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I haven’t meant to keep quiet here quite this much since last Thursday — but now the pause may get extended through the weekend. We’re on the road to Connecticut to see an old friend, so new posts may not be possible and won’t be a priority.

I watched part 2 of Frontline’s “Bush’s War” documentary last night. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it; with a good Internet connection, you can watch it online.

One might quibble with the title; it wasn’t just Bush’s war: it was Rummy’s, Cheney’s, Condi’s, Powell’s, Tenet’s, Bremer’s, Franks’s, Casey’s, and Sanchez’s war as well — and ours too, at least for those of us (like me) who let ourselves be swayed into ever supporting it. I feel like I’ve said my mea culpas — and probably ought to extend them sometime. But so what, it’s still “mea culpa” and that doesn’t undo anything.

As far as the documentary itself: there’s a real value to retrospectives like this even if you think you follow the news closely. For me, having Condoleezza Rice’s role laid out as it was last night was revelatory. She obviously is the “last man standing”, so to speak, among the original Iraq war cabinet — and the “surge” is laid at her doorstep and that of Philip Zelikow, of 9/11 Commission fame.* They both failed to see that local “clear, hold, build” occupation successes — such as they were — in places like Tal Afar couldn’t be replicated across all of Iraq, even with a few thousand more U.S. troops. Rumsfeld was actually an opponent of a “clear, hold, build” strategy executed by U.S. troops, arguing that was the job of (nonexistent) Iraqi military units.

But at least one thing I don’t buy in the documentary is the implication that higher level administration officials — Cheney, Tenet — really, truly expected WMD to be found; they knew they’d been twisting arms or had their arms twisted to turn up what little fool’s gold they’d come up with.

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* And, apparently unbeknownst to that commission, an author of the 2002 NSS (National Security Strategy) advocating preemptive and preventive defense.

Here’s some stuff Bush has said about and during his trip to Africa:

• America is trapped in this notion that we care about human life.
• I mean, you got the Dalai Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks.
• We believe in human rights and human dignity. We believe in the human condition.
• We live in a world where everything’s, like, instant.
• [Condoleeza Rice] asked me whether or not I really cared about Africa and my answer to her then is the same answer I will give to you now: Absolutely, it’s in our national interests that America help deal with hopelessness.*
• You’re right, my presidency does end. And that’s one of the great things about American democracy.

As ever, it’s all true. Before the trip, Dubya really turned the tables on one foreign radio journalist who was acting a little too smart during a roundtable in the Roosevelt room:

Q: Mr. President, I’m impressed by your policy statement on Africa today.
THE PRESIDENT: Were you listening?

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* Added context bonus: this was from a Bush response during “Joint Press Availability” with President Kikwete of Tanzania, at the State House in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
NOTE: Most items via “Whatever it is, I’m against it,” but I found the last one all by myself.

# Kenneth Pollack — Incredibly Enough, He’s Even Stupider Than You Thought (Jonathan Schwarz, “A Tiny Revolution”) — Schwarz reviews Pollack’s book “Persian Puzzle”, in which Pollack thinks it odd and irrational that Iranians were stocking up on naval equipment, which implied to Mr. “Threatening Storm” that they were spoiling for a fight with the good old U.S.A. Turns out they had a pretty decent reason for doing so — the US was sinking Iranian ships. Schwarz:

…it’s standard in government bureaucracies for people to become blithering idiots who have no idea what’s going on right in front of their face. So Pollack isn’t unusual in that regard. But it takes a special man to use his own blithering idiocy about his own country as justification to believe another country is mysterious and incomprehensible. Kenneth Pollack is that special man.

# This is the way, step inside (Spencer Ackerman, “toohotfortnr”) — Ackerman wades into Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” book and finds its definition of fascism overbroad, not applicable to Goldberg’s “exhibit A” — the Wilson era — even by Goldberg’s own definition. Ackerman concludes:

I’m starting to think Jonah Goldberg is not an intelligent man.

