The Rag Blog

Senate leaders will introduce a bipartisan resolution of opposition to President Bush’s new Iraq policy as early as today, taking the lead from House Democrats who are increasingly divided on how far to go to thwart additional troop deployments to Iraq.

The resolution — crafted by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) — will not come to a vote before Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. But by sending it to Biden’s committee this week, Democratic leaders will give senators from both parties multiple opportunities to voice concerns about the president’s policy.

In another high-profile move, Democratic leaders yesterday tapped Sen. James Webb (D-Va.), a Reagan administration Navy secretary who secured victory in November on an antiwar push, to deliver the party’s nationally televised response to Bush’s speech.

Here is this week’s national feel-good story: the New Orleans Saints have rebounded from a 3-13 season in 2005 and are now only one victory away from reaching the Super Bowl. The Saints are said to embody the “never say die” spirit of the city’s residents, and a victory over the Chicago Bears next Sunday will help revive spirits among the long-suffering victims of Hurricane Katrina. If the Saints can come back from the devastation of 2005, so can New Orleans. This story line will be repeated time and again in the coming week, but the truth is that the fortunes of the Saints football team are totally irrelevant to the city’s rebirth. And while the corporate hucksters who run the NFL try to lure non-football fans to identify with the Saints’ cause, the greater truth is that, as Bob Herbert put it in the January 15 New York Times, the Saints may be rising but New Orleans is “Descending to New Depths.”

There is nothing that warms the hearts of the sports industry and television networks more than when a professional team’s fortunes can be shrouded in a higher purpose. In some cases—as when Doug Williams became the first African-American quarterback to lead his team to winning a Super Bowl—the outcome of a game does have a broader social impact. But most of the time this framing is only about marketing, and even Williams only ushered in more black quarterbacks, not a society more supportive of racial justice.

In 2005, the New Orleans Saints football team lost their home field when the hurricane damaged the Superdome. The team’s plight was said to echo that of hundreds of thousands of its residents, who also were displaced by President Bush’s incompetent handling of the storm.

Today, the Saints have made one of the most remarkable turnarounds in football history, and only must beat the Chicago Bears next Sunday to reach the Super Bowl for the first time. Everyone outside Chicago will be rooting for the plucky Saints, whose victory is said to provide a shot of inspiration for those still struggling to rebuild the community.

But while a Saints victory would be exciting for a long inept NFL team, it is irrelevant to the real life situation in New Orleans. In fact, I have yet to hear a single sports announcer say anything about President Bush’s responsibility for the mess in New Orleans, as they instead focus all attention on Hurricane Katrina as the sole cause.

In other words, the Saints crusade has given the media another excuse to whitewash President Bush’s unprecedented failure to prevent the destruction of a major American city. So long as we link the team’s success to progress in the city, we can forget about federal government’s ongoing malfeasance.

How could anyone say the conservative-liberal controversy is a myth? Our nation has become red state versus blue state, right versus left, conservative versus liberal, Republicans versus Democrats. Some friends and families cannot discuss politics lest tempers flare and fights erupt. Anthony Signorelli’s excellent book Call to Liberty, Bridging the Divide between Liberals and Conservatives clearly explicates the factors behind this divisive polarizing behavior.

Many conservative pundits relish slamming liberals. The liberal response appears inept because liberals do not identify with charges the conservatives make. One of the conservative’s favorite authors, Ann Coulter, even claims that to be a liberal is to commit treason against America.

Former Republican Congressman Jim Gibbons of Nevada once declared, “Tree-hugging, Birkenstock-wearing, hippie, tie-dyed liberals [in Hollywood should]… go make their movies and their music and whine somewhere else…. It’s just too damn bad we didn’t buy them a ticket to become human shields in Iraq.”

01/14/07 “Slate” — — Why is the United States poised to try Jose Padilla as a dangerous terrorist, long after it has become perfectly clear that he was just the wrong Muslim in the wrong airport on the wrong day?

Why is the United States still holding hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, long after years of interrogation and abuse have established that few, if any, of them are the deadly terrorists they have been held out to be?

And why is President Bush still issuing grandiose and provocative signing statements, the latest of which claims that the executive branch holds the power to open mail as it sees fit?

Willing to give the benefit of the doubt, I once believed the common thread here was presidential blindness — an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the president to believe that these futile little measures are somehow integral to combating terrorism. That this is some piece of self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is just a chump and Guantanamo merely a holding pen for a jumble of innocent and half-guilty wretches.

But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn’t really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.

Two scrupulously reported pieces on the Padilla case are illuminating. On Jan. 3, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio interviewed Mark Corallo, spokesman for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, about the behind-the-scenes decision-making in the Padilla case—a case that’s lolled through the federal courts for years. According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla’s case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004, the Bush administration’s sole concern was preserving its constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants. “Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose,” she reports, which is why Padilla was hauled back to the lower courts. Her sources further confirmed that “key players in the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney’s office insisted that the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved.”

Deborah Sontag’s excellent New York Times story on Padilla on Jan. 4 makes the same point: He was moved from military custody to criminal court only as “a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court.” So this is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla’s dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they’d already won.

