I'm having trouble getting my head wrapped around this one. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced his resignation this morning. I just don't get it. This guy has already burned through any last shred of reputation or dignity he had left (along with any chance of ever getting that Supreme Court nomination) with his farcical appearances before Congress. When he wasn't refusing to answer or claiming not to recall the events in question, he was quite obviously lying his fool ass off, and every American paying any attention knew it. But all that obfuscation seemed to pay off. The investigations into the US Attorney firings all appeared to crash into the wall of stupidity Gonzo threw up. So why is he resigning now, just when it looked like he had weathered the storm and successfully shielded Karl Rove and dubya from those investigations? I think there's another shoe getting ready to drop here, and it must have some doggy poo on it.

Meanwhile the preznit and various sycophants are blaming the Democrats and their partisanship for Gonzo's demise.

President Bush on Monday said he reluctantly accepted the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, whose "good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."

Bush said it's "sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person" is impeded "from doing important work."

Riiiiight. The important work of turning the Justice Department into a powerful and dangerous arm of the Republican Party. I am so sick of the bullshit whining about partisan witch hunts and how "there's no evidence of any wrongdoing" at the Justice Department. If that's true, why is Gonzo now joining a rather large list* of senior Justice Department officials resigning in the face of these investigations? Astonishingly enough, the same tough guys who illegally wiretap pretty much the entire country while assuring the public that they have nothing to worry about if they have nothing to hide are being chased out of town by Congressional investigations even though they are entirely innocent! I guess it's all for the best though. After all, how can we expect them to protect Amurka from terrorists if they can't stand up to those mean old Democrats?



* Here are some I've seen in the news. I'd bet there are plenty more below my radar: Paul McNulty, Deputy Attorney General; Michael Elston, Chief of Staff and Counselor to McNulty; Kyle Sampson, Chief of Staff and Counselor to Gonzales; Wan Kim, Assistant Attorney General Civil Rights Division; William Mercer, Acting Associate Attorney General; Bradley Schlozman, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Civil Rights Division; and of course Monica Goodling, Director of Public Affairs and White House liaison.

The preznit has decidered to get back to doing what he does best, campaigning. He was in Kansas City today speaking to the VFW in a sort of pre-emptive strike, drumming up support for the report he's going to release next month on the progress of The Surge, which every thinking person on the planet already knows is going to recommend continuing his Iraq debacle. He's scheduled to give another version of the same speech to the American Legion next week, and I'm sure there will be more to follow. It looks like dubya is going to stick with the same old game plan he's used so many times before. It goes something like this:

Phase One - Preach To The Choir: Start with dubya standing before a soothing blue background emblazoned with the catchy slogan for his latest abortion of a foreign or domestic policy - for this example I'll use The Great Stupid - speechifying to a hand-picked, (usually elderly) flag-waving conservative audience already known to be solidly behind the preznit. The mainstream media will dutifully report these speeches before the adoring crowds without mentioning that no protesters or opposing viewpoints of any kind were allowed within a half mile of the event.

Phase Two - Echo Chamber: Crank up the right-wing noise machine in support of The Great Stupid for 24/7 denigration and smearing of the nay-sayers, questioning the patriotism, bravery and birthright of anyone who opposes the preznit. Some of this rhetoric will inevitably find it's way into articles and editorials from mainstream news outlets as they constantly pursue "balanced coverage" to avoid being labeled "liberal media." Administration officials and supporters immediately begin citing these same articles as evidence of widespread bipartisan support for The Great Stupid.

Phase Three - No Lube: Proceed to ram The Great Stupid up the ass of Congress and the country. If it's pointed out that every poll shows the vast majority of Americans don't actually support The Great Stupid, and in fact think dubya is stuffed more full of shit than a cheap kielbasa, just trot out the tired old line that the preznit doesn't govern by the polls and is only doing what needs to be done to protect Amurka. Mission accomplished.

