Right Wing Nut House

It is very difficult to examine Carl Bernstein’s lengthy piece in Vanity Fair calling for a Senate investigation into the policies of the Bush Administration if, for no other reason, than trying to figure out the author’s purpose. There are times when Bernstein seems to be advocating the formation of a Senate Committee a la the Senate Watergate Committee (indeed, he cites the Ervin Committee endlessly as an example of good, bi-partisan government at work) and then there are times when he seems to be saying that we should simply skip the investigation and go right to impeachment.

Clearly, Bernstein was torn between trying to write an overview of what troubles him about the Bush Administration (and not coincidentally, Congressional Republicans) and a bill of particulars for impeachment and conviction of the President. In that respect, the article comes off as a vicious partisan attack, repeating every opposition charge made against the President over the last five years. Some of Bernstein’s charges actually border on the surreal as in his blaming Bush for “losing” New Orleans, as if the President could have held back the flood waters or moderated the winds of hurricane Katrina in some way. Botching the recovery is a legitimate criticism. Blaming the President for the weather is silly.

That said, Bernstein’s indictment cannot be easily dismissed. Nor should it be. Thoughtful Republicans, as Bernstein points out, have raised serious questions about many of the particulars the author uses to illustrate what he and the Democrats consider to be Administration malfeasance. Specifically, the roots of detainee abuse, the questionable legality of the NSA intercept program (of which no one can make a definitive legal judgement due to a lack of specifics), the continuing controversy over pre-war intelligence and whether it was “twisted” or simply mistaken, and a host of other issues that Bernstein says requires a bi-partisan Senate investigating Committee to examine.

Bernstein is dreaming if he actually believes it is possible for such a Committee to be formed by Republicans. He is being equally frivolous if he thinks that Senate Democrats would demonstrate even the minimum amount of bi-partisanship required not to turn the workings of such a committee into a three ring circus. And he cannot be serious in comparing the Senate Watergate Committee from 30 years ago - a time that the saw the three major networks taking extraordinary care in their coverage of the Committee’s deliberations - with any such committee convened today where cable news, Comedy Central, MTV, CMT, Pat Robertson, and even Al Gore’s Current TV would all be vying for audience and attention.

The world of news and news gathering have undergone a revolution since Watergate with not only the proliferation of news outlets but the way in which news itself is covered. I cannot imagine investigative hearings of the kind envisioned by Mr. Bernstein not degenerating into the most vile media spectacle of the age, a feeding frenzy that would render any judgement made by such a committee suspect in the eyes of most fair minded Americans.

Even more worrisome is the absolutely chilling effect such hearings would have on the Office of the President. There are legitimate questions regarding the questionable use of executive power by the Bush Administration. Only the most partisan Republican could say otherwise. It is part of the democratic process that these questions be asked, debated, agonized over, and examined closely for any actual abuse. But in an age of terror where a strong Chief Executive is absolutely essential to protect the homeland, can we afford another emasculation of Presidential powers as occurred in the wake of Watergate? Some of what President Bush has done to wage war against Islamic jihadists has stretched his enumerated and implied constitutional powers to the limit. For this reason, a serious examination by Congress may, in fact, be necessary to resolve questions of legality so that future Presidents will have the freedom - or be constrained as the case may be - to act surely and decisively on our behalf to protect us without worrying about whether the House Judiciary Committee will seek to throw him out of office.

In this respect, I agree with Bernstein that the Republican Congress has failed miserably. The last 5 years have seen the Congress abrogate its responsibilities as overseers of the American republic. Charges of corruption in war contracts, Katrina contracts, the waste of taxpayer’s money in both of those enterprises, and a lack of curiosity on the part of Congress to delve deeply into issues like domestic spying, detainee abuse, the war between the White House and the CIA, the Saddam documents, and even the leaking of classified materials that Mr. Bernstein applauds but which only the most rabid Democratic partisan would see as harmless to our national security.

But nothing happens in a vacuum. And the fact of the matter is, we live in a time when the opposition party simply cannot be trusted to maintain even the appearance of impartiality if such hearings were to convene. If this sounds like both parties are at fault for the current state of affairs, so be it. Both sides are being driven by rabid partisans that make up their respective base of support. This kind of polarization simply was not present 30 years ago when the Watergate Committee hearings convened and would today lead to judgements by a similar kind of investigative committee suspect in the eyes of nearly half of the electorate regardless of what evidence emerged or conclusions reached.

For Bernstein’s part, he makes many compelling arguments for investigating the President while at the same time offering some of the flimsiest evidence for impeachment:

Perhaps there are facts or mitigating circumstances, given the extraordinary nature of conceiving and fighting a war on terror, that justify some of the more questionable policies and conduct of this presidency, even those that turned a natural disaster in New Orleans into a catastrophe of incompetence and neglect. But the truth is we have no trustworthy official record of what has occurred in almost any aspect of this administration, how decisions were reached, and even what the actual policies promulgated and approved by the president are. Nor will we, until the subpoena powers of the Congress are used (as in Watergate) to find out the facts—not just about the war in Iraq, almost every aspect of it, beginning with the road to war, but other essential elements of Bush’s presidency, particularly the routine disregard for truthfulness in the dissemination of information to the American people and Congress.

The first fundamental question that needs to be answered by and about the president, the vice president, and their political and national-security aides, from Donald Rumsfeld to Condoleezza Rice, to Karl Rove, to Michael Chertoff, to Colin Powell, to George Tenet, to Paul Wolfowitz, to Andrew Card (and a dozen others), is whether lying, disinformation, misinformation, and manipulation of information have been a basic matter of policy—used to overwhelm dissent; to hide troublesome truths and inconvenient data from the press, public, and Congress; and to defend the president and his actions when he and they have gone awry or utterly failed.

This “How often do you beat your wife, Mr. President” approach may score points in partisan Democratic circles but can hardly be taken seriously in any other context. For instance, the idea that dissent from Bush Administration policies has been overwhelmed is laughable. And hiding “inconvenient” facts and data from the press? This is an impeachable offense? Lying to Congress or concealing information from them would be a crime. Spinning data to put the best possible face on the news is an art form, one of the truly regrettable aspects of the modern presidency. Each succeeding Administration over the last 25 years has sought to manage the press and the information available to it. The idea of making such a practice grounds for impeachment is ridiculous.

Having said that, Mr. Bernstein’s point regarding the lack of understanding of how several high profile failures of the Bush Administration came about are good ones. Examining the decision making process and even second guessing executive department decisions is a legitimate function of Congress that Republicans have ignored. This is simply bad government and conservatives who care about this country should be outraged at the lackadaisical way in which Congress has gone about the vital business of oversight during the Bush Administration. They demonstrated no such reluctance during the Clinton years.
And while politics certainly plays a role in such decisions, oversight responsibilities even of the majority party must be embraced if for no other reason than to maintain the separation of powers between Congress and the Executive.

Will such investigations lead to the impeachment of the President? Here’s Bernstein’s summary of the charges:

Most of what we have learned about the reality of this administration—and the disconcerting mind-set and decision-making process of President Bush himself—has come not from the White House or the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security or the Treasury Department, but from insider accounts by disaffected members of the administration after their departure, and from distinguished journalists, and, in the case of a skeletal but hugely significant body of information, from a special prosecutor. And also, of late, from an aide-de-camp to the British prime minister. Almost invariably, their accounts have revealed what the president and those serving him have deliberately concealed—torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, and its apparent authorization by presidential fiat; wholesale N.S.A. domestic wiretapping in contravention of specific prohibitive law; brutal interrogations of prisoners shipped secretly by the C.I.A. and U.S. military to Third World gulags; the nonexistence of W.M.D. in Iraq; the role of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney’s chief of staff in divulging the name of an undercover C.I.A. employee; the non-role of Saddam Hussein and Iraq in the events of 9/11; the death by friendly fire of Pat Tillman (whose mother, Mary Tillman, told journalist Robert Scheer, “The administration tried to attach themselves to his virtue and then they wiped their feet with him”); the lack of a coherent post-invasion strategy for Iraq, with all its consequent tragedy and loss and destabilizing global implications; the failure to coordinate economic policies for America’s long-term financial health (including the misguided tax cuts) with funding a war that will drive the national debt above a trillion dollars; the assurance of Wolfowitz (since rewarded by Bush with the presidency of the World Bank) that Iraq’s oil reserves would pay for the war within two to three years after the invasion; and Bush’s like-minded confidence, expressed to Blair, that serious internecine strife in Iraq would be unlikely after the invasion.

But most grievous and momentous is the willingness—even enthusiasm, confirmed by the so-called Downing Street Memo and the contemporaneous notes of the chief foreign-policy adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair—to invent almost any justification for going to war in Iraq (including sending up an American U-2 plane painted with U.N. markings to be deliberately shot down by Saddam Hussein’s air force, a plan hatched while the president, the vice president, and Blair insisted to the world that war would be initiated “only as a last resort”). Attending the meeting between Bush and Blair where such duplicity was discussed unabashedly (”intelligence and facts” would be jiggered as necessary and “fixed around the policy,” wrote the dutiful aide to the prime minister) were Ms. Rice, then national-security adviser to the president, and Andrew Card, the recently departed White House chief of staff.

Bernstein sets the impeachment bar extremely low which, in my mind, destroys his entire critique. “Misleading” the country in the lead up to the war would seem to be his most serious charge. But relying on the so called Downing Street “memos” would be problematic in the extreme. What exactly does” fixed” mean? And Bernstein’s characterization of intelligence and facts being “jiggered as necessary” is pure partisan spin.

This is not the only partisanship shown by Bernstein in the article:

Is incompetence an impeachable offense? The question is another reason to defer the fraught matter of impeachment (if deserved) in the Bush era until the ground is prepared by a proper fact-finding investigation and public hearings conducted by a sober, distinguished committee of Congress.

We have never had a presidency in which the single unifying thread that flows through its major decision-making was incompetence—stitched together with hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale. There will be no shortage of witnesses to question about the subject,…

The “question” of whether or not incompetence is an impeachable offense is ludicrous and if any Congressional investigation were to take it up would be grounds for committing the bunch of them. This is simply not serious and Bernstein should know it.

And Bernstein’s constant, annoying comparisons to Watergate smack of a certain kind of triumphalism on his part that dilutes his main arguments. Nixon’s impeachable offenses were committed against domestic political opponents. Bush’s transgressions - if any there be that would rise to the level of impeachment - would be against the enemies of the United States except for the question of the Administration’s pre war activities and the pushback against Joe Wilson’s lies (which should also be seen in context of the partisan warfare being carried out by the CIA against the White House).

But it is at the end of his piece that Bernstein proves he’s learned very little in 30 years:

After Nixon’s resignation, it was often said that the system had worked. Confronted by an aberrant president, the checks and balances on the executive by the legislative and judicial branches of government, and by a free press, had functioned as the founders had envisioned.

The system has thus far failed during the presidency of George W. Bush—at incalculable cost in human lives, to the American political system, to undertaking an intelligent and effective war against terror, and to the standing of the United States in parts of the world where it previously had been held in the highest regard.

There was understandable reluctance in the Congress to begin a serious investigation of the Nixon presidency. Then there came a time when it was unavoidable. That time in the Bush presidency has arrived.

