disconnect

Eliot Spitzer

So I was reading a Slashdot article yesterday about NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announcing a deal with the RIAA to pay artists $50 in royalties they had been withholding from them. If you don't know who Eliot Spitzer is, he's the guy who investigated investment banks like Merrill Lynch for their role in hyping worthless stocks during the dot-com bubble, and recently went after mutual funds for letting favored investors trade after the close of markets at the expense of normal investors. Here are a couple of articles about him, one from the Christian Science Monitor, and one from Time magazine. The point is, he's a damn good Attorney General, he fights for what's right, and he has broad bipartisan support because of it ("you see, i'm a uniter, not a divider").

Anyway, someone on Slashdot made the comment, "If Kerry wins the Presidential election, I'm thinking that Spitzer has a good chance at being AG for the US." I immediately thought this was brilliant. I've been so focused on hoping that Kerry will get elected, working to make that the case and bracing myself for the possibility that that won't happen that I haven't put any thought into who he might have in his administration. Even his Vice Presidential choice is up in the air now. But it's not entirely a moot point, because the very real possibility that someone like Spitzer could be Attorney General is in itself another good reason to vote for Kerry.

I don't think I've posted anything on here yet about John Ashcroft. I've certainly wanted to, but if I haven't mentioned him yet it's probably because it's a little too much like beating up a kid in a wheelchair - it's just too easy. I could devote a whole day to writing about how the guy is incompetant and unqualified, but I'll stick to just two examples for the sake of brevity. The first is from the New York Times article of April 13, 2004 entitled 9/11 Panel Is Said to Offer Harsh Review of Ashcroft. The whole article is pretty scathing, but I liked the following bit best:

Commission officials said that there was irony in the panel's finding that before Sept. 11, Mr. Ashcroft may have been too timid about seeking electronic surveillance of terror suspects. They said their investigation suggested that until the attacks, Mr. Ashcroft had resisted signing emergency warrants that would have allowed eavesdropping in terrorism investigations, apparently because he had only a rudimentary knowledge of how the warrant process worked.

Apparently the reason the PATRIOT Act was needed because Ashcroft couldn't figure out the way to obtain warrants the usual way. I wrote that as a joke but it's pretty much true. The second quote is from Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies":

John Ashcroft before September 11 had refused to increase counterterrorism funds and had not placed terrorism in the top-priority issues for the Justice Department. When I and one of my staff met with Ashcroft early in the Administration, we were left wondering if his discussion with us had been an act. My associate asked me on the drive back to the White House, "He can't really be that slow, can he? I mean, you can't get to be the Attorney General of the United States and be like that, right?"

Suffice it to say that if you're not convinced that Ashcroft is a terrible Attorney General, there's a lot more you can read about him that will convince you. So the upgrade from Ashcroft to Spitzer at AG would be gigantic. Simply the suggestion made me excited enough to write a whole long post about it. So I felt compelled to mention that this is yet another notch in the column of improvements that a Kerry administration would bring over the current one.

Random Thoughts

One thing that I've never quite grasped about this whole Iraqi prisoner torture thing is, what's up with taking all the pictures? Didn't it ever occur to someone to say, "Hey Jake, before we beat the shit out of these Iraqis and strip them naked, let's put down the cameras?" Or are these guys like those idiots who film themselves knocking over mailboxes with baseball bats? Were these supposed to be souvenirs of their time in Iraq? "This is me in front of a mosque in Najaf, this is some sand from the desert outside Basra, this is me urinating on a prisoner in Abu Ghraib..." I'm curious, what was the long-term plan for these photos, were they headed for the future George W. Bush presidential library or something? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that if you're about to commit some violations of the Geneva Convention, you might want to record as little of it as possible. Just a tip from me to you the next time you feel like abusing some prisoners you're in charge of.

Reason #418 Why The Iraq War Was A Mistake

"Voters said they trust Bush to do a better job [than Kerry] of protecting the country by 58 percent to 35 percent." (from 3/23 - if you have a more recent poll, let me know)

I wish I could take those 58 percent and beat them over the head with articles like this. Bush doesn't know how to handle North Korea. The Defense Department wants to sit back and ignore the situation. People with experience are pushed to the sideline simply because they worked in the Clinton administration. Negotiation discussions were scrapped by hard-liners in Cheney's office and in DoD. And North Korea uses the time to produce more nuclear weapons.

Tell me how this helps protect our country.

I guess the only positive coming out of Rumsfeld not resigning or Bush not firing him is that it'll be obvious that the only way to get these people out is to vote for Kerry this November. I'm curious though, exactly what would you have to do to be fired or resign in the Bush cabinet? Would you have to start an expensive (in terms of billions of dollars, hundreds of US lives and thousands of Iraqi lives) war based on false pretenses? Oh wait, he did that. I guess being on watch during systemic torture by soldiers isn't enough either. Does he have to personally fly to Iraq and ride an elderly Iraqi woman like a donkey? Would that be enough to force him to resign? I'm curious as to what the threshold is here.