The sad thing is, this game plan will most likely work. It usually does. In fact, the only time it hasn't worked for dubya is when he tried to destroy privatize Social Security and the only reason it didn't work then was his inability to inject enough fear of brown people coming to take away your jeebus into the debate. That's much easier to do with The Great Stupid.

Even though dubya's argument for staying in Iraq has essentially devolved into "We must continue this catastrophe because if we stop it will be a catastrophe," he'll be able to frighten enough of the rubes that polls (the one's he doesn't govern by) will indicate a slight increase in support for his war without end. And that, coupled with evidence of some progress on the ground (after 4 and a half years, how could there not be some progress to point to on the ground), will be enough to force the feckless Democrats in Congress to capitulate to him yet again.

I just finished reading reading a 25 page report titled The Tenuous Case for Strategic Patience in Iraq written by Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. It is a comprehensive, level-headed and politics-free look at what the situation on the ground in Iraq looks like right now. I highly recommend taking the time to read it. And even though Cordesman, as the title implies, is arguing for our continued, long-term presence in Iraq, he is absolutely not one of dubya's empty-headed, flag-waving neocon supporters. Check out these little snippets:

Like it or not, the US is rightly seen as having gone to war for the wrong reasons, as having consistently mismanaged the “peace” that followed and been largely responsible for the suffering of some 27 million Iraqis. Strategically, ideologically, and morally, the US cannot avoid being linked to the future of Iraq, regardless of whether it maintains a military presence.

It is important to note in this regard that while Americans are still concerned with finding ways to define “victory” in Iraq, virtually the entire world already perceives the US as having decisively lost.

None of these factors are reasons for making open-ended commitments to remaining in Iraq or for "staying the course." There is no point in pursuing failed strategies or failed policies. Iraq is a gamble, and one where even the best-managed future US policies may still fail. It is a grim reality that the mistakes and blunders that have dominated US policy in Iraq throughout the US intervention have interacted with Iraqi failures to make any continued US effort one filled with serious risks.

Nope, he's definitely not a loyal bushie. His arguments for more time are based on his confidence in the people we have in charge in Iraq now (namely Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus) and the limited - but genuine - progress they have achieved in recent months.

...professionalism has replaced the vacuous ideological reliance on hope that crippled much of the initial US effort.

As for confidence in the people in charge in Washington? Not so much:

The domestic US security structure has so far failed to present meaningful options, and seems incapable to doing so. The US team in Iraq, however, is much more experienced, and there is a new degree of realism and competence that clearly can never come from within a failed Bush Administration.

In the end though, Cordesman only gives us a 50/50 chance of success, a coin toss. And most of our chance lies in the hands of the Iraqi government:

Any major Iraqi failure to move forward over the next six months, to come to grips with the realities described above, and to solidly co-opt the Sunni tribes and put a real end to JAM and other Shi'ite sectarian cleansing will make strategic patience of limited value or pointless.

And by Cordesman's thinking, no matter how the coin lands, we're still in Iraq for many years to come.

It looks like dubya's brain is resigning at the end of the month. My first thought when I read the news was that it was just another rat deserting the rapidly sinking ship of this administration, but this isn't just another rat. This is the smart rat that all the other rats look to for strategy in the quest for a permanent rat majority. This is Ben.

While I believe it's possible that Rove is running away from this administration, I'd bet money it's not because of the feeble investigations and hearings the Dems are holding into the US Attorney firings. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the Valerie Plame outing, who is by all accounts a pretty sharp guy, had Rove in front of a grand jury on multiple occasions and was never able to lay a glove on him. The Dems haven't even managed to get him to testify, let alone force his resignation. In his own words:

When asked for his reaction to those who say he's being "run out of town," Rove responded, "That sounds like the rooster claiming to have called up the sun."

No, this guy's not easily frightened. For years he's been two steps ahead of everyone who's tried to hold him accountable in any way for his actions, probably three steps ahead of Congressional Democrats, and I feel certain that's still the case. The real reasons for his leaving are known only to the evil genius himself, but I will venture a couple of guesses.

