Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Donald Rumsfeld Uses the Passive Voice

Justin Eliot:

Justin Eliot: Rumsfeld On Abandoning Geneva: 'All Of A Sudden, It Was Just All Happening': "All of a sudden, it was just all happening, and the general counsel's office in the Pentagon had the lead," Rumsfeld told former Washington Post journalist Bradley Graham, as quoted in By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld. "It never registered in my mind in this particular instance--it did in almost every other case--that these issues ought to be in a policy development or management posture. Looking back at it now, I have a feeling that was a mistake. In retrospect, it would have been better to take all of those issues and put them in the hands of policy or management."

[Rumsfeld is talking about] the Bush Administration's decision -- in which Rumsfeld played a key role -- to not grant prisoner-of-war designation to detainees from Afghanistan. In the Department of Defense, which had authority for Gitmo, the policy initially took the form of a since-declassified January 2002 memo, written by Rumsfeld, that said Al Qaida and Taliban detainees "are not entitled to prisoner of war status" under the Geneva Convention. This memo, as Graham puts it, "effectively nullified half a century of U.S. military adherence to the [Geneva] conventions"...

Preschool-age children will resort to the passive voice like this: "the chair got broken." Grownups do so more rarely.

Forensic Table Reading: Bush CEA Forecast Edition

In email, lurkers are questioning my claim that:

Forecasting the Obama Economy: ...what happened to the Mankiw CEA over the winter of 2003-2004, when high politics appears to have reached down into the forecast, changed the table for payroll employment (and only payroll employment: the rest of the forecast is not out of line with contemporary professional forecasts), and produced an estimate for December 2004 (a) inconsistent with the rest of the forecast, and (b) high by 2.3 million in its estimate of payroll employment--all because Karl Rove and company thought it important to avoid headlines like "Bush administration forecasts 2004 payroll employment to be less than when Bush took office." White House Media Affairs would have a much harder time pressuring the forecasters to produce a "rosy scenario" if the pressure has to be kept on month after month [as the Troika forecast is revised, updated, and released at a monthly frequency].

I think that the smoking gun is provided by a little forensic table reading--going through the Bush administration's economic forecasts year-by-year as they were published in the successive versions of the Bush-era CEA's Economic Report of the President, the ERP:

• In the 2002 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.2% growth expected for the next two years gives you 2.9 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 2.1% per year...
• In the 2003 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.5% growth expected for the next two years gives you 4.4 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.8% per year...
• In the 2004 ERP, Table 3.1 shows 3.7% growth expected for the next two years gives you 6.2 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.3% per year...
• In the 2005 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.4% growth expected for the next two years gives you 4.1 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.8% per year...
• In the 2006 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.3% growth expected for the next two years gives you 3.8 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.9% per year...
• In the 2007 ERP, Table 1.1 shows 3.0% growth expected for the next two years gives you 3.3 million jobs--for a forecast labor productivity growth rate of about 1.8% per year...

The forecast rate of labor productivity growth over the next two years or so is a relatively stable variable. It starts at an annual rate of 2.1% in the first Glenn Hubbard ERP, and then Glenn and company drop it to 1.8% the next year as they become less optimistic about productivity growth in the aftermath of the collapse of the high tech bubble. Thereafter the Bush CEA forecast assumes a labor productivity growth rate of 1.8% - 1.9% in every year save one: the 2004 ERP, issued at the start of 2004, drops the labor productivity growth rate to 1.3% (and the 2005 ERP raises it back up to 1.8%).

Was there anything in the economic data that would make one much more pessimistic about labor productivity growth in early 2004 and only early 2004? No.

But assuming a 1.8% labor productivity growth rate at the start of 2004 would have meant that the forecast average level of employment in Tqble 3.1 for 2004 would have been lower than the level of employment when Bush took office, and that would have created a point of political vulnerability. There were two ways to fix this that would have satisfied White House Media Affairs: (i) reformat the table so that it no longer reports an annual average payroll employment number, or (ii) push assumed labor productivity growth down because if you keep GDP the same but reduce labor productivity arithmetic forces your forecast to produce higher employment.

Why the Bush CEA didn't pick option (i) is something I have never understood...

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How Damnable Is Mark Sanford?

In email, maureendowdsfriendwhodoesntwantanycredit@gmail.com writes, contra those who say, "At least Mark Sanford is sincere!":

It's hard for me to find anything decent or honest about a politician who rejects stimulus money for a state with the 2nd highest unemployment rate in the country out of some misguided loyalty to an uncompromising political ideology. I understand the point you're trying to make here, but there is nothing even remotely admirable or honest about putting ones narrow and misguided beliefs ahead of the livelihoods of the voters who you are nominally elected to serve.

Just because Sanford isn't as hypocritical as your average Republican doesn't mean he's not a jerk. In fact, I'll gladly take the hypocrite over the ideologue; at least people dont get hurt as badly when the hypocrite is around. (The contrast btw Reagan and [George W.] Bush comes to mind here).

Also, its hard for me to believe that currying favor with the mindless and knee jerk enemies of government in South Carolina, not to mention New Hampshire and Iowa, didn't also play a role in Sanford's thinking...

Mitch Daniels Did Not Do His Job

Oh dear. Only 52 hours in working for National Review, and the brainrot has gotten to Reihan Salam:

The Agenda on National Review Online: Daniels for Rushmore: Like NR's Mark Hemingway, I'm a slightly fanatical admirer of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels...

One of the threads of Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty is that Mitch Daniels simply did not do his job as Bush's OMB Director. The OMB Director is the principal--indeed, the only--voice inside the White House for fiscal prudence, for trying to ensure that the money the government spends is spent well and that the resources the government raises are adequate for the spending plans the White House evolves. While he was Bush OMB Director, Daniels simply did not do his job.

Page 219:

Mitch Daniels became agitated. He blurted out, "Well, yes, but if you can't do the right thing when you're at 85 percent approval, then when can you do the right thing? I think it's time to say no." Everyone looked with surprise at Daniels--he has a way of expressing what others are thinking but don't say. Often, he'd find himself doubling back when he got an arched brow from Cheney or Rove...

And page 296:

The Commerce Secretary echoed much of what had been said.... As usual, not a real discussion, O'Neill thought as he looked over at [Mitch] Daniels.... He knew Daniels was focused on the perils of rising deficits, but it would take gumption to air those concerns in a room full of tax cut ideologues. "I think we need to balance concerns," Daniels said.... "You need to be out front on the economy, but I am concerned that this package may not do it. The budget hole is getting deeper... we are projecting deficits all the way to the end of your second term." From across the table came glares from the entire Bush political team. Daniels paused.... "Ummmm. On balance, then, I think we need to do a [tax cut] package... accelerate the rate cuts and the double taxsation of dividends..." O'Neill looked with astonishment at Daniels... turn 180 degrees in midsentence...

Surely we can do better? Surely we can find a Republican who has (a) held high federal office and (b) actually done his job?

Demagoguery and the Responsibility of a Bureaucrat

Todd Gitlin asks a question of Council on Foreign Relations head Richard Haass:

Demagoguery of Choice | TPMCafe: I was present at a conference in Maryland sponsored by the NewsHour in November 2002 when Mr. Haass, then head of policy planning at the State Department, issued a ringing defense of the impending war, which evidently he now maintains that he already opposed as a war of choice, not necessity. At the time, he stirred together, in Cheneyesque fashion, claims about Saddam and al-Qaeda, about Iraqi WMD, and the rest. I arose to argue with him and called his presentation "demagogic," but my protest did not attract his interest or sympathy. I'm curious to know if Mr. Haass believed what he was saying to this audience of foreign policy influentials at the time; if his presentation was a presentation of necessity or of choice; if he agrees that he was demagogic; and if he has any regrets.

There are hard questions as to how one should act when one works for an administration that is making a mistake on matters of policy. One could resign--and see one's place taken by somebody who will make the mistakes even better. One can be a good soldier and argue publicly for the mistaken policies while arguing privately for the right thing, in the belief that:

But it has always seemed to me that the minimal requirement imposed on the "good soldiers" is this: you don't tell lies in public.

From what Todd Gitlin reports, it looks as though Richard Haass--a man whom I have never heard praised in his role at the head at CFR--told things that he knew to be lies or that he could easily have determined to be lies in public.

David Brooks Joins Those Trying to Unseat Rush Limbaugh and Richard Cheney from Their Positions at the Head of the Republican Party

However if Brooks wants to get anywhere he is going to have to work much harder and to find a different frame for his anti-Cheney and anti-Limbaugh columns than Obama is a liar":

Cheney Lost to Bush: [A]fter Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy.... The Bush people...did things most of us now find morally offensive and counterproductive. The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years.... But that period ended long ago.

By 2005, what you might call the Bush-Rice-Hadley era had begun. Gradually, in fits and starts, a series of Bush administration officials — including Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Jack Goldsmith and John Bellinger — tried to rein in the excesses of the Bush-Cheney period. They didn’t win every fight, and they were prodded by court decisions and public outrage, but the gradual evolution of policy was clear....

Throughout the second Bush term, officials were trying to close Guantánamo, pleading with foreign governments to take some prisoners, begging senators to allow the transfer of prisoners onto American soil.... [T]he practice of waterboarding... [was halted by] a succession of C.I.A. directors starting in March 2003, even before a devastating report by the C.I.A. inspector general in 2004....