Contrary to what Bernstein and the press have believed for 30 years, the “system” failed in that President Nixon was hounded to resign rather than go to trial in the Senate where he almost certainly would have been convicted. Our “system” does not include the press having the power to change who is President. That power is constitutionally reserved for the Congress. And George Bush is suffering from an excess of “hubris and mendacity on a Nixonian scale?”

The author’s crack about our “standing in the world” also shows a total lack comprehension on Bernstein’s part. This is part of the myth surrounding 9/11 where everyone supported us until George Bush blew it and made everyone mad at us. The outpouring of sympathy for the American people was unprecedented following 9/11. And so was the feeling of satisfaction on the part of even our closest allies that the government of the United States had suffered a blow. Former Ambassador to Great Britain Phillip Lader was reduced to tears on the BBC program Question Time 2 days after 9/11 by people in the audience who jeered and slow handclapped when he tried to defend American policy.

Is Bernstein correct? Is it time to investigate Bush? If there was a way it could be done that would guarantee even the appearance of fairness, I would be for Congress looking into some of the more problematic areas of the Bush Administration’s habit of sidling up to the line of legality with regards to the exercise of executive power. But since there is no way such an investigation wouldn’t degenerate into a simple exercise in partisanship, why bother? If the Democrats take control of Congress, they will have such a partisan investigation. And unless some “smoking gun” can be found that shows the President committing outrageously illegal acts, there is no way Bush would ever be convicted.

Bernstein’s article, a combination of thought provoking analysis and partisan hackery, should at least act as a catalyst for a discussion that is long overdue by Republicans regarding the state of their own house. Something must be done if the party is going to maintain not only its majority status but also the confidence of the American people. We might start by taking a hard look at the people currently in leadership positions and hold them accountable for their actions.

UPDATE

Ralph Luker makes the same point I made here about the danger of impeachment becoming a regular feature in Washington when there is divided government:

Of course, impeachment proceedings begin in the House of Representatives, not the Senate, but holding impeachment proceedings in the second terms of two presidents in a row would set a terrible precedent for the future of the American presidency. Two recent presidents have set some bad precedents, themselves, however; and there seems to be no other remedy short of enduring another 2½ years of this.

Oil.

Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it. And with levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rising with still uncertain effects (if any) on our future climate, oil as a modern culprit for most of the evils in the world makes trying to secure reliable access to it almost an apologetic exercise.

In the interest of oil, we kowtow to some pretty nasty governments and nasty people who ordinarily we would be looking to isolate and condemn. Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are perfect examples of governments run by kleptocratic despots who we dare not offend by pointing out too many of their shortcomings lest the spigots be dialed back a bit and the price of petroleum skyrocket.

For it isn’t only access to the commodity that’s important, it’s how much it costs us to buy. Oil is not only the lifeblood of industrialized civilization, cheap oil is the difference in capitalist democracies between good economies and bad economies. This singular fact has caused governments over the years (including our own) to seek influence and even control over the governments that are blessed by luck and geography in having the stuff. Bad economies are not healthy for a leader’s political career. Just ask Jimmy Carter.

But is that all oil is? A commodity for which nations fight for control in an endless game of move and countermove? Obviously no. Cheap, plentiful oil is the difference between life and death for millions. Not enough oil to harvest the crops and get them to market? Not enough oil or ruinously expensive fuel for heat in winter?

These are not made-up scenarios. The tiny disruption in supply in 1979 due to the Iranian revolution which resulted in a 3% shortfall and economic chaos ensued. Panic caused gas lines with people topping off their tanks because no one was sure there would be oil tomorrow. Tens of thousands of Americans were laid off when companies that depended on oil to stay open were forced to close their doors.

Now imagine a crisis with a 15% shortfall in supply. Far fetched? In Iran, a madman has his fingers wrapped around the jugular of the west because President Ahmadinejad controls the Straits of Hormuz through which a significant portion of the world’s oil sails every day. All this holocaust denier need do is close his fingers and the economic calamity would be upon us in a matter of weeks.

The ultimate question then as it relates to last night’s thrilling episode: Are Logan’s actions justifiable under any circumstances? Logan has taken pre-emptive action to secure America’s supply of oil for the foreseeable future in spite of the fact that there is no present crisis in the supply or availability of oil. Logan sold nerve gas to terrorists, acquiesced in the killing of a former President, caused the deaths of numerous other innocents just so that he could invoke the military terms of a treaty that would allow American troops (and we assume American oil companies) access to the largely undeveloped oil fields of central Asia.

If Logan or any President committed such heinous acts under those circumstances, they would be impeached. But suppose there was a crisis of supply or access? Would we see Logan’s actions in a different light? I daresay a President who was faced with such a catastrophe and did nothing to address the needs of the American people might also find himself on trial.

In the midst of the oil crisis of ‘79, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, figuring correctly that America and the west were distracted. One of President Carter’s sanctions for the Soviet’s misbehavior was preventing the sale of wheat to Russia. Our domestic left (and American farmers) went ballistic. How dare we deny food to hungry people! But couldn’t a similar question be asked of oil producing nations? In the end, is oil just a commodity like gold or silver? Or is it something more? Is it ever worth going to war over? Destabilizing governments for? Killing for?

Moral questions with no easy answers…

SUMMARY

We find Jack and Wayne Palmer in a parking lot as a car pulls up. It’s Bill whose character hasn’t been getting much face time lately which is probably why the writers stuck him in there without warning. For a show that’s supposed to be in “real time,” not seeing Jack call Bill and ask him to meet was a little burp in the continuity universe. Not too jarring, but still, an annoyance.

After dropping off Wayne (and we assume the dead bank manager Carl bleeding all over the backseat of Jack’s car) Audrey calls to inform Jack that Secretary Heller has landed and to please hurry. Greeting her mystified father, Audrey wonders if the Secretary’s bodyguards can be trusted. Given the way the show is going, I don’t trust anyone who isn’t signed through next year.

Jack pulls up and, after getting Heller away from his bodyguards, plays the incriminating tape. Realizing immediately the significance of Jack’s evidence, the Secretary wants to confront Logan. Leaving the hangar where he, Jack, and Audrey were discussing the tape, Heller re-enters with his bodyguards, walks up to Jack, and in the best tradition of his office, chops Jack in the throat sending the surprised agent to the ground where he is immediately restrained by Heller’s bodyguards. It turns out that our man Heller has determined that revelations regarding the President’s dealings with terrorists and murderers would be too much for the American people to bear not to mention the “damage” to the office of President.

Not mentioned by Heller is that the American people are a helluva lot tougher than elitists like the Defense Secretary think and that the unanswered question regarding Logan would be “How much more damage can be done to the office that hasn’t been done already?” Besides, if the office can survive a Nixon or a Clinton, it can certainly survive a Logan. That said, I’m sure there are some of you who might even agree with Heller’s actions in restraining both Jack and Audrey while trying to get Logan to do the right thing and resign. But Jack is right. Logan cannot be trusted and Heller was only going to make himself a target.

Any bets on when Heller goes to that great big Pentagon in the sky? I say as soon as next week when Logan will start tying up loose ends.

At the ranch, Logan and Buckaroo Banzai discuss the turn of events that has resulted in Jack escaping from the bank with the tape. Logan assures Buckaroo that once CTU finds out where Jack is, he’ll pass along the info so that the incriminating tape can be recovered.

Back at CTU, Miles hatches a plan to trap Chloe using Sweet Sherry to pass false information to her about the hunt for Jack. When Chloe tries to get in touch with Audrey, Miles traces the call to the airport where Jack and his love are now being held. This guy Heller isn’t much of a father. Last year, he gave CTU the go ahead to shoot truth serum into his son and this year, he has his bullyboys manacle poor Audrey to a pole in a storage room.

No Father’s Day presents this year, I guess.

Granny Hayes tells Logan that CTU has pinpointed Jack’s location at which point the President orders CTU to stand down, that he will send in the military. Confused, Granny calls Mike Novak which destroys about half the current conspiracy theories on the web. Novak, he tells us, was busy doing “other things” which is why we haven’t seen him for 3 episodes. When Granny tells Mike about being pulled off the Jack Op, Novak calls the man in charge of martial law in Los Angeles, General Warren. When queried about the Jack Op, Warren confesses his ignorance. Mike doesn’t stop there. He sees the Veep who tries to reassure him of Logan’s intentions. Now completely in the dark, Mike takes his questions directly to the President.

The tissue of lies told by Logan to Mike, to his wife later, to the Veep, to Granny at CTU, and to everyone else is a house of cards. All it will take for the whole rotten edifice to come tumbling down will be exposing one of those lies. Mike suspects he’s having smoke blown his direction but does nothing, not believing for an instant Logan’s resurrection of the Chinese gambit as a reason for using “covert ops” to capture Jack. And Logan does his usual brush-off of “I am the President. Don’t second guess me” which perplexes Mike even more.

Logan eagerly calls Henderson and tells him where Jack and the tape can be found. Buckaroo boards a helicopter (black of course) with another half dozen men, found via his endless supply of traitors, mercs, killers, and thugs. Jack has been methodically working his way through Henderson’s private army the last few episodes and one wonders if Banzai will ever run out of accomplices.

Back at CTU, Chloe realizes too late that she’s been trapped. She’s apprehended by clueless CTU security who seem to have dropped the ridiculous red shirts they were wearing in favor of more traditional white. Then again, it is spring…

In the holding room, Miles gloats over Chloe who can’t bring herself to tell the truth about what’s going on. However, proving herself every bit the field agent, she uses her geek charms (and some sleight of hand) to relieve Miles of his key card that she uses immediately to try and make her getaway. Confronted in the hallway by Sweet Sherry who is about to turn her in, Chloe begs for understanding. Failing that, she tries a little blackmail, telling Sherry that if she’s caught and it turns out Jack is innocent, she will recommend a psyche test for her. Probably administered by Dr. Feelgood, I would hesitate too if someone told me I was going to be up for a psyche test at CTU. The blackmail works and Chloe makes her escape.

Heller calls Logan and acts like the cat who swallowed the canary. Logan feigns ignorance even after the Secretary says “I think you know exactly what this is about.” Realizing he’s about to be exposed, Logan calls Buckaroo and orders him to get the tape otherwise he’s toast. Thus, one of the more interesting meetings of the entire series is about to take place.

Seeing Heller arrive, Nutzo Martha’s political antennae is fully extended. Something is wrong, she asks Aaron? And here, we get the slightest hint that Martha and Aaron may have played a little slap and tickle in the past when, asking Aaron to tell her what’s going on, she sidles up very close to the Secret Service agent and says in a low, throaty voice, “You can trust me. You know that.” Aaron promises to meet her out at the stables shortly. We are not surprised that when she gets out there, Aaron is nowhere to be seen, a victim of knowing too much.

Meanwhile, the confrontation between Logan and Heller, superbly staged and acted, gets underway with Heller accusing and Logan denying. Finally realizing that Heller has the goods, Logan tries to justify his crimes:

LOGAN: How dare you sit there and judge me. Until you sit in my chair, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

HELLER: Your chair is not a throne, Charles.

