Right Wing Nut House

My first post about net neutrality was greeted with much skepticism by some of my conservative friends. In particular, Matt, who claims to be The Only Republican” in San Francisco , has an answer for those who say that the construction of a two-tiered internet by giant Telecos where big companies will pay a fee so that their sites and search engines receive favored treatment on the “information highway” is a trojan horse of sorts; that in fact, the concept of net neutrality is a way for government to control the net at the “router” level:

You should not be surprised that the loudest advocates of ‘net neutrality are those on the far left, including MyDD, and MoveOn. Their arguments are very much in line with things like McCain-Feingold and the old Fairness Doctrine.

It is also being sold as “fear the big bad corporations”. I don’t have any particular affection for any of the companies involved here, but I do know that customers know best. Some customers might indeed say, I will pay more for better video. Alternatively, the market may say “we like it the way it is”, which is neutrality de facto. In either case, we don’t need Congress or the FCC to make the call.

The history of the Internet has told us we should imagine the unimagined. Let’s preserve the absence of inhibition that has gotten us this far. Keep it libertarian. No new laws.

Read Matt’s entire piece which he calls a “Primer” for Conservatives on the issue.

This is all well and good. And there may be a way to address some of Matt’s concerns in the current Telecommunications Reform bill that just passed the Energy and Commerce Committee and where a net neutrality amendment went down to defeat. But is there a real threat?

Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the Internet’s First Amendment — a principle called Network Neutrality that prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its Web site open quickly on your computer.

Net Neutrality allows everyone to compete on a level playing field and is the reason that the Internet is a force for economic innovation, civic participation and free speech. If the public doesn’t speak up now, Congress will cave to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign by telephone and cable companies that want to decide what you do, where you go, and what you watch online.

This isn’t just speculation — we’ve already seen what happens elsewhere when the Internet’s gatekeepers get too much control. Last year, Telus — Canada’s version of AT&T — blocked their Internet customers from visiting a Web site sympathetic to workers with whom the company was having a labor dispute. And Madison River, a North Carolina ISP, blocked its customers from using any competing Internet phone service.

To my mind, the potential is certainly there for mischief by both government and large corporations. The difference is that we can keep on eye on government and influence potential troublemaking a lot easier than we can at Comcast.

The New York Times has come out four square for net neutrality:

One of the Internet’s great strengths is that a single blogger or a small political group can inexpensively create a Web page that is just as accessible to the world as Microsoft’s home page. But this democratic Internet would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate. Providers could also block access to sites they do not like.

In another comment on my post, Matt has a pretty good response:

You don’t need to trust the telcos. Your supermarket can offer any product it wants, ditto the PC companies, ad infinitum, and these industries are serving consumers extremely well. The only place where customers are not served well are regulated utilities. That is exactly the model that the neutrality proponents are advocating.

Commenter “AM” says it’s all much ado about nothing:

There are some applications for which success falls from 100% to 0% at a particular latency and packet-loss threshold. The only way the service provider can assure that these applications will work when the net is under load is to provide differentiated services.

This is a technical issue, not a political one. Dont be conned – get informed.

Before your eyes glaze over, here’s “Cosmoreaxer” who agrees with him:

This has been covered for weeks on Digg, and it’s pretty clear if you take a moment to read more: This is the cable and telcos vs. the online content providers like Amazon and Yahoo. It’s not about the corporations trying to keep the little guy down, it’s about the corporations fighting with other corporations about whether to move certain packets (basically, video and VoIP) over the net faster than other packets (less intense, non-streaming info, i.e. e-mail and the web).

That’s it. This is what you’re shrieking like an anti-capitalist street protester about?

In fact, I’ve read that same complaint about net neutrality on several sites; that if you don’t stream a lot of video and VoIP, you’re basically paying for those who do. That’s an issue I would like someone to explain to me (just like you would explain it to your 5 year old child). Is it fair to ask people to pay for internet services they don’t use? And if that kind of service can be differentiated, isn’t it a matter of fairness that sites that use the tremendous bandwidth it takes to stream video pay more than those who don’t?

These are tough questions because they are 1) so highly technical that people like me feel totally inadequate in addressing; and 2) the answer appears to depend on what side of the liberal/conservative divide you come down on.

But is this really a “political” issue in the sense that it is right vs. left? I would love to be able to find a consensus as we did on the FEC regs that came down last winter. However, that seemed to be pretty straightforward as an issue of free speech. This net neutrality business makes me feel like I’m walking through cotton candy.

What we need is a good old fashioned debate with point/counterpoint responses and done in as non-technical a manner as possible. For all you geeks out there (and I use that term affectionately because I have tremendous admiration for your skills and knowledge) bless your hearts but when you start talking about “packets” and “load” I want to place my hands around your necks and squeeze. Please remember that many if not most us are computer klutzes and need a “Special Ed” approach to any technical issues.

One thing is for sure: There will be times over the next few years when we will be defending internet freedoms from both government and gigantic corporations. When you look at the growth of commerce on the net over just the last 5 years, you realize that big government and big corporations are like blood hounds who have picked up the scent.

And what they’re smelling is money - lots of it. It looks to me we may need that “Army of Davids” if we’re going to protect the net from the kind of intrusions that would alter our enjoyment and our quest for knowledge.

UPDATE

Firedoglake weighs in criticizing former Clinton politico Mike McCurry for his piece on HuffPo with typical gentleness, thoughtfulness, and understatement:

Tell us again, Mike you lying sellout, how we online activists are just a bunch of clueless, uncouth whiney kids. . . with whom the New York Times apparently agrees. Chris Bowers exposes the lying bulls**t about netroots activists you, Joe Klein and your other pecksniff power pimp sellouts keep hawking at the corner of 17th and L.

