensitive and highly secret (so secret that even Vice President Agnew wasn't aware of them) negotiations that would lead to the "China opening." Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, according to Kissinger, wouldn't deal with an American president who couldn't keep his own secrets. It was only then that Nixon set in motion the events that would ultimately lead to his resignation of the presidency. He created the "plumbers unit" that famously broke into the Watergate, but only after a "black bag" job at the office of Ellsberg's Los Angeles phychatrist.

Granted, it should be noted that by the time the Pentagon Papers were leaked, Nixon and Kissinger were illegally wiretapping, through the good offices of J.Edgar Hoover, several journalists and members of Kissinger's own staff in relation to other leaks. No one was fired, let alone prosecuted, for those leaks, although they did greatly complicate Kissinger's own confirmation as Secretary of State.

Secrecy, classification and leaks are the way Washington does business and has for generations. You may not like it, but there's very little getting around it.

What I find problematic is the Republican Party's new-found obsession with integrity when it comes to national security-related information. And that's where the Special Operations  Political Action Committee enters our discussion.

 

Even though the above video is the creation of fevered GOP hacks, I encourage you all to watch it, if for no other reason than it's hilarious. Former Navy SEAL, Ben Smith in particular might be the most transparent hack on the face of the earth.

Actually, sir, Obama did whack Osama bin Laden. You know how I know that? Because if the operation went sideways and a bunch of SEALs get killed instead, he alone would have been blamed for it. Ask Jimmy Carter how that works. So spare me the sanctimony, you prick.

Before I go further, I should state my opinion on the bin Laden operation. When Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign that he would go into Pakistan to get him, I joined Hillary Clinton, John McCain and, yes, even Mitt Romney in thinking it was a fantastically bad idea. I still think it was a bad idea because we may not know the real consequences of it for several more years. The Pakistanis are unpredictable folks, and they're pretty much going to be running the show in Afghanistan after the rest of us get out. Humiliating the ISI may yet have consequences that outweigh the benefit of putting a plug into bin Laden's noggin. And President Obama will be held to account for those consequences, as well.

First, almost every accusation that OPSEC PAC makes has been carefully disassembled by Peter Bergen, who knows more about al-Qaeda than almost anyone else on the planet.

Second, Obama might not have had to announce the bin Laden attack if the SEALs didn't crash their own secret helicopter. Does anyone think that the Pakistanis would have kept that secret for them after a foreign military invaded one of their heavily populated cities? Really?

Third, Republicans sure react differently about retired military speaking out against their civilian masters depending on which civilian masters are being spoken out against.

The Night of the Generals was as instructive as anything possibly could be. In 2006, a number of retired senior military and policy advisors publicly called for the resignation (or firing) of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the growing debacle in Iraq. These were incredibly serious people with centuries of experience between them. Some were close personal friends and ideological allies of Rumsfeld himself. Nobody in the OPSEC PAC rises to the level of rank or experience as those who participated in the "Generals' revolt" of 2006.

Practically every Republican house organ compared what the generals were doing as something akin to treason, "preening" for the "Leftist press" and the "defeatist" mainstream media. Of course, as soon as President Bush did fire Rumsfeld, those criticisms went down the memory hole.

At this point, I should bring in some more history.

For example, we know that President Bush very selectively declassified the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to further the case for removing Saddam Hussein. The declassification was selective in that it gave the impression that America's intelligence community was unanimous in its assessement that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Left out of the declassification was the fact that the intelligence branches of the Air Force and the Department of Energy dissented. The community also had a much lower level of confidence in the findings than the administration presented them as having.

Then there was the deliberate leak of Valarie Plame's identity as a CIA operative. We now know that the intial leak came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who admitted the leak immediately to investigators. But there's hardly a journalist alive who would run a story like that with only a single source. Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff (and Counsellor to the President) Scooter Libby and Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff - and political consigliere - Karl Rove helpfully confirmed the Armitage leak. In Libby's case, it was confirmed to several reporters, including Tim Russert and Matthew Cooper.

Upon Libby's conviction in relation to the Plame leak, President Bush committed what I consider to be a disgraceful act in commuting his sentence, which most Republicans applauded. But even that wasn't enough. In the closing days of the administration, Vice President Cheney, again supported by innumerable Republican partisans, repeatedly asked the President to pardon Libby outright.

While we're on the topic of the selective outrage over national security leaks, there's a story just today that highlights it.

The author of a recently announced insider account of the raid that killed Usama bin Laden has been identified to Fox News as a 36-year-old former Navy SEAL Team 6 member from Alaska who also played a role in the high-profile rescue of an American captain kidnapped by Somali pirates.

The book, "No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden," is set to hit shelves on Sept 11. It is penned under the pseudonym "Mark Owen," according to the publisher, but multiple sources told Fox News his name is in fact Matt Bissonnette, 36, of Wrangell, Alaska. Bissonnette could be exposing himself to legal trouble, as the Pentagon has not vetted the account.