First, as I said above, it's possible that he is distancing himself from this administration, but if so, it's not because of anything happening right now. Nothing catches Rove by surprise, so it would have to be something that's about to happen, some particularly nasty allegation about to come to light. This strikes me as unlikely simply because the nastiest things about this administration would appear to already be common knowledge - kidnapping, torture, warrant-less wiretapping, complete disregard for our constitution - all common knowledge, and all things Rove and the administration have managed to spin as necessary for them to protect Amurka. I just can't see how there could be anything else out there that's bad enough to chase Rove out of DC. Unless (gasp) the preznit got a hummer from an intern or something.

My second guess is simply that Rove has finished what he came to DC to do, the systematic politicization of every department of our government is complete. We've had six-plus years of dubya's - or rather Rove's - political appointees forcing out high-level career bureaucrats and replacing them with young, arrogant, right-wing zealots from Regent University and the like. Dubya's legacy will always be tied to his debacle in Iraq, but Karl Rove leaves as his legacy a government that is perhaps forever changed, because even after this administration leaves office, the bureaucracy - the machine that is our government - will continue to be manipulated and controlled by people whose politics are inherently hostile to the very bureaucracy in which they work.

We've already seen some results of what this entails in the complete decimation of what used to be FEMA. In the years ahead, we'll hear increasingly shrill complaints from the right about how our government is incapable of efficiently providing basic services. And we'll see numerous sober policy papers and editorials generated by right-wing think tanks recommending that we solve this "crisis" by privatizing virtually every aspect of our government. Like I said, two steps ahead, maybe more.

The United Nations Security Council today passed a US-backed resolution updating the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI). From CNN's article:

Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said this "marks an important new phase in the U.N.'s role in Iraq."

The resolution, which passed 15-0, says the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq seeks to "foster regional dialogue" on matters such as "border security, energy and refugees." It will work with the Iraqi government to "resolve disputed internal boundaries" and will promote discussion on national reconciliation. It also will help plan a census.

When I first read that I thought the UN was inexplicably coming to rescue the guy who declared the UN "irrelevant" from his self-created disaster in Iraq. So I bopped on over to the UN website for more details and found this from the resolution discussions a couple of days ago.

“There was really quite a unanimous agreement in the Council itself on what the role of the UN should be,” Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs B. Lynn Pascoe said after briefing the 15-member body...

He stressed that physical security is a concern after the Secretary-General’s Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 others were killed in a bomb attack in Baghdad four years ago. Since then, international civilian UN staff in Iraq have been reduced to a maximum of 65, although many more UN personnel work from Amman in neighbouring Jordan.

He said that the number of UN staff in Baghdad could reach a maximum of 95 by October, but cautioned that security was a major concern, citing recent mortar and other attacks in the Green Zone in the city.

That's right. A unanimous resolution from the UN Security Council to expand their mission in Iraq results in maybe 30 more people in Iraq. And they will be talking head civilian advisors. No peacekeeping forces or security forces or troops of any kind.

Sadly, it looks like the rest of the world's message to this administration is pretty clear; you fucked it up, you fix it. The US and Iraq are both going to be paying the price of dubya's arrogance for a long time.

I haven't had much to say lately, partly due to just being too busy, but also due to this general feeling of malaise. I tried to exorcise it with the post below, but I mostly just bored myself. I did want to point out that I have upgraded my site software and one of the changes in the new version is that the permalink for each post is now part of that post's title. Supposedly that makes it better for search engine optimization. We'll see. I just know there are dozens of people out there googling for liberal atheist bloggers who post less and less frequently all the time.

My first taste of presidential politics came during the Watergate scandal back in 1973-74. The events playing out in Washington during that time provided my 6th and 7th grade social studies lessons with vivid, real-time examples of how our system of government works. It wasn't just a learning experience for school kids though, it seemed all of America was paying attention.

(Looking back on it now, I wonder how much of this attention was due to our citizenry being essentially a captive audience. Those were, after all, the days before cable television, video games and home computers. If the networks - all three of them - were covering the Watergate hearings, you either watched that or found something else to do.)