Let’s have a look at the names in your lobbying firm, shall we? Oooh, Randy Tate, one of the founders of the Christian Coalition. Tell me again, Mike, about your Democratic bona fides, how we should all be civil and moderate in tone? Let’s check out your clients. Oooooh. . . the Republican National Committee! Well, how-dee-doo! And the Lincoln Chaffee endorsing Sierra Club makes an appearance here, as do both the ACLU and the Department of Homeland Security. Interesting! Would any financial supporters of the ostensibly progressive groups on this list like to send a little note to them about Mike’s firm’s conflicts of interest?

Ed Cone is also disgusted by McCurry’s shilling for the telecos.

I’m guessing former Clinton mouthpiece Mike McCurry meant to sound tough and bloggy with this post about net neutrality.

It helps to mix a little Google into your act, too: McCurry sounds ignorant when he calls Vint Cerf “Vince.”

That’s one thing I would like to see addressed in ethics legislation; the “revolving door” in Washington. People should not be able to move from either Executive or Congressional branches of government into private lobbying gigs for at least 10 years. That sounds draconian but it’s just getting ridiculous.

UPDATE II: ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE

In the post above, I asked for a simple explanation of some of the issues. Not only have some excellent comments been left below (See Andy and Cosmoreax especially) but Dale Franks at Q & O has a great post on the issue as well.

Ain’t the internets somethin’?

It’s times like these I really wish Mike Royko was still alive and writing his columns about Chicago politics.

Royko, with an eye both cynical and sweet, saw politics as something of a patriotic three ring circus with charlatans and crusaders vying with criminals and reformers for money and attention, all hoping the ringmaster in the person of Mayor Richard J. Daley (his son is Richard M.) would cast his baleful, hooded eyes in their direction and thereby bless their efforts. Since the charlatans and criminals were usually pretty well connected, they always seemed to come out on top, leaving the crusaders and reformers to fight another day.

The reason for the reverie about Royko is that he would have had an absolute field day with this bit of nonsense passed by the Chicago City Council:

Chalk up another first for Chicago, which on Wednesday became the nation’s only combined nuclear- and foie gras-free zone.

After passing a sweeping ban on public smoking in December, the City Council has now followed up with a more exclusive bit of lifestyle policing. On a voice vote, aldermen outlawed the sale of the fatty delicacy made from goose or duck liver, settling a months-long culinary battle between goose huggers and gastronomes. (Aldermen declared the city a nuclear-free zone in 1986.)

Foie gras isn’t made in Chicago, only eaten here in a handful of posh restaurants and sold at gourmet food shops. But ban supporters claim its production is barbaric, with tubes jammed down the gullets of ducks and geese to force-feed them until their livers swell to 10 times normal size. At a council committee hearing, actress and animal rights activist Loretta Swit likened force-feeding to the torture of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Swit, you may recall, played Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on the Korean War TV series M*A*S*H which I guess makes her an expert on the torture of both POW’s and mass television audiences. Now that she mentions it, I seem to recall those gruesome pictures where we stuck tubes down the throats of those jihadis and force fed them pork and beans. Otherwise, I can’t for the life of me understand what torturing human beings at Abu Ghraib has to do with goose livers.

That is, unless the aldermen are preparing a Manifesto that would free all animals from the drudgery of serving humans. They might want to start by closing the world famous horse racing facility Sportsmen’s Park (not before they give me back all the money I’ve lost there over the years) and then move on to freeing all the exotic beasts trapped behind bars at Lincoln Park Zoo. Freeing them might be a problem because being exotic beasts themselves, the aldermen might not appreciate the competition from other ravenous predators prowling the city.

Or perhaps that as long as we’re equating humans with animals, they may want to emulate the Spanish socialists who are calling on granting human rights to…APES!

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for “the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings.” The PSOE’s justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests “the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species.”

According to the Project, “Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species’s closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals.”

Talk about socialism appealing to the lowest common denominator…

The socialists see great apes possessing “sufficient mental faculties” only because they follow Lenin’s dictum “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” although no one has checked recently to see how well the socialists can draw termites from a piece of deadwood using a broken reed or whether they’ve forgotten how to use a rock to crack hazelnuts.

Our simian friends have a lot to teach their socialist brothers. After all, how much worse could being ruled by Chimps and Gorillas be than having socialists run a government? I’d bet there would be a lot more lying around building nests out of grass and a lot fewer executions.

Quite an improvement, no?

UPDATE

Tom Elia had the story before I did and quotes an Agence France-Presse report that refers to Chicago as “hogtown,” referencing the slaughterhouses that haven’t been a large part of the city of more than 40 years. Quoth Tom:

Maybe if the Agence France-Presse reporter expanded his or her reading list beyond, say, books by Upton Sinclair, he/she might know this.

Maybe it’s time for this reporter to try out some Nelson Algren… ya know, stuff like dat…

They probably think Al Capone still runs the liquor business…

“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.” (Pearl Buck)

You and I have fallen asleep at the wheel lately. While we were busy making fun of liberals, looking into the McCarthy mess, and wailing about immigration reform, Congress and the giant telecom companies have temporarily put one over on us.

They’re trying to steal the internet right from underneath our noses.

Let me explain. The way our internet currently works is pretty straightforward and, to give you the buzzword of the day, “net neutral.” That is, if you want to visit this site, you click your mouse over a link and presto! You’re magically transferred to my little slice of nuttiness. If you have a broadband connection, you’re whisked here in nothing flat. And with DSL or dial-up, the resources allocated by your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to find the quickest route to the House and to load this page are exactly the same as those allocated if you are trying to access Daily Kos. In short, your ISP is simply providing access - they don’t have the right to act as a “gatekeeper” by giving priority in the allocation of net resources to one site over another.

