Right Wing Nut House

I will be on the O’Reilly Factor tonight to talk about YearlyKos.

Michelle Malkin will be guest hosting and I’ll be on with NPR’s Juan Williams to mix it up over the radicalism or not of the attendees.

Since I live 55 miles away, they’re sending a limo to pick me up. I’ll think about all of you as I’m sipping champagne and eating banned foie gras in the backseat.

UPDATE: LIVEBLOGGING MY TAPED APPEARANCE ON THE FACTOR

Off camera - saying hello to Michelle. She’s nice.

7:01 - There I am. SHEESH! Lose some weight, dog.

7:03 - Contradicting the host - surefire way to get yourself invited back - especially after she set up the piece with a slice of Hillary. “It’s Kucinich, not Hillary.”

Dope.

7:05 - Blah, blah, blah - oh yeah keep smiling dummy.

7:06 - (Breathe…in…out…in…out…)

7:07 - HATEMONGERING LEFTY LIBTARD PHILISTINES!

7:08 - “By the way, Juan. Please pass the Grey Poupon…”

7:09 - And we’re out. Take that thing out of my ear - not you, the nice looking woman who unbuttoned my shirt to mike me up.

Hubba, Hubba.

Thanks to Michelle for inviting me. Next time, I’ll try “English as a second language” so that everyone understands me.

UPDATE: 8/7

Here’s the transcript from last night’s show.

And Allah, as always, has the video.

Many thanks to Pajamas Media for sending me as a representative of the press to cover YearlyKos. Not only was my sojourn among the netroots instructive, but the trip supplied enough blog fodder to keep me writing for a week - if I so choose.

Don’t worry. I have no intention of being that boring. However, allow me to share some of my pithy observations and razor sharp insights into what was going on both above and below the surface.

The number one thing I learned was that liberals are people too. This may not seem an earth shattering observation. After all, we’ve suspected for years that lefties shared many of our genes and that they may, at some point in their evolution, have even used stone tools and decorated their bodies with various kinds of artwork.

I can assure you that they are at least as similar to us as chimpanzees - except chimps are cuter and don’t constantly interrupt you when you’re speaking and trying to make a point. However, all that aside, liberals are pretty normal. They have a different sense of humor of course. And they may not laugh as much as conservatives although I wonder who will be doing the chuckling on election day 2008?

They have their radicals. So do conservatives. Both manifestations of extremism are humorless, boring, and smelly. Radicals are so intent to push their ideas on the rest of us that they’ve forgotten their way to the bathtub. And where conservative radicals tend to be younger (age being a leavening factor among conservatives) lefty radicals tend to be older. Also, liberal extremists may have a few years on their conservative counterparts but they try to look young and act young anyway. Lots of near seniors were present with body piercings and tattoos. And I swear some of them were wearing “earth shoes” and Jesus sandals.

Political red meat tossed to the attendees by speakers, panelists, discussion leaders, and presidential candidates was pretty harsh stuff. If I didn’t know any better, I would say that our republic has less than a year and a half to live - unless we elect all Democrats and throw many if not all Republicans in jail. Or behead them, or something. John Edwards, by the way, must be prevented at all costs from becoming President. First of all, the obvious reason that America governed by this metrosexual priss would be an invitation to every terrorist, thug nation, and rogue beauty consultant to descend upon this country en masse and make our lives a living hell. Not only terrorist attacks as a regular occurrence but just think of the damage to our masculinity.

John Edwards will be tougher on rich people than he will be on al-Qaeda. That might make us all feel better, seeing people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet reduced to paupery and forced to sell old copies of Windows ME and junk bonds in the street. Will it make us safer? I report. You decide.

I actually wouldn’t mind seeing Dennis Kucinich as President. We’ve never had a gnome as chief executive before and at the very least, it would be a novel experiment in discovering if psychoses are contagious.

Mike Gravel might make things interesting for a few years. His ideas of what constitutes global warming would be slightly skewed as a result of spending all that time in Alaska. Minneapolis would seem a veritable tropical retreat while Chicago might seem equatorial in climate.

Would someone please wake Chris Dodd up and tell him he can go home now?