Anyway, Watergate had it all; political espionage, illegal wiretaps, subpoenas, resignations, firings, indictments and convictions involving everyone from third-rate burglars to administration Cabinet members and White House personnel. All playing out around a president who felt he was above the law, citing executive privilege to cover his crimes. But the Supreme Court ruled against Nixon and he was forced to resign or be removed from office. It was, quite simply, our constitutional system of checks and balances between the three branches of government in action.

Then into the oval office stepped Gerald R. Ford to finish out Nixon's second term. Citing a need to put an end to the divisive national debate for the greater good, he granted Nixon an unconditional pardon. So my first taste of presidential politics was a bitter one. At 12 years old, I learned that the bad guys don't always go to jail.

The four years of Jimmy Carter's term as president pretty much coincided with my four years of high school. I hit puberty, discovered girls and sex and cars and beer and sex and marijuana and rock 'n' roll... and sex. In short, I was too busy to pay much attention to politics other than to participate in the national pastime of ridiculing Carter for his ineffectual handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. I turned 18 and cast my first vote for an affable actor from California.

While I was dropping in and out of college, Ronald Reagan and his administration, in direct violation of US law, sold arms to our sworn enemy, Iran, purportedly to gain Iran's help in securing the release of US hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. They then - also in direct violation of US law - used the profits from these arms sales to help finance the Nicaraguan rebel group known as the Contras in their attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicaragua. The CIA and the State Department also used money from drug trafficking to fund the Contras. The Contras used this funding to carry out a campaign of kidnapping, torture, rape and murder of innocent civilians including nuns, priests and human rights workers.

Reagan appointed a commission to investigate these crimes and then, testifying before this commission, surprisingly couldn't remember much of anything about anything. Huge numbers of documents were destroyed to keep Congress from seeing them and Congressional hearings were effectively stonewalled. The investigations were still ongoing when Reagan left office, replaced by his vice-president George H. W. Bush.

The presidency of Bush the elder, smarter is memorable more for what he didn't do than what he did. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the US-led international coalition quickly and soundly defeated the Iraqi military, sending them back to Iraq, Bush decided not to pursue them into Iraq, reasoning that our military could find itself stuck in a quagmire much like Vietnam. And (of course) he pardoned the key players in the Iran-Contra scandal on his way out of office after having been defeated in his re-election bid by the Bill Clinton. No one ever went to jail for Iran-Contra.

Under the Clenis, the US enjoyed 8 years of relative peace and prosperity, large economic gains, expansion of world-wide free trade and reduction of welfare entitlements at home and a strong international reputation. I've heard lefties say he was the best Republican president in modern history. A special prosecutor spent 700 million tax dollars investigating an Arkansas land deal in which the Clenis lost money, and ultimately Congress impeached him for lying about a blow job. At the height of the impeachment proceedings, his approval rating was 73% - higher than Ronald Reagan's ever was. George W. Bush was elected to succeed him on a ticket of bringing integrity back to the White House.

Which brings me to dubya. It's like we've culled all the worst aspects (and people) from the Nixon and Reagan administrations and simultaneously removed the last remnants of Congressional oversight or checks and balances. This administration has normalized and legalized warrant-less wiretapping, kidnapping, torture, and foreign invasion all in the name of national security and protecting Amurka from an enemy that the preznit defines. Any attempts at oversight are met with a polite "fuck you" as administration personnel routinely go before Congress and refuse to answer questions or just tell one lie after another, then lie about having lied. All with no consequences whatsoever. I find it astounding that only one individual - Scooter Libby - from this administration has actually been charged with a crime and his sentence was commuted before he ever got near a jail. They have perfected the cover-up.

Based on the cluster-fuck they've created in Iraq, I feel confident that this particular pack of thieves will be out of power for at least one presidential term, but looking back over what I have written here, I can't help but see a pattern. I fully expect to see a lot of the same names and faces popping up in some future Republican administration, one that's even more authoritarian, more secretive, and more dangerous to democracy. Our government is moving inexorably away from our constitution.