When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he is... attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public... the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way...

Colin Powell Tries to Expiate His Sins by Reforming the Republican Party

Laura Rozen:

War and Piece:: WP: Powell urges Republican party to become more inclusive.

Not sure if we should salute him yet--his sins are mighty--but he is less condemnable and contemptible than was the case yesterday.

Republicans: The Stupid *and* Immoral Party

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

OK, I'm No Longer Surprised: It's just who they are:

[Andie Collier:] She's the 69-year-old speaker of the House of Representatives, second in the line of succession and the most powerful woman in U.S. history. But when you see Nancy Pelosi, the Republican National Committee wants you to think "Pussy Galore." At least that's the takeaway from a video released by the committee this week - a video that puts Pelosi side-by-side with the aforementioned villainess from the 1964 James Bond film "Goldfinger...."

"It's an attempt to demean your opponent, rather than debate them. If they're serious that this is an issue of national security, then you'd think that one would want to debate it on the merits," [Ann Lewis] says. "It's almost as if they can't help themselves." 

That's because they can't.

For some time now I have been responding to Daniel Klein's whimpers about the low numbers of Republicans in academia as evidence of some sort of bias by pointing out that the existence of any academics who are Republicans is evidence of an opposite kind of bias--that nobody dedicated to education and truth-telling could stomach being a Republican today, and nobody who isn't dedicated to education and truth-telling had any business being a Republican.

Now I think it is time to expand that list of professions in which having professional ethics is simply inconsistent with being a Republican...

Firedoglake » Including every mumbled “and” & “the”

From Attaturk:

Firedoglake » Including every mumbled “and” & “the”: Well, here's something everyone could have anticipated, but as usual, other than bloggers it seems only Warren Strobel and John Landay of McClatchy reported:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's defense Thursday of the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

Well, this column is apparently going to be as long as a Leon Uris novel, but here is a selection.... Oh, you damn dirty hippies -- being all right and not serious like Dick Cheney. Because David Broder and his ilk know serious, and only serious can be appreciated. Especially in the form of needlessly dead soldiers and civilians in a third-world country (no pictures though).

Andrew Samwick on Republicans and Taxes

Andrew writes:

Libertarians and Taxes: From David Boaz of the Cato Institute, who visited Dartmouth yesterday:

Too many advocates of small government still have this lingering attachment to the Republican party,” Boaz said. “It’s like being a battered wife — how long do you wait to leave?

Perhaps the more interesting part of the analogy is, Where do you go when you leave?  Typically, it is not to another partner, but to a period in which you are not in a relationship until you can recover from what just happened and make the changes that are needed so it never happens again. Are the Libertarians doing that?  I'm not so sure.  Consider more of what Boaz said: Boaz described the recent Republican tea parties in protest of tax day as “the revival of a freedom movement.” He also referenced a recent advertisement run by the Cato Institute in several major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times. The advertisement discussed perceived flaws in the economic stimulus package. “Someday, this ad is going to be remembered as the revival of the free market movement,” Boaz said.

At moments like this, we go back to Milton Friedman's adage, "To spend is to tax."  I cannot really come up with a better word than juvenile for the tea parties -- don't protest the taxes unless you can identify the specific cuts in expenditures that you would make to bring the budget into balance.  If you think taxes are bad, then you should think deficits are worse, because they raise the taxes of people who were not represented in the decisions to spend the money. That's the real lesson from the Revolutionary War period that should be drawn.  And the danger for the Libertarians is that if they don't put the reduction in expenditures ahead of the reduction in taxes on their agenda, they are destined for another abusive relationship down the road.  This title of an Economix post [by David Leonhardt] had it right, "Where Were the Medicare Tea Parties?" 

Cheney vs. the Asteroid

Bruce Reed of "Sadly, No!" has the story:

Sadly, No! » Dick vs. the Asteroid: Peter “The Mustache of Enhanced Interrogation” Kirsanow tells us all how super cool Dick Cheney’s torture defense was yesterday:

Cheney: Adult Peter Kirsanow: A serious, important speech. Politicians and the media seem unduly impressed by favorability polls, often drawing unwarranted conclusions from them. Since Cheney has relatively high unfavorables, it’s assumed that the public dismisses his statements. It would be interesting to see the results of a more finely calibrated poll, one that compares how well-respected, competent, and effective the subject is perceived to be relative to similarly situated individuals. As a friend succinctly puts it, “When that big asteroid finally heads toward Earth, who’s the person you’d most want to be in charge?” I suspect Cheney would score at or near the top....

Here at Sadly, No! Research Laboratories, we recently detonated a hydrogen bomb near a massive pocket of electromagnetic energy, thus creating a parallel timeline.... Read on, if you dare, to see how this counterfactual history played itself out...

[A] small asteroid crashed into a rural area of Wyoming, killing 2,000 people in a small town and leaving a massive crater 60 miles wide in the ground. President Richard Cheney, who was just awakening from a nap in his underground White House lair, was informed of the crash by Chief of Staff Alberto Gonzales, who the day before had handed him a memo from NASA with the headline “Asteroid hurtling toward the United States.” “That damned space rock has just assaulted my home state!” Cheney snarled. “Nobody could have predicted this would happen!” Cheney called a press conference later in the day and urged Americans to show strength and resolve in the face of this unprecedented assault on the Heartland. “Asteroids are evil rocks,” said the president. “We do not negotiate with evil rocks; we defeat them.”...

An enraged Cheney was determined to never let another asteroid crash into the United States again and had decided to use any means necessary in order to achieve that end. Cheney reasoned that it was not enough to merely respond to asteroids after they crashed. For America to be truly secure, the government needed to attack asteroids long before they reached orbit. To this end, he decided that the United States needed to set an example to other asteroids in the galaxy by launching a preemptive strike on the large asteroid that was menacingly hovering over the Earth: namely, the moon. In order to build his case for war against the moon, Cheney worked to strong-arm NASA into proclaiming that the moon could come unhinged from its orbit to the Earth at any moment and that the military needed to destroy the sinister heavenly body in order to safeguard the homeland. When NASA officials balked at his request, Cheney hired George C. Deutsch, a disgraced former NASA press aide, to go through the agency and make lists of all scientists who displayed signs of disloyalty. Once the list had been completed, the scientists were then rendered to Cheney’s underground White House lair for interrogation. The following transcript was taken from a video of an interrogation session under the White House...

[An unknown NASA scientist is tied down to a waterboard in President Cheney's underground lair. Cheney and NASA Grand Inquisitor George C. Deutsch enter the chamber to start the interrogation.]

DEUTSCH: My liege! I have brought forth the Unbeliever to receive your judgment!

CHENEY: Fine work, my young apprentice. And what are his crimes?

DEUTSCH: My liege! He refused to sign a loyalty oath proclaiming that our solar system has been scientifically proven to have been created by an Intelligent Designer!

CHENEY: Bah! The heretic will rue the day he defied my will! Tell me, heretic, do you not regret your lack of faith?

[Cheney pours water over the scientist's head, causing him to gasp and writhe in pain.]

SCIENTIST: GLAAAAAAAAARBB!!! ACK! Please, yes! I repent! Just stop it with the water!

CHENEY: You are wise to confess, heretic! You may achieve penance for your actions by doing one simple task: signing your name to this official policy document that proclaims the moon to be a mortal danger to the security of the United States that must be eliminated!

SCIENTIST: Buh, buh, but sir? You’re talking about destroying the moon? Thu, thu, that would be extremely unwise because…

[Cheney pours more water on the scientist.]

SCIENTIST: GLARRRRRRB!!! OK, OK, I’ll sign it! I’ll sign it, I’ll sign it!

CHENEY: That’s good. Now here’s the pen. Let’s…

[A knock at the door interrupts Cheney. Deutsch opens the door and a hunched-over Alberto Gonzales shuffles in carry a basket of dead rabbits.]

GONZALES: Master, I have brought you your daily basket of fresh uncooked bunny rabbits to devour!

CHENEY: That is excellent, Alberto! Bring them to me!...

After obtaining all the necessary intelligence from NASA officials, Cheney went on the Sunday morning talk shows and began to build his case for war. In addition to the signed statements of top NASA officials attesting to the moon’s nefarious intentions, Cheney produced an alleged picture of terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta walking on the moon just days before the asteroid struck Wyoming. Cheney called this the smoking gun that proved that the moon posed a threat too grave to ignore.

Although McClatchy later reported that the supposed picture of Atta that Cheney showed on Meet the Press was actually a photograph of Neil Armstrong, the media in general did not question the premises of the president’s claims. The British tabloids in particular ran wild with the claim that the moon could crash into Earth a mere 45 minutes after being knocked out of its orbit. On May 21, 2010, Cheney went on national television and said that he was giving the moon 48 hours to surrender before he would launch a nuclear strike to destroy it. Senate Democrats, alarmed that the president would declare war on the moon without their consultation, tried to draft a nonbinding resolution telling the president that they might be displeased if he were to launch his preemptive lunar assault. The measure was scuttled, however, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said that they wouldn’t have the 95 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster.

Two days after his ultimatum to the moon was met with eerie silence, Cheney ordered to sinister rock destroyed...

John Roberts, Wingnut

Jeff Toobin:

Annals of Law: No More Mr. Nice Guy: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker: Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party...

Bush Administration Officials Let Off the Hook Because They Were Only Giving Orders...