The tell-all book also has apparently upset a large population of former and current SEAL members who worry about releasing information that could compromise future missions. One Navy SEAL told Fox News, "How do we tell our guys to stay quiet when this guy won't?" Other SEALs are expressing anger, with some going so far as to call him a "traitor."

Because the bin Laden raid was actually a CIA operation that was carried out by the SEALs, not sending the manuscript of "No Easy Day" to Langley for security review may (or may not, the structure of the hit makes it legally questionable) a federal crime.

But you know what else is a crime? Knowingly revealing the name of someone who participated in two classified operations, which "multiple sources" did and Fox News ran with. Moreover, they very helpfully told the extremists who might want to exact revenge, where he lives.

Of course this, like other national security leaks that  don't help the GOP politically, is registering very low on the Republican Outrage Meter. Why, I'll bet that Sean Hannity doesn't devote 1.100th ofthe time to the leak of Matt Bissonnette's name as he did to ball-washing OPSEC PAC and their retarded theories of how life really works.

And that's why these people can't be taken seriously. Fox News, along with innumerable blogging morons, can't throw around classified names while still presenting themselves as Patriotic Protectors of National Security.

Well, I guess that you can. but you expose yourself as being nothing better than what you accuse Barack Obama of being: a partisan glory hound that holds the fortune of his own party above that of the national security of the United States.

In the end, OPSEC PAC and it's birther leader, should be viewed for what it is: a ridiculous (if well-financed and connected) Republican joke.

Meet the Power Twins of Fantasy Budgeting

Here's a good rule of thumb when reading about politics: If you see someone describe a liberal program as "Marxism," you can safely conclude that they haven't got a clue what they're talking about or they think that you're an idiot. When someone says "This is Marxism," you can automatically be sure that it actually isn't.

One of the central tenants of Marxism is the workers controlling the means of productions, usually through the mechanism of the state. Say what you will about North American liberals, but very few of them have ever actually advocated that. But the very same people who get enraged when they're compared to Hitler cheerfully associate their political opponents to Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. I'm not aware of Barack Obama ever saying that he wants to collectivize farming, although both parties have essentially done that through price supports and subsidies for some 70 years now.

That being the case, you can automatically dismiss Fox News, the Sun News Network and roughly three-quarters of Republican and Conservative Party blogs as ignorant, dishonest or both. All you need do to understand the fallacy of their argument is look back to 2003 when the Republican Congress passed - and President Bush the Younger signed - Medicare Part D. They gave boner pills to grandpa and still managed to turn that into a welfare program for the pharmaceutical industry. That, my friends, takes talent.

It doesn't end there, either. "Limited government conservatives" also doubled the size of the Department of Education, which their own party platform once regularly called for the abolishment of; fought two Asian ground wars off the books; passed enormous tax cuts without cutting any spending whatsoever and enacted into law monstrous highway and farm bills. All told, the GOP of 2001-'07 spent trillions of dollars that the country didn't have.

The Bush programs are the biggest drivers of the deficit even today. The tax cuts alone cost close to $4 trillion every decade that they remain in place. Medicare D costs about $700 billion, which will only increase as more seniors become eligible.

And Mitt Romney's newly minted running mate, Paul Ryan voted for it all. He says that he was "miserable" during the time of Dennis Hastert's wild-spending speakership, but he went on to vote for the 2008 Bush stimulus, TARP and the $14 billion Bush bailout of GM and Chrysler (full disclosure: I supported the last two and still do.)

No one forced Representative Ryan to do any of this. He was independently elected and never faced a close race in his district. He very well could have stood on principle. He just didn't want to.  Throughout his seven terms in Congress, Ryan has been to balanced budgets what Genghis Khan was to being a "people person."

His various plans are living testaments to ideological wishful thinking, each and every one of them.

Let's start with his 2005 plan to partially privatize Social Security, shall we?

The version of the plan that Bush introduced would have cost a trillion dollars over a decade to implement, none of which was paid for in any way. Ryan's original proposal would have cost twice that, again with no financing included.

Coming as it did so soon after the Enron-Arthur Andersen scandal, the GOP was very careful to always point out that retirement funds would only go into "government-approved stocks," which is the very definition of "picking winners and losers in the market." But that's apparently okay when Republicans do it.

Then there's the moral hazard involved. Most of the GOP can't stop screaming about TARP, but that bailout program would be dwarfed by the bailouts necessitated by a market crash with trillions of dollars of Social Security money involved. Because the stocks involved would be "government approved" the government would have an obligation to maintain their solvency. You'd suddenly have dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of companies that essentially operate under the same guarantees that Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac used to.

What would happen to the companies whose stocks weren't "government approved?" I'm not guessing that it would be something good.

Oh, and as we learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial panic (and as the great Screed of Momus points out), the markets are driven almost entirely by fraud, which the Republican party is adamantly against doing anything about.

Let's move on to Ryan's Medicare proposals.

Originally, the program was to be turned into a voucher program of about $2,500. This is silly for a number of  reasons.

Firstly, I'm not aware of a single comprehensive insurance plan for young, healthy people that costs as little as that. From what I understand, they average between seven and thirteen grand. Nor is there any indication that these vouchers would be indexed to the explosive inflation of the health care market.