LOGAN: I am protecting the interests of our country.

HELLER: You mean oil…

LOGAN: (Shouting) Yes! YES! This country needs energy more than you or anyone in this gridlocked government cares to admit. We’ll see how you judge me when the cost of oil goes up to $100 a barrel and the people who put me in office can’t afford to heat their homes or run their cars.

HELLER: And you think that justifies the blood on your hands?

No answer from the former Jellyfish now a simply pathetic excuse for an American President.

Heller demands Logan’s resignation by morning. He has no choice but to agree. And as an extra measure of security, Heller demands that Vice President Gardener be present when the document is signed.

Chloe, after waltzing out of the top-secret, highly secured CTU headquarters and driving away in her own car, shows up at Bill’s front door like a lost little girl. Bill welcomes the waif into what appears to be a home worth a cool quarter mil, not bad for government work. The two get busy trying to get back up to speed on the rapidly developing chain of events.

What with Henderson and his goons on their way and Jack realizing that Logan couldn’t be trusted any further than he could throw him, Bauer figures out a way to use the steam pipe to melt the plastic restraints off of his hands. Freeing himself with a series of painful grunts (which means you or I would be screaming at the top of our lungs as our wrists were seared), Jack cold cocks one guard and surprises the other (from whom he retakes possession of the precious tape). Jack is about ready to escape when the dreaded black helicopter makes its ominous appearance and opens up on the Secretary’s bodyguard and Bauer.

A terrific firefight ensues with Jack taking down two thugs even before they can disembark from the copter. The bodyguard proves his metal by taking down two thugs himself before meeting the fate of all those who try to help Jack in gunfights. As a denouement to the battle, Jack takes careful aim and blows up a gas truck taking out the last of Henderson’s 3rd crew. Henderson himself has snuck into the hangar where poor Audrey has been stuck waiting for Jack.

Another excellently done confrontation this time between Jack and his nemeses Henderson. Buckaroo has Audrey under the gun and Jack tries appealing to the better angels of his nature:

JACK: Let her go, Christopher!

HENDERSON: After I have the recording.

JACK: Why are you doing this? Why are you protecting Logan?

HENDERSON: I’m protecting something far more important than Charles Logan.

JACK: What?

HENDERSON: The integrity of our government.

JACK: Our government has no integrity. Not when someone like Charles Logan occupies the Presidency.

Do we have another clue here? “I’m protecting something far more important than Charles Logan.”

COULD HENDERSON ACTUALLY BE WORKING FOR AN AGENCY TRYING TO “STING” THE PRESIDENT? Or was it simply Henderson’s way of saying that he’s a patriot?

Anything is possible.

Jack eventually relents in giving the tape to Henderson but not before Buckeroo slashes poor Audrey in an artery in her arm thus putting her on the death watch. Jack has 15 minutes or its back to being an oil driller and having to put up with 15 year old Derek and his stacked but clueless mom. To forestall that horrible prospect, Jack applies a tourniquet to Audrey’s profusely bleeding arm.

Henderson calls Logan with the good news about the tape just as the President was about to sign his resignation. Then, in front of the Vice President, Logan fires Heller. But Heller isn’t done. He spills the plot while a fascinated and thoroughly perplexed Vice President Gardener looks on. Does he believe Heller? Let’s hope he’s not as dumb as most Vice Presidents.

Heller is escorted out of the Presidential compound but one gets the distinct feeling he will be back and that he will thoroughly enjoy his second visit.

BODY COUNT

Six thugs are done in. One good guy bites the dust. Jack had a fun night as he got to blow up a gas truck and kill 4 bad guys.

JACK: 30

SHOW: 181

SPECULATION

Aaron’s disappearance is troubling. Only Martha knew he was going to be out there. Is Martha part of the plot or does she have her own ax to grind?

Why is martial law still in effect? This, plus a few other nagging questions leads me to believe that one more shoe is going to drop on this plot before the season is over.

UPDATE

Don’t forget to visit Blogs4Bauer for the best 24 commentary around.

I missed all the fun this past weekend piling on poor Maryscott O’Connor when the pajama-clad left/dom exploded from the pages of the Washington Post onto righty blogs as the poster girl for the Daffy Duck left.

First, I was happy to see that we have one thing in common; we both smoke when we write. Longtime readers of this site know that when I prepare for my muse to take me in her arms and stroke me (yes…it’s THAT kind of relationship friends), I brew a strong pot of fresh bean coffee (this time of day I prefer either Kona or a Jamaican blend) and carefully place a freshly opened pack of Basic 100’s Full Flavor cigarettes within easy reach. The two - coffee and cigarettes - go together like sex and Barry White. And when in the throes of creative ecstasy, watching as the words writhe effortlessly (or tortuously) on the monitor in front of me, I unconsciously caress one cigarette after another, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs and exhaling a Murrowesque cloud of thoughtful, wisdom drenched, aromatic vapors.

If I can’t write like Murrow, at least I kinda smell like him.

Anyway, Maryscott sure sounded angry, didn’ she? Doc Sanity should make a housecall on this fruit and nut cake. Failing that, I think the poor woman needs a gigantic hug from all of us righties who make her life so miserable, day after day.

But Maryscott has the advantage of being in possession of at least half a brain. Poor Jim Carroll of the Boston Globe has not been vouchsafed such a luxury:

LAST WEEK, the rattling of sabers filled the air. Various published reports, most notably one from Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, indicated that Washington is removing swords from scabbards and heightening the threat aimed at Iran, which refuses to suspend its nuclear project. It may be that such reports, based on alarming insider accounts of planning and military exercises, are themselves part of Washington’s strategy of coercive diplomacy. But who can trust the Bush administration to play games of feint and intimidation without unleashing forces it cannot control, stumbling again into disastrous confrontation?

An Iranian official dismissed the talk of imminent US military action as mere psychological warfare, but then he made a telling observation. Instead of attributing the escalations of threat to strategic impulses, the official labeled them a manifestation of ”Americans’ anger and despair.”

The phrase leapt out of the news report, demanding to be taken seriously. I hadn’t considered it before, but anger and despair so precisely define the broad American mood that those emotions may be the only things that President Bush and his circle have in common with the surrounding legions of his antagonists. We are in anger and despair because every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass. Bush’s team is in anger and despair because their grand and — to them — selfless ambitions have been thwarted at every turn. Indeed, anger and despair can seem universally inevitable responses to what America has done and what it faces now.

“Rattling of sabers”…”removing swords from scabbards”… It sounds like Mr. Carroll has accidentally stumbled onto a game of Dungeons and Dragons. And the fact that “every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass” would make things pretty dicey for us if only someone would please tell us 1) which nightmares are Carroll talking about and 2) who did the warning?

This is called hyperbole. Writers use it in lieu of outright lying when trying to sound like they know what they’re talking about. Not only does it give them a privileged frame of reference (Am I the only one who racked my brain frantically trying to conjure up which nightmares he was talking about and which one of 10,000 unhinged lefties might have warned us about them?) but it certainly does heighten the drama, doesn’t it?

Except, of course, this is not a screenplay, it’s a newspaper column. Or is it? Mr. Carroll’s psychological analysis of the Bush Administration’s “anger and despair” as well as our own “anger and despair” (I guess “anger and despair” are lethally contagious) makes it seem as if rather than appearing on the OpEd page, Carroll’s screed might have better been published in another venue more suited to his penetrating amateur psychoanalyzing.

I guess Mad Magazine didn’t have the space available.

Mr. Carroll explains:

While the anger and despair of those on the margins of power only increase the experience of marginal powerlessness, the anger and despair of those who continue to shape national policy can be truly dangerous if such policy owes more to these emotions than to reasoned realism. Is such affective disarray subliminally shaping the direction of US policy? That seems an impudent question. Yet all at once, like an out-of-focus lens snapping into clarity, it makes sense of what is happening. With the US military already stressed to an extreme in Iraq by challenges from a mainly Sunni insurgency, why in the world would Washington risk inflaming the Shi’ite population against us by wildly threatening Iran?

But such a thing happened before. It was the Bush administration’s anger and despair at its inability to capture Osama bin Laden that fueled the patent irrationality of the move against Saddam Hussein. The attack on Iraq three years ago was, at bottom, a blind act of rage at the way Al Qaeda and its leaders had eluded us in Afghanistan; a blindness that showed itself at once in the inadequacy of US war planning. Now, with Iran, nuclear weapons are at issue. And yet look at the self-defeating irrationality of the Bush team’s maneuvering. How do we hope to pressure Tehran into abandoning its nuclear project? Why, by making our threat explicitly nuclear.

OH FOR GOD’S SAKE!

I’m trying very hard not to lose control, a task made nearly impossible when reading such imbecilic, idiotic drivel.

The attack on Iraq three years ago was, at bottom, a blind act of rage at the way Al Qaeda and its leaders had eluded us in Afghanistan; a blindness that showed itself at once in the inadequacy of US war planning.

You’ll have to excuse me while I wipe my monitor of the spittle that exploded from my sputtering mouth, which occurred just prior to my jaw hitting the floor and starting to dig.

“At bottom” nothing. Say it was for oil. Say it was to avenge Saddam’s attempted assassination of his father. Say it was to get his buddies at Haliburton richer. Say it was because Bush knew there were no WMD’s but invaded anyway to help him win re-election.

Posit any crackpot, confused, moonbat theory about why we invaded Iraq. But to say that “at bottom” the invasion was an “act of blind rage” is mindless. The notion has no basis in fact whatsoever, There is not a shred of proof for it.

Proof? Proof? We don’t need no stinkin’ proof. We’ve got Jimbo Carroll and his Travelling Pseudo-Psychoanalytical Crystal Ball to look into the souls of men and tell us what they’re really thinking and feeling. And, of course, that special insight granted to only the purest of liberals who, after all, only have our best interests at heart and a desire to tell us what it all means.

And is this guy serious about “the inadequacy of US war planning” in Afghanistan? We did in a couple of months what the second most powerful army in the history of human civilization - the Soviet Military - couldn’t accomplish in a decade! And this represents “inadequacy in US war planning?” Get. A. Grip.

It’s almost as if Carroll has ensconced himself in an alternate imaginary universe, oblivious to the reality in this one, skipping along with his head in the clouds and his foot in his mouth, spouting his lunacies without realizing that the inhabitants of the real world look upon him as we would a masturbating monkey in the zoo; with a mix of curiosity and embarrassment.

More words of wisdom from our Flatulently Freudian Flim-Flam Fakir:

As if that were not irrational enough, the Bush administration chose this month, in the thick of its nuclear standoff with Tehran, to reveal plans for a new nuclear weapons manufacturing complex of its own — a major escalation of US nuclear capacity. This represents a movement away from merely maintaining our thousands of warheads to replacing them. The promise of new bombs to come, including the so-called bunker-buster under development, may be the final nail in the coffin of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which binds Washington to work for the elimination of nukes, not their enhancement.

Set the cauldron of Iraq to boiling even hotter by daring Iran to join in against us. Justify Iran’s impulse to obtain nuclear capacity by using our own nuclear capacity as a thermo-prod. How self-defeating can our actions get?