As for the rest of them - Richardson, Obama, and Hillary - any of them would probably be alright. At least until Republicans regain their equilibrium. Then again, they only allow a President to serve two terms, right? Might want to make plans for that GOP Victory Dance in 2028 or so given our past experience on the back benches of government.

One observation I would never have dared put in a piece for PJ Media or anywhere else I write is that for a movement and party that prides itself on inclusion, the gathering appeared very white. There were definitely more people of color than there would be at a conservative or Republican event. But as I scanned the faces of attendees to the Presidential Leadership Forum where almost all YKos was gathered, my rough estimate was 75% white - perhaps larger.

I read nothing untoward into this figure. The conference had no control over the color of those signing up (unlike the Democratic convention that mandates racial diversity in precise amounts to the decimal point). And it can hardly be called hypocritical when attendance was voluntary. I’m also sure they didn’t turn anyone away because of race.

And yet, there it is. Does that say something about the netroots? About America? Or is it inconsequential?

The fact that is that if it had been a GOP event and that high percentage of whites were in attendance, we’d never hear the end of it. So perhaps the netroots will grant conservatives a little leeway in their criticism next time, right?

Right.

Lastly, I will sound this warning to the GOP and conservatives a lot between now and next summer. Ignore or make sport of the netroots at your own peril. Underestimate them and you will get the holy living crap kicked out of you in 2008. These people are organizing far beyond blogs and blog readers. And that organization extends almost down to the precinct level as I’m sure next year’s Netroots Convention will show (they’ve decided to rename the shindig in order to move it away from one guy’s blog).

They are determined, well funded, optimistic, committed, and excited. The GOP is uncertain, underfunded, hopeful but pessimistic, dispirited, and seemingly leaderless, rudderless, and without an agenda.

Who do you think is in better shape going into next year’s contest?

UPDATE

I’m not the only one who noticed how white the gathering was:

For all the talk about the increasing influence of this growing group — “We are a community . . . a movement . . . an institution,” Cooper said in a speech Saturday night — what gets scant attention is its demography. While the Huffington Post and Fire Dog Lake, both founded by women, are two of the most widely read blogs, the rock stars are mostly men, and many women bloggers complain of sexism and harassment in the blogosphere.

Walking around McCormick Place during the weekend, it became clear that only a handful of the 1,500 conventioneers — bloggers, policy experts, party activists — are African American, Latino or Asian. Of about 100 scheduled panels and workshops, less than a half-dozen dealt directly with women or minority issues.

All snark aside, this says more about America than it does about progressives, conservatives, or either party.

In order to come to YKos and participate, you have to be able to:

1. Afford air fare from wherever you are coming.

2. Afford to stay in a hotel like the Hyatt for two nights (won’t find anything cheaper in the city - not with the special group rate Ykos got).

3. Afford to be able to take off 2 or 3 days from work.

4. Afford to feed yourself at Chicago prices (largest restaurant tax in US)

Minorities who may have wanted to attend might not have been able to afford the trip as easily as their white counterparts.

It’s that simple.

My interview with Sergeant David Aguina, the young man who walked into the lion’s den at YearlyKos and pulled John Soltz’s tail by arguing that the surge is working, is up at Pajamas Media. There is also an audio file with much more from the earnest kid who is surprisingly soft spoken and who brought his mother along for support.

Sergeant Aguina is not a bombthrower or rabble rouser. Some on the left have called him crazy or unbalanced for using the forum to argue for the surge and I am not sure that it was the best place to make that argument. But it is delicious irony that he used the same tactics the left uses to make a point he wanted to make in a hostile setting - “speaking truth to power” so to speak.

He impressed me as a sincere, well mannered, well brought up “kid” (he’s 25 years old). His passion boiled just beneath the surface of that quiet exterior. Believe me, when he started to talk about how those Iraqis shared their lunch with him the day he was pulling guard duty and couldn’t get his own command to send him some food, he got very emotional. His hands trembled slightly when holding the candy wrapper from that day and I got the impression that he would give the Iraqis the shirt off his back if they asked.