Second, no insurance company in their right mind would sell coverage to seniors, who are usually riddled with preexisting conditions and as a risk group are only slightly behind suicide bombers. Furthermore, your average senior would hit the coverage cap in his or her plan in about 20 minutes.

The only way that you could make sense this fantasy from a business perspective is to incorporate most of the elements of ObamaCare, including the individual mandate, into it and Ryan seems to be against doing that. The United States might as well just include the cost controls from Logan's Run. They're actually more practical than anything Paul Ryan has proposed.

Third, no one over the age of 55 at the time of passage would be impacted. This means that you'd be running the current system for tens of millions of current and incoming seniors with less revenue while also implementing the massively expensive transition. In the short to medium term, the Ryan plan is even more expensive than doing nothing at a time when the country can least afford it.

Paul Ryan's ideas about the tax system are even more stupendously fantastic, relying more on faith than on logic and experience.

The idea of lowering rates and paying for it by closing loopholes and eliminating deductions is actually a good one. What sets off alarm bells in my head is that neither Romney or Ryan will tell you which loopholes they'll close or deductions they'll eliminate. Ryan laughably dodged the question by saying "I'm not on the Ways and Means Committee."

That answer should automatically disqualify him from being taken seriously because it makes his program impossible to score. You don't know what it will cost or if it balances because you're left to guess what half of it actually is.

You should then assume that no loopholes will be closed or deductions eliminated. And you can also be assured that that won't stop anyone from passing the proposed tax cuts anyway. As Jay Batman at Screed of Momus says, tax cuts always pass. Spending cuts and structural reforms to the code almost never do, especially by themselves.

If I know Republicans half as well as I think I do, I can almost guarantee you that they'll pass the tax cuts first, with their solemn word that they'll do everything else "later," which means "when we're finally broke and the international bond market makes us." So, on top of the existing Bush tax cuts, you'll get another round of cuts that are at least as large (and probably larger because of a 10% cut at the top rate) costing a total of at least $9 trillion over the next ten years when combined with the 2001-'03 cuts. They're promising that they'll eat their asparagus for dessert if only they can have their cotton candy for dinner.

Finally, both the Romney and Ryan plans both assume GDP growth of 4%, this despite the fact that the average rate of growth since the end of World War II has only been 3.2%. Despite his gigantic tax cuts, the economy only averaged 2.09% growth under George W. Bush. Neither candidate provides any evidence that they'll achieve this rate of growth. You just have to take their word for it. But we know that both Romney and Ryan's plans (and especially Ryan's) cause the deficit to skyrocket in the short term.

That raises an interesting question. If the Republicans control both houses of Congress after November, will they continue raising the debt ceiling again and again for President Romney and Vice President Ryan?

There are a lot of ways that you could describe these two, but no serious person would use terms like "fiscally conservative" to do it. If anything, they're worse than the statist liberals because they bankrupt the country faster.

There's a well-known way to contain entitlements, but no one in the United States is serious about doing it. First, you immediately raise the retirement age for everyone under, say, sixty. Then you scale benefits to average income earned during the last ten or twenty years. Getting rid of the payroll tax cap is also a pretty good idea because you'll need the revenue. Once that's done, you means-test the entire mess so that no one who retires with a net worth of more than, say, two million dollars collects benefits at all.

That way you can cover the people who actually need the programs while people more serious than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan figure out a way to gradually phase the entire blight out of existence. If we've learned anything about government involvement in retirement planning and providing health care, it's that they've made them unbelievably expensive.  But it will (and should) take several decades to phase out the government role in them.

If you're an American that actually cares about these kind of things, I don't know what to tell you other than that you should seriously consider voting for Gary Johnson. He's the one candidate for the presidency this year (and, in actual fact, in the last fifteen years) who actually has balanced a budget.

The Ballad of Dick and Sarah

In case you haven't been paying attention for the last several decades, former Vice President Dick Cheney is a nasty fucking piece of work. He's easily the most dangerous person to have inhabited the executive branch since at least A. Mitchell Palmer or J. Edgar Hoover.

There's no shortage of people who'll tell you that Richard Nixon was, but there's also no shortage of people who don't know what they're talking about. For all of Nixon's malfeasance, he was continually frustrated by the bureaucracy and ultimately betrayed by his own co-conspirators.

That wasn't true of Cheney. Having learned at the feet of his mentor, the master of bureaucratic infighting, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney bent not only the bureaucracy, but even the Cabinet and the President of the United States to his will throughout the first Bush term. Anyone who's interested in seeing multiple examples of how he did this should read Barton Gellman's invaluable book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.

It was only in Bush's second term; when the unmitigated disaster of Iraq had become clear, the Valarie Plame scandal that resulted in Scooter Libby's indictment and conviction, and the 2006 off-year elections that ended 12 years of Republican rule in Congress, that the vice president's influence waned supplanted by that of Condoleeza Rice, Josh Bolten and, finally, Bob Gates. In his recent memoir, Cheney himself tells of a National Security Council meeting regarding the possibility of a preventative strike on Iran. The vice president was the only official present in favour of one.