That’s not to say the technology that could change net neutrality doesn’t exist because it does. And wouldn’t you know it, the giant telecom companies want to use that technology for what else? To make more money:

The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video — while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services — or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls — and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

Last night while we were enjoying our dinner, the enemies of a net neutral internet scored a significant victory in the House Energy and Commerce Committee with the passage of a Telecommunications Reform proposal that would allow large corporations to take control of the net in ways that would harm free speech and free commerce:

The bill passed 42-12, but not before AT&T got off its final counterattack, just before passage around 7 p.m. In the empty room, right before final passage, Gonzales, from the home town of AT&T, San Antonio, offered an amendment to require the FCC to make a study “competition in the Internet world,” particularly what he called “special arrangements” between Web sites and other companies. It would be similar, he said, to the type of tie-in arrangements that proponents of Net Neutrality said will exist with telephone companies favoring content. Such arrangements between Web sites and others, Gonzales says, would make it hard for a “garage-bases startup” to make a go of it. Citing an article from Southwest Airlines’ magazine, he noted that Google gets revenue from ads tied to searches and that Yahoo is “fighting for deals.”

Democrats were flabbergasted. Eshoo, who represents Silicon Valley, said she was “baffled by the amendment, because Gonzales, who earlier said he was opposed to regulating the Internet. This, she said, “is about regulating search engines.” Markey said he was preparing an amendment to expand the study to include the top five telephone companies and top five cable operators, but didn’t get to offer it. The Gonzales amendment was defeated 11-43, but Google, and Yahoo! and the others should be on notice. This isn’t over. They are squarely in the gunsights.

We’ve been hearing about the promise of broadband for more than a decade, a potential life altering technology that will integrate our entire homes so that all of our communications will be part of one, seamless whole. Television, phone service, internet access, and anything else we choose to include would be controllable through the magic of a broadband connection. Access to thousands of movies, songs, TV shows, news, and blogs, as well as interactivity on a scale never previously seen will change commerce, culture, and radically affect the everyday lives of citizens.

When I first heard of this vision, I couldn’t imagine it. Growing up in a world with three networks and where newspapers were still an impactful part of society, even the advent of the computer revolution didn’t faze me that much. That is, until I got my broadband connection from Comcast last year. The amount of on demand content on my television is pretty extraordinary - much of it available for no extra charge. And while I am currently resisting switching our phone service to Comcast, it is probably just a matter of time before I give in there as well. It goes without saying that the speed of my internet connection - the ability to download A/V as well as flitting from site to site almost instantaneously, makes me wonder how I ever lived with a dial up connection.

I can now see the vision of those broadband pioneers. The outlines of this brave new world are just starting to take shape. But all of these dreams will be meaningless if we allow the large telecom companies and their toadies in Congress to set themselves up as traffic cops on this information highway, the final arbiters of taste, politics, and perhaps even speech itself. Their brazenness in attempting this coup d’etat has been made possible because people like you and me fell asleep. We forgot that vigilance is the price we pay for living in a democracy. We neglected out duties as citizens and the rich, the powerful, and the greedy took full advantage.

I am sorry to say that most of us on the right either ignored this issue or failed to warn people adequately. This must change. There is a website devoted to defeating this attempt at internet regulation called Save The Internet.Com. I urge you to go to this site and join the coalition to protect the internet from the machinations of giant corporations who wish to impose their own, narrow vision of what the internet should be on the rest of us.

The fight is just beginning. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

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.

Although this story comes to us via the far left British rag The Guardian, much of the information about what happened to $12 billion dollars in Iraqi reconstruction funds is a matter of public record gleaned from court cases, pending criminal trials, and other more reliable sources.

The short answer to what happened to $12 billion in Iraq is that it was stolen. And for the most part, the US government knows it and refuses to prosecute the thieves.

At the start of the Iraq war, around $23bn-worth of Iraqi money was placed in the trusteeship of the US-led coalition by the UN. The money, known as the Development Fund for Iraq and consisting of the proceeds of oil sales, frozen Iraqi bank accounts and seized Iraqi assets, was to be used in a “transparent manner”, specified the UN, for “purposes benefiting the people of Iraq”.

For the past few months we have been working on a Guardian Films investigation into what happened to that money. What we discovered was that a great deal of it has been wasted, stolen or frittered away. For the coalition, it has been a catastrophe of its own making. For the Iraqi people, it has been a tragedy. But it is also a financial and political scandal that runs right to the heart of the nightmare that is engulfing Iraq today.

[...]

Because the Iraqi banking system was in tatters, the funds were placed in an account with the Federal Reserve in New York. From there, most of the money was flown in cash to Baghdad. Over the first 14 months of the occupation, 363 tonnes of new $100 bills were shipped in - $12bn, in cash. And that is where it all began to go wrong.

“Iraq was awash in cash - in dollar bills. Piles and piles of money,” says Frank Willis, a former senior official with the governing Coalition Provisional Authority. “We played football with some of the bricks of $100 bills before delivery. It was a wild-west crazy atmosphere, the likes of which none of us had ever experienced.”

First of all, a good question to ask would be what nincompoop authorized the shipping of 363 tons of cash to a place where there was absolutely no chance of keeping track of it? With no banking system, it is laughable to think someone actually believed that corruption and thievery wouldn’t be rampant with so much cash lying around.

In fact, they probably knew and didn’t care:

The environment created by the coalition positively encouraged corruption. “American law was suspended, Iraqi law was suspended, and Iraq basically became a free fraud zone,” says Alan Grayson, a Florida-based attorney who represents whistleblowers now trying to expose the corruption. “In a free fire zone you can shoot at anybody you want. In a free fraud zone you can steal anything you like. And that was what they did.”