Overall, he was very believable. I must point out that while I was able to discover he was in the army (and is currently in the reserves) I have been unable to confirm as yet whether or not he was in Iraq. I have no reason to doubt it except that as we all know, there are many fabulists out there on the right and left and I would not be the first person taken in by one if this nice, sincere young guy turns out to be something less than truthful. (See Update III below where Aguina has confirmed his service in Iraq.)

The reaction among the netroots - outside of the loutish behavior by John Soltz - was interesting. He says they listened politely to him, argued respectfully, and they all ended up agreeing to disagree. Evidently there were a couple of people who dismissed him out of hand but they were the exception.

My own personal experience can confirm the Sergeant’s impressions. Even when people found out who I was, we found common ground talking about writing or blogging. And when we talked about politics, we took turns making our points and tried not to flame the other. It made me wish for just a little more civility and understanding in the blogosphere. My uneven performance in that regard notwithstanding, perhaps my experience at YearlyKos will temper some of the more outrageous insults I toss without thinking at the left.

David Aguina will probably continue his mission to bring his views on the success of the surge to the attention of as many people as possible regardless of their political affiliation or ideological inclinations. We can admire him for that.

Is he right? Time, as it always does, will tell us.

UPDATE

This isn’t the first time Sergeant Aguina has stood up for what he believes at a gathering of anti-war activists:

David Aguina, a soldier who has completed a tour of duty in Iraq, appeared at Chandler Park in military dress to support the war, and politely told anyone who would listen of the four peace activists captured in Iraq in November 2005.

His mother Iris Hernandez told me that David made a presentation for one of his classes on the situation in Iraq that had many of the students in tears and the professor praising him for his organized, impassioned plea.

Just as I admire lefty activists who are passionate about their cause while respecting the views of others, so too I admire Sergeant Aguina. I don’t agree with him on much of anything. But you can’t help but hold someone like him in high regard.

HT: Hesiod

UPDATE II: BLACK HELICOPTERS CIRCLING

Also courtesy of my friend Hesiod, the theory that Michelle Malkin sicced Sergeant Aguina on the netroots:

I was just informed that the guy in uniform this morning…..the one who posed a question to the panel about Progressives and the Military….. was a plant from the Right Wing….one Michelle Malkin to be specific, who has a blog called hot airbags or something self-referential like that.

More on this later. If this is true, it represents the most egregious, ugly, shameful and anti-American tactic I’ve ever witnessed in my own experience of studying and trying to improve US civil-military relations.
I’m not going to link to her blog, which I just checked out…and indeed, she’s accusing the conference of stifling dissent. QED Malkin, you are an idiot.

Before someone puts two and two together and comes up with something different than 4, here’s full disclosure:

1. It is true, I work for Michelle Malkin moderating comments and performing other duties.

2. It is true I wrote the piece on PJ Media about my interview with Sergeant Aguina.

3. It is not true that Sergeant Aguina has anything to do with me, Michelle Malkin, or anyone else I am aware of. If I knew of a connection with the army, with any conservative or military group, I would have reported it. In fact, when I saw the woman who was walking around with him, I was sure she was some media handler from a conservative group or perhaps a veterans organization.

It was his mother. And she was there armed with one of those dictation tape recorders taping every word that Andrew, I, and her son was saying - obviously concerned that her son would be misquoted.

PJ Media videographer Andrew Marcus and I were in the giant Foyer where hundreds of other YearlyKos attendees were milling about when Andrew saw Aguina walking toward the fountain. Andrew knew who he was because he had briefly interviewed him the day before right after his tete a tete with Soltz.

And that’s the story. No conspiracy. No plot to disrupt YearlyKos (Why would we want to do that? We want to be invited back!) No black helicpoters circling McCormick Center.

Aren’t you disappointed?

UPDATE III: AGUINA’S SERVICE CONFIRMED

I just got off the phone with David Aguina. He is sending PJ Media his overseas deployment record and reservists contract. So much for the qualifiers about him being in Iraq.

My second article for PJ Media about my excellent adventure at YearlyKos is up. It’s about the eerie feeling of deja vu I’m getting walking around McCormick Place.