That hasn't stopped Dick from being an all-around asshole, though. If he reminds me of anyone, it's former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau in his retirement. Like Trudeau, Cheney believes that there's really one guy qualified to hold and exercise power, which would be him. And like Trudeau, Cheney won't shut the fuck up about it.

However, for the last four years, Cheney focused himself on undermining the Democrats generally and the Obama Administration, in particular.

That's changing. Now he's focusing his fire on the 2008 ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.



Now, it's an open secret that Cheney and McCain have a longstanding hatred for each other. And, to be fair, Cheney's remarks are much more of a shot against McCain's judgement than they are against Palin. But most folks aren't going to see it that way, and the last few days have shown that they haven't.

Cheney's attempt to sew himself to President Ford's legacy is also worthy of comment. Firstly, as then-White House Chief of Staff, Cheney wasn't principally responsible for the 1976 campaign, James Baker was. The selection of Bob Dole after Nelson Rockefeller was dumped from ticket was a campaign decision, not a White House one. And that's especially true given the very real possibility of a brokered convention resulting from Reagan's challenge for the nomination. We also now know that Ford told both Bob Woodward and Tom DeFrank that he thought that Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had lost their fucking minds in the Bush Administration.

His criticism of Palin is odd, as well. If he had said that Governor Palin was a whiny retard, consumed with identity politics and who shouldn't even be allowed in the White House as a goddamned tourist, most reasonable people would have agreed with him. Instead, he focused on her readiness to be president.

I'll grant you that anyone who got higher than a C in high school civics was more prepared for tthe presidency than Sarah Palin. As a matter of fact, Lisa Ann is more ready to be president than Palin was or is.

But the Republican litmus test is usually "executive experience," and that's something that Dick Cheney himself was profoundly lacking in. He went into government almost immediately after college. His positions as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense were administrative, policy was decided at a higher pay grade than his, especially in the Ford and first Bush Administrations. He was the first and only member of the congressional leadership that I'm aware of who held Congress in open contempt. Cheney didn't actually run anything until he went to Halliburton when he was 54 years old.

The second I saw Cheney's remarks on Sunday morning, I know the real fun was going to start. McCain blew Cheney off rather gracefully and with no shortage of humour on Monday morning. But Palin is famous for her inability to keep her mouth shut, and for the rather unorthodox things that come out of it when open.

On Monday night, she unloaded.



That interview is nothing short of hilarious. Neither of those broads could have been more delusional if they were stuffed full of magic mushrooms and horse tranquilizer.

Let's get one thing straight right off the top. Sarah Palin came by her "86-87% approval rating" as governor the old-fashioned way - she fucking bought it. In her first year in office, she jacked up the royalty the state takes from the oil companies and gave every man woman and child in the state $1,300.  A family of four got $5,200 in free money from Sarah Palin's "spreading the wealth around." Given that, it's sort of an indictment that her approval wasn't at 115%.

Moreover, after the 2008 campaign, she couldn't quit as governor - for reasons that no one fluent in the English language can understand to this day - fast enough.  Actually, that's not true. She wanted the fast, easy money that only the freakshows of reality TV and Fox News can bring.

The Van Sustern interview reinforced the single most prominent quality of Palin: her utter denial of personal responsibility for anything. That was something I first noticed in her mostly unreadable book It's All Nicole Wallace's Fucking Fault, but it's a theme that she hasn't let up on and one that her Fox cohorts continually enable. Remember, this a woman who characterized a query about what newspapers she read as "gotcha question" and therefore Katie Couric's fault. And I actually dare you to find someone more inoffensive in journalism today than Katie fucking Couric.

For a century the GOP portrayed itself as the party of rugged individualism, but they just can't stop embracing self-declared victims of everyone as their standard-bearers. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan never pissed and moaned in public about the "lamestream media." But the overwhelming majority of modern conservatives actually want to present themselves as a put-upon underclass while at the same time saying that they're the only ones capable of leadership. While she didn't invent it, Palin embodies that.

Far be it from Greta to break the former governor of her delusions. She cites polling from before the collapse of Lehman Brothers that's supposed to show how entirely made of awesome Sarah is. But those numbers are misleading.

First, the "Celebrity" ad - released just before the Democratic convention - softened Obama's numbers, as even the Obama campaign admitted after the election. It was the only thing that McCain did to panic them throughout the entire campaign, and it denied them a convention bounce. It was even worse because Obama's "Greek pillars in a fucking football stadium" played directly into the narrative of "Celebrity."

Second, Palin energized the Democrats every bit as much as she did the Republicans. Campaign manager David Plouffe details that in his book The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory. Much was made of the fact that the McCain campaign raised some $3 million within 24 hours of Palin's convention speech. Plouffe revealed that Obama raised just as much from liberals that hated her, especially liberal women. No one healed the hurt liberal chicks suffered from Hillary Clinton's loss quite like Sarah Palin.

