Said Max Cleland today: "For Saxby Chambliss, who got out of going to Vietnam because of a trick knee, to attack John Kerry as weak on the defense of our nation is like a mackerel in the moonlight that both shines and stinks."
Yes, that's the Saxby Chambliss who went down and dirty against Cleland back in 2002. And now the Bush campaign is sending him out against John Kerry.
What else is there to say? Bring it on. This time we're ready to fight back.
--Josh Marshall
As probably comes as no surprise, I've gotten quite a lot of email in response to last night's post on the gay marriage issue.
Some of those responses seemed to me to miss the thrust of the post, since it was intended more as a critique of what has been my position on this issue than a statement of that position.
Yet I'd rather not try to interpret what I wrote. Some, or rather most, of the posts I write on TPM are intended as arguments. Sometimes they're closely reasoned, or flippant or polemical; but in every case I am making a specific argument, a specific point. Others, like the one from last night, are more like thinking out loud. I'm trying to present an honest reflection of my thinking, or my wrestling with an issue, rather than a deliberate argument.
In any case, this is all a long way of saying, take it as you will.
One other point.
Many readers have written in to say that the real answer to this controversy is simply to get the state out of the marriage business, with all its trappings of sanctity and traditionalism. The state should only be in the business of issuing value-neutral marriage licenses -- perhaps called civil unions for gays and straights. And then individuals can decide what sort of religious ritual they want to add on, or whether they just want a civil ceremony.
The underlying argument here is that our present notion of marriage is really an improper tangling together of church and state. And the sooner they're untangled, the better.
Part of me agrees with this proposition. But we're fooling ourselves if we think this gets us out of the political thicket. That sort of change would be a radical break from past practice and it is profoundly secular in outlook.
I think there is little way of getting around the nub of this issue. Our current laws announce, and are based upon, a clear value judgment: that unions between a man and a woman are both different from and better than unions between members of the same gender.
[ed. note: I don't like making interlinear comments like this. But some people have apparently read the above graf as my saying that I think heterosexual unions are 'better'. To this I can only say, please read more carefully. I am noting the value judgment embodied in our law, which I believe is indisputable.]
You can't get around that uncomfortable fact. To get the state out of the marriage business would simply take the state from its current position in favor of heterosexual unions to one of agnosticism, a grand 'no comment.'
I think that might be a good solution. But let's not imagine that the people who oppose gay marriage or gay rights generally aren't going to have any problem with that. And thus the politics of it remains largely the same, though perhaps slightly more palatable to one slice of the electorate.
In any case, there's no escaping how revolutionary this moment is in the way we order the state's relationship to the most intimate aspects of our lives. And the inescapable fact that the status quo means the continued denigration of committed same-sex relationships is why I'm reconsidering my position of supporting civil unions rather than gay marriage outright.
Here are some letters I received in response to last night's post ...
Josh,I'm 62 years old and grew up in Missouri. When I married my first wife, who as Japanese American, we had to do so in another state. At that time it was against Missouri state law for interracial marriages to take place. Times change.
40 years later the pain of that state-sanctioned inequality, which made some couples second-class citizens, still stirs an old, deep-felt resentment. While I'm not gay, I certainly have sympathy for the state-sanctioned unfairness that gay couples endure and believe that in another 40 years (probably much sooner) gay marriages will be a simple, accepted fact of life.
John
[New Email]
I've been reading your website for several weeks now and have enjoyed it.
I appreciate your article on Gay Marriage and understand your feelings about it. I do not want to debate the subject with you, we are clearly on the same side.
I just want you to know that my partner and I were married at city hall on Thursday this week. We waiting in line for about 9 hours and were prepared to camp out on the side walk overnight if we had to. In line behind us were two women who had driven 27 hours from El Paso with their son in tow. Just in front of us were two women who had flown in from Virginia and two men who'd flown in from Kansas City. There were also lots of Bay Area couples there. There were couples with babies in strollers and one couple with an aged mother in a wheelchair and hooked up to oxygen.
This is not the right time. There is no right time. There is just the right thing to do. This was the right thing to do.
The Republicans and the far right are going to us as scapegoats no matter what we do. We all know that. We have always known that.
Now they know a little more about us.
James
Vallejo, CA[New Email]
Josh,
Your post for today about your struggle on gay marriage was very interesting. I just explained exactly your points to my Christian massage therapist so it confirmed what I perceived as the struggle in the world - at least for reasonable people! I'm sure you'll get emails galore. I appreciate your openness and honesty. I'll try to be brief. As a gay woman, 52, with 3 adult open minded heterosexual children, spiritual but not Christian, partnered for 13 years, married (in our own minds/hearts with our God as a witness) for 10 years - and looking forward to the paperwork and rights to catch up with the feelings and commitment....I have to simply say - accepting anything short of equal is NOTHING. No matter how others can use it politically or not - what's right is right. When you settle for anything short of right - you're selling yourself and this country short. So many people forget what America stands for - Freedom and equality. Any form of intellectualizing away equal rights for gay families has no foundation in logic or law. This will be proven - it's just a matter of time.
