What Happens: The Sequel!
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Some links...
Slideshow of US Newspaper Front Pages
Cspan.org where you can watch Bush's press conference.
Interestingly Bush said he spoke to Rumsfeld about replacing him yesterday. He emphasised that the decision was not as a result of the election.... which is curious. Rummy looks like a sacrifice.
And one for Craig...
Before you start dissing the conspiracy theorists I suspect you may find that this election produces quite a few theories from the republican side of the debate.
But assuming that George Allen wants a recount. (And the margin is possibly too big to justify one now. But we need to see absentees counted first. Serving Servicemen may have voted GOP in big numbers. VA has lots of soldiers abroad.)
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Russell Brown wrote:
Pelosi also promised to make her Congress the least corrupt in history. Easier said than done, but it's hard to see how the new Houses could be any less arrogant and dishonest than those that are passing.Every measure of sound, accountable government (and, indeed, traditional conservative values) has gone south in the last five years. This has been a terrible Congress and, as Rolling Stone proposed a couple of weeks ago, quite possibly the worst ever.
Well, let's just wait and see... I don't envy Perlosi (and potentially Harry Reid if the Dems also have a one vote majority in the Senate) the job she'll have hosing down the caucus who want to deliver some payback for the last twelve years, the real tensions between the Kossak base who want a sharp lurch to the left and the 'moderates' who think that would see their seats go back to the GOP in '08 if their get their s**t together and start acting like real conservatives as opposed to theo-cratic nuts. (And I wouldn't say thats a done deal by any measure. The big irony is that for every Rick Santorum who got the flick, so did two moderates like Lincoln Chafee who was anti-war, socially moderate/fiscally conservative, cordially loathed by the theo-con hard right and had approval ratings around the 70% mark.)
The funny thing about Congress, is that while the majority party had enormous influence over committees, the timing and scope of legislation etc., fling around subpoenas like confetti at a wedding, but there are real risks in overplaying your hand - especially if your seat (or presidential aspirations) are in play in two years. Talking about bipartisanship is one thing, making it work is quite another.
And with all due respect to Rolling Stone, 'worse Congress ever'? Perhaps if your sense of history begins with Woodstock. :) I've been reading Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, and during the five decades the Democrats ran Congress there was plenty of scum-baggery, sharp practice and outright fraud going on.
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Alistair Thompson wrote:
Before you start dissing the conspiracy theorists I suspect you may find that this election produces quite a few theories from the republican side of the debate.So the loony left and the rabid right both need wee fistfuls of anti-psychotics washed down with decaf - pardon me if I fail to be shocked by that proposition. :) Sorry, but I still hold to the notion that cock-up trumps conspiracy - or incompetence is a more plausible explanation than malice - 99.99999% of the time. To use a domestic example, I think the Police were at best gutless, or plain incompetent, in their decision not to prosecute both Labour and National over clear prima facie cases they breeched electoral law in the last campaign. I most certainly draw the line at allegations of political interference, unless someone puts some rock solid evidence on the table. Not a conspiracy theory, evidence.
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Russell,
To reiterate a point I made yesterday, the kind of law enforcement we need is full on law enforcement that has the tools provided by the Patriot Act, the NSA program the Swift program and probably a bunch of other programs that the New York Times hasn't found about and published on their front page (yet) at its disposal. An approach that focuses on prevention. The kind of law enforcement approach that the US had in the 1990s when the CIA was barred, by law, from sharing information about terrorists with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies is much less successful than the full court press we have now, after all that approach led directly to 9/11. I fly across the Atlantic every now and again and I want the law enforcement to have every tool they can to stop Al Qaeda. It pisses me off that law enforcement are not allowed to use profiling, one of the most effective techniques at picking up bad guys. We will never beat those guys when we tie law enforcements arms behind their backs and blindfold them al la the Clinton DOJ in the 1990s.
To stop Al Qaeda, we need full on law enforcement and military action, like the bombing of the Madrassa in Pakistan last week where Zawaheri was understood to be.Re Rummy: Bush is wasting his time if he thinks by being "nice" to Pelosi et al, by dumping Rummy, that he will get some cooperation and bipartisanship, he wont, they will just spit in his face and make more demands. If he wanted to dump Rummy, he should have done it months ago, when it might have made a difference to last nights’ results.
Another point on the election. Do you hear the silence, the silence of no Republicans going ballistic about the result, making accusations of fraud and filing lawsuits? A lot of the results were very, very close, but no hissy fits. The Missouri senate seat was won by only a relative handful of votes, and Talent conceded even though there is an FBI investigation underway into an ultra liberal group called ACORN which is accused of fraudulently submitting 35,000 voter registration forms. If the boot was on the other foot, the noise would be deafening.