Third, she committed the cardinal sin or any vice presidential candidate: she made herself the story. Palin can bitch all she wants about the "lamestream media," but it was her singular determination to be unprepared for the Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews that changed the narrative from her being an "exciting Maverick" to someone that might actually be a moron.

Van Sustren  makes the snide and incredibly counter-productive assertion that Cheney "isn't afraid to say things about the women," citing his "little slap at Condolezza Rice." Instead of hitting back on that, Palin lets it reinforce her "Poor, poor Sarah: Victim of sexism" narrative.

Look, if women want to play the "defenseless little girl" who can't take a "little slap" victim role, maybe it's better that they stay out of politics entirely. You don't achieve equality by changing the rules of the game to better suit your strengths. You change your strengths to better suit the rules of the fucking game. I'm annoyed beyond words when liberal women take that manipulative route, but I actually despise it when conservatives do it.  To quote Palin herself, she should "man up" or shut the the fuck up. Nothing is more disgusting than conservative victimology.

And you know what?  If you want to play the victim yourself while preaching rugged individualism for everyone else, you're a hypocritical cunt, regardless of your gender. For the last four years, I've listened to Republican assholes decrying "sexism," even though they were often the same people who made sixteen years worth of jokes about Hillary Clinton, and sometimes even Chelsea.

The "poor, put-upon Sarah" act is further undermined by her twice mentioning Cheney's "misfires," a half-clever reference to his blowing giant holes into Harry Whittington. To my mind, that almost equalled Palin's deeply offensive and wildly stupid "blood libel" spectacle after the Gabby Giffords shooting in it's sleaziness. You either get to play the victim or go for the easy shot to the balls, but you don't get to do both.

Everybody who knows anything about Dick Cheney knows that he isn't a sexist, he's a misanthropist. To know love requires having a heart, and spent the better part of a year being plugged into a wall like a friggin' smart car precisely because he didn't have one. After leaving office, Cheney wouldn't keep quiet about his disagreements with the president he was supposed to loyally serve. Why in the fuck does anyone think he wouldn't give a half-wit like Sarah Palin "a little slap?"

Palin failed miserably at re-branding herself as the face of the movement when she had a very clear shot at doing so. She could've taken a year or two to have learned something about the issues and become a serious spokesperson for the cause. Instead, she went for the easy money and became a more fuckable Snooki instead. And even that glory is fleeting. She's increasingly marginalized in the Tea Party and you don't even see her on Fox News as much as you used to.

Cheney's got bigger plans. He was around for the fall and resurrection of Richard Nixon, and I think he has something similar in mind. He knows that after pulling off the almost impossible task of being less popular than George W. Bush, he won't make many gains in popular esteem. But he very much can re-invent himself as a power within the party.He's working with the Romney's vice-presidential selection team for that very reason. If Romney wins, the reasoning goes, Cheney might find himself a consigliere of sorts in a Romney White House.

But even there, Cheney will fail in the eyes of history. Nixon thought much bigger than that. After his resignation, he picked a very few issues - all related to foreign policy - that he chose to care about and work with any president that would listen on them, regardless of party. It's only in the last few months that we've learned just how close Nixon had become to Bill Clinton.

Nixon lived for just shy of twenty years after resigning. There's little chance that Cheney will. It's actually a shame that Cheney is devoting the time left to him to public partisan politics instead of doing what Nixon did, furthering issues that he cares about. Very few people know more about the mechanical operation of the executive branch than Dick Cheney does. He could be an invaluable resource to future presidents of both parties, but he's almost adamantly insisting on being a failed political hack.

In that, he and Sarah Palin aren't all that different.

Senor Citizen: Dan's Unlikely Journey

Blaming the debacle in Iraq on the Coalition Provisional Authority is far from fair. Because Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and President Bush all decided that the State Department was going to be frozen out of the post-war occupation and because there never was any planning for the occupation at the Department of Defense, the whole adventure was doomed from the very start.

The history now pretty clearly shows that the White House and DoD didn't seem to think that a long-term occupation was necessary. Rumsfeld and Cheney seemed to think that they could hand the entire country over to Ahmed Chalibi and everything would be fine, despite a decade's worth of warnings from State and the CIA that Chalabi was as dishonest and corrupt as an Iraqi could be without being a blood relative of Saddam's.

Granted, that didn't stop everyone in the Bush Administration from blaming their proconsul, L. Paul Bremmer for everything that went wrong. Read any of their memoirs. The one recurring theme is "Our ridiculous lack of any planning whatsoever had nothing to do with it. It was all Bremmer's fault!"

If you've read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's magnificent book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone - and if you haven't, you really should - you know that the CPA was its own, completely separate disaster. It was staffed from top to bottom with Republican political hacks that were determined to engage in weird social experiments directly out of the American Enterprise Institute. For example, Bremmer saw to it that the Iraqi people had a flat tax before they had reliable electricity. It was the single most unserious occupation operation in American history.