Surely, something besides intelligent strategic theory is at work here. Yes. These are the policies of deeply frustrated, angry, and psychologically wounded people. Those of us who oppose them will yield to our own versions of anger and despair at our peril, and the world’s. Fierce but reasoned opposition is more to the point than ever.

“Nuclear standoff?” Um…that would require two states to possess the demon weapons, something that may come to pass sooner rather than later but is not the case at present. Therefore, Carroll can drop the dramatic pretensions anytime he wishes.

As for our “bunker busters,” those have been in development for more than a decade which means that the former Commander in Chief William Jefferson Clinton also signed off on their development. Was he suffering from “anger and despair” too?

Building new nukes and retiring old ones is not against the NPT or START nor is it considered provocative except by anyone but liberals like Carroll who view any attempt by the United States to defend itself as “provocative” by default. I guess when someone says that they wish to destroy you while in the midst of racing to build weapons that can accomplish that task, we should avoid provocations like improving our ability to stop a bunch of maniacs from bringing about the end times.

The hysterics on the left about the United States using nuclear weapons has a kind of breathless, gossipy quality to it - sort of like a bunch of 13 year old girls talking about sex at a sleepover: “And then he kissed me and I got all mushy inside…OOOOOH.” It’s as if the mere discussion of the subject is both exciting and forbidden at the same time while giving the writer a special thrill to be in virgin territory. It’s not going to happen. To believe that there is one chance in a million of it happening is ignorant. Or it is a deliberate attempt to add to the “Bush is evil” theme that seems to be lefty writer’s favorite pastime.

Carroll is not a serious man. And to write a column so full of laughable postulates about the inner motivations of the Bush Administration is to reveal a either a writer who is extremely bored with himself or, more likely, unconsciously transferring his own “anger and despair” onto his enemies.

Wonder what Dr. Sanity would have to say about that?

UPDATE

Jonah Goldberg:

The week the deranged president of Iran again calls for the annihilation of Israel and once again denies the Holocaust ever happpened James Carroll draws the only logical conclusion: Bush is a lunatic and this administration is run by “deeply frustrated, angry, and psychologically wounded people.”

That about covers it…

That old saw which states “All politics are local” was first used (I believe) by former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill when pundits were predicting huge gains for Republicans in the 1978 elections. Jimmy Carter was as unpopular as George Bush and Republicans were rubbing their hands together in anticipation of picking off several Democrats. O’Neill, a burly, old-fashioned Irish pol with the charm of a snake oil salesman and the fighting instincts of a Doberman Pincher was whistling past the graveyard. The Republicans successfully made Carter’s incompetence an issue and picked up 15 seats in the House and 3 in the Senate.

The GOP now faces a similar situation with the Democrats trying to nationalize the upcoming mid-terms while Republicans seek to keep people’s focus on their own Congressional candidate. How successful can the Democrats be in pushing the President front and center in people’s minds? Michael Barone:

The slight uptick in Republican percentages in 2002 and 2004 can be explained by higher Republican turnout. Looking ahead to next November, there is reason to believe that the Republican base is turned off — by high spending, by immigration — and may not turn out as heavily. But if so, how much difference will that make?

Polls are not good predictors of turnout — only elections are. Last week, we had a special election in the 50th district of California, whose Republican congressman resigned in disgrace and went to prison. In 2004, the 50th district voted 55 percent for George W. Bush and 44 percent for John Kerry. Last week, the district voted 53 percent for Republicans (there were 14 candidates, the winner among whom goes on to a June 6 runoff) and 45 percent for Democrats. There were only two of them, and the leader, Francine Busby, got 44 percent of the vote — the same percentage as Kerry. That may be 1 percent higher when the last absentees are counted.

Barone’s reasoning is sound. Even though the “base” may be turned off or unenthusiastic, if relative turnout percentages remain basically the same, the Republicans will lose some ground but probably not the 15 seats necessary for Democrats to take control of the House.

But can one extrapolate a national result from looking at one pro-GOP district? Barone thinks that there are two general hypotheses that govern mid-terms:

Hypothesis One sees House elections as a referendum on the president and his party. If the president’s job rating is above 50 percent, his party tends to suffer only narrow losses or even, as in 1934 and 1998 — and almost in 1962 — makes gains. If the president’s job rating is significantly under 50 percent, his party tends to lose lots of seats.

[...]

Hypothesis One was developed by political scientists and psephologists over many years. Hypothesis Two is one I developed myself, and it’s based only on the elections of the last 10 years. In the five House elections from 1996 to 2004, there has been very little variation in the popular vote percentages for both parties. The Republican percentage of the popular vote for the House has fluctuated between 49 and 51 percent, the Democratic percentage between 46 and 48.5 percent

In other words, our politics has become so polarized that very few minds are changed despite all the Republican missteps thus making turnout the determining factor. And given the GOP’s record in the past 2 elections, this in fact bodes well for the party in November.

This could be especially true if Republicans carry through with their idea to energize at least a few more conservatives by playing the social issues card:

Protection of marriage amendment? Check. Anti-flag burning legislation? Check. New abortion limits? Check.

Between now and the November elections, Republicans are penciling in plans to take action on social issues important to religious conservatives, the foundation of the GOP base, as they defend their congressional majority.

In a year where an unpopular war in Iraq has helped drive President Bush’s approval ratings below 40 percent, core conservatives whose turnout in November is vital to the party want assurances that they are not being taken for granted.

Democrats have no comparable counter-play and must rely, as they did in 2004, on the anger and disgust of their base at the policies and personality of George Bush. This is because so few Republicans (relatively speaking) are willing to walk into a voting booth and pull the lever for the Democrats.

It’s their own fault. I daresay not too many people are willing to vote for a party that called Republican voters after the 2004 election “ignorant mouthbreathers,” or threatened to secede from the Union because they did not want to co-exist with people from the other party.

In fact, I’d say that’s the major difference between 2006 and 1994; it isn’t necessarily the rough percentages of people who identify themselves as Republican or Democrat it’s how many minds can be changed to vote for the other guy. It was even more pronounced a phenomena in the Watergate year of 1974 when the Democrats nearly destroyed the Congressional GOP party by picking up 49 seats in the House and 3 in the Senate (despite having to defend twice as many seats as Republicans). In that election, there were massive numbers of Republican defections. No such trend is possible today.

But can strong dislike for the President really make a difference?

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll showed 47 percent of voters “strongly” disapprove of Bush’s job performance, vs. 20 percent who said they “strongly approve.”

In the recent past, this perennial truism of politics — emotion equals turnout — has worked more to the Republican advantage. Several weeks before the 2002 midterm elections, Bush had 42 percent of voters strongly approving of him, compared with 18 percent in strong opposition. Democrats were stunned on election night when Republicans defied historical patterns and made gains in the House and Senate. The president’s party usually loses seats during the first midterm elections after he takes office.

This number is a mirage. In strong Democratic districts, I daresay opposition to Bush this time around is as close to unanimous as you can get which would drive those numbers to their current stratospheric heights. In strong Republican districts, support for the President may have dropped but not enough to unseat the GOP incumbent. This leaves what the experts have been saying is about 35 seats that are “in play” and ripe for the picking if the Democrats field good candidates and can get out the vote.

So in the end, we’re back to turnout. And even though many Republicans may in fact stay home , they may be offset by an increase in movement conservatives that are energized by the prospect of Republicans dealing with issues near and dear to their hearts.

I am a lot less pessimistic about Republican chances in November now than I was during the winter. Unless things crash in burn in Iraq or some other calamity befalls us, it appears that the Republicans will hold on to their majorities. Their advantage may be cut in half in the House and they may lose 2-3 seats in the Senate, but as it stands now, politics will indeed be played out at the local level and the Democrat’s attempt to nationalize the election to their advantage will fail.

UPDATE

Jim Geraghty agrees with my final analysis and adds this caveat for Democrats:

You’ll recall that in 1996, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t.

And in 1998, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t. (Credit where it’s due, they closed the margin a bit.)

And in 2000, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t, until Jeffords switched parties.

And in 2002, Dick Gephardt said, “We’re going to win back the House!” And Daschle said, “We’re going to expand our majority in the Senate!” But they didn’t.

In 2004, Pelosi and Daschle said, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t.

So I’m not really all that surprised to hear Pelosi and Reid and Schumer saying this year, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!”

Yes, sooner or later, they’re going to be right; it’s unlikely that the GOP will hold both houses of Congress for all eternity. And maybe this is the year. But can we have a little more skepticism? Some acknowledgement that we’ve been hearing these same confident boasts for a decade, and they’ve turned out, cycle after cycle, to be mostly empty bluster?

Do you mean to tell me that the mainstream press and the Democrats were confidently predicting victory just prior to the last 5 elections only to be totally, completely, 100% WRONG?

Never would have guessed it…

Are you going to be a “stay at home” Republican this November?

Those of us who have had nasty fantasies about stringing up some Republican leaders by their feet and slowly lowering them into a vat of boiling oil have found that idea more than a little tempting. D.J. Drummond argues strenuously against it:

If the Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives, their stated policies and intentions leave no doubt that they would harass Vice-President Cheney and President Bush, with a near-absolute likelihood that they would impeach President Bush, regardless of the fact that there are no valid grounds for such an action. If the Democrats gained control of the Senate, you could expect the end of any confirmation of any justice in the mold of Scalia, Roberts, or Alito. There can be no doubt that should the Democrats gain control of both bodies, they would work relentlessly to remove both Bush and Cheney.

A Democrat-controlled House would not only deny making the Bush tax cuts permanent, but would unquestionably increase taxes, as is the historical model. A Democrat-controlled Senate would demand the immediate retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, while making sure to punish any nation brash enough to support American efforts in the past half-decade. A Democrat-controlled body, whether House or Senate, will immediately move to both make citizenship for illegal Hispanic aliens easier, and to grant voting rights to undeserving demographic groups, including convited felons and illegals who don’t even desire citizenship.

I agree to a certain extent with DJ, although I think the Democrats will be so busy investigating Bush they won’t have time to do much of anything else. All that pent up rage and hate carried around by the liberals for 6 years is more than likely to dominate every committee in the House and the Senate as various committee chairmen and sub-committee chairmen vie with each other to see which of them can generate the most anti-Bush, headline grabbing revelations in the shortest possible time. And since Republicans haven’t seen fit to practice any oversight on such matters as post war contracts in Iraq, Katrina relief funds, the role of the mercs in Iraq, the Pentagon’s post war planning, and on, and on, and on…Democrats should be able to keep themselves so busy that becoming a danger to the republic will be an afterthought.

That said, I think DJ loses me here:

And don’t think that we will just make things right in 2008. A Democrat-controlled legislative body can be sure to press for return of the “Fairness Doctrine”, which in practical application will be used to shut down effective Republican communication avenues, like Talk Radio and Conservative blogs. A clue to how this would be done can be found in a 2005 initiative from Google, which wanted to designate any blog which regularly linked to other blogs or its supporting evidence as a “spammer”, and thereby shut it down. Also, like taxation, the historical model for the Democrats’ desire to control information mediums is well-established.