Eric Martin:

Obsidian Wings: Quote of the Day: Satan's Editors edition:

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.  I’m not sure that’s such a great idea.

The Editors wins round two of The Internet.  That is, until his plagiarism of Maureen Dowd surfaces, and the blogger ethics panel strips him of his blogofascist credentials.

Very nice line...

David Leonhard and Bruce Bartlett on Fiscal Policy

David Leonhardt:

Where Were the Medicare Tea Parties?/a>: Bruce Bartlett, the economist and former Reagan administration official, has been pounding the drum to get people to be more realistic about taxes. His case, in short, is that taxes will have to go up to cover the cost of government that Americans want. Referring to this week’s tea parties — the protests against taxes — Mr. Bartlett writes on Forbes.com:

[P]protesters... assume that the deficit has increased solely as a result of Barack Obama’s policies. But... the Congressional Budget Office was projecting a deficit of more than $1 trillion this year back in January, before any of Obama’s policies had been enacted, and a cumulative deficit of $4.3 trillion through 2019.... [P]rojected deficits have gotten larger since January. But much of this resulted from deteriorating economic conditions.... [M]any of those that loudly denounced the Obama stimulus package for its impact on the deficit would have cheered the McCain stimulus package even though it would have increased the deficit by about the same amount.

Proof of this proposition is that there were no tea parties during the years when George W. Bush was turning the surpluses of the Clinton years into massive deficits. Indeed, if concerns about deficits are the primary motivation for this week’s tax protests, then these same people should have been holding demonstrations of support for Bill Clinton in 2000 when the federal government ran a budget surplus of 2.4% of the gross domestic product–equivalent to a surplus of $336 billion this year.... [T]he greatest addition to national indebtedness occurred in 2003 when Bush rammed through the Republican Congress a massive expansion of Medicare to provide drug benefits even though the system was already broke...

Questions of Fact

The corrupt and mendacious Charles Krauthmmer writes:

Charles Krauthammer : This month, I wrote a column outlining two exceptions to the no-torture rule: the ticking time bomb scenario and its less extreme variant.... The column elicited protest and opposition that were, shall we say, spirited. And occasionally stupid. Dan Froomkin... asserted that "the ticking time bomb scenario only exists in two places: On TV and in the dark fantasies of power-crazed and morally deficient authoritarians."... On Oct. 9, 1994, Israeli Cpl. Nachshon Waxman was kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists. The Israelis captured the driver of the car. He was interrogated with methods so brutal that they violated Israel's existing 1987 interrogation guidelines, which themselves were revoked in 1999 by the Israeli Supreme Court as unconscionably harsh. The Israeli prime minister who ordered this enhanced interrogation (as we now say) explained without apology: "If we'd been so careful to follow the [1987] Landau Commission [guidelines], we would never have found out where Waxman was being held"...

I had thought that Yasir Arafat had told the Israelis where Waxman was being held. Anybody know anything?

And, of course, the most interesting thing is how narrow Krauthammer's defense of Cheney, Bush, Rice, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Tenet is. As I understand things, we imprisoned 15,000 people at black sites around the world, tortured 5,000 of them, and killed 100 under torture--and our principal aim in torturing people was "for the hell of it" while our secondary aim was "to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."

A half-competent and half-moral editor would pull Krauthammer's column and replace it with something informing his readers. But Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post is neither half-competent nor half-moral.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

And His Nobel Prize!

Josh Marshall:

Just Thinking | TPM: If, as Dick Cheney's daughter says, Cheney's torture crusade is like Al Gore global warming activism, can't he hurry up and form his pro-torture organization and shoot his movie?

Gene Healy Is a National Treasure...

Every time I get fed up with the Cato Institute and decide to dump everything that spews out of it automatically to /dev/null, Gene Healy writes something to pull him back.

I think that the Republican Party needs to die because it does not believe that "adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy"--it adheres to no values whatsoever. I hope that it will, and that Gene Healy will be at the core of its replacement:

Of Course It Was Torture: Thursday, the Obama administration released previously classified memos detailing interrogation techniques used against enemy prisoners.... Bush administration lawyers assured the CIA that waterboarding detainees and keeping them awake for a week or more was perfectly legal.... Conservative legal analyst David Rivkin, one of Bush's most reliable defenders, insists that "any fair-minded observer" would conclude that the documents prove that "the Bush administration did not torture." But... Rivkin's assertion is on a par with left-wing diehards' claim that President Clinton didn't commit perjury.

Let's start with waterboarding. If it's not torture, then maybe we owe an apology to the Japanese soldiers we prosecuted for it after WWII. It felt "like I was drowning," Lieutenant Chase Nielsen testified in a 1946 war crimes trial, "just gasping between life and death."... [T]he policy was, at the very least, criminally stupid.... Bush administration defenders prefer to describe each technique in isolation, glossing over the fact that it was the relentless combination of such tactics for extended periods that made them rise to the level of torture.... Read the descriptions military personnel provided of prisoners' reactions to "enhanced interrogation": "Detainee began to cry. Detainee bit the IV tube completely in two. Started moaning.... Yelled for Allah. Urinated on himself.... Trembled uncontrollably." Does that meet the statutory definition? Gosh yes, that's a tough legal question.

The point here isn't to make you shed a tear for Al Qaeda prisoners; mass murderers (actual or aspiring) are pretty hard to feel sorry for. But anyone who understands the issue ought to feel some remorse over the damage our policy did to the rule of law and American interests abroad....

Imagine if, shortly after 9/11, someone had told you that the US government would adopt an interrogation policy based on Chinese Communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. You'd have thought that person was pretty cynical. But he'd turn out to be exactly right.... SERE was adopted in the wake of the Korean War to train American soldiers to resist abuse by rogue regimes. After 9/11, we put those techniques to work to interrogate terrorist suspects. It's hardly surprising, then, that... "We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms." Beaten savagely by Egyptian torturers, one victim of our "extraordinary rendition" program concocted a story about Saddam Hussein giving Al Qaeda WMD training. That story made it into Colin Powell's UN Security Council speech selling the Iraq War.

In his ill-fated presidential campaign, Republican congressman Tom Tancredo got his biggest applause line when he cheered for torture in a May 2007 debate: "I'm lookin' for Jack Bauer!" The real thing is a lot less glamorous—and a lot less effective—than what you see on TV. Around the same time Tancredo was mugging for the cameras, General David Petraeus issued an open letter to his troops warning against the use of torture: "Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy." That's a principle we should keep in mind going forward.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Impeach Donald Rumsfeld. Impeech Condi Rice. Impeach Them Now

Yes, they did torture people to elicit false confessions that would give them an excuse to attack Iraq.

Jonathan Landay should not say "find" evidence. He should say "manufacture" evidence. Otherwise the story s good:

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link: The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.... A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration.

"There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used," the former senior intelligence official said on condition of anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity. "The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there." It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document. "There was constant pressure on the intelligence agencies and the interrogators to do whatever it took to get that information out of the detainees, especially the few high-value ones we had, and when people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued. "Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies." Senior administration officials, however, "blew that off and kept insisting that we'd overlooked something, that the interrogators weren't pushing hard enough, that there had to be something more we could do to get that information," he said.

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq. "While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results." Excerpts from Burney's interview appeared in a full, declassified report on a two-year investigation into detainee abuse released on Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., called Burney's statement "very significant." "I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist." Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

A senior Guantanamo Bay interrogator, David Becker, told the committee that only "a couple of nebulous links" between al Qaida and Iraq were uncovered during interrogations of unidentified detainees, the report said. Others in the interrogation operation "agreed there was pressure to produce intelligence, but did not recall pressure to identify links between Iraq and al Qaida," the report said. The report, the executive summary of which was released in November, found that Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were responsible for the abusive interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan...

The Bush Administration: Malevolent, Not Ignorant

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti put an improper frame around the torture issue. Not to do the staffwork on a policy--and not to check the staffwork that others have done--is making a decision to be deceived. But Shane and Mazzetti hide their eyes from that fact:

In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use: The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods used on Americans during military training. How could that be torture?... [W]ithout a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.... [N]o one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.... George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of... waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia. They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer [i.e., John Yoo] most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.... Today... Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House. Philip D. Zelikow, who worked on interrogation issues as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 and 2006, said the flawed decision-making badly served Mr. Bush and the country.

"Competent staff work could have quickly canvassed relevant history, insights from the best law enforcement and military interrogators, and lessons from the painful British and Israeli experience,” Mr. Zelikow said. “Especially in a time of great stress, walking into this minefield, the president was entitled to get the most thoughtful and searching analysis our government could muster.”...

Leaked to the news media months after they were first used, the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods would darken the country’s reputation, blur the moral distinction between terrorists and the Americans who hunted them, bring broad condemnation from Western allies and become a ready-made defense for governments accused of torture. The response has only intensified since Justice Department legal memos released last week showed that two prisoners were waterboarded 266 times and that C.I.A. interrogators were ordered to waterboard one of the captives despite their belief that he had no more information to divulge...