Of course, that's not why some 4,500 American soldiers and innumerable Iraqi civilians died after Saddam was driven from power. That was directly caused by CPA Orders Number 1 and 2, which de-Baathified the Iraqi civil service and disbanded both the military and police. As a consequence an insurgency that was estimated to be about 3,000 immediately ballooned to 300,000, or roughly twice as large as the U.S military presence in Iraq. Because the Americans were devoting their resources to finding weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist instead of providing security until it was too late, anarchy prevailed for the next four years.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's spokesman was Dan Senor. During his time in Iraq, he gave Rajiv Chandrasekaran one of the greatest quotes I've ever read.  "Off the record, Paris is burning. On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq."

With a record like that, how could he not become a senior foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney? If you've been following Governor Romney's international travels this past week, you'll see that it's going swimmingly.

Mr. Senor, 41, is an unusual hybrid: He is a policy wonk, media maven, successful author and financier. He made headlines last weekend when he told reporters that if Israel launched a pre-emptive unilateral strike on Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Romney “would respect” that decision, a claim Mr. Senor softened somewhat in a later statement.

For his part, Mr. Romney said in an address on Sunday that preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons “must be our highest national-security priority,” but made no mention of an Israeli attack.

If in fact Mr. Senor used the word "pre-emptive" strike in regards to Iran, that's a cause for concern because it indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I've gone over this before, but it bears repeating. An attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would not, as a matter of both international law and common sense, be pre-emptive. Pre-emption rests entirely on the imminence of a threat. Since there wouldn't be a deployable weapon, let alone a stated threat that one would be used forthwith, the Iranian program does not pose an imminent threat.

Such a strike by Israel, the United States, or anyone else would meet the definition of a preventative war, and those are illegal under any reading of international law and tradition. President Eisenhower spoke eloquently when he said "Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing."

The point is that pre-emption and prevention, despite what most Americans currently choose to believe, are not interchangeable. They are separate and distinct from one another. One is legal and righteous, the other is criminal. Someone who can reasonably be expected to hold a senior national security post in a potential Romney Administration should know the difference.

Then it got worse.

The trip has attracted its share of controversy. Mr. Romney departed from official U.S. policy and described Jerusalem as the “capital of Israel,” “culture.” Such a comment is “racist” and “shows a lack of knowledge,” said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.

From time to time,  conservative politicians will ward-heel their way over to Israel and promise that they'll move their embassies to Jerusalem when they get themselves elected. Canada's Joe Clark did this in 1979.

But, like Clark, they never actually do it, mostly because they get a good look at reality as soon as they take office. There isn't a Muslim country in the world that will accept foreign embassies in Jerusalem so long as that city's status remains unresolved. And we still have to deal with Muslim countries, mostly because there are so many of them and they have so much oil. You might not like that, but it remains a fact.

The Israelis never really expect said politicians to follow through on this stupid promise, but those politicians have their credibility damaged in Israel's eyes for having made it in the first place, as I'm sure the aforementioned Joe Clark will tell you. In making such a colossally stupid promise, you manage to pull off the impressive feat of enraging Muslims and Jews. And for what?

As for the "Palestinian culture" remark, not only was that an enormous foreign policy gaffe, it was incredibly idiotic as a domestic political matter. Romney's home state of Michigan is much closer than it has any business being. Because it has more Arabs per square foot than anywhere else in America, I'm pretty sure it won't be for much longer.

Not only was Romney himself born and raised in Michigan, Dan Senor himself was the communications director for the first and only Arab-American United States senator, Spencer Abraham ... of Michigan. If Mitt were to win the Wolverine State, his path to the White House become immeasurably easier, since he'd also probably pick up Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Minnesota with it.

The Governor then went on to praise Israel's health care system, citing all kinds of spending to GDP numbers and health outcomes, while ignoring that a central facet of it is, you guessed it, an individual mandate. As I said at the great and good Velociman's place this morning "If one created an individual mandate in the state one governed, suggested that his party campaign on Wyden-Bennett (which contained an individual mandate,) and then went on to praise a foreign health care system with an individual mandate without being asked ... Well, reasonable people might begin to suspect that one doesn't have a huge problem with individual mandates."

Everyone is still focusing on Romney's Olympic disaster in England, which was more funny than anything else. But what he did in Israel was worse by several degrees. They were not only entirely self-inflicted wounds, they were wounds of some consequence.

Look, I don't know if either of those gaffes were Senor's idea, but I do know that it's his job to stop Romney from making them. When his candidate is overseas (which I think is a brutally stupid thing to do in a modern campaign, anyway. The deepest wound John McCain inflicted on Obama four years ago was the "Celebrity" ad that used footage from the The One's Berlin visit.) Dan Senor's single biggest responsibility is to keep his fucking mouth shut! The single easiest way for a candidate to get himself in trouble is to make with the goddamned talkee-talk, especially when he's anyplace more foreign than Wayne County.

I don't take any pleasure in writing this. Whenever I've seen him on TV, Senor has struck me as a decent breed of cat. We're roughly the same age, we grew up in the same hometown (although I only learned that this morning,) we both have a deep interest in foreign policy, and we both have bad hair. The only difference between Dan Senor and I is that he has a great education, a cool job, a ton of money and a hot wife. Oh, and I never took part in destroying the Middle East.