Democrats may be expected to create yet another version of “campaign finance reform”, to maintain the control they hold and more, if the MSM can create the illusion of corruption in the GOP while covering up crimes by the Left, the resulting vacuum from shutting down Conservative sources would be filled as it was in the 1960s, by the sitting networks. This would be worth at least twenty points in the 2008 Presidential Election, which would be more than sufficient to place a Donkey in the Oval Office again. The results of adding illegals and felons to voting rolls can only strengthen the Democrat’s hold, and since we already know they will do anything to keep hold of power, there will doubtless be additional nasty tricks played to keep control once they have it.

That’s a tall order for Democrats to fill. Even if Democrats were serious about re-establishing the “Fairness Doctrine,” there’s no guarantee their caucus would be united in such an effort. Any attempt to shut down Rush Limbaugh et. al. would be met with extraordinarily serious opposition. The giant corporations that own talk radio stations would have something to say about it as well as both liberal and conservative bloggers. I daresay campaign finance reforms would meet a similar fate.

DJ has an excellent point about the issue of judicial nominees, however. But even if Republicans maintain control of one or both houses of Congress, judges will have a hard time getting confirmed as Democrats drag their heels even more than at present as they try to draw the process out through 2008 when they hope that a Democratic president would be able to reverse many of those nominations.

But “shutting down Conservative sources would be filled as it was in the 1960s, by the sitting networks?’ Sorry, that’s not in the cards. To say that network news (or even the cable outlets) will somehow gain massive numbers of viewers is wrong. For better or worse, TV news is going the way of the dinosaur and nothing and nobody can reverse that trend. They have been hemorrhaging viewers for 25 years both with the Fairness Doctrine and without it. It’s hard to see that changing what with the explosion of alternative media sources (unrelated to blogs) as well as a declining market for straight news to begin with.

However, I wanted to address DJ’s main thesis; that Republican voters who stay at home have only themselves to blame if Democrats take over the Congress in 2006. This goes to the very essence of what it means to live in a democracy and what an individual vote actually represents.

John Adams said “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” I wholeheartedly agree. There is no such thing as a “wasted” vote. A vote is a statement of one’s innermost and most passionately held beliefs. It cannot be “wasted” anymore than getting up at a PTA meeting to speak against an overwhelmingly popular motion is a wasted exercise. Being heard even if you are a lone advocate is what is important. And the fact that this right to be heard is protected and cherished in our republic is a true blessing, something we take for granted far too often.

If expressing opinions is the essence of democratic governance then casting a vote is the ultimate manifestation of the concept of free will; individuals make a choice on who they wish to represent their personal interests. By choosing someone who they believe reflects their personal opinions about issues important to them in a very personal way, voters seek to influence the course of events in their society in as direct a way as possible, given the enormous size of the United States. And in practical terms, living in a two party state has the advantage of maximizing the influence of a single voter by making one’s preference an either/or proposition.

But is influence the goal of voting? Or self-expression? I would argue that given that we live in a representative democracy, voting as a civic act is expressing a preference. Like a piano tuner wearing boxing gloves, a voter cannot fine tune his society by casting a ballot. He can, however, make noise like the piano tuner, pounding on either the higher register or lower sounding keys, making a generalized statement of being satisfied with the status quo or agitating for a change.

So if voting is a statement and you disagree with the way Republicans are running the country, why not just vote for the Democrat?

If you believe that the only way to express a preference is by voting, then casting a ballot for a Democrat is your only option. Thankfully, our Constitution didn’t make that necessary. No one is forcing you to vote. There is no Constitutional requirement that you express a preference at all. The reason is that despite all the cries of “dictatorship” and “fascism” by the left when railing against Bush and the Republicans, the Constitution was written in such a way that such an eventuality is well nigh impossible.

Remember all the cries against “gridlock” in the 1990’s? Many people believed that divided government - two parties controlling separate branches of government - was a catastrophe. George Will didn’t think so:

What is the worst outcome of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny are democracies prey? Tyranny of the majority. Solution? Minimize the likelihood of durable oppressive majorities by maximizing the number of minorities — factions — that will coalesce only into unstable, transitory majorities.

Hence the revolution James Madison wrought in democratic theory: Democracy, far from requiring a small, homogeneous, faction-free society, will flourish in an “extensive” society with a saving multiplicity of factions. Hence government’s first duty (Federalist 10) is to protect the seedbed of factions, the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” Furthermore, the Constitution’s separation of powers created a government of checks and balances, replete with blocking mechanisms, including supermajorities, vetoes, veto overrides, judicial review (it turns out) and, not least important, bicameralism.

The fact is, the “seedbed of factions” is missing today not because one party controls both houses of Congress and the Presidency but because many Republican legislators refuse to act in accordance with their beliefs and the beliefs of their constituents and instead act to maintain their influence and feather their own nests. They have lost touch with the people who elected them. In this respect, I prefer not to enable them further by casting my vote to encourage their profligacy nor to continue standby by idly watching them hand out my money to special interests in hundreds of projects that benefit the few while ignoring the many.

I have been a Republican since 1976 and have never contemplated voting for a member of any other party. But if voting is ultimately making a statement then not voting is making a statement as well. I know what Mr. Drummond is trying to say about the catastrophic consequences of a Democratic majority. In this, he may be correct. But at the moment, the Republican party from top to bottom is a broken instrument for reflecting the people’s will. And if the only way to fix it is to throw the rascals out by either casting your vote for another candidate or staying home, then it may be time to start thinking about those options.

There has been some soul searching on the left recently about whether or not the liberals love America. More specifically, whether one can love America while hating everything about her.

Joel Klein of Time Magazine started it all by saying out loud what many professional Democratic politicians have been saying privately for years; that “the hate America tendency of the [Democratic Party's] left wing’ had made it harder for Democrats to challenge Republicans on foreign policy.”

Klien specifically mentioned The Nation and Michael Moore in a great blog post at HuffPo entitled “The Crucial Difference Between Liberals and Leftists” which, for obvious reasons, did not sit well with the editor of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel who shot back with her own HuffPo piece ““The Crucial Difference Between Joe Klein and Reality.”

This is not just one more obscure lefty debate about some arcane detail of dogma that usually puts most everyone - including liberals - to sleep. It’s a discussion long past due and, from my point of view, is actually encouraging. For in shaping the parameters of the debate, what emerges is a clear separation between those whose vision of what America is all about matches that of the overwhelming majority of citizens and those who, while claiming to “love” America, actually love some other country, unrecognizable to all but the most deluded among us.

We on the right should probably stay out of this discussion - which, of course, is why I’m going to throw my two cents in. For in the end, it explains much of why the classic liberalism of a Robert Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey has become so marginalized and the dominant New Left Stalinists of The Nation , the Greens, George Soros, the Dean/Kerry axis, and the Hollywood elitists have become so important to the Democratic party.

The turning point of course, was Viet Nam. Opposition to that war energized the far left who themselves had been marginalized in the immediate aftermath of World War II as mainstream Democratic and liberal organizations like the ACLU and the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) fought and won internal power struggles against the pro-Moscow wing of the Democratic party. After a brief dalliance in trying to form their own political party in 1948 by nominating and running socialist Henry Wallace for President on the Progressive party ticket, the Stalinists were driven underground during the McCarthy excesses of the 1950’s. (Note: Wallace’s 1948 campaign should be seen as a turning point in American politics with regards to racial equality and applauded if for no other reason than the principled stand taken by the socialists on civil rights).

Viet Nam changed the entire internal dynamic on the left in the early sixties. Opposition to that war began even prior to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965 among a small cadre of young radicals on campuses who saw the war as an issue to advance a revolutionary agenda. These New Leftists were unencumbered with the pro-Moscow “old left” political baggage and, in fact, had little or no connection with Gus Hall’s Communist Party USA that played such a large role in leftist politics in the 1930’s and 40’s. This group, later designated as “Trotskyites” were out to stop the war but were equally dedicated to overthrowing the establishment and bringing about a socialist revolution. The more rational among them like Tom Hayden and Al Lowenstein (an anti-communist seen by most of his contemporaries as “not radical enough”) wished to do this through the ballot box. Others had no such illusions and sought the violent overthrow of the government.

The Trotskyites, to some extent, eventually absorbed the old pro-Moscow left and this alliance of convenience formed the core of the anti-war left during the period of Viet Nam protests from 1965 onward.

It is important to point out that this group of “New Leftists” were not only opposed to conservative supporters of the war but also the classic liberals who backed the war in its earliest days. These liberals eventually turned against the war both as a matter of principle and politics, but it was they who were most eager to engage the Soviet Union in the Third World in what John F. Kennedy called “the long twilight struggle” against communism.

Our escalating involvement in Viet Nam could be called the greatest liberal impulse of the 20th century as for the first time, America confronted communism not only militarily, but on the battlefield of ideas as well. The New Left coalition opposed this approach because of the large pacifist element in their ranks and also because they hated what America stood for; individual rights and especially free market capitalism. Their vision of revolution did not include such selfish notions of personal freedom or the exploitive capitalistic system. In 1972, they succeeded in momentarily capturing the Democratic party and nominated quasi-socialist George McGovern for President, a disaster of historic proportions for classic liberals who were unfairly connected with the New Leftists in that overwhelming defeat.

In politics, losers don’t get to set the agenda. So while the Trotskyites proceeded to tear themselves to shreds in vicious, internecine battles over dogma and tactics (resulting in the formation of several violent offshoots), the old pro-Moscow left moved to the fore and appropriated much of the rhetoric and slogans of the New Left in a classic case of political absorption. Now in the mainstream of the Democratic party, the 1974 midterms saw many of the 72 freshmen Democratic Congressional candidates who won election successfully appealing to both the pro-Moscow left and classic liberals.

Because this “New” old left supplied the bulk of activists to work on campaigns (and in the years to come an increasing amount of money), the allegiance of these Congressmen turned more and more toward a radical redistributive social agenda and a less bellicose, more accommodating posture toward the Soviet Union. And as politics became more polarized in the 1980’s and 90’s, what was once the far left wing of the Democratic party went completely mainstream, shunning classic post World War II liberal ideals for what became known as “The Third Way” or a kind of democratic socialism as it was practiced in Europe.

Which bring us back to the Klein-Vanden Heuvel imbroglio that has the left in such a tizzy. Klein was trying to draw what I thought was a careful distinction between America as it is seen by classic liberals (who might even be considered “hawkish centrists” in the Democratic party as described by Vanden Heuvel) and leftists who reject the America as it is seen by the overwhelming majority of us in favor of a radically different country they have created out of whole cloth.

They hate the America you and I take for granted. Not the America of Bush or the Republicans. Not the America of most liberals who, while advocating solutions to our problems that we might disagree with nevertheless use basically the same frame of reference when talking and thinking about America as we do. The kind of America that liberals, conservatives, centrists, libertarians, and the rest of us believe in and work to better has at its core a strong, stubborn belief in the innate goodness of America and its people and a faith in the American “system:” free markets, free labor, and free men. While not a prerequisite, most of us also believe in American exceptionalism - whether that belief has a secular or religious foundation - that we are different from other nations on earth.