Thanks for your site... I read it every day.
Judy[New Email]
Josh,
I hope you don't catch too much flack for your thoughtful post on gay marriage. I appreciate your honest description of your own conflicted thoughts on this and I very much share them (hopefully not just the two of us). As a married straight man, I genuinely feel that my state-sanctioned marriage will never be entirely valid until my gay friends enjoy the same priviledges as my wife and I do. At the same time, one can easily see how Rovian Republicans must be salivating at the thought of having another fear-based issue to stir the troops with. "So, you're not as afraid of terrorists these days? How about GAY PEOPLE getting MARRIED just like YOU AND THE MISSUS?????". I don't know the answer either, but in the end, I know I'll be standing alongside my gay friends, cheering them on and maybe, just maybe, being someone's best man some day.
Thanks for your good work,
Adam Chase[New Email]
I'm a fan of TPM.
I feel sure that you are a logical person. The rationale you are pursuing in your mind re gay marriage is typical of a lot of decent, middle of the road Americans. I think that after the smoke clears you'll have no reasonable alternative to admitting that your reluctance to back gay marriage is simply based on the idea that we are too "different" to join with straights in celebrating a loving commitment. It's the old miscegnation argument.
I know you'll finally come around to seeing it for what it is.
Thanks for all your hard work and wonderful blog.
Linda, who just celebrated her 31st "anniversary" with a wonderful partner.
[New Email]
As an openly gay man who was actively involved in Democratic politics and fundraising a few years ago, I initially shared your apprehension about the backlash involved in making gay marriage an issue in a presidential election year. I suffered my friends reaction to this position as recently as a few weeks ago.
"Don't ask, don't tell" strikes me as the military equivalent of gays ceding the right to even civil unions. The fact remains that while gays can serve in the military and not be asked about their sexuality, they're still not protected...let alone embraced for their service...under law.
So, the pragmatism you subscribe to and I did as well until very recently is much like Bill Clinton's "look, I tried and this is the best I can do." I've come to the conclusion that it's better to have fought the battle and lost than never fought at all. Like chosen careers in the military, we're dealing with peoples lives here, not abstract concepts.[New Email]
Thanks for your very thoughtful post on gay marriage.
I'm a gay man, mid 50s, happily partnered. My immediate and visceral response to the fight over gay marriage is, like many of your readers, to settle for nothing less than true equality.
I'm also a literate and thoughtful man, deeply concerned about the steep slide into danger that Bush's policies and actions have taken us. My immediate and visceral response to that is to put aside all other goals and focus only on defeating Bush.
My fear is that gay people will be 2004's Nader, handing the right a slim victory. I haven't a clue how to resolve my hopes and my fears! But thanks for helping me examine and articulate them.
Regards,
Chuck
To conclude, I should say that I've made no particular attempt to find a representative sampling of the letters I received. These are the ones that caught my attention, moved me, or just made me think the most. To the extent that I could characterize them, I would say that the majority of the letters had a tone and content of friendly criticism, though there were more than a few that contained only one or two epithets.
--Josh Marshall
I truly hope that Democrats will not spend too much <$Ad$>time abasing themselves, begging Ralph Nader not to run again for president in 2004, as he seems likely to announce he will do on Meet the Press this Sunday.
Certainly, this latter-day political narcissist has already made up his mind what he's going to announce. So there's no point waiting to call him what he is: an enemy of progressive change in this country and a cat's paw of the Republican party.
If anything, calling him a 'cat's paw' is too generous since a dupe at least doesn't know he's being used.
In any case, I have a rough confidence that this won't be as damaging to Democratic prospects as some fear. Because after the last four years I just don't think that many people will get in line again behind this pied piper of political oblivion.
Late Update: A reader notes that since Nader now isn't even running as a Green, he has apparently abandoned even the pretense that he is in the race to create a viable third party in American politics. If he runs, it would now be strictly on a platform of vacuous moral posturing and self-aggrandizement.
--Josh Marshall
Wow. The Fox News poll has the president down at 48% approval. For some reason I cannot begin to fathom, the statistic doesn't seem prominently on display on the FoxNews website. (I can't even find it.) But you can see the brutal numerical truth here.