Michael Tomasky on How Newt Gingrich Has No Rightful Place in American Politics or Government

Michael:

Michael Tomasky: Did an Obama judicial nominee really express a preference for Allah over Jesus?: From the second I read the sentence, I knew there was something fishy about it. Many years' experience in reading and then looking into rightwing canards set off the usual alarm bells in my head. So I know how these things work. But even I was shocked after I looked into the truth of the matter. My daily readings led me to an interview with Newt Gingrich in Christianity Today. The former speaker was asked whether opposition to tax increases was an adequate "uniting message" for his party. Gingrich replied that there had to be more to the party's story. For instance, he said:

You have Obama nominating Judge Hamilton, who said in her ruling that saying the words Jesus Christ in a prayer is a sign of inappropriate behavior, but saying Allah would be OK. You'll find most Republican senators voting against a judge who is confused about whether you can say Jesus Christ in a prayer, particularly one who is pro-Muslim being able to say Allah. That seemed, frankly, ridiculous. I happened to know that the "Hamilton" in question was from Indiana.... I also happened to know that "her" first name was David, so Gingrich could not get even this basic fact straight.... So I wanted to know more.... [A] search returned thousands of rabid posts from the wing-o-sphere about this judge who thinks Indianans should be allowed to pray to Allah but not to Jesus.... [E]ventually I found my way to... Hamilton's actual decision... Hinrichs v Bosma.... Naturally, it's all a lie, but as I said, even I was shocked at how rancidly despicable a lie it was....

Hamilton's decision is eminently calm and even-keeled... he relies on two decisions from the fourth judicial circuit... the country's most conservative.... Wynn v Town of Great Falls. The town council opened its meetings with a prayer that regularly mentioned Jesus Christ.... Not only did Hamilton rely on the country's most conservative federal circuit court, he specifically cited an opinion written by one of the most conservative jurists on that court. Judge J Harvie Wilkinson is always on the short list when a US supreme court seat opens up during a Republican presidency. But even Wilkinson wrote....

We cannot adopt a view of the tradition of legislative prayer that chops up American citizens on public occasions into representatives of one sect and one sect only, whether Christian, Jewish or Wiccan. In private observances, the faithful surely choose to express the unique aspects of their creeds. But in their civic faith, Americans have reached more broadly. Our civic faith seeks guidance that is not the property of any sect....

[H]ere's where the lie comes in... what did [Hamilton] say about Allah?... [T]he decision doesn't so much as mention Allah.... Read this paragraph, from page 49:

The Speaker has also suggested that such an explicit caution about Christian references "would be the first known religious viewpoint discrimination in connection with the Indiana House invocation."... The criticism is misguided. The decisive point of constitutional law is that a practice of sectarian prayer favouring any particular religion violates the establishment clause. From the evidence here, it is clear that the letters asking invited clerics to "strive for an ecumenical prayer" have not been sufficient to prevent many Christian speakers from using the prayer opportunity to advance and even to proselytise Christianity. The same strictures will apply to sectarian Jewish or Muslim prayers, for example. This record, however, shows no efforts by Jewish or Muslim clerics to use the prayer opportunity to advance their particular religions. At this juncture, there is no need to be more specific in the injunction as to what would amount to a sectarian prayer in those traditions.

The same strictures will apply!... [T]he wingers have taken the last sentence of this paragraph, yanked it completely out of context, and then taken the extra step (or two or three) of insinuating that of course, this kind of Godless heathen is exactly the sort of nominee you'd expect from a secret Muslim president....

I'd like to report that this is unusual, but this kind of slippery illogic is standard operating procedure on today's right. Find something that might inflame opinion and stoke prejudice, and pump it. Doesn't matter that it isn't really true. By the time the other side explains that it isn't true, we'll already have won. They know that no one's going to read page 49 of a legal opinion. As it happens this time someone did, but often, alas, they're right.

These are sick, sick people. May their Jesus consign them to history's ash heap.

What Happened to Richard Cheney's Reality Testing?

Josh Marshall writes:

Into the Dark | TPM: A long time reader chimes in ...

My boss spent a lot of time working with Cheney when he was Sec. of Defense REDACTED. Despite being a liberal Democrat he had a huge amount of respect for both Cheney's intellect and character before he became VP. I don't really buy it either, but he swears that Cheney underwent some sort of transformation, possibly due to a stroke.

It sort of baffles me too. I think a lot of people just fooled themselves about Cheney's politics. But I've had enough people (with sufficient proximity to speak with some authority) say things like this that I think it's possible that something characterologically changed about Cheney between 1993 and 2001.

Who Have We Become?

Or, rather, who have George W. Bush and his Republican Party turned us into?

Hilzoy is up at 2:21 AM, worrying:

The Washington Monthly: A couple of other things that are missing from the torture memos:

First, the memos cite various legal precedents for the definition of torture. They are particularly fond of Mehinovic v. Vuckovic, which involved "a course of conduct that included severe beatings to the genitals, head, and other parts of the body with metal pipes and various other items; removal of teeth with pliers; kicking in the face and ribs; breaking of bones and ribs and dislocation of fingers; cutting a figure into the victim's forehead; hanging the victim and beating him; extreme limitations of food and water; and subjection to games of 'Russian Roulette'." (p. 24; the details of this case are repeated on four separate occasions in this memo alone, like an incantation.) Isn't it strange, then, that not a single one of the cases in which the United States has prosecuted people for waterboarding turns up in these memos? You'd think they might be apposite. Oddly enough, though, Steven Bradbury didn't think to include them.

Second: As I noted last night, under the US Code, an important issue in determining whether something counts as producing "severe mental pain or suffering" is whether it produces "prolonged mental harm". In discussing this question, especially with regard to sleep deprivation and waterboarding, Steven Bradbury spends a lot of time discussing the scientific literature on these topics. And yet, once you think about it, he had a much better source of information available to him. These memos were written in May, 2005. The CIA had been using these "methods of interrogation" for nearly three years. Moreover, the memos fall all over themselves describing the repeated psychiatric evaluations that detainees are given:

"Prior to interrogation, each detainee is evaluated by medical and psychological professionals from the CIA's Office of Medical Services ("OMS") to ensure that he is not likely to suffer any severe physical or mental pain or suffering as a result of interrogation." (p. 4)

Bradbury then quotes the OMS' guidelines:

"[T]echnique-specific advance approval is required for all "enhanced" measures, and is 'conditional on on-site medical and psychological personnel confirming from direct detainee examination that the enhanced technique(s) is not expected to produce "physical or mental pain or suffering"'. As a practical matter, the detainee's physical condition must be such that these interventions will not have lasting effect, and his psychological state strong enough that no severe psychological harm will result." (p. 4)

Moreover:

"Medical and psychological personnel are on-scene throughout (and, as detailed below, physically present or otherwise observing during the application of many techniques, including all techniques involving physical contact with detainees), and "[d]aily physical and psychological evaluations are continued throughout the period of [enhanced interrogation technique] use." (p. 5; square brackets in the original.)

With all those psychological workups having been conducted on CIA detainees over a period of nearly three years, one might think that the CIA, and specifically its Office of Medical Services, would have lots of information on whether or not the techniques under discussion actually did produce any "prolonged mental harm." And yet, strange to say, the memos don't mention any evidence at all about the effects of these techniques on CIA detainees[1]. It's pretty strange that the CIA had all that data about the psychiatric effects of its interrogation techniques ready to hand, and yet no one mentions it.

Or then again, maybe not.

[1] This is particularly striking in the case of Abu Zubaydah, whose psychiatric condition is described at considerable length in the August 1, 2002 memo. As Emptywheel has noted, the description of Abu Zubaydah in the memos is completely different from the FBI sources quoted by Ron Suskind -- they called him "certifiable". But let's pretend we don't know that, and ask: given the 2002 memo's extensive description of Abu Zubaydah, and given that he was the detainee on whom these techniques had been used the longest, wouldn't it be natural for Bradbury to explain what dazzling psychological health he was enjoying several years after the CIA had begun using "enhanced techniques" on him?

On reflection, though, maybe using Abu Zubaydah as a poster child for the benignity of the CIA's methods would not have been such a good idea:

"The sadistic treatment of Abu Zubayda also seems to have affected him psychologically in bizarre ways. Two sources said that he became sexually obsessive, masturbating so much his captors feared he would injure himself. One described him as acting "like a monkey at the zoo." A physician was called in for consultation -- one of many instances in which health professionals have played truly disturbing roles in this program."

Matt Duss on the Strange Case of Ahmed Chalabi

Matt writes:

Wonk Room:Chalabi: ‘Iran Benefited From Toppling Saddam’: The idea that Iran has been the main beneficiary of the Iraq war isn’t particularly controversial any more — except, of course, among the war’s neoconservative advocates, who continue to insist that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and empowering Iraqi factions with longstanding close ties to Iran was a huge defeat for Iran.... [M]any of these people — Sen. John McCain and his adviser Randy Scheunemann among them — were also Chalabi’s biggest boosters.... Given what’s known now about Chalabi’s cooperation with Iran’s intelligence services, though, it’s pretty chilling to consider how close some of Chalabi’s marks came to taking the White House last November. Unfortunately, as shown by the continuing prominence of McCain, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocon fantasists, inadvertently aiding America’s enemies is no barrier to influence in American foreign policy, as long as one is always careful to err on the side of war, and meticulous in dressing one’s belligerent strategic stupidity in patriotic drag...

Will Fox News and Rush Limbaugh Kill the Republican Party?

Perhaps they will.