A good example was the the Iraqi currency exchange programme (Ice). An early priority was to devote enormous resources to replacing every single Iraqi dinar showing Saddam’s face with new ones that didn’t. The contract to help distribute the new currency was won by Custer Battles, a small American security company set up by Scott Custer and former Republican Congressional candidate Mike Battles. Under the terms of the contract, they would invoice the coalition for their costs and charge 25% on top as profit. But Custer Battles also set up fake companies to produce inflated invoices, which were then passed on to the Americans. They might have got away with it, had they not left a copy of an internal spreadsheet behind after a meeting with coalition officials.

Not only brazen crooks but stupid ones as well. Sounds like the cat burglar who dropped his wallet inside the house he was robbing.

The spreadsheet showed the company’s actual costs in one column and their invoiced costs in another; it revealed, in one instance, that it had charged $176,000 to build a helipad that actually cost $96,000. In fact, there was no end to Custer Battles’ ingenuity. For example, when the firm found abandoned Iraqi Airways fork-lifts sitting in Baghdad airport, it resprayed them and rented them to the coalition for thousands of dollars. In total, in return for $3m of actual expenditure, Custer Battles invoiced for $10m. Perhaps more remarkable is that the US government, once it knew about the scam, took no legal action to recover the money.

This is just one company. And it’s not the worst of it either:

But this is just one story among many. From one US controlled vault in a former Saddam palace, $750,000 was stolen. In another, a safe was left open. In one case, two American agents left Iraq without accounting for nearly $1.5m.

Perhaps most puzzling of all is what happened as the day approached for the handover of power (and the remaining funds) to the incoming Iraqi interim government. Instead of carefully conserving the Iraqi money for the new government, the Coalition Provisional Authority went on an extraordinary spending spree. Some $5bn was committed or spent in the last month alone, very little of it adequately accounted for.

One CPA official was given nearly $7m and told to spend it in seven days. “He told our auditors that he felt that there was more emphasis on the speed of spending the money than on the accountability for that money,” says Ginger Cruz, the deputy inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction.

Certainly some corruption was bound to occur with all that money being thrown around. But it is depressing to see the hogs and vultures in a feeding frenzy at a time when a small fraction of what was stolen or lost or wasted might have made a difference in the lives of ordinary Iraqis and given them something to hope for following the fall of Saddam.

Instead, they got more of the same kind of corruption and thievery that sapped their confidence in the Coalition Authority and its ability to make their lives better.

Read the entire article. Along with the usual Guardian anti-war blather, there are some other eye-opening examples of malfeasance that should cause your blood to boil.

This is the first in a series of 6 articles examining the issues and questions raised in Edwin Feulner and Doug Wilson’s book Getting America Right. Each article will examine one of the six questions the authors think we should be asking of every piece of legislation being considered by Congress.

The six questions can be found in my review of the book here.

*******************************************************************

How can it be determined if a proposed piece of legislation is the business of government?

The question is deceptively simple. For contained in that interrogatory is the confluence of government and politics. It highlights the clash of desire and necessity. It defines what kind of a people we want to be. And the answer to it is the permanent divide between liberals and conservatives.

A good starting point for looking at the history of the growth of what has been the “government’s business” would be the Civil War. It was here that “the arm of the federal government first reached out and tapped the ordinary citizen on the shoulder” as Bruce Catton put it when the great Civil War historian wrote about the first national draft in American history. Up until that time, the closest that the overwhelming majority of American citizens came to dealing with the federal government was in mailing a letter. Now the government in Washington could bypass the state and local government and affect the life of the individual American citizen directly.

The Draft Riots in New York city as well as in other places were not entirely the result of this radical measure taken by Lincoln to supply the northern army with much needed troops. In New York especially, there was a nasty element of racism and class involved. The government allowed that a draftee could purchase an exemption for the sum of $300. This amount was far beyond the means of most poor people. Couple that with a simmering resentment against free blacks among the almost equally oppressed Irish and the occasion of the draft simply supplied the kindling for a conflagration that killed hundreds.

But the very thought that the government in Washington could affect the life of the individual American was so radical that even supporters of the Conscription Act hastened to assure people that this was a wartime measure only and that such power granted the federal government would be taken away once the emergency had passed. Such was pretty much the case until the progressive movement burst upon the American political scene in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The existence of the progressive movement was a testament to the American belief in the perfectibility of society. Progressives believed that by applying scientific principles to government and couple it with technological progress, all of the ills afflicting society could be cured. The “March of Progress” was on and the government juggernaut began to role. Income taxes, business regulation, and an alphabet soup of new agencies and departments in the Executive Branch to deal with the new spirit of government intervention all came to pass even before the Great Depression.

It was Roosevelt’s New Deal, born out of dire necessity occasioned by a starving, nearly bankrupt country that finally placed the federal government at the forefront of radical intervention in the lives of individual citizens. With the massive expansion of public works and other measures like Social Security, the depression era federal government was for the first time taking on responsibilities that most Americans up to that time had reserved for themselves, their families, and their communities.

World War II brought unparalleled interference by government as rationing proved to be the most intrusive program ever enacted, telling people how much of a commodity one was entitled to and when they could buy it. And the War Planning Board was able to dictate to corporations what they could make and how much simply by controlling the supply of raw materials. Steel for washing machines was out. But if you wanted to make tanks, that was a different story.

In the immediate post war years, even though direct government control of the economy had been ceded, the left sought to influence both economic and social policy using incentives in the tax code to affect change. The result was an ever-expanding role of government in the decision making of average Americans.

The 1950’s saw no slackening to the pace of interference as a host of new agencies were born and the government entered the highway building business in earnest as the Interstate Highway System began to spread its ribbons of concrete across the country. Fueled by a gas tax, the building of the national interstate system could be considered one of the most necessary and successful government programs in history. What it has become in recent years is a repository for pork barrel politics and wasteful spending.