--Josh Marshall
You know it's really a new day when Chicago's Mayor Daley says he'd have "no problem" if Cook County started allowing gay marriages.
Sure, it's not the Mayor Daley. It's his son. And Richard M. Daley's ability to reclaim the Chicago mayoralty for his family has from the start been based on rapprochements with all manner of groups, political factions and ideological tendencies that were, if not beyond the pale, then at least subordinated in the Chicago of his father.
But you can't have much familiarity with the strains and schisms that rent the Democratic party in its urban bastions of the North through the latter decades of the last century, and the particular convulsion in Chicago in 1968, and not find those words coming from that mouth something bracing, unexpected, in some sense hard to fathom, and yet terribly welcome.
Andrew Sullivan has been commenting on this at some length in the last few days. But it's amazing to watch how San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom's act of inverted civil disobedience (a Mayor violating the seemingly clear letter of the law in the cause of a higher principle of equality) has unleashed the floodgates around the country. The county in New Mexico, which briefly started issuing marriage licenses, has now apparently reversed itself. But I think Andrew is right that this spate of marriages -- at least in San Francisco and perhaps now in other locales -- has suddenly made this whole issue concrete and human in a way it simply wasn't before.
I'm not sure that makes the movement's eventual success more likely. But it clearly makes it impossible for anyone to ignore. It now has to be confronted across the political spectrum -- by some eagerly, and by others with great reluctance.
I must confess to a deep ambivalence about same-sex marriages. It's not one of belief or values, but one of pragmatism, at least as I understand it -- and yet a pragmatism I'm not entirely comfortable with.
I strongly support civil unions -- the ability of gay and lesbian couples to solemnize their unions and enjoy the whole raft of civil protections, privileges and obligations that heterosexual couples do through marriage -- survivorship rights, the ability to visit and make decisions for a sick spouse in the hospital, etc. Anything less just conflicts with everything I believe is right and just.
My reason for not supporting gay marriage -- and I think there's a difference between opposing and not supporting, in this case -- is that it seems like a step that would trigger a backlash that would a) quite possibly prevent the adoption even of civil unions and b) provide a tool for conservatives to win elections and thus prevent or turn back various other progressive reforms that are no less important than this one. (Of course, this hybrid reasoning has all manner of uncomfortable echoes from the middle decades of the 20th century.)
In other words, when I say that I don't support gay marriage, my reasoning and rationale are inextricably tied up with my sense of the larger political context in which the question arises -- what's possible and what's not, and what the larger political repercussions would be. In fact, I find the two parts of the equation difficult to untangle even in my own head. (If there's an undertone of uncertainty or moral awkwardness you recognize in this post it likely stems from my feeling that the open embrace of gay marriage from so many unexpected quarters shames what seems to me to be my own timidity.)
I don't think these concerns about broader political repercussions can be easily or honestly ignored. And yet if we posit a country in which there is marriage for heterosexuals and civil unions for gays and lesbians, then, paradoxically, I think the state-imposed stigma becomes even greater than it is now. Not entirely so, but at least by one measure.
Today we have marriage. It's a state-sanctioned institution for men and women. The state just, by and large, isn't involved in homosexual relationships. Now, I know that there are laws on the books in many states that definitely do involve the state in same-sex relationships adversely. And in practice, the state can have much less than a hands-off approach.
Yet, if we have marriage (for straights) and civil unions (for gays), then you have the state being in the business of solemnizing and recognizing both kinds of relationships, but in a way that clearly gives preference -- even if just symbolically -- to straights. Once you make the leap to civil unions, this sort of public denigration of same-sex relationships seems hard to justify, and full gay marriage seems hard not to embrace.
I know that little in these ideas or formulations is novel. They just give a sense of my thoughts on the issue, and my wrestling with it. But the images of happy newlyweds in San Francisco is jostling my own calculus of pragmatism and right.
--Josh Marshall
Bad Counsel?
Let me share a thought with you.
As you know, there's a been a scandal bubbling in the Senate Judiciary Committee since late last year over whether Republican staffers stole Democratic staff memos covering judicial appointment strategy. Now, for some time, this whole matter has been a sort of side light to the bigger stuff going on in politics. In fact, Republicans in government and out came up with a whole series of theories to explain why this theft really wasn't a problem. Most came down to the argument that the Dems didn't have sufficient security on their computers to keep the GOP staffers out -- sorta like how if there's no lock on my pocket you're allowed to steal my wallet so long as I don't notice.
In any case, outside of most people's notice, this has all changed of late. Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle has been conducting an investigation into the matter. And a few weeks ago it emerged that the infiltration had been far more extensive than earlier believed. For at least a year, and probably more like eighteen months, GOP staffers accessed the Democrats confidential files. And they snatched approximately 5,000 of them, give or take.