Matthew Yglesias muses on the insights of DEL. DEL:

Conservatism as Entertainment: One interesting thing about how much Fox news and friends are covering these tea parties is that it’s illustrative how much conservatism has been transformed from a political movement into an entertainment demographic. Political movements, I would think, are defined by a common set of semi-coherent policies and proposals that movement sympathizers hope to see implemented by government. Entertainment demographics are defined by shared tastes or predilections that media companies can target for ratings.

The GOP has abandoned the business of coming up with and articulating a political platform, opting instead to host and promote counter-cultural parties that seem strange and foreign to the vast majority of their co-nationalists. Then, Fox, Glenn and Rush cover these events relentlessly because it’s an effective way of getting the attention of a specific demographic and boosting ratings. As for the rest of us, when we think of conservatives we no longer think “fiscal responsibility” or “national security”; rather, we see one more alternative lifestyle choice among many - and a very odd one at that.

And Matt writes:

You hear a lot these days that Republicans are “in disarray.” But they’re not, really. It’s just that the way our political institutions work, a congressional minority party doesn’t generate a high-profile leader. Now you combine this leadership vacuum with the fact that the right has developed a very robust ideological media apparatus on talk radio and on Fox News and you have a problem. In effect, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are more prominent public figures than are John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, to say nothing of legislators who might actually be appealing figure. And since only a tiny minority of Republican members of congress are willing to suffer the dread “RINO” tag, the vast majority of elected officials seem to feel the need to kowtow to the whims of conservative movement media leaders.

The problem is that the incentives facing a media figure are very different from the incentives facing a politician. A politician needs, basically, a majority. And the decisive votes are bound to come from people who don’t like politics much or really care about it. For a media figure, however, a much smaller audience than “half the people” would still constitute enormous success. But you need to appeal, intensely, to the small minority of people who care enough about politics to bother watching, reading, or listening to political commentary.

Why Is Paul Krugman the Only Person Writing for the New York Times Who Is Telling It Like It Is?

I had hoped that once the Bushies were out of power and could no longer threaten to deprive reporters of access that journalists would tell things like they are. Silly me. Paul Krugman:

Tea Parties Forever: Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats. But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.

One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties”... antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so. But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party. Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because “liberal” doesn’t seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists? Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh....

[Tom] DeLay, a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution — he famously suggested that the teaching of evolution led to the Columbine school massacre — also foreshadowed the denunciations of evolution that have emerged at some of the parties. Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects.... So what’s the implication of the fact that Republicans are refusing to grow up, the fact that they are still behaving the same way they did when history seemed to be on their side? I’d say that it’s good for Democrats, at least in the short run — but it’s bad for the country. For now, the Obama administration gains a substantial advantage from the fact that it has no credible opposition, especially on economic policy, where the Republicans seem particularly clueless.

But... and events could still put that party back in power. We can only hope that Republicans have moved on by the time that happens.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Welcome Back to Reality!

Good to have you back, Doug!

Satyam Khanna:

Think Progress: McCain’s former economic adviser flips on Bush tax cuts: Throughout the presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) top economic adviser and former CBO director, Douglas Holtz Eakin, argued passionately for McCain’s proposal to extend the Bush tax cuts (and cut some more taxes for the wealthy on top of it). Holtz-Eakin, however, has now come out against making the tax cuts permanent, acknowledging that it would explode the deficit:

Though economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin spent the 2008 presidential campaign advising Sen. John McCain to defend the Bush-era tax cuts, he now thinks they should be allowed to expire on Dec. 31, 2010 due to “the prospect of an Argentina-style fiscal meltdown.” Said Holtz-Eakin: “If you ask: ‘Who pays the taxes?’, it’s the first step toward not having the answer be: ‘Our kids’”...

IIRC, however, that is still only two of five top Republican economic advisers. I think that former Bush CEA chairs Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and Eddie Lazear are still on record in favor of extending Bush's tax cuts for the rich--only Ben Bernanke, I think, has joined Holtz-Eakin and is opposed.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Jon Henke Edition Intellectual Garbage Pickup--John Henke at "The Next Right" Edition

UPDATE: Jon Henke writes:

I must object to the caricature you've made of my views in your recent post.

I'm not a Bush cheerleader. I never voted for him, and have been a vocal critic. I know you probably haven't read much of my writing - I object to that, too! - but I've been quite critical of the Republican nonsense about tax cuts solving revenue problems, as well as the game of fiscal chicken they're playing by cutting taxes and increasing spending.

What's more, I've actually pointed out previously that Krugman has been quite consistent in arguing that, while fiscal policy is generallly an inappropriate tool to address recessions, it becomes a more legitimate tool when we've run out of monetary rope. Indeed, in that post you cite, I point out that those fiscal stimulus arguments are certainly legitimate.

However, the deficits over the upcoming decade are massive, and we're hearing the same deceptive "but we'll cut these massive deficits in half" rhetoric and number-manipulation that we saw before.

I certainly understand why you haven't exactly been following what I write. I mean, I think that's a tragedy, etc, etc, but I understand you probably have things to do beyond hanging on my every word. But, even though I'm sure it is unintentional and not personal, you have misunderstood and misrepresented me.

I only write to point that out because I like and respect you, and I hate to think our rare intersection would be a misunderstanding.

Jon is right.

I am clearly far too cranky this evening.

I apologize.

Nevertheless, there are two important points:

1. We need to worry about the deficits in 2015, 2020, 2025, and beyond--not about the deficits in 2009, 2010, and 2011.

2. The key to dealing with the deficits in 2015, 2020, 2025, and beyond is--you guessed it--health care. That is the entire ballgame.

---

rmoomaw writes:

What in your opinion is wrong with this analysis?

John Henke, Doubling Down on the Deficit Disaster | The Next Right.

I reply:

r (if I may):

1. The long-run deficits that John Henke decries are not much, much worse than they were in 2003--they are somewhat better. Obama has cut the long-run deficit. Bush boosted it. It remains a big problem--but it's not a problem of Clinton's or Obama's or Pelosi's or Reed's creation, it's a problem created by Bush and his cheerleaders like Jon Henke.

2. Henke accuses Paul Krugman of inconsistency for worrying about deficits in 2003 but not about short-run deficits now. If the 2003 unemployment rate had been forecasted to be above 10%, Krugman would have been calling for bigger deficits in 2003 as well. I don't know whether Jon Henke is foolish or mendacious, but "cyclical deficits when the economy is in deep recession good; long-term structural deficits bad" ought not to be too complex a doctrine to be grasped by someone who claims to be speaking for the Next Right.

I think that takes care of it.

Yours,

Brad DeLong

Washington Post Crashed-and-Burned Watch

Republicans lie, all the time, about everything. Even those whom Barack Obama reaches out to and asks to be members of his cabinet.

Steve Benen:

The Washington Monthly: THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A 'LIGHT-SWITCH TAX'.... In an apparent effort to be an even more shameless hack, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) argues in a Washington Post op-ed today that "all American families will get stuck with a new 'light-switch tax' on electricity bills that is in the president's budget."

It's not just Gregg. While President Obama cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans, a standard Republican talking point is that Obama is also raising taxes on everyone who uses electricity. The new GOP catch phrase popped up about a week ago, when the House Republican Conference said in a press release that the administration supports "a light switch tax that would cost every American household $3,128 a year."

As is too often the case, the difference between Republican rhetoric and reality is overwhelming.

As Brian Beutler explained, "There is, of course, no such tax in the president's proposal or the budget resolution, and nor could there be. Obama's proposal contemplates revenue from a cap-and-trade bill, and there is a deficit neutral reserve fund for future climate change legislation in the resolution, but even that section was amended last night to provide that any increased energy costs would be offset by cap-and-trade revenue."

PolitiFact also scrutinized the Republican claim and described it as a "pants-on-fire" kind of lie.

"It's just wrong," said John Reilly, an energy, environmental and agricultural economist at M.I.T. and one of the authors of the report [cited by congressional Republicans]. "It's wrong in so many ways it's hard to begin." [...]

The tax might push the price of carbon-based fuels up a bit, but other results of a cap-and-trade program, such as increased conservation and more competition from other fuel sources, would put downward pressure on prices. Moreover, consumers would get some of the tax back from the government in some form.

The report did include an estimate of the net cost to individuals, called the "welfare" cost. It would be $30.89 per person in 2015, or $79 per family if you use the same average household size the Republicans used of 2.56 people.

The cost would grow over time as the program ramps up, but the average annual cost over time in today's dollars -- that is, the "average annual net present value cost" -- is still just $85 per person, Reilly said. That would be $215.05 per household.

A far cry from $3,128. And that isn't the only inaccuracy in the claim.

The Republican claim isn't just an error or a mistake, and it's not a subjective question open to interpretation. The GOP talking point is an obvious and transparent lie.

I'm not optimistic, but the Washington Post, which ran Gregg's blatant falsehood, should do the responsible thing here. It was wrong to publish the lie, but the paper now has the opportunity to publish a correction so readers are at least aware of the fact that the New Hampshire Republican is trying to deceive them.

Dan Froomkin on the Torture of Abu Zubaida

Dan reports on what the Washington Post now prints as front-page news--something it ould have printed three years ago:

White House Watch - Bush's Torture Rationale Debunked: Abu Zubaida was the alpha and omega of the Bush administration's argument for torture. That's why Sunday's front-page Washington Post story by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick is such a blow to the last remaining torture apologists. Finn and Warrick reported that "not a single significant plot was foiled" as a result of Zubaida's brutal treatment -- and that, quite to the contrary, his false confessions "triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms."