Other than that, it's like we're connected at the soul.

But if you were still wondering why I think Mitt Romney's going to lose this election, the Israel trip is instructive.

Two solitudes: Why Canadians will stay richer than Americans

I'm constantly amused by people who have no idea what they're talking about getting on TV, which you see a lot of on Fox News. The obvious pride that Fox stuffs into its ignorance, combined with great production values and hot chicks, is what makes the network essentially viewing for me.

Just this morning, I was watching something called Cashin' In, a business affairs show with M*A*S*H's Wayne Rogers as a panelist. Rogers used be Trapper John and is now a Republican mouthpiece who pretends to be a financial analyst.

This week's report that Canadians are wealthier than Americans for the very first time in history was the main point of discussion.

While Americans might enjoy throwing politically-charged barbs at their neighbors to the north, Canadians now have at least one reason to be smug.

For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American, according to a report cited in Toronto's Globe and Mail.

And not just by a little. Currently, the average Canadian household is more than $40,000 richer than the average American household. The net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, compared to around $320,000 for Americans.

As U.S News points out, this isn't the old Canadian dollar, which was only worth about 60 American cents, either. Due to a spectacular free fall of the greenback that began in 2002-'03, the two currencies are at about par and have been for about three years.

By the way, a high Canadian dollar actually hurts our economy. Given that we're an export economy, a higher dollar increases the price of said exports. We're doing better than the Americans in spite of a high dollar, not because of it.

Trapper John was able to hijack the debate by issuing a ton of GOP talking points about corporate taxes that are sort of true, but only sort of. The Cashin' In folks that passed for liberals, and pretty much everyone in the Canadian media, decided that they were only going to tell half the story, as well.

For that reason, Canada is very probably going to stay richer than the United States, which I figure is about five years from the point of no return.

Yes, the Canadian government has cut corporate taxes fairly significantly in recent years, and there's a lot to be said about the competitive edge that those cuts give an economy. On this, Trapper John is actually right, while telling not quite a third of the story. I'm seeing this talking point throughout the American media and blogosphere, so I thought that I'd address it. But I warn you now, it's gonna take a while to explain.

One of the major differences between the United States and Canada is that we could afford to cut corporate taxes. We weren't crazy enough to think that they would spur enough growth that they would they would pay for themselves, which tax cuts by themselves almost never do. Even classical supply-siders will tell you that but modern Republicans won't.

Canada got where it is today over the course of nearly thirty years. It caused a lot of hurt, unspeakable amounts of political upheaval, and intelligent decision making from both of the major parties at the time.

When the Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney came to power in 1984, our debt problem was as bad or worse than America's is today. The outgoing Liberal Minister of Everything (and future prime minister) Jean Chretien said in public that "we left the cupboard bare." Consecutive Liberal governments between 1963 and 1984 vastly expanded the role - and therefore the cost - of the federal government. They just couldn't be bothered actually paying for it.

Mulroney tried cutting spending, but the opposition Liberal Party made that politically toxic. He instead focused on the revenue side of deficit reduction. First he signed the Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which grew the economy and therefore the tax base. Then he instituted a national 7% sales tax, the Goods and Services Tax.

While the constant dollar size of the debt and deficits grew, they began shrinking as a percentage of GDP. They were still unacceptably high, but trending in the right direction.

Of course, the idea of a national sales tax was about as popular as you'd think it would be, and Mulroney's government was reduced to two seats - a drop of 154 out of the then-295 seat Parliament - a few months after his 1993 retirement.

When Chretien took office that year, the international markets forced his hand on the spending side. The Economist was calling for Spain to replace Canada in the G7 and there was a very real fear of a confidence crisis in the market. That would have driven interest rates up and made the situation impossible to correct without a major devaluation of the dollar.And Canada's credit rating actually was downgraded during Chretien's first term.

Chretien and his finance minister, Paul Martin, took an axe to everything, cutting ministries by roughly 25% each. Between those cuts and the Mulroney revenue, not only was the budget balanced by the turn of the century, the government was running surpluses.

And those were real surpluses, not the imaginary ones that Bill Clinton and the Republican Congress created out of whole cloth in the late 1990s. Those were the product of the tech bubble and accounting fraud. Even if Bush hadn't passed stunningly large tax cuts and gone to war with everybody, the U.S government still would have gone back into deficit because Clinton and the Republicans hadn't factored unfunded liabilities into their budgets. Plus, they raided the Social Security trust fund to create the mirage of a balanced budget, thereby increasing the unfunded liabilities.

It was only after dramatic revenue enhancements under Mulroney and draconian spending cuts under Chretien that subsequent prime ministers Paul Martin and Stephen Harper even thought of cutting corporate taxes. Had it been done during the Mulroney or early Chretien years, it would have only ballooned our crippling deficits and shaken market confidence to the point that we couldn't service our debt anymore.

Then there's the more recent history to consider. Unlike the United States, the Canadian government didn't allow the banking and housing markets to become huge under-funded and over-leveraged casinos that were born to fail.