But the big change came last Thursday at an open hearing of the Judiciary Committee. Faced with the new evidence, pretty much every Republican on the committee gave up on offering any justifications or excuses for what had happened. And even those who had been most aggressive in fighting off Democratic attacks conceded that what had happened was quite possibly criminal and should be pursued by law enforcement authorities.
This week a trio of Republican senators on the committee felt compelled to hold a closed door meeting with conservative activists to tell them to back off. To quote The Hill: "[S]enators, who received last week a closed-door briefing on the investigation from Senate Sergeant at Arms Bill Pickle, warned conservatives they might come to regret their position when the results of the probe are fully known. Pickle is expected to finish his investigation by March 5."
Now here's where this gets interesting. The report from the Sergeant at Arms is coming down the pike really soon. (Let's call it the Pickle pike.) And most of the Republicans on the committee seem to agree now that this is a criminal matter, at least in the sense that there were probable illegalities committed. It's hard to see how that won't lead to a criminal referral when the report comes in.
So say a referral is made to the Justice Department. If that happens, how can they not appoint a special counsel? Not only is the issue at hand inherently political, but the political appointees at the DOJ work with the White House Counsel's office and the Judiciary Committee Republicans to plan and coordinate strategy for judicial nominations. The whole issue here is whether their colleagues on the Senate staff side were purloining Democratic staff memos to aid that planning. It seems like a classic case where the folks at Justice would need to recuse themselves.
Now we come to the White House Counsel's office. Remember, what we're talking about here is planning and strategizing on how to get judicial appointments through the Senate confirmation process. On the Republican side that involves Senate staffers, people at Justice, and the White House Counsel's office. Indeed, the whole process is quarterbacked out of the Counsel's office.
We already know that at least two Senate staffers accessed and archived the Democratic staff memos for more than a year. We know that thousands of documents were involved. And we know that the contents of at least some of those memos were leaked to conservative journalists. Those memos provided invaluable assistance in planning strategy on the Republican side.
How likely is it the existence and/or contents of those memos were discussed in the regular meetings Senate staffers held with members of the White House Counsel's office to plot strategy for getting through their judicial nominees?
And if a special counsel is appointed ... well, you see where this is going.
--Josh Marshall
Math is not my strong suit. So maybe someone can help me with this.
A new line item in the White House talking points is to say that the economy is on the right track because it has produced some 366,000 jobs in the last five months.
In his noon press briefing yesterday, Scott McClellan listed as one of the signs the economy was on the right track the fact that "there have been more than 366,000 new jobs created in the last five months." And just an hour earlier, in a brief chat with reporters before meeting with the President of Tunisia, the president said: "I'm pleased by the fact that since August there's been 366,000 new jobs, in one survey."
Now, the problem here is that everyone at the White House from the president on down is trumpeting this number like it's a good thing, when in fact, it's not.
If I'm not mistaken there's a general consensus among economists that in our current economic circumstances we need roughly 150,000 new jobs created each month just to break even -- basically, just to keep up with a growing working age population.
So just to break even on the employment front we needed about 750,000 new jobs to have been created over the last five months. In fact, the economy created just less than half that number. So basically, 366,000 new jobs in five months isn't very good at all.
The president is pleased that on his watch the economy can't even produce enough jobs to keep up with a growing population? Can't he set his sights a bit higher?
--Josh Marshall
Let's call it the big bat.
We all know that first the Dean campaign, then the Clark campaign, and then to lesser extents the other Democratic presidential candidates and now even House candidates have used the web to haul in large sums of money from small donors.
But the big test won't get started until a month or more from now.
Let's say John Kerry wins the nomination. I think that's overwhelmingly likely. But in this case I'm just using the assumption to sketch out a hypothetical or rather plot a sensible course of action. I'm not trying to prejudge the outcome of what's going to happen over the next couple weeks.
One of the biggest factors in this upcoming race has always been what would happen in the spring and summer of this year. The game plan goes something like this ...
After the Democratic primaries are over, the eventual winner would have spent a lot of money winning the nomination. And that nominee-to-be would probably be pretty near the spending caps he or she had had to agree to to get matching funds.
That means that for all intents and purposes the Democratic nominee would be out of cash and probably out of luck till the general election phase began after the conventions. That's when a new round of public funds would come in and the spending caps would reset.
Right about that time, though -- in early spring -- President Bush will be able to go on the airwaves with the equivalent of campaign commerical carpet bombing and bludgeon the Democratic nominee while he has no funds to fight back.