The leftover Stalinists and Trotskyites from the 1960’s that Klein was attempting to separate from the classic liberals might talk about being patriotic Americans in the same way that David Duke says he’s not anti-black, just pro-white. The Stalinists live in a country so radically different than the one you and I inhabit that they can’t for the life of them imagine (like Duke and other hatemongers) why anyone thinks them anti-American. They start from the premise that America is evil, “essentially a malignant, imperialistic force in the world and the use of American military power is almost always wrong,” as Klein so aptly points out. It doesn’t stop there, of course. They believe our history is a sham, our myths, destructive, our families, dysfunctional, and our educational system, laboratories for engineering social change.

It is perhaps unfair to say that this is the dominant culture in the Democratic party. But I believe it accurate to say that the majority of its activists and many of its big money contributors ascribe to this notion of America. Klein was correctly pointing out that this is the Democratic party that is successfully portrayed by Republicans as “mainstream” despite their small number because of how vocal and organized the Stalinists are compared to the rest of the party, particularly more moderate groups like the Democratic Leadership Council.

Is it unfair for Republicans to do this? No more so than it is unfair when Democrats try to portray the Republicans as a party of religious fanatics whose neoconservative leadership is the personification of evil. Politics is a full contact sport and trying to delineate what is “fair” or “unfair” is an exercise in futility.

On the other hand, it is unfair of us on the right to confuse the anti-American left with the mindless anti-Bush sentiment that prevails in the Democratic party. The question that has always troubled me is has this Bush Derangement Syndrome actually led Democrats to giving the appearance of anti-Americanism in their opposition to the war? The “Bush lied” meme has been a godsend to many Democrats who initially supported the war but, like their ancestors during Viet Nam, have since had a change of heart and have latched on to the idea that Bush tricked them into that support. And while their opposition obviously gives aid and comfort to the enemy who see their only way to victory in waiting until the political will for the war in America to evaporate, does it reflect political calculation or anti-Americanism? Or is it just one more unconscious manifestation of a virulent hate of the President?

It may be totally unnecessary for the Democratic party to sort this out since the Republicans seem intent on doing everything they can to lose control of the House and the Senate next November. But if the party cannot take advantage of such a deeply wounded opponent, what then? Will the majority of patriotic, America-loving Democrats be able to marginalize their crazies? Or will the Republicans continue to be successful in portraying the Democratic party as made up of radical, anti-American leftists?

This is a debate that bears watching. At stake is the future of both parties and a possible realignment with a decidedly more leftist tilt to our politics.

Jawdropper of the day is from Bilmon of the site Whiskey Bar who, it turns out, is a very silly person. In fact, given the level of silliness in this post about the right and “Munich,” as well as some truly funny misconceptions, obfuscations, misrepresentations, relativistic meanderings, and demonstrably lazy thinking, my BS-O-Meter ticked wildly upward to the point that I felt the gentleman needed to have his proverbial clock cleaned so that the record (if anyone cares about such an arcane matter as history) can be set straight.

This is getting to be something of a regular feature at The House, sort of like a daily horoscope except it doesn’t appear daily and a horoscope contains more ultimate truth than anything found on liberal websites. For some reason, my takedowns of David Neiwert, Glenn Greenwald, and other lefties always seems to occur on the weekends. Thus, a tradition is born. It’s almost like my other weekend tradition of making myself hamburgers every Saturday night for dinner except there’s a helluva lot less meat in liberal “Here’s what’s evil about the right” posts.

I actually agree with Mr. Bilmon’s initial postulate; it is silly to compare the Allied surrender at Munich with doing nothing about Iran. The trouble is, no one was doing that. In fact, as I pointed out here, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard took another “road to World War II” moment - the German re-militarization of the Rhineland - and tried to stretch that dubious analogy to cover our inaction regarding Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons. Bilmon gets around to pointing that out but not until he makes a fool of himself criticizing the right for bringing the specter of “a feeble old man standing on an airport tarmac, holding an umbrella in one hand and waving a meaningless scrap of paper in the other.”

As I said earlier, no one has brought up the Munich simile except Mr. Bilmon. What Hugh Hewitt, Bill Kristol, and others were tortuously trying to say by bringing up the re-occupation of the Rhineland was to point out that if the French and British had acted while the balance of forces were so immensely heavy in their favor, Hitler would have been forced into a humiliating retreat that probably would have meant his being deposed by the German army. In my post debunking Kristol, I point out that, in fact, France was not entirely opposed to the notion of a strengthened Germany given that most western democracies saw Stalin’s Soviet Union as the real threat to world peace.

What makes the Munich analogy even more problematic (probably the reason no one on the right has used it) is that by 1938 and the Czechoslovakian crisis, that balance of forces had been redressed considerably by Germany. And while the combined armies of Britain, France, and the Czechs could have ultimately defeated Hitler, the cost would have been infinitely greater than simply pushing the two measly brigades that Hitler marched into the demilitarized zone back a few dozen miles.

Mr. Bilmon must have had Munich on the brain which is the reason for the obvious disconnect. Or perhaps he was making an obscure point about “The Road to Munich” which was a long chapter in Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Either way, it’s idiotic. Curious that Bilmon heads a paragraph “Party like it’s 1938″ and then reveals that, in fact, his right wing targets were talking about the Rhineland occupation which occurred in 1936. But we better not tell Mr. Bilmon that. He’s on a roll about Munich and the wrong lessons being drawn by the right about the singular failure of will on the part of the British. And once a liberal gets on a roll (even if he’s laughably wrong) one might as well try and stop Teddy Kennedy from crashing “Dollar Draught” night at the “Coyote Ugly” bar.

Speaking of ugly, here is what passes for deep thought by Mr. Bilmon regarding his analysis of that elfish Iranian trickster, President Ahmadinejad:

“…[W]hile the by-now stock comparison between Ahmadinejad and Hitler is absurd militarily, politically it’s not nearly as far fetched as the normal run of Orwellian newspeak.

I don’t say this because of Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denials or his public fantasies about Israel being wiped off the map. I certainly don’t dismiss those remarks. I’m keenly aware that all too many “sensible” observers (most of them on the political right) dismissed Hitler’s Mein Kampf ravings as merely a carny act to bring in the rubes. But I also know that firebreathing rhetoric about destroying the “Zionist entity” has been a staple of Middle Eastern political hate speech since Nasser’s time if not before – just as talk about nuking Mecca has become an occasional feature of American political hate speech. I take such talk seriously, and I think everybody should, but I don’t automatically assume that those who say such things are actually planning to commit genocide.

No, Ahmadinejad’s resemblance to Hitler – and the reason why I find him a legitimately scary guy – is more a function of his role in the decay of the Iranian revolution, which is starting to take on some definite Weimer overtones.

“Public fantasies” about destroying Israel that he “certainly [doesn't] dismiss?”

Talk about Orwellian doublespeak! They are either fantasies or something not to be dismissed. Which is it and why undercut their brutality by referring to them as fantasies in the first place? And as long as you brought up my soul brotha Adolf Hitler, has there been the leader of a sovereign state since Der Fuhrer who has spoken so brazenly about the destruction of a neighbor? But of course, after telling us he doesn’t dismiss such rhetoric, he then proceeds to do so by comparing Ahmadinejad’s threats to destroy Israel with some of our mouthbreathers on the right who call for nuking Mecca (Representative Tancredo called for nuking Mecca in response to an Islamic nuclear weapon being detonated on American soil which is a far cry from Ahmadinejad’s threat to destroy Israel without provocation).

I know it must have escaped Mr. Bilmon in all the hustle and bustle of smearing conservatives but I wonder if he happened to notice that President Ahmadinejad is the leader of a nation working to get its hands on nuclear weapons while the mouthbreathers are leaders of their local beer chugging club - a slight but significant difference when talking about being able to “nuke” anyone. Even if Bilmon can come up with more significant examples of conservative cluelessness about nuking Mecca, no American President with his finger on the nuclear trigger has been quoted as saying any such thing.

And by taking the default position that we shouldn’t “automatically assume that those who say such things are actually planning to commit genocide,” Mr. Bilmon gives us a perfect illustration as to why no one will ever trust the left with American national security (except perhaps in extremis given the current crew’s continuing cluelessness about homeland security) until Bilmon et. al. turn that statement around 180 degrees: In a post 9/11 world we must automatically assume the worst.

This, of course, is the chasm between 9/10 liberals and 9/12 conservatives (”neo” or not). This is not the place nor do I have the inclination today to rehash the entire pre-war debate about pre-emption or Saddam’s support for terror groups which are becoming more obvious with every revelation contained in the Saddam documents and notwithstanding Peter Bergen putting his hands over his ears and screaming “NEENER, NEENER, NEENER.” The point being that there is a threat of mass casualty terrorist attacks carried out by enemies of the United States and nothing and nobody should be overlooked nor the threat downplayed as just some political ploy by the party in power.

I would hope that if the left regains the White House in 2008, we on the right never question the chief executive about moves he or she might make to protect us. And please don’t throw Clinton’s questionable military moves during his impeachment troubles up in my face. The last I looked 1998 comes before September 11, 2001 on the calendar.

Bilmon then goes into a long, mostly correct analysis of what Seymour Hersh referred to as Ahmadinejad’s “white coup” that has changed the face of the Iranian government. Instead of radical theocrats turned inward toward oppressing their own people, Ahmadinejad and his allies have overturned the status quo by kicking out the corrupt, established order and installed fanatics. Mr. Bilmon almost gets to the truth in this passage:

In his recent New Yorker article, Sy Hersh calls this Ahmadinejad’s “white coup,” and cites a recent wave of forced resignations in the Foreign Ministry. More importantly, key Revolutionary Guard commanders also have been turning up dead – like the dozen or so who died in a plane crash last December. Some are said to have been leading opponents of Ahmadinejad.

(Update 10:10 pm ET: I should have been more circumspect here. It isn’t clear whether the RG officers who died where enemies or allies of Ahmadinejad. Nor is there hard evidence that the crash was due to an act of sabotage. It is reasonably clear, however, that a subterranean power struggle is under way inside Iran, and that Ahmadinejad’s moves to consolidate power are at the center of it.)

It isn’t hard to see some ominous parallels here. A Marxist would probably say Ahmadinejad is playing the classic Bonapartist role: taking advantage of a political stalemate between social classes to forge a personal dictatorship. Or maybe he’s just the inevitable product of an authoritarian system in terminal decline, like Milosevic in Yugoslavia. Or maybe he’s really only explicable in Iranian terms.

I don’t know. But Ahmadinejad’s combination of demogogic appeal, ideological zealotry and end-times eschatology does make him a much more plausible stand-in for Hitler than an apparachik like Milosevic or a thug like Saddam. Even Juan Cole – hardly a neocon sympathizer – has called Ahmadinejad “essentially fascist.”

Ahmadinejad’s purge was not confined to the Foreign Ministry. Every part of government has undergone a shake-up, replacing radicals with fanatics. In fact, this has been happening for years in both the Assembly of Experts (the body who supposedly oversees the office of the Supreme Leader but who, in actuality have become much more radicalized under Khamenei’s rule) and the Guardian Council whose handpicked members rule on the constitutionality of laws passed by the legislature.