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James B, i think your comments can more effectively be conveyed if you just post some Colbert vids
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Craig is 100% correct about "the worst congress ever".
Has anyone here heard of Dan Rostenkowski, the Dem chairman of the Way and Means Committee until 1994. The guy was a major league crook.
Harry Reid, about to be the Dem Majority leader in the Senate has his 4 sons working as lobbiests. If the Dems wants to root out corruption, that would be a great place to start.
Don't get me wrong, the Repubs deserved a kick in the butt for either getting on the take in a few cases, and not doing anything to stop it in many other cases. -
Well that's quite sane Craig... and I tend to agree. Evidence is what we all need. That's why the evidence of actual electronic vote fraud in Florida in 2000 led off the Hacking Democracy movie. Its the only actual evidence of fraud that there is.
The Dem victory doesn't change the fact that the US election apparatus remains (unnecessarily} extremely vulnerable to fraud. Dirty tricks abounded in this election.
Google is showing 800+ stories for voting glitches this morning and for all we know fraud took place but failed in MT and VA.
Greg Palast's POV that the GOP went out to actively suppress the vote in every manner possible is not disputed by the facts as I see them. Meanwhile - even if Greg doesn't take the electronic threat very seriously - the machines do remain vulnerable to fraud, they are not properly tested they are built by companies with very clear partisan ties to the republicans.
You say...
the real tensions between the Kossak base who want a sharp lurch to the left and the 'moderates' who think that would see their seats go back to the GOP in '08 if their get their s**t together and start acting like real conservatives as opposed to theo-cratic nuts.
This gets a bit to the nub of the problem of bipartisanship which everybody seems to be is grappling with this morning.
The Kossak's as you call them are not very keen on bipartisanship attempts with torturers, war criminals and people who have pi**ed all over the US Constitution (remember the Nuclear Option for judicial appointments!). The Military Commission Act is as Keith Olbermann said a complete and utter disgrace.
Meanwhile what is left of the republican party is the "Theocratic Nuts" - and as Andrew Sullivan said in an earlier post - even more rabid now than it was before. Moderate republicans in the less redneck parts of the US got their butts kicked by association with an illegal and immoral war and are now gone.
And so what happens next.
The Kossacks will speak softly but immediately start looking for evidence or crimes. And before you can say jimminy cricket they will want to start trials and launch special prosecutors on their merry way. Dick Cheney looks to me to be in trouble sooner than most. But with John Conyers & Henry Waxman as chairs of House Committee can you really expect anything other than probity?
The Theocratic Nuts meanwhile are incapable of compromise. They are already talking in terms of waiting for the big terrorist attack on America to teach the Democratic voters a lesson.
And does anyone really beleive George Bush, Dick Cheney or Karl Rove are capable of reaching out to Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean & Harry Reid? The DNC is no longer dominated by fans of Hillary Clinton and Joe Leiberman.
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I don't think there is any onus on the Dems to spend the next two years undoing 6 years of Shrubism or 12 years of Rep domination of Congress. A lot of new Dems appear to be too conservative to want to pursue that anyway.
Like Al says, A couple of years investigating the activities of the Bush cabal would be sufficient to help them consolidate support (and even find an electable Presidential candidate) in 2008. No need to be particularly rabid reformers (their legislation will be vetoed anyway).
My suggestion? Deny cash for pursuing the war in Iraq unless it is doubled and the troop numbers doubled and properly supported. That will get the Americans out of Iraq quicker than Stay the Course. A bit of a stretch I know :)
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James B, i think your comments can more effectively be conveyed if you just post some Colbert vids.
Wordy McWord, Jamie. James B. sounds as though he was born to regurgitate Republican talking points. In the last post, there's some nice not-so-subtle blaming of the Clinton administration, use of the inevitable 'bad guys' (by which he means some nebulous group of those of Middle Eastern extraction), and some 'liberal media' snot about the New York Times.
I lived in Texas for four years. Reading his posts is almost comfortingly familiar. :)
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Danielle, do you have anything useful or intelligent to add to the discussion?
If you don't agree with my points, rebut them. -
And with all due respect to Rolling Stone, 'worse Congress ever'? Perhaps if your sense of history begins with Woodstock. :) I've been reading Robert Caro's biography of LBJ, and during the five decades the Democrats ran Congress there was plenty of scum-baggery, sharp practice and outright fraud going on.