A milder version of this happened in 1996 when an unchallenged Bill Clinton went on the airwaves early and took advantage of the period when Bob Dole had no money to respond. But the war chest President Bush has been able to amass is far, far larger. What's more, like Kerry, he's opted out of the public system for the primaries. So he can spend as much as he wants.
(As it happens, I think that going on the air early for Clinton in 1996 just put the icing on the cake. That was never going to be a close election. This, on the other hand, is definitely going to be close.)
Now, assuming Kerry's the nominee, one part of the equation has already changed: if memory serves, Kerry opted out of the public financing system for the primary phase of the campaign. So he can spend as much as he can raise.
But he still won't have anywhere near as much as President Bush will have in reserve.
That's where the big bat comes in.
How well will the Kerry campaign -- and the rest of the Democratic party, broadly construed -- do in the middle-months of this year raising small-donor cash online to keep President Bush from unleashing all his fire power while Kerry has no way to fire back?
We'll return to this question later with some thoughts on how they might go about it.
--Josh Marshall
On the Today show this morning, the <$NoAd$>president's campaign chairman Marc Racicot, said that that forecast of 2.6 million new jobs this year wasn't a forecast but rather a "goal".
That prompted this exchange in this morning's gaggle ...
QUESTION: Scott, on taxes and jobs, your campaign chairman, Marc Racicot this morning said that the job prediction or the job forecast in the CEA report was a "goal." You indicated to us yesterday that it was simply a figure that was based on economic modeling. So what is it? Is it an objective analysis of the current state of the economy, or was that a political document?Scott McClellan: John, I think it is what it is. The data is a snapshot that economists use at a point in time for economic modeling. That's what I said yesterday. So it is what it is --
QUESTION: Right, but Racicot --
Scott McClellan: -- and it's based on the data available at that point in time.
QUESTION: So was Racicot wrong in describing it as a goal?
Scott McClellan: I haven't seen those specific remarks. I'll be glad to look at them, but it is what it is, and it is how I described it yesterday.
[Here there's a short and snappy back-and-forth between John and Scott on the difference between predictions and goals, and what the definition of 'is' is.]
Scott McClellan: John, I'm giving you the facts. It is what it is.
QUESTION: And the meaning of the word "is" is?
Scott McClellan: Well, John, I think that where the discussion of policy should be -- or the discussion should be is on policy. And the President is a decision-maker. The President leads by making policy decisions. And the policies we are implementing are working to strengthen our economy and create an environment for robust job creation. New jobs are being created. The unemployment rate is declining. The policies this President has advocated and passed are working. And I think the American people think the discussion should be there on the policy decisions that are being made. Some don't want to discuss the policies. But it's important for a President to lead and make decisions, and then defend those decisions.
QUESTION: You understand the difference between a forecast based on economic modeling and a stated goal. Racicot just seems to indicate that this is a stated goal.
Scott McClellan: It is the economic forecast for our annual Economic Report. That's what it is.
QUESTION: So it's not a goal?
Drip, drip, drip ...
--Josh Marshall
Now this is something special. Tompaine.com has <$Ad$>set Bob Dreyfuss up with a blog on Iraq and national security issues, The Dreyfuss Report.
Bob and I disagree about a lot on foreign policy. Generally speaking, he's just much more to the left than I am on the issue. But he's one hell of a reporter. And the whole complicated, ugly, tragic, farcical Iraq mess is the sort of story that's just made for him.
I'll be visiting this site again and again.
Bob links to this very important article by Knut Royce in Newsday which reports on how the US has "awarded more than $400 million in contracts to a start-up company" tied to Ahmed Chalabi.
If we didn't have so many billions to spare, one might almost think that was a problem.
--Josh Marshall
To get a read on the current state of <$NoAd$>play between the White House press corps and Press Secretary Scott McClellan (and, by extension, the White House) see today's back and forth from the noon press briefing in which McClellan tried to explain why the president issued a prediction about estimated job creation last week but won't stand behind the numbers this week.
Q So why not -- why aren't you standing behind it?MR. McCLELLAN: I think what the President stands behind is the policies that he is implementing, the policies that he is advocating. That's what's important.
Q That's not in dispute. The number is the question.
MR. McCLELLAN: I know, but the President's concern is on the number of jobs being created --
Q My question is, why was the prediction made --
MR. McCLELLAN: -- and the President's focus is on making sure that people who are hurting because they cannot find work have a job. That's where the President's focus is.
Q Then why predict a number? Why was the number predicted? Why was the number predicted? You can't get away with not -- just answer the question. Why was that number predicted?
That's near the point when it pretty much broke to nah-nah-nah. Read the whole section.