# Bad News for Mike Gravel (Jim MacDonald, “Making Light”) — New Hampshire citizen gets a two question phone call from a pollster:

“Are you planning to vote in the Democratic primary?”
“Sure am.”
“Who are you planning to vote for?”
“Mike Gravel.”
“Oh, you mean you’re going to vote in the Republican primary.”
“No, Mike Gravel is a Democrat. Two-term Democratic senator from Alaska.”
“Are you sure?
“Yes.”

# I can press when there needs to be pressed (WIIIAI, “Whatever it is, I’m against it”) — WIIIAI observes today’s Bush interviews with Israeli television, Al Hurra, and Al Arabiya, featuring several gem-quality Bushisms:

“I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be — hold hands. [...]

And what ends up happening in this process is that the leaders will commit, and then they’ll get their committees to work, and it gets stuck. And that’s when I’ll have to work with Condi Rice to unstick it.

Ahem. Does Laura know about this? Does she help? WIIIAI: “I’d put a joke in here, but each version of “Like the time I got my () stuck in ()” I come up with is more disturbing than the one before.”

# The Republican debates according to a 9-year old (DailyKos diarist 8ackgr0und N015e) — This guy gave his 9 year old the job of following the GOP debate on Saturday: “Follow me below the fold for the 9-year old’s rendition of a fight between Sarge, Wrinkles, Bunny Ears, Oily, Beagle Eyes and Carrot Face…” From the resulting transcript:

They are rude
Interrupt alot!

Beagle Eyes
Arrogant foreign policy
We need 400,000 troops
Don’t let politicians get involved
Leave it to military with blood on their boots. [...]

Sarge
John Micane never supported amnesty
Charge $5,000 to stay
attack ads

Wrinkles
Immigrants should not be rewarded

Fight.Fight. Interrupt. Fight

Oily
Do not sent 12,000,000
Ronald Reagan on some commercial. [...]

Sarge
Obama doesn’t have the background to lead.

No candidate likes Obama.
Republicans don’t think he’ll be a good president.
Obama gonna win.

More from Barton Gellman’s review of the new Ron Suskind book, “The One Percent Doctrine“:

The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

Now beat it. But wait — there’s more!

Three months later, with bin Laden holed up in the Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, the CIA official managing the Afghanistan campaign, Henry A. Crumpton (now the State Department’s counterterrorism chief), brought a detailed map to Bush and Cheney. White House accounts have long insisted that Bush had every reason to believe that Pakistan’s army and pro-U.S. Afghan militias had bin Laden cornered and that there was no reason to commit large numbers of U.S. troops to get him. But Crumpton’s message in the Oval Office, as told through Suskind, was blunt: The surrogate forces were “definitely not” up to the job, and “we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful.”

“All right, Crumpton. You’ve covered your ass, now.” Now beat it.

I’d prefer to think this is just run of the mill (for Bush/Cheney) extreme fecklessness and incompetence, rather than yet more high crimes and misdemeanors by our ruling duumvirate. But it seems important — for their sake! — to try to rule out darker explanations for why Bush didn’t care much about an imminent attack, and didn’t heed warnings the attacker would elude capture.*

Come November, there should be some investigations. Make them happen. Call your Democratic Congressman, or your Democratic challenger and let them know you want these matters — the August 6 memo, the Downing Street memo, NSA warrantless surveillance, Tora Bora, torture, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Katrina, and more — investigated, with a view to impeachment if warranted.

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* Reminds me of the recent Atlantic Monthly article about al-Zarqawi by Mary Ann Weaver:

During my time in Jordan, I asked a number of officials what they considered to be the most curious aspect of the relationship between the U.S. and al-Zarqawi, other than the fact that the Bush administration had inflated him.

One of them said, “The six times you could have killed Zarqawi, and you didn’t.”

The need to connect Bush and Lincoln comes from the very highest administration sources. In his Salon piece “A deluded king and his court lickspittles,” Blumenthal writes,

In the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, Bush was flattered by the analogy that he was like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, winning a world war and present at the creation of a new international order. However, since the election of 2004, a period during which the violence in Iraq has not diminished, Bush has been told he more closely resembles the beleaguered Abraham Lincoln. He is the Great Emancipator who has freed 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq but has not yet won the war.