It is unclear whether the “purification” of the Iranian revolution has the complete backing of the Supreme Leader. But it is equally clear that he could put a stop to it if he wanted to. The resistance to Ahmadinejad has coalesced around two disparate personalities; former Presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (who might be said to represent the “old guard” of the revolution) and Mohammad Khatami who has been described in the western press as a “moderate” which means that he didn’t want to murder quite as many innocent Iranian civilians as his predecessors. Both men wholeheartedly supported the secret Iranian nuclear program with Rafsanjani making the initial moves during his first term as President.

All this points to big trouble. Even if the Supreme Leader tires of Ahmadinejad’s pulling the tail of the lion and replaces him, the chances are very good it will be with either one of the gentlemen mentioned above. The Iranian nuclear program would continue apace only this time, without the overblown rhetorical swipes at the west. This will make it extraordinarily easy for the Iranians to drive a wedge between us and our European allies who are looking desperately for a way to avoid a confrontation and would leap at the chance of pretending to negotiate with a “reasonable” Iranian leader. Of course, in practical terms this means that Iran would probably have a bomb by the end of the decade.

Finally, after once again carrying on his lonely crusade in raising the specter of Munich (since no one on the right has done so lately) Bilmon brings up a “missed opportunity” that the Iranians gave us in 2003. He quotes from a piece by a former Bush White House national security insider who says we missed a big chance to make an accommodation with the mullahs:

In the spring of 2003, shortly before I left government, the Iranian Foreign Ministry sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations to resolve bilateral differences. The document acknowledged that Iran would have to address concerns about its weapons programs and support for anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. It was presented as having support from all major players in Iran’s power structure, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei . . . Unfortunately, the administration’s response was to complain that the Swiss diplomats who passed the document from Tehran to Washington were out of line.

But this side of the story really goes back further, to the Clinton administration’s dithering response to the blossoming of the Iranian democracy movement in the late ’90s and the 2000 presidential victory of moderate reformer Mohammad Khatami.

The opportunity for detente was out there, but the Clintonites were utterly intimidated by our own hardliners – not least the ones in their own party – and never developed a coherent policy either to engage the reformers or challenge their opponents.

Every meaningful “reform” initiated by President Khatami was either blocked by the legislature or invalidated by the Guardian Council. And these were not earth shattering changes; basic issues like women being able to walk around without being clubbed by Revolutionary Guard religious enforcers and allowing opposition newspapers to publish something critical of the regime every once and a while.

How US engagement with Iranians would have changed this one iota is wishful thinking or worse, a refusal to recognize the true nature of the regime regardless of whether a “reformer” or a fanatic is President. Liberals get all doe-eyed and squishy when it comes to talking with nutcases like Ahmadinejad or that frequent overnighter at the White House Yasser Arafat. They believe that if they talk long enough and persuasively enough, they can change these gimlet eyed radicals into reasonable people.

One more reason to distrust the left with the security of the country.

If that’s not enough, how about this curious case of Bilmon blaming the Bush (”Cheney”) Administration for not accommodating the Iranians who approached us with open arms:

The irony is that the point when America was in the best possible position to dictate a deal (an ultimatum, really) to the Iranians – after the fall of Baghdad three years ago – was also the point when the Cheney administration was least willing to even think about negotiations. Such is the price of hubris. Given what’s happened since then, is it any surprise that the uranium “crisis” – and Ahmadinejad’s defiance – have only boosted his political popularity and clout?

Ahmadinejad doesn’t need Bush to be defiant. After saying that the Iranian President’s rhetoric should be taken seriously earlier, here Bimon seems to be saying that it’s Bush’s fault Ahmadinejad is throwing nuclear spitballs at the White House. Which is it?

And can you imagine the reaction of Bilmon, the left, and the entire State Department to an American demarche to Iran in the form of a veiled ultimatum? This is why people like Bilmon cannot be taken seriously. Heads he and the left win; tails, Bush loses.

And this is what passes for deep thought on the left.

Even though I agree with some of what Bilmon says regarding the current crisis, as is usual with the left, faux analogies, exaggerated rhetoric, false assumptions, and an uncanny ability to obfuscate the truth by exhibiting a blind hatred of all things Bush makes even their most trenchant analysis ring more hollow than the chocolate Easter Bunny I plan on eating with my hamburger tonight.

George McClellan was in a snit.

The Commander in Chief of the Army (circa 1862) had just returned from a meeting with a Congressman who was urging him to get the army moving toward Richmond pronto. It had been more than 6 months since the disaster at Bull Run and everyone in Washington was getting antsy, not least the President who quipped morosely that if McClellan was not going to use the army, then perhaps he (the President) might borrow it for awhile.

McClellan was feeling persecuted. Everyone in Washington was an armchair general, telling him how to win the war. The President, in a pathetically amateurish attempt to remedy his lack of military knowledge, was reading treatises on war by night and writing long, chatty letters by day telling him:

And once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Mannassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty — that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note — is now noting — that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.

I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.

Lincoln wrote that letter as McClellan’s 100,000 man army sat in front of a Confederate battle line on the James Peninsula in Virginia that featured fake wooden guns and the theatrics of rebel General John Magruder who, in order to make his 15,000 man force appear to be a great host, continuously marched a brigade across the front of the Union lines, easily fooling the cautious McClellan into thinking he faced more than 100,000 men.

But that was in the future. The Congressman McClellan was so disgusted with was John Covode of Pennsylvania who sat on the most powerful Committee in the history of the United States Congress: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Covode had just informed Little Mac that he was in danger of losing his command unless he got the Army of the Potomac up and moving toward Richmond and the General was in a foul mood. He sat down and wrote a letter to his wife complaining bitterly about the interference of the “rascals” in Congress who seemed more interested in assessing an officer’s anti-slavery credentials than in their military abilities. Despite being given more power than any general since Washington, McClellan felt hemmed in and hamstrung by a group of amateurs who were looking over his shoulder and criticizing every move he made or, in the present case, didn’t make.

The Joint Committee was born out of the frustration in Congress with Union setbacks in the early days of the war and what the radicals saw as insufficient zeal for victory on the part of some officers. If, as Clemenceau said “War is too important a thing to be left to the generals,” then the Committee felt perfectly comfortable in making it their business to meddle in the affairs of the army. Woe betide the luckless officer who got into their sights. Because America was fighting a civil war, even the loyalty to the flag of officers could be and was questioned.

Nothing illustrated this salient fact more than the case of General Charles P. Stone whose attack on a small rebel encampment near Leesburg ended up an unmitigated disaster. Not only did he lose the battle, but the man most responsible for the loss, a former United States Senator Edward Baker, was killed in action. The Battle of Balls Bluff was a minor skirmish by Civil War standards but its impact would be felt for the rest of the war. In response to the defeat, the Congress decided that the executive branch needed guidance in the prosecution of the conflict and the Joint Committee was born. Their first target was General Stone himself who, while never accused outright of treason, was nevertheless tarred by innuendo and gossip to the point that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered his arrest. For 189 days, Stone sat in a cell without being charged with any specific crime. He was finally released without apology and was never able to live down the cloud placed over him by Congress.

Whether it was the Committee’s intent or not, Union officers got the message. Headquarters operators like General Joe Hooker and Benjamin Butler cultivated Committee members, taking them into their confidence and lavishing praise on their activities. Combat officers like General Phil Kearny complained that the Committee’s second guessing was having a deleterious effect on an officer’s ability to carry out their duties.

Indeed, that was almost a universal criticism of the Committee’s investigations:

The Committee on the Conduct of the War was feared during its lifetime. Army commanders saw what was happening to their predecessors and let this influence the decisions they made on the battlefield. General Ambrose Burnside most certainly let the phantom of McClellan’s non-aggressive behavior color his judgment when he continued to send the waves of Union soldiers to their deaths up the slopes of Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, and again when he moved his army out of their winter camps into the Virginia quagmire in the infamous Mud March. How many other general officers made decisions based not strictly on what was best for their commands on a given field, but rather on what was “safe” conduct as far as the CCW was concerned? George Meade knew what was happening when he testified to committee members at Falmouth, after the Fredericksburg defeat. In a personal letter he wrote, “I sometimes feel very nervous about my position, [the committee is] knocking over generals at such a rate.”

In fact, the Committee did an enormous service to the Union cause. More often than not, they were able to weed out incompetent officers who were usually replaced by competent ones. They cared not a fig if an officer had West Point credentials, something that the President seemed over awed with at times. In fact, the Committee saw West Point as something of a bastion of Southern sympathizers, so many of the US trained officer corps leaving the army to fight for Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. And while it is true their meddling sometimes caused problems for armies in the field, their investigation into medical treatment of wounded soldiers led to the formation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission which forever changed the way the army cared for its wounded. And other investigations into corruption in the granting of military contracts as well as being out front in urging President Lincoln to recruit and train black soldiers proved to be tremendously helpful to securing victory.

Could such oversight by Congress have prevented Abu Ghraib and other prisoner abuses? Would such a Committee if in existence today insisted on more troops on the ground at the beginning of the occupation? Could Donald Rumsfeld have survived this long if Congress had been looking over his shoulder? Would 363 tons of $100 bills been flown into Baghdad - $12 billion dollars worth - and ended up with employees of the Coalition Provisional Authorities using the banded stacks as footballs?

The Republican Congress has failed. It is as dysfunctional a legislative body as has ever been elected in my lifetime. While individual members have shown brains, courage, and thoughtfulness, as a group - and especially its quiescent, arrogant, and clueless leadership - it has been a disaster. We on the right have acknowledged this fact in one way or another. There has been nary a commenter on this site (with the exception of the few hopeless partisans who still drop by now and again) who hasn’t pointed out with brutal clarity the shortcomings of our party’s elected representatives. We should now take the next step and set up the guillotine because its time for some heads to start rolling.

To the Republicans in Congress, I would say yes, investigating Administration shortcomings is a partisan undertaking and it is a given that Democrats will turn hearings on any wrongdoing involving the war be it corruption in contract letting or prisoner abuse into one long diatribe against George Bush and the war. But you are all big boys and girls and politics is a tough business. If you can’t take the heat, stand aside and let others take your place with more fortitude and a desire to do the job citizens elected you to do. The medicine will be strong. But not taking it will once again plunge Republicans into minority status and elevate people who, we all believe, would not do the job of protecting America in this critical hour.

If Congress had something like the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War today, I daresay not only Donald Rumsfeld, but also the self serving, ass covering Generals who have recently come out calling for his resignation would have been in the Committee’s sights from day one. Rumsfeld’s failures are their failures. The fact that they are too arrogant to see that says everything you need to know about their “confessions.”

I really am at a loss about what to do. Staying home on election day goes against everything I believe about Republicans and democracy. But I am coming around to the belief that if not voting is the only way to change the leadership dynamic of the Republican party so that honorable conservatives rise to positions of prominence, then so be it.

When Donald Rumsfeld was nominated as Defense Secretary way back when the world was young, the daffodils were blooming, there were still two tall Trade Center towers standing in New York, and we could delude ourselves into thinking that America was invulnerable, the conventional wisdom about the President’s national security choices was that they were a “dream team,” the brightest, the most competent administrators available. Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, and Cheney - they would be able to guide and teach the inexperienced former Governor of Texas about the ways of the world and reshape American military and foreign policy for the new century.