--Josh Marshall
Want to brush up on how to spout the increasingly farcical party-line on Iraqi WMD?
You're in luck.
As our latest addition to the Talking Points Memo Document Collection, we've just posted the Department of Defense Talking Points on Iraqi WMD distributed last Thursday.
--Josh Marshall
The president says he's "troubled" by <$Ad$>the rush of wedding licenses being issued to gay couples in San Francisco. But I don't think that's really what's troubling them. I think what's really got their guts in knots are these numbers from the new CNN/USAToday/Gallup poll which shows that both John Kerry (12%) and John Edwards (10%) hold double-digit leads over the president among likely voters.
The poll actually has the president's approval number holding pretty steady at 51%. But his reelect number -- which is the more significant one heading into an election has fallen to the low 40s.
You don't judge a race when one candidate is in a trough. But this is quite a trough.
--Josh Marshall
I like John Kerry. And, last night's results notwithstanding, I think he's got this race pretty much wrapped up. But take a look at the Kerry website and the Edwards website, and tell me which one radiates more energy and excitement.
--Josh Marshall
Some mumbo-jumbo just turns out to be ... well, too mumbo. This from CNN ...
The White House backed away Wednesday from its own prediction that the economy will add 2.6 million new jobs before the end of this year, saying the forecast was the work of number-crunchers and that President Bush was not a statistician.
I think we'd all agree to that last point. But can he hire one?
Embarrassing. The bloom is really coming off this rose.
The credibility account is close to overdrawn.
Drip, drip, drip.
--Josh Marshall
Back to the tangled web files ...
Knocked on his heels by increasing evidence that he willfully deceived the American public, President Bush is off to a new strategy of spreading around the blame. Let's call it the anti-buck gambit. Don't pass the buck. Just get an M-80, light it, put it over in the corner with the buck on top of it. Then no more buck, no more problem.
In any case, back to our story. The new line is, well, okay maybe we were wrong. But everyone else was wrong too. So who's gonna cast the first stone.
Said the president yesterday at an Army base in Louisiana: "My administration looked at the intelligence and we saw a danger. Members of Congress looked at the same intelligence, and they saw a danger. The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence and it saw a danger. We reached a reasonable conclusion that Saddam Hussein was a danger."
Filling in the blanks here, the argument is that everyone thought Saddam had WMD. So it's not my mistake. It's everyone's mistake.
Now, this is dishonest at a number of levels. But let's just pick one. When it comes to what constitutes a threat, all 'WMD' are not created equal. Mustard gas is close to irrelevant weighed against the threat of nuclear weapons, especially effectively deliverable ones. And on this there was in fact fierce and public disagreement. Let's take the UN and their inspectors versus the White House.
One of the key points the White House never mentions is that, notwithstanding what people thought before the return of inspectors, we found out quite a lot during the brief period when inspectors were in the country. And almost all of what we learned was damaging to the White House's case for war. Indeed, one reason for the hurry to start the war was the fear that the case would collapse entirely. (For a broader discussion of what the UN knew and what we 'knew', see this excellent piece by Fareed Zakaria in a recent Newsweek.)
In any case, one of the key findings was the IAEA's determination, after its initial round of inspections, that there was no evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. For a variety of technical reasons, it's much more difficult to hide a real nuclear weapons program from inspectors who are on the ground in your country than it is to hide, say, a chemical or biological weapons program.
So the IAEA's judgment came with a lot of weight -- at least to those who were interested in knowing the state, or even the existence, of Iraq's nuclear efforts.
So the UN (the IAEA is, in effect, a part of the UN) definitely disagreed with the White House on the WMD issue.
And what was the White House's response? Recall this exchange between Vice President Cheney and Tim Russert on the eve of the war ...
MR. RUSSERT: And even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said he does not have a nuclear program, we disagree?VICE PRES. CHENEY: I disagree, yes. And you'll find the CIA, for example, and other key parts of our intelligence community disagree. Let's talk about the nuclear proposition for a minute. We've got, again, a long record here. It's not as though this is a fresh issue. In the late '70s, Saddam Hussein acquired nuclear reactors from the French. 1981, the Israelis took out the Osirak reactor and stopped his nuclear weapons development at the time. Throughout the '80s, he mounted a new effort. I was told when I was defense secretary before the Gulf War that he was eight to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon. We found out after the Gulf War that he was within one or two years of having a nuclear weapon because he had a massive effort under way that involved four or five different technologies for enriching uranium to produce fissile material.
We know that based on intelligence that he has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past.
That of course would be the same Vice President Cheney who told Hans Blix before he took on his job that "we will not hesitate to discredit you" if Blix failed to march to the White House's tune.