The explosion of social services offered by government in the 1960’s and 70’s altered the landscape of American society forever as we are still dealing with the consequences of many of these destructive programs that fostered dependency, hopelessness, and the break-up of millions of families. The addition of several executive departments such as CPSC, EPA, and the Departments of Energy and Education spread the influence of government until it touched every aspect of American life and commerce.

The 1980’s to the present has seen the growth of the corporate lobbying industry whose goal is simple; wrest as much money from the federal government as possible through tax breaks, incentives, and even direct grants. Giant companies whose only need of government is to help them destroy competition or fatten up the bottom line now feed at the federal trough with impunity.

I felt this short history of the growth of government was necessary if only to illustrate a simple point; it doesn’t have to be this way. And Messrs. Feulner and Wilson argue that it was our failure to ask that simple question “Is it the Government’s Business” that has gotten us into this mess in the first place.

When asking that question, we can obviously answer in the affirmative when it comes to national defense. We can also say with a reasonable amount of certainty that it probably isn’t a good thing to have 50 different standards for air and water quality. It is probably necessary to have some kind of a national social safety net involving programs that fill elementary human needs like food and shelter (the authors believe that such programs could better be handled by “state governments, neighbors, family, and local churches” which is true but unrealistic in that most poor people are cut off from society because of government dependence). Given time, there are probably dozens of areas where even a conservative could answer “yes” to the question at hand such as regulation of the stock market, anti-trust protections, and other measures designed to prevent us from returning to the turn of the 20th century when corporate trusts held sway over government and politics.

From my point of view, the question is not trying to create a “small” government which is, I believe, and impossibility in a 21st century industrialized democracy of nearly 300 million people. Rather, by asking if a law or regulation is the government’s business, we can certainly make government “smaller” thus making people and companies more self-reliant and give them more control over their own destiny.

The authors believe that “government bureaucracies are no match for the speed, creativity, and innovation that privately based free marketeers bring to problem solving” which is certainly true up to a point. The recent experiment in privately owned prisons is a good example. While praised for cost-effectiveness, the facilities have been cited for everything from poor nutritional programs to substandard rehabilitation efforts involving remedial education and job training. And studies have shown that recidivism rates are higher from these privately run prisons than from state and federal facilities (although many argue that there simply isn’t enough data yet to make those kind of determinations).

At bottom, what the question “Is it the government’s business” does is force us to keep decision making about what is best for society as close to the grass roots as possible. Would this engage the interest of a larger proportion of Americans in politics and government? And if it didn’t, wouldn’t that mean that the same activists who now drive the political agenda would be the only ones who seek to answer that question?

It’s my belief that even if we can only marginally affect legislation and regulation by asking that question every time a law is proposed, it would improve our lives. For that reason alone, the question should be enthusiastically embraced by the Republican party and especially Republican candidates for office.

For the last couple of years, I’ve struggled to come to grips with the disconnect between having a conservative President and a conservative Congress on the one hand and a style of governance that is decidedly unconservative on the other. Record deficits - partly a result of 9/11 and funding the War on Terror but nevertheless a source of distress and puzzlement - along with a series of failures in both formulating policy and passing legislation have made it clear that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that conservatives have taken to their role as stewards of the republic.

It’s easy to say that conservatives in government have lost their way, that they’ve forgotten the principles that got them elected in the first place. This may be true. It’s also easy to say that many in Congress have succumbed to the siren song of political expediency and corruptive power where members pump the spigot of federal spending to maintain their position and influence. This may also be true.

But what very few on the right are talking about is that after 12 years of conservative governance, we are no closer to realizing the single most important goal modern conservatives set for themselves more than a quarter of a century ago when it became clear that the welfare state was failing the very people it was supposed to be helping and instead, was dragging the nation toward the soul-deadening, spirit killing folly of socialism.

We have failed to shrink the size of government.

In fact, by any measurement one would care to use, government has grown astronomically under conservative governance. Taking the most obvious example, the federal budget has nearly doubled since 1995 with spending going from $1.56 trillion in FY 1995 to the current proposed 2007 budget of nearly $2.8 trillion. Even under the Bush Administration, budget outlays have increased by $800 billion. Pages in the Federal Reigster (the compilation of federal regulations) have grown more than 17% over the same period from 68,000 to more than 80,000.

I don’t want to hear about how the budget is less a percentage of the gross domestic product or how, adjusting for inflation, it grew more under Democrats. The inescapable fact is that it is much larger since conservatives came to power and no amount of fancy rhetorical footwork is going to obscure that fact.

Government is more intrusive. It has insinuated itself more into our daily lives in demonstrably quantitative ways. In our schools, our work, our medical decisions - the very fabric of our society now feels government’s tentacles intertwined so tightly, that peeling them away will require not just determination and herculean efforts, but perhaps a profound revolution in the way that the American people see the government itself.

For at bottom, it is the American people - us - who have failed. While many more people identify themselves as conservatives than liberals, the fact is there is a chasm between what we say about government and what we want from it. Most everyone thinks the government spends too much or taxes too much, or regulates too much, or is just plain too big. But when it comes to their own lives, their own choices, it is just as clear that people believe the government isn’t doing enough. We hold government responsible for the state of the economy, for the cost of food and medical care, for the condition of our schools, our roads, our bridges, rush hour traffic, the drug problem, crime, homelessness, the poor, the almost-poor, the safety and security of our transportation system…shall I go on?

In short, it is impossible to preach “small government” when the people demand that we have a large one.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News is what I would call a good conservative, consistently supporting the principles of conservatism on a wide variety of issues. But reading Mr. Hawkins response to a liberal who wanted to know why we spend so much money on defense gave me the feeling that I had entered a time machine and been transported back before conservatives came to power:

We believe that the role of the government is to protect us from foreign threats, enforce the rule of law, and keep taxes and regulations to minimum so that people can solve their own problems. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that many of the problems we have as a society are directly caused the government’s bungled attempts to “help”.