Zubaida was the first detainee to be tortured at the direct instruction of the White House. Then he was President George W. Bush's Exhibit A in defense of the "enhanced interrogation" procedures that constituted torture. And he continues to be held up as a justification for torture by its most ardent defenders. But as author Ron Suskind reported almost three years ago -- and as The Post now confirms -- almost all the key assertions the Bush administration made about Zubaida were wrong. Zubaida wasn't a major al Qaeda figure. He wasn't holding back critical information. His torture didn't produce valuable intelligence -- and it certainly didn't save lives. All the calculations the Bush White House claims to have made in its decision to abandon long-held moral and legal strictures against abusive interrogation turn out to have been profoundly flawed, not just on a moral basis but on a coldly practical one as well. Indeed, the Post article raises the even further disquieting possibility that intentional cruelty was part of the White House's motive.

The most charitable interpretation at this point of the decision to torture is that it was a well-intentioned overreaction of people under enormous stress whose only interest was in protecting the people of the United States. But there's always been one big problem with that theory: While torture works on TV, knowledgeable intelligence professionals and trained interrogators know that in the real world, it's actually ineffective and even counterproductive. The only thing it's really good as it getting false confessions. So why do it? Some social psychologists (see, for instance, Kevin M. Carlsmith on NiemanWatchdog.org) have speculated that the real motivation for torture is retribution. And now someone with first-hand knowledge is suggesting that was a factor in Zubaida's case. Quoting a "former Justice Department official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida," Finn and Warwick write that the pressure on CIA interrogators "from upper levels of the government was 'tremendous,' driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates...

"'They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new,' the official said. 'They'd say, "You aren't working hard enough." There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't talk, we'll do whatever.'"' The Post story also makes it clear that some people with great reality-denying skills remain at the upper levels of the government: "Some U.S. officials remain steadfast in their conclusion that Abu Zubaida possessed, and gave up, plenty of useful information about al-Qaeda," Finn and Warwick write. "'It's simply wrong to suggest that Abu Zubaida wasn't intimately involved with al-Qaeda,' said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much about Abu Zubaida remains classified. 'He was one of the terrorist organization's key facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated, provided critical information on senior al-Qaeda figures...and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members. How anyone can minimize that information -- some of the best we had at the time on al-Qaeda -- is beyond me.'" But who are these people? How can they still possibly believe this given all the evidence to the contrary? What are they doing still in government?

Author and investigative reporter Suskind first exposed the rampant fallacies of the administration's Zubaida narrative in his explosive June 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine. See my June 20, 2006 column for a summary. But mainstream news organizations, unable to match Suskind's sources, largely refused to acknowledge his reporting. Indeed, in September 2006, when the White House for the first time publicly acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA detention and interrogation program, Bush had no qualms about putting Zubaida front and center. In a major speech, he proudly described how Zubaida -- "a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden" -- was questioned using the CIA's new "alternative set of procedures" and then "'began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives."

All lies and euphemisms. But all reported pretty much straight at the time by a mainstream media that, if it noted Suskind's reporting at all, did so as an afterthought...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming

An excerpt:

Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: there were detailed discussions and briefings on cyber-security and often terrorism, and on a classified program. . . . he seemed—I was disturbed because he seemed to be trying to impress us, the people who were briefing him. . . . The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming

An excerpt:

Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: Christine Todd Whitman, the E.P.A. administrator, was one of several people in the Cabinet, along with Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who strongly supported a proactive position on climate change. And she was, I think, in Europe telling European governments that the U.S. position was to regulate carbon dioxide. And when she got back home, she had an interaction with the president in which she was very brusquely told that that was off the table. The turning point, essentially, was that Cheney grabbed hold of this issue and took down the whole notion of regulating CO2.

Thoughts on Bruce Bartlett's Views on Obama vs. McCain on Dealing with the Economic Crisis

He thinks that Obama is not doing well, but that there is no reason to think that McCain would be doing any better:

The Arena - Politico's daily debate with policymakers and opinion shapers: I’ve gotten this question from several of my conservative friends lately. They know that I publicly declared my support for Barack Obama.... My friends seem to think that six weeks is enough time to render a verdict on Obama’s administration and declare it a total failure. In that time, he’s rammed a hugely expensive stimulus bill into law that will greatly expand the size of government, fumbled the bank bailout, and initiated a number of efforts to reverse George W. Bush’s policies. So, as a conservative, would I vote for Obama if I had it to do over again?

The answer is yes and the reason is simple: I have no reason to think John McCain would be doing any better. He has given no indication since the election that he has any better ideas about how to deal with the economic crisis than Obama does.... All I ever saw in McCain’s campaign was a continuation of the failed policies of George W. Bush that got us into the mess we are in today. The only vote I have ever cast for president that I regret is my vote for Bush in 2004. That is because I knew better at the time...

And Bartlett adds:

On a related point, I think it was irresponsible for Bush to leave office without leaving behind a blueprint of what he would be doing to deal with the economic crisis if he were still in office. He didn’t publish a budget—at all, not even a current services baseline—and his Economic Report was totally vacuous. If he had used his administration’s resources to develop an alternative policy before leaving office it would at least have provided a guide for his party to follow. That fact that he did NOTHING only proves that he didn’t give a crap about the American people or his party, either. His whole administration was about him, him, and only him. What an asshole.

Perhaps McCain would have had an easier time assembling a political coalition to enable a resolution of the banking sector crisis, perhaps not. Obama seems to be stuck. Restoring health to the banking system--and thus keeping us in a deep recession rather than in a depression--seems to me to require either (a) the socialization of losses--enormous presents to bankers and bank shareholders--or (b) nationalization. The Democratic left (and some Republicans) won't let Obama do (a). The Democratic right (and all Republicans) won't let Obama do (b). McCain might have been able to cobble together a coalition to do some version of (a).

On fiscal policy, I don't see that big a difference between Obama and McCain. McCain would do more tax cuts and fewer spending increases, but were he president right now Doug Holtz-Eakin, Mark Zandi, Phil Gramm, Carly Fiorina, and Kevin "Dow 36000" Hassett would be moving a similarly-sized stimulus package through congress with the unanimous support of all the Republican members and economists who are currently crying that fiscal policy is ineffective.

The John-Yoo-Is-a-Bad-Faith-Actor Caucus

Orin Kerr is a proud and welcome member of the John-Yoo-Is-a-Bad-Faith-Actor caucus:

Orin Kerr: John Yoo: "Now that I'm not in the government, part of my role, because I have a certain amount of expertise, is to try to keep the government honest." -- From an interview with the Orange County Register.

On the other hand, back when he was in government...

We public members of the caucus are still relatively small in number (although a hell of a lot of remarkably prominent lurkers support us in email).

On the other hand, the public members of the John-Yoo-Is-a-Good-Faith-Actor caucus are even smaller in number. I know of none save for Mark Graber, David Rivkin, and Alberto Gonzales...

Brian Tamanaha Joins Those of Us Who Have Concluded that John Yoo Does Not Argue in "Good Faith"

Nice to see. From one perspective it is obvious. From another perspective it is sad that most every lawyer and law professor who agrees with Brian is still being vewy, vewy quiet.

Brian Tamanaha:

Defenders of the Bush Administration who argue against the criminal prosecution of former government officials for their illegal activity—torture, violation of FISA, etc.—uniformly raise a two part “good faith” excuse: 1) those who ordered and engaged in these illegal activities relied in “good faith” on Department of Justice legal opinions that authorized the activities; and 2) the legal opinions were “good faith” interpretations of the applicable law by Office of Legal Counsel lawyers (Yoo, Bybee, Delahunty).

The first part of this “good faith” excuse raises large questions: Can one rely in “good faith” on a memo which purports to authorize obviously illegal activity?... Is “good faith” reliance a valid defense?

This post sets aside those issues to focus on the second part of the “good faith” excuse.... The memos authorizing these illegal activities bear all the trappings of ordinary legal argument. How does one prove that these “legal opinions” were constructed in bad faith?... But the recent release by the OLC of several of the relevant memos removes any doubt: these memos were elaborate exercises in manipulative legal argument.... OLC lawyers were faced with a big hurdle: the applicable law was directly contrary to what the Administration wanted to do. (That’s the thing about law—it can get in the way.) Rather than concede that the actions were illegal and could not be done, however, the lawyers constructed a covering legal analysis which arrived at the desired ends. The soundness of their legal argument did not matter. What mattered was that OLC has the power to issue legal opinions that are authoritative for immediate purposes (within the executive branch) and the mere issuance of the opinion supplied the first part of the “good faith” excuse described above (providing a defense to those who directly engaged in the illegal conduct). (As an analogy, think of a tax lawyer knowingly preparing a letter that approves of the legality of an illegal tax shelter, thereby supplying the client with a reliance defense against subsequent IRS enforcement actions.)...

[I]t is essential to understand the extraordinary claims these OLC lawyers made. Their core argument... is that, as head of the executive... and Commander in Chief of the military, the president has the authority to do whatever he deems necessary... to conduct the “war” against terror... “plenary power” (that is, absolute, unqualified) over these matters.... The president can authorize torture, approve of searches and seizures without warrants, order the domestic use of the military, abrogate treaties on his own authority, and he may “dispose of the liberty” of prisoners as he pleases, to offer a few examples, all without interference from courts and congress. The memos specifically assert that the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution must give way when the president deems it necessary in defense of the nation.... Pause and let that sink in. It’s all there in the memos. Read them and be chilled....