It reminds me of 1980:

Anyone who lived through those times and experienced the feeling that ideology and politics had merged so that the ends and means were exactly the same would recognize what is happening at YearlyKos. Top to bottom, inside and out, this movement is nothing less than revolution. The ideas driving it are standard liberal fare; anti-war, health insurance, environmental protection, education, and jobs top the agenda. But the way the issues are being framed by participants in the dozens of panel discussions, workshops, and forums is where the action is. The nuts and bolts savvy of the political activists fuses with the wonks and wise men of the left’s intellectual brain-trust to turn out a brand new way to showcase these ideas to the public.

Some will see my analysis as perhaps reading too much into what is going on there; a bunch of lefties having a conversation with themselves that in the end, won’t amount to a hill of beans.

If you believe that, you ignore the underlying trends in polling and an evolving consensus among Democrats about how they will package their core issues in 2008.

As for those trends, I attended a fascinating panel discussion on the 2008 Election that featured a series of (to my eyes) shocking graphs. These graphs were not “snapshots” of public opinion but rather trends in opinion going back 2 years or more. They revealed in full color the uphill battle faced by the GOP in 2008. On every issue, every perception of the candidates, Democratic trend lines were going up while Republicans were static or trending down.

Trends are not easily reversed. And if what I believe about what is going on at YearlyKos is true, something earth shaking could very well occur on election day in 2008.

NOTE: In my article yesterday, I quoted Markos Zuniga as using the word “cleanse” to describe the plans of the netroots to remake the Democratic party. The phrase Zuniga actually used was “cleaning the Democratic Party out.”

I apologzie for the error and any aspersions cast on Mr. Zuniga.

My latest PJ Media column is up. It’s about my excellent adventures wandering around the YearlyKos convention.

I’ll have more to say about this next week. Until then, here’s a sample from my column today:

The third annual YearlyKos Convention got underway today at McCormick Place in Chicago with 1500 delegates from around the country attending workshops and listening to political experts while getting primed for political battle in 2008.

And as Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, AKA “Kos,” made crystal clear at a press conference this afternoon, the battle will not only be against Republicans, but also against Democrats who need to be “cleansed” from the party. Kos didn’t name any names, saying we will find out “soon enough” which Democrats would be targeted for defeat in the primaries. But his message was clear; on issues near and dear to the hearts of the progressive on line community, Democrats will adapt or they will face the wrath of this new force in politics.

In effect, Kos has promised to remake the Democratic Party in the image of the netroots. And while many observers think that this would pull the Democratic Party too far to the left, Markos disagrees.

“There is no Jesse Jackson wing of the Democratic party anymore. We are the center,” he said.

I may not get much on the site today or tomorrow due to my attendance at the netroots convention.

The votes are in from this week’s Watchers Council vote and the winner in the Council category is yours truly for my post “Little Noted But Long Remembered.” Finishing in a tie for second was “Russia Vs. The US: No Contest” by Cheat Seeking Missiles and “Boy, Was Thomas Right” by The Colossus of Rhodey.

Finishing first in the non council category was “ON THE FRONTLINE / Cpl. JOHN MATTHEW BISHOP: In the Shadows of Fallen Comrades” from The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

My brother Jim, an accomplished folk musician and life long teacher, has emailed me with the sad news that Tommy Makem, the great Irish folk singer, has died of cancer at the age of 74.

The death of Makem is significant for a number of reasons. His passing leaves only Liam Clancy left alive of the original “Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem” folk group who took America by storm in the early ’60’s. At its height, the folk revival in America produced an astonishing outpouring of musical talent whose imprint on American culture, mores, and politics we feel to this day. The left wing activism of artists such as Pete Seeger, Mary Travers, Judy Collins, Joan Baez, and a young Bob Dylan roiled the streets and changed the face of America forever. And they did it through music.

Some changes, we might indeed look at in askance; other changes relating to civil rights were necessary and vital to bringing justice to those previously denied it. The great fomenting of ideas and a new way of looking at the world began with this hearkening back to our roots as a revolutionary society that the folk revival brought to the surface. It is hard to imagine the America of today without the influence of those folk artists and the songs they taught us all.