Since that’s the case, I’m a big believer that the government is far too big and spends far too much. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that except when it comes to border security and illegal immigration enforcement, there’s no program the Federal government is involved with that should have its funding increased. To the contrary, a significant across the board cut of funding for almost every program would be perfectly acceptable to me.

Of course, I realize that probably horrifies you Angela. But, you have to understand that the conservative view is that all government programs are rife with endemic waste, red tape, corruption, and incompetence that is impossible to fix. Put another way, you may be able to starve, shrink, or perhaps even slightly improve the behavior of the beast, but you will never change it’s nature. That’s why it’s usually a good idea to choose small government over big government and private industry, the market, and individual choice over government involvement at all.

I don’t want to pick on Mr. Hawkins but his definition of conservative governance is so divorced from the reality of what conservatives are doing in Congress and the White House that if I didn’t know better, I would question whether or not we both live in the same country.

Does this mean that all of these Republicans who ran as conservatives - including George Bush - aren’t really people of the right but actually liberals in disguise? Not if you listen to their rhetoric. And this, dear readers, is the crux of the problem.

I am absolutely convinced that when conservatives in Congress use rhetoric identical to what John Hawkins used in his response to that reader they believe it wholeheartedly. And to complete the disconnect that all of us recognize and are disgusted by, those very same Republicans will go to the floor of the Congress and proceed to vote for bigger government. Are they all hypocrites? Are they just a bunch of cynical politicians who think they can put one over on the voters? What is going on?

What is clear to me is that conservative rhetoric no longer addresses the world as it really is, that there is a profound difference between critiquing government and actually running it. What Mr. Hawkins synthesized into a couple of well written paragraphs has been a staple of conservative politicians since before the time of Ronald Reagan. What happened? Where has conservatism gone off the rails?

Somewhere between being a minority party criticizing the welfare state and offering concrete solutions to the nation’s problems and the current state of affairs on Capitol Hill, the rhetorical justification for conservative governance has disappeared. It has been subsumed by the realities of governing a liberal (dictionary definition), industrialized, 21st century democracy in the Age of Terror. For all the intellectual energy being expended in our think tanks, universities, journals, magazines, newspaper columns, and even here in the blogosphere, the undeniable fact is that the prescriptions to the problem of shrinking the size and scope of government have either failed or haven’t been tried due to their political inviability.

Eliminate the Department of Energy? Or Education? How? Federal responsibilities in these areas are growing, not shrinking because people demand it. How do you cut OSHA without endangering lives? Or the FDA? These aren’t agencies that one can simply take a red pen to and cut willy-nilly. In fact, the totality of good that these agencies do to protect our food, drugs, and workplace overwhelms any generalized conservative critique of their functions. Changes to these and other regulatory bodies must be made with extraordinary care lest their legitimate activities be affected negatively.

And what about that great conservative bugaboo the EPA? Can one legitimately claim that corporations both large and small will do the right thing and not pollute our water and air if left to their own devices? Many would but who would want to live near those who wouldn’t?

How about the Consumer Product Safety Commission? Now here’s a ripe target for conservatives. But even a cursory look at the history of that agency will show that while they have been as intrusive and as capricious as any government agency in existence, they have also saved countless thousands of lives by forcing companies to make their products safer.

The libertarian argument against both the EPA and CPSC - that people won’t buy products from companies that kill people ergo the marketplace will regulate their behavior - falls rather flat when one considers that it might be me or you whose life is lost as result of environmental negligence or some product that was unsafe. I daresay that most Americans wouldn’t accept the risks that many libertarians and conservatives are willing to take on simply to shrink the size of government. That is why those agencies were created in the first place.

If conservative rhetoric can no longer be wedded to the reality of governing, what is to be done? The answer lies in where the ideas that gave birth to that rhetoric came from in the first place.

The list of 20th century conservative intellectuals whose thoughts on government and freedom energized both activists and politicians is a long and distinguished one. Hayek, Nash, Kristol, Friedman, Buckley, and a host of others gave an intellectual underpinning to the distillation of ideas that was turned into the rhetoric of political combat. And in the marketplace of ideas where that combat was joined, conservative rhetoric resonated (as it does today) with a majority of Americans and led to our current majorities in Congress and holding the White House 26 out of the last 38 years.

But rhetoric that worked well while conservatives were a minority has failed to translate into effective governance. And the reason is that for all the intellectual spine supplied by conservative thinkers to conservative ideas, they all grew up and were shaped by a liberal world. Hence, while writers like Hayek and Friedman especially employed an attractive positivism in their critiques of liberalism, they nevertheless by necessity made government the number one antagonist in their proscription against modern society.

And here is where the rhetorical rubber may never meet the real-world road for conservatives. It is one thing for Hayek to hector against statism. It is quite another to look a 14 year old pregnant black girl in the eye and tell her she’s better off on her own. For in the end, “small government” means one thing to conservatives and quite another to people who need government to survive.

Does this mean that conservatism is dead, that the idea of “small government” is a pipe dream? Hopefully, conservatism means more than simply trying to define the size of government. If that were not the case, Republicans would go the way of the Federalists, the Whigs, the Bull Moose, and other political parties whose ideas were superseded by events on the ground in America. Perhaps what is necessary is a new language of reform that conservatives can create to address the kinds of problems with government that speak to ordinary people. Certainly a commitment to a realistic kind of federalism would help. Beyond that, bringing efficiency, honesty, and integrity to government would be in keeping with conservative values.