[L]awyers in the OLC (Yoo, Bybee, and Delahunty) claimed that the president is above the law in the various respects identified above—and these were the official positions of the Department of Justice until the belated repudiation by outgoing OLC Deputy Steven Bradbury in his January 15, 2009, memo.... So why has the “good faith” excuse for these legal memos evaporated? Exhibit A is Bradbury’s repudiation.... The abject emptiness of their legal arguments is reflected in Bradbury’s unequivocal language, retracting point after point: “the assertions excerpted above are not the position of the OLC;” “the sweeping assertions in the opinions…are not sustainable;” “the prior opinion…is incorrect;” “We disagree…;” “This Office has substantial doubts…;” “we have substantial doubts…:” “The survey of early history [in the memo]…does not support the opinion’s assertion…;” the argument “is problematic and questionable…;” “the reasoning supporting these assertions is unconvincing;” “We found the two opinions’ treatment of this history to be unconvincing, their analysis…to be doubtful.”

As Bradbury makes clear, the legal analysis in these memos, time and again, was just plain bad legal argument.... Consider this concluding passage from a Yoo-Delahunty memo.....

The courts have observed that even the use of deadly force is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment if used in self-defense or to protect others. Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and of its citizens. If the government’s heightened interest in self defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it would certainly also justify warrantless searches.

Huh? The reasoning goes like this:

1. Individuals can use deadly force to defend against a deadly attack;

2. The government can use deadly force to defend the nation against an attack;

3. Therefore: the government can engage in warrantless searches.

As Bradbury asserted (politely), dismissing this analysis: “We believe that this reasoning inappropriately conflates the Fourth Amendment analysis for government searches with that for use of deadly force.” It’s stupefying.... The OLC memos are replete with selective historical arguments, selective readings of constitutional and legislative history, selective citation to judicial precedents, selective readings of statutes, and selective leaps of logic. Advocacy of this sort is standard stuff for lawyers, but OLC lawyers are in a different position precisely because their opinions have authoritative consequences. There is a difference between what the law is and what the Administration wants the law to be, and the role of OLC lawyers is to advise on what the law is....

The positions taken in these memos were not “mistakes” in legal analysis by unskilled lawyers working under pressure. They were elaborately crafted by capable lawyers. The legal analysis nonetheless fails time and again because the positions they were determined to justify could not be legally justified. That is precisely why this was not “good faith” legal argument.... The law wouldn’t bend as far as they wanted. But they wrote the legal memos anyway, placing the president above the law. As a result, the president and those acting on his behalf were above the law—for a time.

Scott Horton Keeps Us Up-to-Date on Some of the Bush Administration's Crimes

Yoo for the Defense:

Yoo for the Defense—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine): Obama, Yoo says, has put the safety of Americans on the line: his torture ban will “seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks.” Never mind, of course, that no evidence has been advanced of a single instance in which the use of torture produced intelligence that prevented a future terrorist attack, while detailed and specific evidence has now been put forward that torture produced bad intelligence used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Those are irritating details that detract from a nice narrative. So what’s all this about? Is Yoo suffering from withdrawal pangs coming off an addiction to torture?... I’ve followed John Yoo and his writings with some care for a while now, and I think I finally understand what this is about. Namely, a pending probe by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is looking at serious ethical issues surrounding the issuance of Yoo’s legal opinions.

But the OPR probe is far from Yoo’s only or even most pressing worry. The likelihood that he will face a criminal probe and then possibly prosecution is growing. Susan J. Crawford, the Cheney protege tapped as the senior Bush Administration official to oversee the Guantánamo military commissions, publicly admitted in an interview with Bob Woodward, that at least one of the detainees had been tortured through the application of an interrogation regime that had been approved by the White House. In their exit interviews, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were emphatic that in authorizing torture, they relied on the advice of their lawyers, meaning John Yoo. But in the ultimate act of ingratitude, Bush left office without issuing the anticipated blanket pardons to his torture team. NATO allies and United Nations officials are reminding the new Obama Administration that it has a solemn obligation under article 4 of the Convention Against Torture to begin a criminal investigation....

Yoo cannot be oblivious to all of this. And indeed, his column in the Wall Street Journal and his presentations elsewhere tell us exactly what the defense will be. At its core is the argument that, no matter how mistaken, John Yoo acted in good faith when he issued the torture memoranda. He truly, sincerely believes the analysis.... That’s why from April 2004 forward, Yoo has been unwavering in his adherence to the views put forth in those memos.... [W]e see in his current column and other recent statements tale-tell signs that suggest this defense is dishonest....

Immediately after reading Yoo’s memos it struck me that they were the product of reverse-engineering. The way they drifted through issues, the bizarre choice of precedent, the curious misreading of the Constitution in which the clause granting to Congress the authority to address questions surrounding detainees simply disappears--and the equally tendentious and absurd readings of international conventions and precedents--could be explained if you imagined that Yoo had been approached and told to craft a memorandum that legalized practices already in place. If that were the case, those asking for the memo were looking for a get-out-of-jail-free pass from the Department of Justice, and Yoo’s memos were supposed to provide it. Viewed in this light, what Yoo crafted makes perfect sense; otherwise they strike me as impossible to explain....

[I]f Yoo did craft the memos for the explicit purpose of covering the torture project with impunity and pushing it forward by overriding the judgment of serious lawyers at the Pentagon and CIA, then Yoo made himself a part of the torture conspiracy; that he was an accessory after the fact goes without saying.... Considering that Yoo has been excoriated by his academic colleagues for the sloppiness of his reasoning and for his mischaracterization of the authorities he cites, why does he persist? The only explanation I can put forth is that he needs to preserve his good-faith defense–that he may be wrong, but his error is held in good faith....

Does John Yoo recognize that he has blood on his hands? Certainly not. Maybe he sleeps as comfortably as George W. Bush. Or maybe his consuming interest right now is in protecting himself from prison time. And he’ll have to do a much more convincing job if he wants to succeed at that.

Former Gitmo Guard Tells All:

Former Gitmo Guard Tells All—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine): Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo.... Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading....

Neely and other guards had been trained to the U.S. military’s traditional application of the Geneva Convention rules. They were put under great pressure to get rough with the prisoners and to violate the standards they learned.... Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued.... Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners—and that it had nothing to do with the need to preserve discipline and order in the prison.

Second, there is a good deal of discussion of displays of contempt for Islam by the camp authorities.... Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

Neely’s account demonstrates once more how much the Bush team kept secret and how little we still know about their comprehensive program of official cruelty and torture.

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming

An excerpt:

Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality-game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement, and staggering ignorance.

Three-Quarters of the Fiscal Boost Program Hits in the First Eighteen Months

Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias: The Haul: CBO analysis finally lets us get to the bottom of the much-disputed question of whether or not the recovery package is genuinely fast-acting. For the remainder of FY2009, we’ll have about $185 billion in tax cuts and new spending, and for FY2010, we’ll have about $400 billion in tax cuts and new spending. That adds up to 74 percent of the total cost of the bill, meaning that the congress has essentially hit President Obama’s goal of spending out 75 percent of stimulus funds in the first eighteen months.

Now it would have been really nice if we had had an ex-president and an opposition party patriotic enough to have moved this through the congress and signed it early last November--and gained us three months on the incipient depression.

Torture: John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury Chatter

Straws in the wind: Echelon Intercept #3489DE38A9:

[T]he [Justice Department's] O[office of] P[rofessional] R[esponsibility]... came to "very harsh conclusions" about the professional competence of a number of the [Yoo and Bradbury] memos, making "recommendations for further action" with respect to both John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury. Attorney General Mukasey and Deputy AG Filip were reported to be apoplectic about the report and to have attempted to squelch it. Their concern is... for the defense of reliance on advice of counsel that Mukasey put forward in a series of speeches, and that the OPR reports will make, I understand, something of an absurdity...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming

An excerpt:

Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: On September 4 [2001], we had a principals meeting. The most telling thing for me about the attitude of these people was on the decision that had been pending for a long time to resume Predator [remote-controlled drone] flights over Afghanistan, and to now do what we couldn’t have done in the Clinton administration because the technology wasn’t ready: put a weapon on the Predator and use it as not only a hunter but a killer. We had seen bin Laden when we had it in the Clinton administration, as just a hunter. We had seen him. So we thought, Man, if we could get this with a hunter-killer, we could see him again and kill him. So finally we have a principals meeting and the C.I.A. says it’s not our job to fly the Predator armed. And D.O.D. says it’s not our job to fly an unarmed aircraft. I just couldn’t believe it. This is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the director of C.I.A. sitting there, both passing the football because neither one of them wanted to go kill bin Laden.

The Bush Boom: Employment

Lee Price emails us about the Bush Boom:

We now have job numbers for the entire 8 years of the Bush Administration. In the last 8 years, payroll jobs are up only 1.6% (0.2% annual rate). That's far and away the slowest 8 year gain on record. In the 8 years of Clinton, jobs grew by 20.7% (2.38% annual rate). In the 70 years of available data, jobs have grown at an annual rate of 2.2%. For the 62 years before Bush the average was 2.4%.