It’s hard for many of us to recall those days before our silly pretensions about the world were blasted away in the fire, and smoke, and rubble of 9/11. It’s equally difficult for most to recall the immediate aftermath of that horrible day, when American arms performed extraordinary feats of martial skill in vanquishing first the Taliban and then Saddam Hussein. The world looked on in awe - and some in fear - as America accomplished in a few short months what the old Soviet Red Army failed to do in a decade - win a war in Afghanistan.

Equally breathtaking was our triumph in Iraq as American forces raced to Baghdad, brushing aside Saddam’s once powerful army as if it weren’t even there. The architect of those two victories - Donald Rumsfeld - was feted and lionized by most as being the right man in the right place at that time in history. The Defense Secretary enjoyed the confidence of the overwhelming majority of the American people, with a 70% approval rating for his performance in June of 2002 following the Afghanistan campaign and a 71% positive rating in April of 2003 following the fall of Baghdad.

But then came Abu Ghraib. And the insurgency. And mounting American casualties. And finally a sense that Rumsfeld had lost touch with what was really happening on the ground in Iraq. His cheery pronouncements about “progress” were belied by the intractability of the insurgency and questions about who exactly we were fighting. By the time it became clear to the Defense Department that we were in fact fighting almost exclusively a domestic insurgency with deep tribal and sectarian roots in communities that offered them aid and shelter, more than 1000 Americans had been killed and nearly 10,000 wounded.

Then, with no fanfare and no public announcement, the Pentagon switched gears and began to do the things necessary to tamp down what by September of 2004 had become a full blown domestic insurrection against the occupation, not simply foreign terrorists seeking to thwart American designs for Iraqi democracy and Sunni bitter enders. The army began to improve its ground tactics to seek out and destroy the insurgents while continuing to look for ways to safeguard vehicles against the dreaded IED’s.

But for Rumsfeld, whose outlook on the war always seemed to see an overflowing glass rather one that was less than half empty, the disconnect continued. Abu Ghraib and reports of other prisoner abuse showed an executive whose approval of questionable interrogation techniques led to abuses far beyond what any American army had ever done. For this alone, he should have been sacked long ago.

But Bush has hung on to his Defense Secretary almost willfully, a stubbornness that reveals a character flaw that has gotten him into trouble time and time again both in domestic politics and in the prosecution of the war. While not in total agreement with this analysis by a commenter at Belgravia Dispatch, it points out a glaring weakness in the President’s national security planning that must be addressed:

First of all Bush has delegated virtually all war planning and management of the military to Rumsfeld; his own relationships with uniformed military officers or other Pentagon officials appear to be neither numerous nor deep compared to those of other wartime Presidents. Secondly he relies to an unusual — really, an unprecedented — degree on his Vice President to advise him on the political and diplomatic strategy behind the war. Vice President Cheney, a former Rumsfeld subordinate, has been the Defense Secretary’s strongest backer.

The unusual position this has allowed Rumsfeld to assume helps to explain key American policy moves throughout the Iraq war, and in other fields as well. The point I want to make here is that his departure now would not be like any other Cabinet Secretary’s departure — it would leave a huge hole in the middle of Bush’s administration, a vacuum that could only be filled by someone Bush trusted enough to delegate approximately as much authority as that he has given to Rumsfeld. Apart from Cheney himself, there is no such person.

Bush came into office promising a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s so called “CEO Management” style where wide latitude was given cabinet secretaries to carry out policies set by the executive. This worked reasonably well for Reagan in his first term, less so in the second. But the key was that Reagan seemed to have an intuitive sense when to reign in his people, moderating some of their policies to reflect a basic conservative worldview. For instance, while giving defense secretary Cap Weinberger a virtual blank check to re-build the American military, Reagan nevertheless continually asked Weinberger to take a red pen to the defense budget and come up with savings. Reagan was engaged in matters of the budget but left the Big Picture of how to improve our military to the defense secretary.

But Reagan did not have to deal with an ongoing conflict in his time as President, only the long shadow struggle with Soviet Communism. President Bush is not vouchsafed such a luxury. For a President to be so disengaged when it comes to war planning, (a criticism offered by both current and former Administration officials), is to invite disaster. With no one looking over his shoulder, Rumsfeld has erred stupendously in planning for the occupation, in underestimating the insurgency, in stewardship of the billions in reconstruction funds initially given to the Coalition Provisional Authority, and in not realizing that by authorizing interrogation techniques that sidled up to the line of outright torture, it was inevitable that line would be crossed in a horrific series of disclosures that has stained the honor of America and her military.

It may leave a huge hole in his Administration if the President asks Rumsfeld to resign. And it won’t win the Iraq War. But if Rumsfeld stays, there’s a very good chance we will fail. And the President’s obstinacy in keeping the Secretary long past the time it became obvious that he was damaged goods speaks to a flaw in the President’s character that may yet bring him down.

UPDATE

There are, of course, many who don’t quite see it my way. Here’s Richard Fernandez on the recent spate of calls for Rumsfeld’s resignation from retired generals.

UPDATE

One condenscending lefty emailer congratulates me on “following the lead of the generals” in calling for Rummy’s resignation. Readers will note in my main post, I never mentioned those generals who have come out recently calling for Rumsfeld to resign. I didn’t need to. I have written several posts in the last year calling for Rummy’s ouster.

I don’t put much stock in what retired generals say anyway. From my point of view, they are complicit in Rumsfeld’s failures for not doing the honorable thing and resigning if they disagreed so strongly with policy.

In his Wednesday column, David Ignatius has a cautionary tale about conflict with Iran that is chilling in its implications for the future. He asks if the situation with Iranian nuclear ambitions is analogous to what President John F. Kennedy faced with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and if there are any “lessons” that can be learned from our experience in facing down the Russians during that crucial 13 days in October.

I do not believe much in “learning” from history in this fashion. History’s broad sweep precludes such lessons drawn from specific events such as the Missile Crisis, a once in a generation confrontation between superpowers. The currents that make up the ebb and flow of historical forces also have changed radically since that time as the forces of democracy, globalization, and capitalism are in the ascendancy - the exact opposite of what was occurring in the early 1960’s as the Soviet model was sweeping across Africa, establishing a toehold in Asia, and even being dallied with in Latin America.

Kennedy saw the challenge which is why he thought Viet Nam so important. Increasing American advisers from Eisenhower’s 850 to an eventual total of 16,500 before he died, Kennedy saw Viet Nam as the last chance for the west to establish a credible deterrent to the expansion of the Soviet model in the third world.

And we know where that led.

Ignatius describes a valuable atmospheric surrounding the Missile Crisis; the way Kennedy reached his decision:

Kennedy’s genius was to reject the Cuba options proposed by his advisers, hawk and dove alike, and choose his own peculiar outside-the-box strategy. He issued a deadline but privately delayed it; he answered a first, flexible message from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev but not a second unyielding one; he said he would never take U.S. missiles out of Turkey, as the Soviets were demanding, and then secretly did precisely that. Disaster was avoided because Khrushchev believed Kennedy was willing to risk war — but wanted to avoid it.

The Bush administration needs to be engaged in a similar exercise in creative thinking. The military planners will keep looking for targets (as they must, in a confrontation this serious). But Bush’s advisers — and most of all, the president himself — must keep searching for ways to escape the inexorable logic that is propelling America and Iran toward war. I take heart from the fact that the counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Philip Zelikow, is an expert on the Cuban missile crisis who co-authored the second edition of Allison’s “Essence of Decision.”

The key here is “willing to risk war but want[ing] to avoid it.” There seems to be a general belief on the right that the Iranian hierarchy cannot be negotiated with, that they are not rational human beings and would, in fact, welcome death and destruction as it would then meet the conditions for the re-appearance of the so-called 12th Imam who would unite Islam and conquer the world.

I have no idea if this is true. I am not completely dismissive of the idea as many on the left seem to be nor do I necessarily think the entire Iranian government has gone of the edge of a cliff and lost touch with reality. That’s what makes this crisis so unpredictable. President Ahmadinejad uses rhetoric the likes of which have not been seen on the international stage since the days of Adolph Hitler’s thundering orations threatening to wipe Czechoslovakia “off the map.” At that time, Neville Chamberlain dismissed Hitler’s apoplectic rants as political sops to the militarists in the German government. (Chamberlain remained blissfully ignorant of the fact that Hitler was the #1 German militarist until it was far too late).

Since we’re talking about a nuclear Iran, we can be vouchsafed no such luxury of miscalculation. And given the recent history of US-Iranian relations, prudence dictates that we take Ahmadinejad at his word and plan accordingly. Herein lies the fallacy in Mr. Ignatius’ historical parallel with October, 1962: With Russia, we were dealing essentially with a state that was as concerned about its survival as we were. At present, we are not so sure that the leaders of the Iranian theocracy share that concern.

For that reason, some see military action as inevitable. The reasoning goes that under all circumstances, the Iranians must not be allowed to make a nuclear weapon because they do not recognize “traditional” nuclear deterrence strategies. In order for Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to work, both sides have to fear destruction. It is an open question whether the theocrats in Iran fear any such possibility.

Of course, this won’t stop the diplomatic dance at the United Nations or in the capitals of Europe where America will go to seek allies and partners in sanctions and in military planning. But perhaps it might be useful to recall one aspect of the Missile Crisis that, above all others, may have led to the defusing of tensions between the superpowers; the unwritten promise by the United States government that it would not seek to overthrow the Castro regime. In short, a guarantee of Cuban sovereignty.

Kruschev wrote in his memoirs that the reasons he placed missiles in Cuba in the first place was to redress what the Russians saw as a strategic imbalance between the two countries and to protect his client from a Bay of Pigs repeat. The missiles were removed only after Kennedy promised privately to retire the obsolete Jupiter missiles based in Turkey (which were as provocative from the Soviet point of view as missiles in Cuba were to the United States) and a further guarantee that the Americans would not invade or use a proxy army to overthrow Castro. Later, Bobby Kennedy reasoned that such a promise did not include attempts to assassinate Castro, which continued until at least 1965.

Would such a Quid Pro Quo work with the Iranians? Could we guarantee the sovereignty of the Iranian state in exchange for intrusive inspections by the IAEA and a promise by the mullahs not to enrich uranium?

All would depend on whether or not the leaders of Iran are indeed rational and fear war with the United States and the destruction of their regime. And much would also depend on the IAEA, an organization that would have to prove itself to be more than the nuclear enabler it has been in the past.

A tall order, that. And before we could even contemplate such an agreement, there would have to be what diplomats call “confidence building measures” in the interim, something that at this point, seems to be beyond the capability of both countries. Clearly, only a trusted third party could initiate such a dialogue. And given the pariah state of the Iranian nation, such a list would be very short indeed.

There will come a point where direct negotiations with the Iranians will become inevitable. It would help considerably if when that occurs, those negotiations have a chance of succeeding. For that to happen, nothing - including a military option or our willingness to guarantee Iranian sovereignty - can be taken off the table. For when thinking about war with Iran, it is best to remember that unforeseen consequences inevitably follow from conflict.

And those consequences may be so harmful to our interests that we may wish we had explored every option to end the crisis peacefully.