Perhaps it is time to stop talking about “small government” and begin speaking of “good government.” In this modern society we live in, it would seem that the latter reflects more realistically on what the American people believe and what they want out of their government.

IMPORTANT UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS POST

It’s enough to tax the patience of Job. I swear that being a Republican and a Bush supporter is getting harder almost by the day. Unless one is a blind, robotic partisan, this has got to trouble you:

The more than 18-hour delay in news emerging that the Vice President of the United States had shot a man, sending him to an intensive care unit with his wounds, grew even more curious late Sunday. E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occurred and called Vice President Cheney’s office for confirmation.

The confirmation was made but there was no indication whether the Vice President’s office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christ Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner.

One of Powell’s colleagues at paper, Beth Francesco, told E&P that Powell had built up a strong source relationship with the prominent ranch owner, Katharine Armstrong, which led to the tip. Powell is chief political reporter for the paper and also covers the area where the ranch is located south of Sarita.

Armstrong called the paper Sunday morning looking for Powell, who was not at work. When they did talk, Armstrong revealed the shooting of prominent Austin attorney Harry Whittington, who is now in stable condition in a hospital. Powell then called Cheney’s office for the confirmation around midday. The newspaper broke the story at mid-afternoon–not a word about it had appeared before then.

Secrecy about the NSA intercept program? Understandable. Secrecy about the Vice President of the United States accidentally shooting someone and putting them into intensive care? Un.Conscienable.

And please don’t insult my intelligence by trying to make any other excuse than it was politically expedient to withhold the information. In fact, one wonders if the fortuitous set of circumstances had not unfolded as above whether or not the public would ever have found out about the incident.

This Administration’s mania for secrecy is getting on my nerves. There’s just no other way to describe it. I’m not talking about secrecy relating to national security matters. I’m talking about things like holding back documents requested by Congress looking into the Katrina mess. I’m talking about withholding corrected census information from Congress, forcing the legislators to go to court in order to do the people’s business. And these are but two examples. There are some - liberals to be sure - who believe the very concept of “open government” is at risk under this Administration.

Secrecy is corrosive. There is a reason why we have “sunshine laws” and the “Freedom of Information Act.” As recently as 30 years ago, many Congressional hearings were held in camera with no press, no public, and thus no accountability. And the Executive Branch of government was shrouded in secrecy with many of its deliberations completely off limits to Congress.

Now clearly there is a both a body of law and tradition that argues for some kind of executive privilege. But reforms that were instituted following the Watergate affair designed to open government and shine a light on its workings have steadily eroded in the intervening quarter century by both Republicans and Bill Clinton. The fact is, open government is a nuisance, an inconvenience to lawmakers and Presidents alike. But with this Administration, their efforts seem to have gone beyond eating at the edges of the law and have in fact, been directed at gutting the very concept of open government.

But hadn’t the pendulum toward “open government” swung too far in one direction and is the Bush Administration now simply bringing it back into line?

This is certainly true as it relates to national security matters. You simply cannot have the same culture of open government in a time of war than you can or should have during a time of peace. Anyone who argues differently probably doesn’t think we’re at war in the first place.

But there is absolutely no denying the fact that this Administration’s penchant for secrecy has gone far beyond the national security arena and has entered areas where the only excuse for maintaining control of information is domestic political concerns.

One can understand the Administration’s political concerns where a hostile press and maniacal political opposition is concerned. But there are times when the only honorable recourse is to take your political lumps and move on. Political calculations that inhibit the public’s legitimate right to know interfere with the people’s business and engender a feeling of distrust that is unhealthy in a democracy.

Back in 2002, Democrat Henry Waxman was joined by several Republicans on the Committee on Government Reform in asking that the President’s Executive Order that placed Presidential documents off limits to historians and others be rescinded.To this day, that Executive Order stands. If someone could tell me how this contributes to preserving the national security of the United States, I’m all ears. Instead, it is just one more example of needless - some would say reckless - disregard by this Administration for the very idea of “open government.”

Perhaps this Cheney incident will start a debate about secrecy in government and this Administration in general. I would welcome such a debate - if the tin foil hat crowd would stay out of it. Unfortunately, as with most political back and forth these days, the left will make sure to pile on for their own political reasons, blind and oblivious to the damage they do to civil discourse and our republic.

UPDATE

The virulence with which my readers have taken me to task over this post requires a response.

First, there is no “conspiracy” at work here. There isn’t even a “cover-up” although if the story had never come out I’m sure the Administration would have been pleased as punch. This is a simple matter of the Administration withholding bad news to lessen political damage, a stupid, clumsy move given the reaction in the press that any intern in the press office could have told them would occur.

I am amazed that many of you do not see why this was not only idiotic, but wrong. To allow political calculation (the probability of negative press) to override the need to to be absolutely transparent on something like this where, if the Vice President was any other American, would have necessitated an investigation by the police is not in keeping with the idea of open government, something that most of my post was on and that none of my worst critics bothered to mention.

I understand that we are at war. I understand the need for secrecy in national security matters. I even can understand and sympathize with the Administration in not allowing the loony left and the media in their unreasoning hatred of all things Bush to take information and turn it into political hand grenades to toss into the Oval Office in an attempt to “get” the President.

But you must understand the cost of this secrecy - less accountability, less openness, and in the end, less democratic government.

Because what is democratic government in the end but free people making decisions that are best for themselves, their communities and their nation? And doesn’t it just seem logical that in order to make those decisions that we have as much information as humanly possible?

This was the idea behind the open government reforms of the 1970’s. As conservatives we should welcome the opportunity to have transparency in government. Simply put, without it, we are less free.

I could have done without the name calling and insults. I’ve come to expect better than that from most of the commenters on this site.