Like most conservatives, I supported the push for Canadian banking deregulation a decade ago. I was wrong and Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were right. Canadian banks are temperamentally more conservative than their foreign counterparts, so I doubt that they would have over-leveraged themselves in a whirlwind of idiotic derivatives trading that even they didn't understand. But the proposed mega-mergers at the time would have created Too Big To Fail institutions that would have dwarfed even America's as a percentage of our economy.

What the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act did wasn't so much "unleash the economy" as it let the banks become really fat guys who had to be taken out of their apartments by a crane because they were stuck to the couch.

Nor did Canada ever get the insane idea that absolutely everybody in the country had to own their own home, regardless of their ability to actually pay for it. I was raised by a banker, so I can tell you that things like NINJA (No Income, No Job, No Assests) loans would have been unthinkable here, even if they were magically legal. And remember, NINJA loans were a creation of the lenders, not the borrowers. Despite what Republican talking points tell you, there was proportionally very little borrower fraud in the housing crisis.

Canadian law also didn't allow for what amounts to "no money down" mortgages, and those rules have only gotten tighter since the Great Collapse of Ought-Eight. Canadian homeowners can't even deduct their mortgage interest from their taxes. Granted, no other sane country on Earth allows that, either.

We didn't reap the benefits of the housing and banking bubbles, but we didn't lose our shirts when those bubbles burst.

Exactly no one in the United States is proposing anything close to what the Canadian experience demonstrably proved can work. Even the most liberal of Democrats are suggesting minuscule revenue increases by the letting the Bush tax cuts expire only on the wealthy, when they should all expire, including those for the middle class. And Republicans are demanding huge, unaffordable tax cuts up front and not cutting real program or entitlement spending for more than a decade.

When proposed spending cuts and entitlement reform are that far in the future, one can safely assume that they'll never happen at all. The idea of trusting a kid to eat his broccoli after he has his ice cream is so idiotic that even those most negligent parent knows it. And yes, I do understand that I just compared the American government to a spoiled child.

Worse still, the short term (ten-year) cost of entitlement reform would be so high that it would negate the possible (and incredibly optimistic) benefits of the tax cuts. Remember that George W. Bush's Social Security reform plan would have cost a trillion dollars over ten years, and there's no reason to believe that Paul Ryan's Medicare reforms would cost less.

Former President Bush's institute this week put out a laughable book that suggests that America can just grow it's way out of the problem. The only problem is that it assumes a significantly higher average annual rate of growth (4-5%) than the United States has enjoyed since the end of World War II (3.2%.) And that, my friends, is exactly the kind of wishful thinking that put America where it is today.

Unlike what Republican politicians tell you, this isn't 1980. The problem then was unsustainable inflation, which was only broken by dramatically high interest rates that caused a brutal recession. The Reagan tax cuts might have spurred growth after the 1982-'84 recession, but they did so at the cost of tripling the deficit.

For my liberal friends, it isn't 1932, either. Revenue generation alone, as we saw during the Mulroney era in Canada, isn't going to do the trick. Things on your end of the ledger are going to have to change in a big, bad way.

Unless you want them to disappear entirely, entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security are going to have to be means-tested immediately, accompanied with an increase in the retirement age to at least 70. Both are going to have to treated like the middle-class welfare that they are, since the contributions being made to current retirees only barely match the costs. If you want to avoid outright privatization, costs are going to have to dramatically cut.

Oh, and don't look to everybody else for sympathy. Their 401(k) plans got annihilated in the market meltdown four years ago, including those right on the threshold of retirement.

In the very near future, public employee contracts regarding pensions and health care - which are rapidly bankrupting the states - are going to have to be renegotiated in good faith. Public workers going to have to pay dramatically more into their benefit plans. If they don't, current retirees, who really can't fend for themselves, are going to take it in the neck soon.The fact that mid-size American municipalities and counties are already going into bankruptcy is a bad sign. It's just a matter of time before enire states follow them into the rathole. And stop pretending that you can make more in the private sector. That hasn't been true in quite a while now.

You know what? Unlike what most politicians will tell you, now is precisely the time to do it. No politician is going to attack the free lunch mentality when times are good. Any time reform is mentioned in a time of prosperity, that reform s said to threaten an economic downturn. The way I see it, consumer demand isn't going to rebound the the U.S economy for probably a decade, so now might be an ideal time to go with austerity.

But that's never going to happen. As opposed to the Canadian experience in the 1980s and 90s, no one party is going to have the political majority needed to enact a holistic reform of the taxation and entitlement system. The reforms then necessarily have to be bipartisan, and that just isn't going to happen.

Canada gave its governing parties the electoral mandates to carry out the reforms that it did, and it had fifteen years in which to do them. Even then it was painful and politically unpopular. It wasn't easy for the Progressive Conservatives to create a national sales tax, and it lead to to the biggest political debacle in history that I'm aware of. The only reason the Chretien Liberals survived making the cuts that they did was the absence of a unified opposition at the time. God knows that Harper spent enough money once the Liberals fell apart.

No one in the United States, of either party, has the time or the will to do what's necessary before it's too late.

Trapper John won't tell you that. I just did.