Tommy Makem and the Clancy brothers were a little different. Their traditional Irish ditties, patriotic songs, and wonderful stories set to music revealed both the Irish experience in America and, more importantly, what those immigrants were fleeing when they came here. For me, their music inspired a far more personal journey than the great issues being illuminated by the Pete Seegers or Peter, Paul, and Mary’s of the folk music scene. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem’s music opened the door to discovering my family’s Irish heritage and helped us all take enormous pride in who we were and where we came from.

A purely unscientific sociological observation follows. Recent immigrants wear their heritage on their sleeve, proud of their mother country, still feeling the tug on the heart from across the ocean.

Second generation immigrants are much more determined to be “American.” And while not always rejecting that heritage, it becomes a lot less important to them over time. This was especially true of Irish immigrants who saw what happened to their fathers whose Irish brogue would prevent them from getting good jobs or even working at all.

Third generation immigrants - fully assimilated and more likely to marry outside of their ethnic group - will actually seek out and attempt to rediscover their heritage, hungry to explore the past in ways that their fathers or mothers never did.

For the Moran family, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem opened up an entirely new world, a means of discovering our past. Their music was not at all like the melodramatic “American” Irish music we were all familiar with. Their songs were of the real Ireland - a place of pain and suffering, of oppression, and a kind of fatalism that seems to me unique to the Irish people. In fact, the group’s first album - Irish Songs of the Rebellion - released in 1956, celebrated that fatalism in songs that told the story of several futile Irish uprisings against British rule. One of those songs, Roddy McCorely, is a staple of family reunions and is guaranteed to bring emotions about our heritage close to the surface:

O see the fleet-foot host of men, who march with faces drawn,
From farmstead and from fishers’ cot, along the banks of Ban;
They come with vengeance in their eyes. Too late! Too late are they,
For young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today.

Up the narrow street he stepped, so smiling, proud and young.
About the hemp-rope on his neck, the golden ringlets clung;
There’s ne’er a tear in his blue eyes, fearless and brave are they,
As young Roddy McCorley goes to die on the bridge of Toome today.

McCorley was a hero of the rebellion of 1798…as opposed to the Easter Rebellion or any of the dozen or so other uprisings against the British that were put to song at one time or another by the Irish. The image of the young McCorely going to his death so stoically is one of the most powerful of my childhood. It’s an example of a song with a mournful subject that has the effect of uplifting the listener emotionally.

The Irish songbook is full of music like that and Tommy Makem helped bring it alive for all of us. Makem became acquainted with the Clancy’s in Ireland back in the ’50’s. Moving on to Canada and then New York city, the boys were originally interested in becoming actors (Tom Clancy eventually went on to appear in dozens of TV shows and movies). They began to sing in small pubs and taverns to help make ends meet. Eventually, inspired by the Kingston Trio, the boys decided to try making a living as musicians. They immersed themselves in the folk revival in New York city, meeting legends like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Dylan liked the song “Patriot Games” so much he wrote additional lyrics and released it as “With God on Our Side.”

An appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 made their careers. Since that time, the group released dozens of albums, had breakups, reunions, different family members taking part, and finally the death of Paddy and Tom Clancy and now Tommy Makem bringing what is surely an era of folk music to an end.

Beyond the impact the group had on the world at large, their affect on my family cannot be measured. We glory in singing many of the group’s songs (accompanied by my brother Jim and his trusty Martin guitar). The drinking songs, the Irish patriot songs, and the songs of protest, including this strange and wonderful tune about British oppression that fairly drips with satire:

When we were savage, fierce and wild
She came like a mother to her child.
She gently raised us from the slime
Kept our hands from hellish crime,
And sent us to Heaven in her own good time.

Now Irishmen, forget the past!
And think of the time that’s coming fast.
When we shall all be civilized,
Neat and clean and well-advised.
And won’t Mother England be surprised?

“Whack Fol A Diddle” perfectly expresses the mixture of hate and contempt the Irish feel toward the British to this day. There is something so defiant in those lyrics that brings out the pride I feel in being of Irish heritage.

Tommy Makem is gone. I wonder if they’ll put the lyrics to this last verse of “Jug of Punch” on his gravestone?