RM

As more information is released about issues surrounding the top secret NSA intercept program, we’re finding some things that are cause for relief and others that continue to be worrisome. And we are seeing that most delicate of dances in our democracy - the jostling involved in trying to delineate the balance of powers - played out for the most part with a surprising care by members of all three branches of government.

I say surprising because even most Democrats on both the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees seem to recognize the enormous stakes involved and are moving cautiously. Of course, some of the minor actors on both sides are posturing shamelessly, angling for headlines and face time on the talk shows. And then there’s Kos and Company who, in the end, are going to have about as much impact on this debate as their idiotic, screeching denunciations deserve. But looking over the landscape as it exists at the present, I think we can say that there appears to be a willingness not to force a Constitutional crisis over the issues brought out by the warrantless searches and instead, reach a suitable compromise with which all sides can live.

THE EXECUTIVE

Following what most observers say was a mediocre showing by Attorney General Gonzalez before the Judiciary Committee, the Administration was faced with a choice; continue to try and beg off informing Congress about even some of the bare bones details of the NSA program or try and enlist the lawmakers in an effort to keep the program viable. Their hand was pretty much forced when Representative Heather Wilson (R-NM), Chair of the House Technical and Tactical Intelligence Subcommittee which oversees the NSA, threatened to conduct a “complete review” of the program unless a fuller briefing was forthcoming.

At a meeting yesterday, the full Intelligence Committee of the House was given a briefing by AG Gonzalez and General Hayden of the NSA on not only the legal justification for the program but also what Wilson has called “minimization procedures and mechanisms in place and reviews conducted to ensure full compliance with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other laws protecting the privacy of U.S. persons.” Following that meeting, several members including some Democrats expressed surprise and relief at how carefully the program seemed to be tailored.

In one sense, the Administration’s cooperation with Congress was the right thing to do. Yes it might impinge on Presidential prerogatives but at the same time, the Administration read the writing on the wall. Several prominent Republicans in both the House and the Senate have demanded more information from both the NSA and the Department of Justice and the Administration realized their wiggle room had almost disappeared. Just how far this cooperation goes will depend on what the Congress will end up doing with both the NSA program and FISA.

CONGRESS

There appears to be a movement in the Senate to bring the NSA program under the auspices of the FISA court. Senator Arlen Specter, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee announced he is drafting a bill that would “require the administration to take the program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” And Senator Sam Brownback seemed to get on board by saying “I think there’s a decent shot at crafting legislation to make the FISA court a more workable option” for setting guidelines for the surveillance program. He said he wants “a separate set of eyes involved in this to provide safeguards.”

What makes this move significant is that rather than have the Justice Department (and probably NSA lawyers) as the final arbiters regarding who is targeted by the program, the Congress wants to assert its authority by retroactively giving its blessing to the program while also requiring the Administration to go hat and hand to the FISA court in order to continue it. Senator Chuck Hagel explains:

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said in an interview that the “balance must be preserved between the executive branch and the legislature. And I think this is a clear example of where the balance has gotten skewed. . . . The administration cannot unilaterally assume that they have the answers to get around or go over a law.”

Clearly Hagel speaks for a lot of legislators, both Republican and Democratic, who have viewed the Administration’s aggressive domestic security initiatives with something of a jaundiced eye. The President has not been shy about exercising what he sees as executive branch war time powers in order to keep the country safe. Congress, as Congress is want to do, is extremely jealous of its own prerogatives. And thus we have a tug of war between the two branches where both sides are sincere and both may be right.

THE COURTS

Here is where the courts come in. And if this curious article in today’s Washington Post can be believed, what has been going on in the FISA court is at the same time puzzling and worrisome:

Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush’s eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.

The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.

Essentially, the Chief FISA judge was concerned that 1) FISA was not competent to determine whether or not the program was legal, and 2) information from the program not be the sole basis for future FISA warrants. In other words, the Post lede is misleading because the doubts raised by Judge Kollar-Kotelly were not about the actual legality of the program but rather about the standing of the FISA court itself to judge Constitutional issues.

But Kollar-Kotelly’s complaints about tainted wiretaps are a serious issue as we’ve already seen. It is likely that more than one terrorist will attempt to use these revelations as grounds for release from custody.

As Hugh Hewitt has pointed out, in some ways, by taking the two ranking FISA judges into their confidence regarding the NSA program, the Administration may have undercut some of its legal rationale:

The “deal” seems to me to assume that the president lacks the authority to order the NSA surveillance his government put into place, and also seems to arbitrarily burden the FISA process with a new procedural hurdle, one developed by one or two judges, never communicated to their colleagues on the FISC, and never reviewed by an appeals court.

Mr. Hewitt also questions some of the Chief Judge’s unilateral decisions about how NSA information would be handled by the FISA court as well as taking the Department of Justice to task for not “testing” the President’s authority by forcing the FISA court to act.

I wouldn’t dream of crossing Hugh Hewitt on a matter of law but I think the situation with the FISA court points up the Administration’s extreme caution. They knew they were treading in dangerous Constitutional waters and evidently felt insecure enough about the legality of the program that they took the two top FISA judges into their confidence. The judges in turn did their job by requiring DOJ lawyers to get corroborating evidence not based on the warrantless intercepted communications in order to get a FISA warrant. The fact reported in the Post - that there were only two instances where the arrangement didn’t work - should be reassuring. It appears that both branches of government were doing their jobs.

We only have one Constitution. And while I don’t agree that it is a “living” document in the same way that liberals do, it certainly is elastic enough. Over the years, it has been pulled and stretched by the Legislative and Executive branches in a constant battle to exercise power. This is what the framers saw. It’s what they wanted.

Now, if we could only keep the political Mickey Mouse to a minimum, we can get on with the task for protecting the country from terrorists as well as an overreaching executive and a grasping legislature.