They can run and they can hide. They can pass the buck, eat the buck, blow up the buck, hide it in the drawer, twiddle their thumbs and hope everyone forgets about it. But this buck is a MIRVed missile. And it's coming right for them.
--Josh Marshall
Our friend Mr. Perle is giving new meaning to the phrase 'comedy of errors'. Yesterday in Washington he called for the resignation of CIA chief George Tenet and the head the of DIA. "Heads should roll," he said, "not in a punitive or vindictive way. But when you discover you have an organization that doesn't get it right time after time, you change the organization, including the people.... I would start with the head. George Tenet has been at the CIA long enough to assume responsibility for its performance."
Now, this is truly one of those 'where do you start' points of ridiculousness. It's rather like Andy Fastow and Ken Lay calling for heads to roll at the SEC because the government regulators didn't get the whole securities oversight thing quite right. Well, Yes, heads should roll, you say in response. But then when you see the would-be executioners, the rationale and the logic of the thing starts to break down.
It is awfully hard to find a single data point on which the CIA or the DIA were 'wrong' in which Perle & Co. were not wrong-squared or even wrong-cubed, and in which he and his crew were not playing the same old bureaucratic and media games to mau-mau those agencies into being even more 'wrong' than they were. (See this particularly humorous example.)
We can leave aside for the moment that this is far from the first time. Perle himself was a leader in the effort to second-guess US intelligence agencies about the Soviet threat in the 1970s, arguing that Soviet military was far more threatening and powerful than the folks at the CIA believed.
Of course, the CIA did miss the boat on that one. But their error wasn't in underestimating but rather in overestimating the military and economic power of the late Soviet state.
They missed the internal rot and economic and military and political degeneration that would bring the whole edifice crashing down in the late 1980s. To say that Perle's crew failed to see this coming is rather an understatement. As late as 1980, in The Present Danger: Do we have the will to reverse the decline of American power?, neoconservative founding father Norman Podhoretz, lamented whether it might not be too late to prevent the "finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power."
In any case, if Perle wants to call for others to walk the plank, it's a call he should be making from the waves, not the deck.
Who will take this claptrap seriously? Advice on honing our intelligence processes from a serial enabler of intelligence ridiculousness stretching back two generations.
--Josh Marshall
A hard time kicking the habit?
You've probably already heard the story of Richard Convertino, the Assistant US Attorney from Detroit who's just sued John Ashcroft for "gross mismanagement" and various bad acts stemming out of a counter-terrorism case in Detriot.
But look at this passage down in this Associated Press story ...
Convertino also accused Justice officials of intentionally divulging the name of one of his confidential terrorism informants (CI) to retaliate against him.The leak put the informant at grave risk, forced him to flee the United States and "interfered with the ability of the United States to obtain information from the CI about current and future terrorist activities," the suit alleges.
More payback?
--Josh Marshall
Check out this very funny and very good piece by Slate's Jack Shafer about a really embarrassing article in the New York Times. Actually that's Jack Abu Shafer -- read the article, you'll understand.
--Josh Marshall
Oh, how sweet it is. We've been telling you for some time about the 6th congressional district special election in Kentucky, pitting former state Attorney General Ben Chandler against Alice Forgy Kerr.
This was the first federal election of the 2004 cycle. Kerr based her campaign almost exclusively on her strong support for the Bush agenda. And the AP is now reporting that Chandler has beaten Kerr decisively. That marks the first time since 1991 that a Democrat has won a Republican seat in a special election.
This is a big deal for a number of reasons.
The first is the shot in the arm it'll give to Democrats around the country.
But another part of the story is Internet fundraising. As you'll notice there on the left, the Chandler campaign has been advertising for about the last two weeks on this and a number of other blogs. The campaign budgeted about two grand for blog advertising. And my understanding is that by today they had raised close to $100,000 from contributors who linked through from those blogs on which the campaign was advertising.
In other words, they got roughly a 50-fold turnaround on their investment in the final two weeks of the campaign. And in case you're wondering one hundred grand is a lot of money in a House race.
Now, obviously that's exciting news for proprietors of blogs looking to open up revenue streams from advertisers. But the bigger story here is about the Democrats and the Internet, and the way this technology seems to click, shall we say, for the Democratic demographic.
Democrats have always lamented how Republicans just have far better direct-mail lists than they do, and how the Republicans are just plain better at it. And they do have better lists and they are better at it. But I've always thought that it wouldn't really matter all that much if the Democrats had high quality lists too. The truth is that direct-mail, for whatever reason, just works with folks who are apt to give money to Republican campaigns. And it just doesn't with Dems, or at least not nearly as well. It's a different demographic. For whatever social or cultural reasons, the technology or mechanism -- in this case fundraising by mail -- is just particularly well suited to one demographic and not to the other.
