disconnect

Last night, I downloaded a clip from the Daily Show of John Ashcroft in front of Congress this week regarding the torture memo I talked about earlier. Great stuff. You can download it here, or if that doesn't work and you have bittorrent, here's another link.

It's funny, Ashcroft basically tells Congress to go to hell (come to think of it, that's really not funny). He's not going to give them the memo. Why? Because he doesn't want to. Now, it's not like Congress is going fishing here. There was torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere. We know there's a memo in the Bush administration with their feelings on treatment of prisoners. So they want to see it. But Ashcroft says they can't, because he doesn't think that he should have to disclose it. Perhaps someone should clue the Attorney General (and the rest of the administration) into this thing we call "checks and balances". As it turns out, the constitution doesn't have a section in it saying "The Candidate receiving the second-most number of votes in the Presidential Election shall have unlimited powers to govern the Republic as he sees fit." During the 2000 election, Bush was all big on touting "personal responsibility". Now this was largely code for two things - Clinton couldn't be responsible for keeping it in his pants, but I will be, and that people ought to be responsible for working and saving money, so I'll work to cut back on welfare programs and privatize social security. But you can be forgiven if you thought that this responsibility applied to him as well. Except we can't check to see if he's being responsible unless we can peer into the decision-making process in the administration. That's what an open and free democracy rests on. Is Bush responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere? This memo contains information that helps determine that. But they don't want Congress to have it, much less the American people, so they can determine what kind of job the President is doing and hold him accountable for the things going on during his watch. But don't worry, it's only torture we're talking about here, nothing important that you would actually care about or means anything. Oh, and the administration's stance on fighting terror before 9/11, we're not allowed to look into that either. Oh wait, we also can't be allowed to see who met with Cheney in his energy task force. It would just destroy the executive branch if people were allowed to know those things. As we all know, they have a solemn and inviolate right to conduct their business in absolute secrecy.

I was going to post some stuff yesterday about Ronald Reagan, mostly about how Bill Clinton compares favorably to him in a lot of ways (approval ratings, economic growth). This wasn't to bash the guy after he died, but rather to put forward the idea that when Clinton died, I bet people will focus on the scandal in the second term of his presidency, rather than largely overlook it as is happening with Reagan, and that he won't get credit for being "the most popular President of the modern era." I didn't post the stuff yesterday, but today Krugman wrote about it so I'll let him do all the leg work. He also brought up a point I've been thinking about the past few days, which is that even Reagan looks like a fiscal genius compared to Bush (or whoever is doing his budgets for him).

Also, here is a nice graph showing the approval ratings for the past five Presidents. In addition to the Clinton vs Reagan comparison, it gives a nice indication of how buoyed Bush 2's ratings have been by 9/11 and the Iraq war. It helps me to be pretty confident that barring another attack before November, and with any respectable showing by Kerry in the debates (meaning keep the sighs to a minimum), Kerry will do well in the election. I don't really think anyone except evangelical Christians and energy company executives are really enthusiastic about Bush. Most people just figure "well, he's better than a Massachusetts liberal", or "but Kerry will raise my taxes", or "if I don't vote for Bush, then the terrorists have already won." I think the more people know about Kerry, the more comfortable they'll feel voting for him. Or maybe I give people too much credit.

Also, there's more in the NY Times today about the torture memo I mentioned yesterday. I just wanted to make one thing clear though... I think a lot of conservatives are going to complain (or are complaining already) that everyone wants to tie the President's hands with terrorism suspects and it'll put us in danger. But we're not talking about some scene out of "24" here where a terrorist has a nuke in LA set to go off in three hours, we have him in custody and we need to find out where it is. We're not saying you can't rough the guy up there. We're talking about humiliation and torture of ordinary Afghan and Iraqi prisoners on a wide scale. Some, if not most of these guys don't have anything to do with al Qaeda. This isn't a "ticking time-bomb" scenario. You don't have to torture these guys, and it's wrong to do so or suggest that it's alright.

Over on Talking Points Memo is some discussion about an article in the Wall Street Journal which I haven't read because I'm not a subscriber. It's about a Pentagon memo detailing our various excuses for using torture, as I understand it. Specifically, it states that the authority to set aside the law is "inherent in the president." I thought that the idea that the president is above the law had been thoroughly discredited from Watergate to Lewinsky, but I guess Bush thinks he's special. The Talking Points post I linked to has some good commentary about it, but if you're a Democrat, do yourself a favor and don't go back to the earliest archives available on that site, from November/December 2000, like I did. It's really depressing to remember how close we came to avoiding all this mess, and to remind yourself of the sort of mandate Bush got in 2000 to carry out this radical agenda (that being the mandate of 500,000 fewer votes than his opponent).

I was trying to put the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day in some perspective, so I tried thinking of it from the perspective of someone my age back then. 60 years ago, a 20-something year old man was being told that they were in a war that threatened freedom... and their lives may have to be given for the cause. Nowadays, the message I'm getting as a 20-something year old man is that we're at war against an enemy that hates freedom... and if my hamburgers don't contain at least half a pound of Angus beef, I'm a little girly girl.