This need to preserve newly won legal ground also explains the continued operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the camp that—according to Donald Rumsfeld in 2002—houses only “the worst of the worst.” Now that over half of them have been released (apparently, the best of the worst) and even though only about 80 of the rest will ever see trials, the camp remains open. Why? Civil-rights groups worldwide and even close U.S. allies like Germany, Denmark, and England clamor for its closure. And as the ever-vigilant Nat Hentoff points out, new studies reveal that only a small fraction of the detainees there are even connected to al-Qaida—according to the Defense Department’s own best data.

But Guantanamo stays open for the same reason Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration is unable to retreat from that position without ceding ground. In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees. And having gone nose-to-nose with the Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts for these “enemies,” courts guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot just call off the trials.

I’ve written about the movie, The Battle of Algiers; today, CNN is reporting that George Bush is reading a book on the subject (A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962) for lessons on what to do in Iraq. In closing out the piece, both the author and the reporter cautioned the viewer that after the French decided to pull out, tens of thousands of people were killed in the civil war which followed. According to Wikipedia, that’s true enough. What CNN failed to inform its viewers, though, was that before the pullout, while the French were still fighting the Algerians, between 300,000 and 1 million Algerians are estimated to have died. Very much shades of Iraq.

From Rasmussen Reports, the favorite polling firm of Bush followers:

For the second straight day, 35% of Americans approve of the way that George W. Bush is performing his role as President. That’s the lowest level of Approval ever measured by Rasmussen Reports.

That polling was conducted after the President’s “surge” speech. What is particularly notable is this observation:

It is interesting to note that the last time the President’s Approval Ratings hit a new low followed the President’s speech on immigration. Typically, President’s (sic) expect to get a positive bounce following a national address.

It really is striking that whenever one is convinced that Bush’s unpopularity ratings have reached their nadir, the one thing that can always drive them even further downward is Bush’s appearance on national television to explain himself to the country (or, to use Jules Crittenden’s classic formulation: for the President to “address us . . . and show us the way forward”). Even after six years, the more Americans see and hear from George Bush, the more they dislike him.

The collapse of the Bush presidency is truly historic. It is always worth remembering that when Richard Nixon was forced to resign the Presidency, his Gallup approval rating was 25%. The 35% Rasmussen figure for Bush is above the low points measured by most other polls (which is why it is the favorite metric for Bush followers), but it is still abominably low. AP-Ipsos reported several days ago that Bush had just reached an all-time low in its poll — 32%.

If George Bush continues to appear in public and makes speeches, he’s going to soon be within the margin of error of Nixon’s resignation-compelling unpopularity. While a weakened Bush presidency may appear intuitively to be a cause for celebration, it poses a serious danger.

BAGHDAD — Residents of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad, are at risk of contracting a range of waterborne diseases as the city’s sewage system has collapsed after four days of heavy rain, the country’s health ministry said on Monday.

For nearly a week now, 45-year-old teacher Jassim Abdullah has been forced to buy bottled water for his family’s daily use at an expense that his meagre income barely covers.

“We can’t use tap water for drinking or cooking. It’s all sewage. That is why I have put aside 100,000 Iraqi dinars [about US $75] to buy water for cooking and washing,” said Abdullah, a father of five girls, from Baghdad’s poor neighbourhood of Hurriyah.

Dr Abdul-Rahman Adil Ali of the Baghdad Health Directorate warned of the dire consequences of a non-operational sewage system.

“As the sewage system has collapsed, all residents are threatened with gastroenteritis, typhoid fever, cholera, diarrhoea and hepatitis. In some of Baghdad’s poor neighbourhoods, people drink water which is mixed with sewage,” Ali said.

He added that the health ministry was prepared for an initial outbreak of diseases, but expressed concern that unless the municipality could deal with the sewage problem quickly and effectively, health problems would inevitably escalate.

“As a first step, municipality teams should clear the streets and neighbourhoods of the lakes of sewage,” Ali said.

Forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s murder, America’s media still deems African-Americans, Latinos and other people of color unqualified to express views on the nation’s most riveting issue—the Iraq War. CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage of the lead-up to Bush’s Wednesday night speech had anchorperson Wolf Blitzer surrounded by several other pundits/reporters, all of whom were white. And those selected to give their insights were not generals or ex-military leaders, but political hacks like Paul Begala and Bay Buchanan, neither of whom have any basis for providing special insights on Iraq. The media refuses to acknowledge the war’s racial component, and representatives of the African-American and Latino communities whose members are dying for George Bush’s fantasies are deemed unfit to comment upon it.

I do not watch television news at home, but get more than my fill from the bank of televisions where I work out. CNN, MSNBC, various local and national news shows and even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are on display, so I get a cross-section of who is being asked to comment on national and international events.

In the hour before Bush’s Wednesday night speech, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and his staff interviewed what was designed to represent a broad cross-section of opinion on the “surge” strategy. To my surprise, the leading alternative to the right-wing FOX News did not feel obligated to include even a token African-American, not even the Juan Williams-type moderate who can be trusted to parrot the mainstream line.

WASHINGTON, DC–Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

President-elect Bush vows that “together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us.”

“My fellow Americans,” Bush said, “at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us.”

Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

“You better believe we’re going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,” said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. “Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?”