But the Internet does seem to work for Democrats. That was clear in the spectacular early success of the Dean campaign and now you're seeing it in smaller ways in individual House races. That doesn't mean that it won't work equally well for Republicans; we just don't know yet. But for the first time in a long time Democrats have a technology, a mechanism that is allowing them to raise large sums of money, not from a few well-heeled givers but from large numbers of energized Democrats giving $10, $50 or $100 a shot. It's already starting to make a difference.
And as long as we're at it, there's another special election coming up in which a Democrat has a good chance to pick up a seat currently held by a Republican. That's the June 1st special election for South Dakota's single House seat. The Democrat is Stephanie Herseth.
--Josh Marshall
According to this AP article France has convened a special meeting to decide, among other things, whether to send peace-keepers into Haiti.
Doesn't this raise some Monroe Doctrine issues?
And, no, I'm not kidding.
--Josh Marshall
Fiction: "Then close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself, 'There's no place like home. There's no place like home.'"
Source: The Wizard of Oz.
Reality: "The artificial windows revealed an inviting blue sky. Bush portrayed a similarly sunny outlook with remarks that used "optimistic" or "optimism" seven times in 49 minutes. He repeatedly stressed the power of positive thinking as an engine of job creation."
Source: "Bush Upbeat on Economy in Campaign Preview in Fla.", Mike Allen, Washington Post, Feb. 17th, 2004.
--Josh Marshall
I came home this afternoon and saw this headline on the front page of the CNN website: "Bush says Democrats would threaten fiscal health."
The article's lede said Bush told a crowd in Florida that "Democrats would endanger America's fiscal health by raising taxes."
This is one of many reasons why President Bush is in trouble. On fiscal policy, he has not simply lost all credibility. With claims like these, he is right on his way to becoming the butt of jokes. And laughter and derision are in many ways the deadliest bogies in politics.
When the president came into office the budget surplus was over $200 billion. Now the deficit is over $500 billion.
Even my frail grasp of mathematics tells me that's a deterioration in the nation's fiscal health of roughly three-quarters of a trillion dollars in the three years he's been in office. And for almost all of that time the president's party controlled both houses of congress.
And he says the Democrats are a danger to the nation's fiscal health?
This is the arsonist in your house telling you that stranger outside with the hose can't be trusted.
--Josh Marshall
On Friday, I reported on a tense exchange between <$Ad$>Helen Thomas and Scott McClellan over whether the president had taken time off from the Guard because he had been compelled to perform community service.
Now Harry Jaffe provides some helpful follow-up on the spat in The Washingtonian.
Thomas says “I think they are getting pretty nervous about this."
McClellan says "Helen was asking about trashy rumors. There’s a difference between trashy rumors and journalism. I will not dignify them from the podium."
--Josh Marshall
"'I never gave anybody hell,' he would later say, 'I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.'" David McCullough quoting Harry S. Truman, Truman, p. 664.
--Josh Marshall
Thirty-five years old today. In the last several <$Ad$>months this marker seemed hard to get my head around, and more than a little daunting. But now that it's here, it feels right, like it's where I should be.
Thank you very sincerely to all who've sent good wishes.
I took a light week last week. But this week ahead we should be back to the standard frequency of posts. And there's certainly plenty to write about.
The new line out of the White House is that they really just haven't been in campaign mode. But with the Democrats being so mean and ungenerous, well ... they'll have to let loose the dogs.
Allegedly predicting this shift, Peggy Noonan has a piece in the Post today which, among other things, is, in the first few grafs, a good example of cliche and slander gussied up to look like literature. It's worth taking a moment to read.
The key to so much of this is that Republicans -- particularly those in the president's orbit -- simply don't have much experience being on the receiving end of what they normally serve up with such alacrity and zest. They're knocked off balance. Their breath is a bit taken away.
There is a natural tendency for each side to believe the other side is meaner, more disciplined, more unfair, more this, that, and the other. But it's only very recently that Democrats have had enough of an infrastructure of media and fundraising to raise the attention of their ideological competitors. And the White House has, for literally years now, been sowing the wind while using aggressive tactics and the climate of national emergency to knock back any response.
That's beginning to change.
More on all of this soon.
--Josh Marshall
Mathew Gross was Director of Internet Communications for the Dean campaign. But that title, if anything, belied his importance. He was one of the real wizards behind the Dean Internet phenomenon.
He's now left the campaign and set up his own blog.
It's one you won't want to miss.
In fact, Joe Trippi has set up a blog too.
--Josh Marshall