I like how just after I write a post about how Bush never apologizes, he says he's sorry. But oddly enough, at the same press conference with King Abdullah of Jordan, he seemed to back off from the assurances he gave Israel about not having to return to the 1967 borders (I don't know what he said about the right of return issue, I don't see his full text anywhere). Maybe these were empty promises meant to try to calm down the situation in the Middle East. But maybe, just maybe, King Abdullah has found the secret of the mind control voodoo that Bush uses to keep Tony Blair under his sway, and is using it on Bush himself! Stay tuned for further developments.

Those Would Be Some Ugly Babies

Sayeth Friedman: "Mr. Bush needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the heads of both NATO and the U.N., and the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. There, he needs to eat crow, apologize for his mistakes and make clear that he is turning a new page."

Yeah, I think that's scheduled to happen shortly after the ceremony joining Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft together in holy matrimony.

Accountability

One of the things I hate most about the Bush administration (though it's hard to pick a favorite) is their total inability to admit mistakes. I kind of touched on this in a previous post but I really wanted to go into it in more depth, especially after reading this story about an Iraqi scientist held in solitary confinement for more than a year now (with no sign of when he'll be released) apparently for telling the Americans that Iraq didn't have any WMD. The press conference where he couldn't think of a big mistake he'd made was the most glaring example of this. President Clinton can apologize on national television for lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky to some idiot special prosecutor, but if Bush says in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa when they weren't, that's ok, it wasn't his fault, it was flawed intelligence. And then when the guy who tells the world that the intelligence was wrong has his wife's career ruined by someone in the administration, it's not his fault either. And it's not a mistake when we go to war over WMD that doesn't exist, because how could he have known that? And it's not his fault when we can't provide security in Iraq, it'll just "take some time".

Remember, this is a president who campaigned on accountability. He said that because of the Lewinsky scandal (which the rest of the world really didn't care about), the president's word was in danger of no longer being taken seriously. He preached accountability in our education system and said he would being it and responsibility back to the White House. Now the rest of the world thinks the word of our president is as much of a joke as ever.

One symptom of this is the inability of anyone to apologize for anything, such as when Condoleeza Rice (and Bush) refused to apologize for 9/11, getting all caught up in the semantics of the differences between an apology, an expression of regret and saying you're "sorry". Fast-forward to today, and I don't think Bush has apologized to the Arab world for those photos of Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners. He denounced it, but nowhere did he apologize to those abused, to their families, or to the Iraqi people. Is it really that hard to do? Just say, "I'm sorry some of our soldiers forced you to masturbate yourself in front of female soldiers." Is that the end of the world? Yes, I know Bush didn't personally torture anyone but as the president (and commander-in-chief, as he constantly reminds us), he bears ultimate responsibility for the actions of U.S. forces in a war he pushed us into. His rationale for not apologizing for 9/11 was that it wasn't his administration that killed thousands of people, it was the hijackers. Fair enough, but what about the prisoner abuse? Would it kill him to say he's sorry for what happened and give these people an apology? Memo to George: Everyone already knows we've made countless mistakes in Iraq. Just because you don't admit them publicly doesn't mean that no one knows they're there. Give a damn apology and take some responsibility for the actions of people working for you. Apparently he was too busy drinking and partying as a young man to learn the lesson that admitting your mistakes, not being some bullheaded and arrogant, aggressive cowboy from Texas, is the mark of a real man and of real strength.

Disney Forbidding Distribution of Film That Criticizes Bush

I'll let the article speak for itself.

Neocon Idiocy

After reading stories like this, about how the neoconservatives now in charge of Bush administration policy were completely duped by Ahmed Chalabi, I wonder how anyone aware of any of this could want these people to be in power for four more years. Of course this is only one stupid thing of many that they've done, and it's the collection of them together that proves their incompetancy beyond any doubts, but man. He told them lies about Iraq's WMDs and they believed it. He told them he would be friendly towards Israel, and they bought it. Does no one in this administration actually check to see how things are on the ground? That maybe, even if Chalabi is credible (which he's not, he had to leave Jordan in the trunk of a car after the bank he was running collapsed in scandal), he could be lying? That even if he wasn't lying (he was), it doesn't matter what some bonehead exile wants to do with Israel if the overwhelming majority of Iraqis don't support it? It's been obvious for a while now (some would say it was obvious before the war) that their plans for rebuilding the Middle East were doomed to failure, but seeing how weak the foundation was that those plans were built on, I marvel at how anyone could have bought this, and how anyone could re-elect an administration that makes these kinds of mistakes and then says in a national news conference in prime-time that they can't think of any mistakes they've made.

Also, Atrios reminded me of an Onion point-counterpoint from back before the war. It used to be here, and I sent it to some people as recently as four weeks ago, but now it looks like you can only access old Onion articles through "Onion Premium", whatever the hell that is. I found it reprinted online though, so go subvert Onion Premium and read it while you still can, because it's funny, though disturbingly close to the actual neocon response to criticism of their plans. Also, this article in the recent Onion is pretty good too.

[edit] - I was also going to give a link to this NYTimes story about missile defense, another pet project of this administration that is probably not only totally unnecessary, but may not even work.

Two Links

I came across this article in Canada's Globe and Mail recounting a Canadian's appearance on The O'Reilly Factor, and I thought it was kind of funny so I'm passing it on.

Also, there's a site called Media Matters that says it's "dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media". So in case you find yourself being tortured by being forced to watch Fox News until you believe what they're saying, this site may be the antidote.