Told by Condoleeza Rice, for example; on the May 11, 2005 Larry King Show, she said, “I’ve often wondered, in the darkest hours of the Civil War, what people were saying to Abraham Lincoln about whether this was going to turn out all right.”

Not surprisingly, Bush likes that idea; Blumenthal also notes Bush’s comments at Kansas State University on January 23, 2006:

… I understand politics, and it can get rough. I read a lot of history, by the way, and Abraham Lincoln had it rough. I’m not comparing myself to Abraham Lincoln, nor should you think just because I mentioned his name in the context of my presidency — I would never do that. He was a great President. But, boy, they mistreated him. He did what he thought was right.*

True, Bush disavows the explicit comparison, but in the manner of a TV courtroom lawyer who’s introduced an inadmissible point — “…withdrawn, your honor!” It’s a small thing amidst the other news of the moment, but the reason Lincoln’s memory is cherished is not just that he did what he thought was right, but that he did it well, and that he actually was right. We weren’t so fortunate this time around.

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* His very next sentences must be a rebuke to Vice President Cheney:

A lot of politicians, a lot of Presidents have gone through some tough times in the presidency, and I understand that. One of my biggest disappointments is the tone in Washington, D.C. I’ve done my best to try to elevate the tone. I just — needless name-calling, to me, is beneath the dignity of the office of the President.

BBC journalist (and neighbor) Adam Brookes is along for the ride with the “uber-pack” — his term for the press corps accompanying President Bush on his Asia trip. He’s been keeping an entertaining diary of the experience:

November 18: … And in an odd episode, the South Korean Defence Ministry has chosen this moment to announce that it intends to reduce its troop presence in Iraq by a third. This, a day after Presidents Bush and Roh stood side by side proclaiming solidarity over Iraq.

The White House didn’t seem to know it was coming.

“There has been no official communication to the United States of a change of position by the South Korean government,” was the line.

November 19: …John Murtha, a Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania, is the critic of the moment. He has described the Iraq effort as “a flawed policy wrapped in illusion”, and has called for withdrawal.

Why should Mr Bush care about a lone Democrat? Because Murtha is a decorated veteran, a hawk, and he previously supported the war. Most importantly, he’s seen as close to the military. Is Murtha speaking for the army? Some in Washington think so.

As the president’s speech wears on, I can’t be sure, but I think the bursts of applause are becoming less frequent. On the Iraq passages, the clapping seems more restrained - polite rather than tumultuous.

One final observation: in the advance version of the speech was this line: “We will fight the terrorists in Iraq, we stay in the fight until we have achieved the victory our troops have fought and bled for.”

When the President delivered the speech, “and bled” had been taken out.

November 20: …Later, Mr Bush meets the ‘travel pool’ - a group that splinters from the uber-pack to dog his every move.

He is much more animated. America’s relationship with China is ‘big and complex’. China has ‘undergone an amazing transformation’. But a ‘freer economy will yield a freer political system’.

This is one of the president’s core beliefs, in plain view on this trip: when a state liberalises its economy, political liberalisation will inevitably follow.

This belief obviates the need to confront the Chinese leadership. Economic liberalisation is underway in China. Ergo, political liberalisation is only a matter of time. The die is cast.

A reporter asks why he seemed so subdued earlier at his appearance with Mr Hu. The reporter suggests he was ‘off his game’.

‘Have you ever heard of jet lag?’ Mr Bush fires back. He then ends the meeting by striding purposefully away towards a door - which turns out to be locked. An aide shepherds him out.

Also, unless you’re Korean (or maybe Klingon) you’ll want to avoid octopus sushi in Busan, South Korea.

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UPDATE, 11/21: The Poor Man answers the president’s question with one of his own: “Ever heard of free drinks on Air Force One?”

The Washington Post’s Jim Vandehei reports (”Bush Orders Staff to Attend Ethics Briefings“):

According to a memo sent to aides yesterday, Bush expects all White House staff to adhere to the ’spirit as well as the letter’ of all ethics laws and rules. As a result, ‘the White House counsel’s office will conduct a series of presentations next week that will provide refresher lectures on general ethics rules, including the rules of governing the protection of classified information,’ according to the memo, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post by a senior White House aide.