Not all the bad economic performance of the Bush years was Bush's fault--but at leeast 1/3 of it was. Not all of the good economic performance of the Clinton years was Clinton's responsibility--but my assessment is that roughly half of it was. And the Obama administration has so far made a very good start on pursuing a responsible and pro-American economic policy.

On the other hand, during the Bush years the President's Council of Economic Advisers hired 37% more interns than during the Clinton administration...

Women's Issues, Republican Style and Democratic Style...

Jill writes:

Feministe » A Story in Pictures:

People of Ohio! Please Don't Elect Rob Portman to the Senate

Senate Guru writes:

Senate Guru:: OH-Sen: Rob Portman, "A Bush Guy": epublican Senate candidate two-time George W. Bush appointee Rob Portman will no doubt spend the entirety of his Senate campaign running away from George W. Bush and his record.  However, that will be awfully difficult given that Portman served as George W. Bush's Trade Representative (May 17, 2005 - May 29, 2006) and Office of Management and Budget Director (May 29, 2006 - June 19, 2007), two key roles on George W. Bush's economic team.  Nevertheless, Portman is trying to run from Bush and has been called out for it...

Here:

The Scorecard: 2008 Congressional campaign news and analysis: s the liberal Buckeye State Blog points out, Ohio Republican Rob Portman’s Senate campaign biography  avoids mentioning President Bush by name when describing his work in the President’s Cabinet. But he has no such qualms mentioning the first President Bush by name, where he served as Associate White House Counsel before his Congressional stint. Coincidence?

--Josh Kraushaar

Now service in the George W. Bush administration does not automatically disqualify one for further high office--there are people who have served in the Bush administration and have emerged with strengthened reputations, aren't there?

But Rob Portman was both the least effective USTR in history and the worst OMB Director in history--worse even than his predecessor, Mitch Daniels.

The Bush Administration: Worse than I Could Imagine

Hilzoy:

The Washington Monthly: Hmm. Incoming officials say there are no files. Some Bush administration ex-officials agree, but others say that there are files, and that the Obama administration is just making excuses. Who is right?

As it happens, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote that deciding what to do with individual detainees at Guantanamo "will require going through all their files and evaluating the evidence against them". About an hour later, a commenter at Obsidian Wings who is in a position to know, and who is, in my experience, absolutely trustworthy, replied:

There aren't files. No one believes this at first, and it takes a long time to accept it, but really, that's it: no files. There are databases that can be searched . . .

It takes, well, a special kind of administration to detain people for years on end without bothering to assemble case files on them. I'm just glad they're finally gone.

The Bush Administration: Worse than Even I Could Imagine

We read:

Guantanamo Case Files in Disarray: Karen DeYoung and Peter Finn: Washington Post Staff Writers: President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them. Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch."... Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Then Peter Finn and Karen DeYoung take their dive for the Bush dead-enders, allowing them to hide behind a screen of anonymity:

But other former officials took issue with the criticism and suggested that the new team has begun to appreciate the complexity and dangers of the issue and is looking for excuses. After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor...

Each day the Washington Post publishes is a crime against humanity.

An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

From Joschka Fischer:

An Oral History of the Bush White House: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com: Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: I was astonished that the Americans used Curveball, really astonished. This was our stuff. But they presented it not in the way we knew it. They presented it as a fact, and not as the way an intelligence assessment is—could be, but could also be a big lie. We don’t know.

Can We Please Never Forget How Bad a President Bush Was?

Outsourced to Josh Micah Marshall:

Talking Points Memo | Us Too!: Frances Townsend, President Bush's counter-terrorism coordinator was just on CNN talking about closing Gitmo. And from how she tells it, there's really no difference. Obama wants to close it. But Bush did too. Only it 'didn't happen'.

We'll grab the video so you can see.

Colin Powell on the End of George W. Bush's Term and the Beginning of Barack Obama's

Colin Powell:

Colin Powell: The America we remember is back again.

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming

An excerpt:

Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: I was called with the specific question of whether or not the F.B.I. on the ground could interrogate [Lindh] without counsel. And I had been told unambiguously that Lindh’s parents had retained counsel for him. I gave that advice on a Friday, and the same attorney at Justice who inquired called back on Monday and said essentially, Oops, they did it anyway. . . . A few weeks later, Attorney General Ashcroft held one of his dramatic press conferences, in which he announced a complaint being filed against Lindh. He was asked if Lindh had been permitted counsel. And he said, in effect, To our knowledge, the subject has not requested counsel. That was just completely false.

The Bush Era: A Tragedy of Errors

Edward Luce:

A tragedy of errors: “Harry Truman and George Bush both left office with rock-bottom approval ratings,” says Strobe Talbott, head of the Brookings Institution, America’s most venerable think-tank. “That is as far as the parallel goes.... Truman set up Nato, strengthened the United Nations and helped lay the groundwork for the European Union – all legacies that persist to this day. Bush leaves no architecture, no institutions, no treaties and no respect for the international rule of law. His unintended legacy may be for America to turn back to those institutions and try to revitalise them after the aberrations of the last eight years.” It is a damning but unexceptional commentary....

Mr Bush leaves at one of the worst times in Israeli-Palestinian relations, with more than 1,000 killed in the three-week assault on the Gaza Strip. “The Gaza conflict is a fitting end to the Bush presidency,” says Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and initially a supporter of regime change in Iraq. “Israel is applying the original Bush doctrine in Gaza, which says that politics can be changed on the ground through military means. Ironically, in Iraq, Mr Bush has learnt this lesson painfully and has adopted counter-insurgency tactics aimed at winning over the civilian population. But he cannot seem to apply it to Israel.”

Perhaps the most common argument mounted in defence of Mr Bush is that he has prevented any further terrorist attacks on the US mainland since the day that became known to all as 9/11.... Detractors argue that this came at the price of having widened and deepened the pool of support within the Islamic world for future such attacks on America and its allies. In addition to the invasion of Iraq, they cite the use of torture – or “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the words of its defenders – and the use of Guantánamo Bay as a dumping ground for suspects deprived of legal rights. “We kept America secure but at a high cost,” says Richard Armitage, Mr Bush’s former deputy secretary of state. “Much of it was unnecessary.”...

In spite of having a 5-4 conservative majority, the US Supreme Court has rebuffed Mr Ashcroft’s interpretation of the constitution....

Republican and Democratic critics tend to agree on one point: regardless of what is thought of Mr Bush’s policies, he stands accused of serial incompetence. Mr Fukuyama is blunt. “Governing is about setting goals and then executing them. George Bush couldn’t execute his way out of a bag.” The indictment sheet is lengthy. From Mr Bush’s inability to plan for the occupation of Iraq in 2003 to his slow response when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the outgoing president is accused both of failing to understand the consequences of his actions and of an inability to follow through on proclamations he has made. Even diehard supporters such as Michael Gerson, who was Mr Bush’s chief speechwriter for most of his presidency, concede some of the criticism. “Perhaps the most powerful message of the Bush presidency was his ‘freedom agenda’ [to spread democracy round the world],” says Mr Gerson. “But he leaves office without a clearly defined freedom agenda to speak of. It just kind of faded away.”...

Observers have traced much of Mr Bush’s alleged incompetence to his dislike of what he calls “process decisions”... the younger Bush saw himself as “The Decider” – someone who acted on principle and never lost sleep over the consequences.... Some suspected, often correctly, that Mr Bush’s impulses were supplied by Dick Cheney, his vice-president, whose skill at circumventing the usual channels of decision-making was second to none.... Bush’s most secretive decisions were not subjected to expert scrutiny. Sometimes, such as when the Iraqi army was disbanded shortly after the US invasion, the president was unaware of decisions carried out in his name. Particularly since Katrina, his style of decision-making grew into his chief badge of notoriety. For months after 9/11, Mr Bush enjoyed the highest ratings of any president in American history. He leaves office with the lowest. “That takes some doing,” says James Lindsay, a politics professor at Texas university. “After 9/11 Bush had most of the world and all of America on his side. He responded by dividing the world and spurning bipartisanship. The result was that he united rather than divided his enemies. Is that incompetence? You could say that Bush had aspirations but lacked strategy.”

The same charge has been levelled at Mr Bush’s economic policies. Inheriting a budget surplus from Mr Clinton of more than $200bn, Mr Bush bequeaths Mr Obama a record-shattering $1,200bn (€905bn, £815bn) projected deficit for 2009. Following the financial meltdown last autumn, Mr Bush summarised thus: “Wall Street got drunk and left us with the hangover.”... As with the key tenets of Mr Bush’s “war on terror”, Mr Obama has pledged to dismantle much of his predecessor’s economic legacy, most notably the large-scale tax cuts that went disproportionately to wealthy Americans in 2001 and 2003. Again, however, the most pointed criticisms directed at Mr Bush’s economic policies dwell on his alleged incompetence. Until Hank Paulson was recruited in 2006, Mr Bush’s Treasury secretaries were derided as unqualified and seen as peripheral. The same charge was levelled repeatedly at many other appointees, large numbers of whom had scant credentials for the jobs they took on. On the campaign trail, Mr Obama’s biggest applause line came when he promised to appoint “qualified people to government”. From Florida to Ohio, it had audiences on their feet...

The Bush Administration: An Oral History of the Bush White House. The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming

An excerpt:

Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was. . . .