And when I’m dead and in my grave
No costly tombstone will I have,
Just lay me down in my native peat
With a jug of punch at my head and feet.

What do you believe would happen if American forces invaded Pakistan to go after the Taliban without the permission of the Musharraf government?

Most analysts expect the Pakistani people would pour into the streets in protest, destablizing that already fragile country to the point that it would be possible for a much more conservative, Taliban friendly government to emerge from the chaos. Pakistan is already the most anti-American country in the world following our invasion of Afghanistan. It would be stupid to invade and threaten Musharraf’s hold on power.

Pakistan has 60 nuclear weapons. Need anything else be said about a government with that kind of destructive power in their hands with ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban?

Evidently, this doesn’t concern Senator Barak Obama:

In a strikingly bold speech about terrorism scheduled for this morning, Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Sen. Barack Obama will call not only for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, but a redeployment of troops into Afghanistan and even Pakistan with or without the permission of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.

“

“I understand that President Musharraf has his own challenges,” Obama will say, according to speech excerpts provided to ABC News by his campaign, “but let me make this clear. There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al Qaeda leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Blogger Sister Toldjah asks the obvious question: “Would this be before or after those unconditional meetings he would have with the world’s most despotic ‘leaders’?”

In fact, that remark about meeting with the thugs of the world without any preliminaries has evidently cost Obama dearly. The most recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll has Hillary Clinton widening her lead over the Illinois Senator to 43% - 22%. That’s up a whopping 14% since June and shows that Obama’s foreign policy gaffes are not giving Democrats or the American people much confidence in his abilities.

If Obama thought sounding a touger note in his foreign policy speeches would help, he might have least chosen a target to invade who was already an enemy of the United States. By showing a willingness to take the chance of handing al-Qaeda a nuclear weapon on a silver platter, Obama proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is not ready to be President now nor possibly ever.

I am not one to get my panties in a twist thinking that the world will come to an end if a few of my personal communications are captured in a digital dragnet by some dumb brute of a super computer and then released back into the ether without any human on planet earth laying eyes or ears on what was contained in those messages.

It bothers me that the potential for abuse is there - as it should trouble any conservative worth their salt. But to exaggerate the threat to civil liberties by positing the notion that while my Auntie Midge is giving her famous recipe for fruit cake over the phone or via email to one of my nieces that NSA spies are avidly listening in and faithfully taking notes on exactly how much rum should be added to give her delicacy its enormous heft is silly.

Actually, given the weight of the damn thing, there’s a good chance the NSA would see it as a weapon of mass destruction and “disappear” dear Auntie by renditioning her to some dark hole of a prison in eastern Europe. Not that we do that kind of thing anymore, right?

This is the essence of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” leaked by the New York Times in December of 2005. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:

What good comes of insuring our survival at the expense of losing some of our liberty?

If one of our cities was destroyed by a nuclear weapon smuggled into the country by al Qaeda, I daresay the relatives of the dead would answer that question much differently than the arm chair civil libertarians who so blithely condemn the Administration’s actions in the aftermath of 9/11. There are even those who say that there is no choice to make, that our survival as a nation is not at stake at all therefore any argument that includes a loss of privacy rights as a way to head off an al Qaeda attack is setting up a straw man to justify oppression.

I don’t have much sympathy for that argument but I am troubled that our government has skirted so close to the line involving spying on innocent American citizens and may have in fact crossed it. Ultimately, it must come down to a question of responsibility. You and I are not responsible for the safety and security of the United States. The Constitution has vested that awesome responsibility in the office of the President. In the end, where you come down on this controversy depends on how much you trust the occupant of that office not to abuse his authority nor misuse the frightening power our technological prowess has bestowed upon his government to invade our most private and personal spaces.

For if in fact we are in a war for the survival of our republic – and our enemies themselves have made it abundantly clear that this is what the War on Terror is all about – we are in grave danger if we give in to the temptation to turn the issue of liberty versus security into a political club in order to beat one’s political opponent for acting dictatorially or just as bad, unpatriotically. The issue is too important for the kind of lazy generalities being tossed about regarding an absolutist position on civil liberties or aiding and abetting the enemy in a time of war. In the end, we must trust each other or perish.