Interesting. I’d only quibble with the choice of the word “refresher” — anything besides “don’t get caught” will be breaking new ground with this bunch.

Bush Pledges to Investigate Himself

Sure, it’s yesterday’s news, I’m just going on the record here. I used to wonder what the jingosphere would say about it, but that would involve forcing myself to read them. Traveller’s tales from LGF, Instaman, etc. are welcome… oh what the heck, let’s go see for ourselves:

LGF — nothing on this yet that I noticed; the general line is “Bush bashing backfires again.”
Insta — nothing on this yet that I noticed; cites Max Boot decrying the “blame game.”
Powerline — nothing on this yet that I noticed; writes that “European dirigiste model” didn’t do so well either with that heat wave, so there! Predicts the “inevitable commission” — yet no satisfied update that the president will do it himself!
Malkin — nothing on this yet that I noticed; she reacted to Hillary Clinton’s proposal with “Not another damned commission.” All over Al Franken instead, much linked elsewhere.
Captain’s Quarters — nothing on this yet that I noticed; worries that a Senate Katrina probe will turn into a smear campaign.

Not the usual chorus of hosannas to Mr. Hard Work’s latest brainstorm. Hmm.

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UPDATE, 9/7: USAToday, via Stygius:

[House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi] related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire [FEMA director] Michael Brown.
“He said ‘Why would I do that?‘” Pelosi said.
‘”I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn’t go right last week.’ And he said ‘What didn’t go right?‘”

UPDATE, 9/16: Tom Burka: Bush To Investigate Self — Will Ask “Where was I?” and “What was I doing?”

White House press release — President Arrives in Alabama, Briefed on Hurricane Katrina:

“The good news is — and it’s hard for some to see it now — that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house — he’s lost his entire house — there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch. (Laughter.)”
(via TAPPED)

What. An. Incredible. Asshole.

Photo via digby, where the caption reads, “A man holding a baby uncovers the body of a dead man, suspected to have been sitting there for two days, outside the New Orleans Convention Center September 1, 2005.”

Mayor Nagin calls BS on the relief effort:

…I keep hearing that it’s coming, it’s politics, man, and they’re playing games, and they’re spinning, they’re out there spinning for the cameras. They don’t have a clue what’s going on down here. They flew down here one time, two days after the doggone event was over with TV cameras, AP reporters, all kinda goddam — excuse my French everybody in America but I am pissed — “this is coming down”…my answer to that is BS, where is the beef? Because there is no beef in this city, there is no beef anywhere in southeast Louisiana…

…You know the reason the looters got out of control? Because we had most of our resources saving people, thousands of people, that were stuck in attics, man. Old ladies… when you pull off the doggone ventilator vent, and you look down in there, they’re standing in there in water up to their frickin necks. God is looking down on all this, and if they’re not doing everything in their power to save people, they are going to pay the price. Because every day that we delay, people are dying, and they’re dying by the hundreds, I’m willing to bet you.

I need reinforcements, I need troops, man, I need 500 buses. You call him right now, and you call the governor, and tell them to delegate the power that they have to the mayor of New Orleans, and we’ll get this damn thing fixed.

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UPDATE, 9/2: A new joke form is born.

Two reactions to the Bush Fort Bragg speech glean a little more value from the speech than I was able to.

First, Jim Henley pointed out that Bush said “we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave” — which, if sincere, raises the question why we’re building such permanent-looking bases in Iraq. Henley suggests this might be about “splitting the nationalist wing of the insurgency from the jihadist (international) elements.”

Second, Billmon noticed the frequent use of the phrase “terrorists and insurgents” instead of just “terrorists” (via e-Robin). Like Henley, he suggests it’s connected to the reported negotiations with some of the Sunni insurgents; by starting to make the rhetorical distinction, it’ easier to sell those negotiations — and whatever concessions are ultimately made. Remember, after all: we don’t negotiate with terrorists. (And yes, this might amount to a more nuanced view of the Iraqis fighting against U.S. forces than I gave Bush credit for.)