Those “lazy generalities” have supplanted thoughtful argument as each side in the debate has now established their own narrative about domestic spying by this Administration and will brook no change in the parameters of those narratives to reflect new information or an altered perception of the man in the White House who sits atop the national security ziggurat with the capability to do enormous violence to the very concepts of privacy and liberty.

New information such as this should give everyone pause and cause them to re-evaluate their positions:

The Bush administration’s chief intelligence official said yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single executive order in late 2001. The disclosure makes clear that a controversial National Security Agency program was part of a much broader operation than the president previously described.

The disclosure by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, appears to be the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Bush’s order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005.

In a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), McConnell wrote that the executive order following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks included “a number of . . . intelligence activities” and that a name routinely used by the administration — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — applied only to “one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more.”

We’ve had other aspects to the overall surveillance program released in dribs and drabs over the past 2 years. Data mining and getting the cooperation of Telecom companies to monitor the “switching stations” where a lot of overseas phone traffic is channeled are evidently two of the elements that make up the “broader operations” connected to the TSP.

What else? Just what is the NSA up to?

There is no agency of the federal government with the potential to do more mischief to our liberty and privacy than the National Security Agency. Anyone who has read William Bamford’s The Puzzle Palace - which described NSA spying on Americans in the 60’s - should think long and hard about the monumental leaps in technology since that time which allow for even more intrusive and thorough efforts to invade our “private space” than ever before.

At the same time, reforms at the NSA have made it less likely that these abuses will take place. Procedures not even thought of back in the 60’s that relate to the way data is handled are supposed to protect American citizens from the kind of snooping done by the agency in the past.

But the reforms will not stop an aggressive executive if he is hell bent on pushing the outside of the envelope of constitutionality and legality by using the capabilities of the NSA to spy on Americans. All we can do is trust that oversight by the intelligence committees in Congress will prevent the President from crossing the line.

At this point, I am unsure if that oversight has been effective. Nor am I convinced that the Administration has been forthright with the intel committees (or the so called “Group of 8″ made up the chair and vice chair of each committee plus the leaders of the House and Senate from both parties) in their description of all of the activities associated with the TSP.

I am fully cognizant of the fact that these intelligence activities represent the most closely held secrets of our government. And despite those on the left who dismiss the idea of giving the enemy an advantage by leaking the existence of these programs and their inner workings, I believe that al-Qaeda has benefited from the leaks which have revealed enough that they may be able to circumvent at least some of our efforts to keep track of them and discover their plans. (The idea that al-Qaeda already knew we’d try to keep track of them is true. What’s silly is the notion that they had much of a clue as to how we’d do it.) For this reason, the irresponsibility of the New York Times and other publications that continue to leak classified information should be condemned.

What all of this back and forth comes down to is the same thing it came down to 20 months ago when the existence of the TSP was leaked by the Times; how much do you trust the man in the White House to protect our civil liberties while carrying out domestic surveillance activities with the potential for harm?

I must admit to being a lot less sanguine today about the desire of those who wield such enormous power to view the balancing act between liberty and security with the seriousness that the rest of us do.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

As our young men and women spend the next month sweating in the 130 degree heat of a Baghdad summer, risking their lives to build a better future for the Iraqi people, the elected representatives of the people of Iraq - men who will have a hand in running that future our military is trying to build for them - have decided to beat the heat and take the month off.

It is totally, completely, incomprehensible.

Their excuse? They’ve got nothing to do:

Lawmakers said the government had yet to present them with any of the laws. The parliament had earlier signaled its intention to go into recess in August after cutting short its summer break that normally starts in July.

“We do not have anything to discuss in the parliament, no laws or constitutional amendments, nothing from the government. Differences between the political factions have delayed the laws,” Kurdish lawmaker Mahmoud Othman told Reuters.

The parliament is due to reconvene on September 4, just two weeks before the top U.S. general in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and Washington’s envoy to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, are due to report to Congress on the success of U.S. President George W. Bush’s new Iraq strategy and make recommendations.

Just a second here. Hold the phone. They claim they’ve got nothing to do? How about ironing out some of those “differences between the political factions” that have paralyzed the government these many months. They all know the issues involved; reconciliation, the oil revenue sharing plan, a federalism arrangement for power sharing, local elections, and allowing former Baathist party members to get jobs in government. While they’re at it, they might think of reforming the civil service to deal with rampant corruption, hold some hearings on where those billions in reconstruction money is actually going, and tell Mookie al-Sadr to take a hike.

But hey! They’ve got nothing to do so let them flee the capitol for those sandy beaches in Dubai. I hear the Gulf water is fine this time of year - if you don’t mind the film of oil that covers the surface. Maybe that’s why beach volleyball is so popular although the images of women in burkini’s prancing around on the beach would be enough to drive me back to Baghdad.

Actually, I think we should make those weasels meet outdoors in the same 130 degree heat our boys are enduring. We could strap 100 pounds of gear on them for the whole month and tell them they don’t get to go inside until they come to an agreement on at least some of the political benchmarks set by the Administration and Congress. Just to make it interesting, we could lob a few mortars over their heads once and a while to give them the same feeling our guys are experiencing every time they go out on patrol.

All sorts of images come to mind to describe the utter contempt I feel for these bozos. Nero fiddling while Rome burned is particularly apt although history tells us that Nero didn’t fiddle and that Rome actually needed a good fire to clear out the disease infested slums where the fire began. Things just got a little out of hand, that’s all.

No need to start a fire in Iraq. The conflagration that currently engulfs that bloody country has been burning for 4 years and shows little sign of abating. And there’s still plenty of hatred on all sides of the sectarian divide to feed the flames of violence and death for the foreseeable future. That the Iraqi government has chosen this time of all times to abandon their posts and refuse to continue trying to settle their differences shows a lack of respect for the United States and its president who has expended every ounce of political capital - and some he didn’t have - to keep the American commitment from faltering.

And what of our military? We have stretched the ability of our army to deal with conflicts to the absolute limit. Don’t believe me? Ask the incoming Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

He said he was committed to “resetting, reconstituting and revitalizing our armed forces,” acknowledging, “There is strain. We are stretched.” Although recruitment and retention generally remain good and “morale is still high,” he said, “I worry about the toll this pace of operations is taking on [service members and their families], our equipment and on our ability to respond to other crises and contingencies.

“The U.S. military remains the strongest in all the world, but it is not unbreakable,” Mullen said. “Force reset in all its forms cannot wait until the war in Iraq is over.”

Mullen also had this bit of cheery news about our friends in the Iraqi parliament:

Levin expressed skepticism that Iraqi political leaders can take the necessary steps toward reconciliation, saying they “remain frozen by their history.” He described the Iraqi parliament as “at a standstill,” with nearly every session since November forced to adjourn because too few legislators showed up.

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) voiced similar doubts about the ability of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to meet its commitments.

“So the surge is moving forward successfully,” he said. “But the Maliki government is sliding backwards and is failing in the partnership that was established as the predicate, the foundation, for the surge concept.”

It’s not all the PM’s fault. Maliki got the lawmakers to stick around in July, foiling the Council’s plan for two months of lying in the hammock and snoozing the nation’s future away. But for the rest, one can’t help get the feeling that the Prime Minister is just not up to the challenge of enticing the factions to come together and do what is necessary to begin the process of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. In the end, he appears to me to be an empty suit, tugged this way and that by various Shia factions and totally incapable of standing up to those who thirst for the blood of Sunnis or seek revenge for Saddam’s atrocities.

When General Petreaus delivers his report in September, Congress will have to weigh both the successes and failures of the surge as well as the prospect for any progress from the Iraqi government.

For the former, I have no doubt that there will be encouraging news about the security situation in several parts of the country. As for the latter, while Petreaus may seek to put the best face possible on political developments, the cold hard truth is that the Iraqi Council of Representatives does not reconvene from their fun and games until September 4 - a scant two weeks before the American general must face the Congress and try and convince them that the Iraqis are serious about doing the things they simply must do to heal the gaping wounds in the national polity which fuel the violence that make Iraq such an aching tragedy.