I still can't conceive of it actually being worse than the last few years. What dumbfounds me is the way that conservatives seem happy to overlook the abandonment of basic conservative values here. Fiscal fecklessness, pork-loaded spending bills (just check the numbers for the pork explosion in the last five years), the unprecedented intervention of lobbyists and the erosion of basic private freedoms and constitutional protections. And all the while, government has grown basically unchecked.
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James' willingness to maintain his engagement is to be admired. Somewhat.
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James' willingness to maintain his engagement is to be admired.
I agree! Holding the fort all the way from New Orleans. James, I don't want to discourage you at all - but why are you arguing with a bunch of irrelevant (to US politics) kiwis?
Apologies if I missed an earlier post where you said you were an ex pat kiwi or something.
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James,
Occam's Razor suggests that the simple explanations tend to be the correct ones. And surely the real reason America hasn't suffered a wave of Al Qaeda attacks after 9/11 is because Al Qaeda no longer has the capability.
It takes a lot of resourcing and planning to execute anything on the scale of 9/11, and since then Al Qaeda have lost their Afghanistan training camps, most of their senior leadership, considerable Muslim support and therefore their financial base. All this occurred within 12 months of the original attacks, primarily due to military action and old-fashioned international police work.
If the NSA wiretaps and Swift programmes are so essential, how come there was not a series of attacks between 9/11 and when these programmes started? The simple answer is likely to be correct: because Al Qaeda simply doesn't have the capability any more.
Which leads to the conclusion that the johnny-come-lately Big Brother approach espoused by the NSA is simply egregarious over-reach by the security agencies, and is not needed for actual security.
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Russell Brown wrote:
What dumbfounds me is the way that conservatives seem happy to overlook the abandonment of basic conservative values here. Fiscal fecklessness, pork-loaded spending bills (just check the numbers for the pork explosion in the last five years), the unprecedented intervention of lobbyists
Believe me conservatives are not happy about any of that at all, they feel terribly betrayed by the Repub Congress and Whitehouse and this was a major factor in yesterdays' result.
Alistair wrote:James' willingness to maintain his engagement is to be admired. Somewhat.
A couple of points about my motivations:
If someone has facts and reasoning that I am not aware of that rebut my views, I want to find out as fast as possible.Communicating with people of similar views is boring, and I like a bit of back and forth, it is good fun.
There is an element of a desire to perform a public service here. I am a Kiwi who lives in the US and loves both NZ and the US. The gulf of misunderstanding between the countries has never been greater and is so frustrating when ever I go home for a visit. NZ is like an echo chamber, it is all "US bad", "Bush bad", blah blah blah, there is no attempt to understand or to look at things from another perspective, it is painful to say the least. There are sound reasons why the US does some of the things that it does of which most NZers are either completely unaware or seriously misinformed.
So I try to push back a bit. If I make a Kiwi stop and think "there might be a bit more to this than I have heard" or "maybe it is not quite like that after all" then I have succeeded in my quest
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Craig, and more especially James, can I suggest you go and read the RS Worst Congress Ever story. It does make historical comparisons, and while you might not agree with every point or some of the language, it makes a very persuasive, well-referenced case for the point embodied in its headline. There have been bad Congresses, but the one just passed has been the laziest, most partisan, most duplicitous and most feckless one ever.
Here's a quote:
But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.
"The 109th Congress is so bad that it makes you wonder if democracy is a failed experiment," says Jonathan Turley, a noted constitutional scholar and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. "I think that if the Framers went to Capitol Hill today, it would shake their confidence in the system they created. Congress has become an exercise of raw power with no principles -- and in that environment corruption has flourished. The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."
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In the past six years they have castrated the political minority
In that respect, it's worth bearing in mind that this President has had a strong enthusiasm for using delegated executive authority to bypass the Congress entirely. And that was with a quiescent body. For all the talk at this morning's press conference about bipartisanship, I remain to be convinced he has any real commitment to the notion. His performance seemed by turns to be grudging and petulant.
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Clarke wrote:
Which leads to the conclusion that the johnny-come-lately Big Brother approach espoused by the NSA is simply egregarious over-reach by the security agencies, and is not needed for actual security.
What about the UK plane plot that was uncovered a few months back? There was a plot to blow up the Brooklyn bridge in 2002 or 2003 that was uncovered due to intelligence sharing enabled by the Patriot Act.
You are absolutely correct that Bush going after Al Qaeda and tearing up the organization has been very effective, but there is also no doubt that the bastards (they may be different bastards)are still trying to kill as many infidels as they can.
In any case, the NSA wasn't a Johnny come lately effort, it was underway quite quickly after 9/11, the NYT revealed its existence only recently. If you capture a bad guy in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq who has a bunch of US phone numbers on his laptop or written down somewhere, why an earth wouldn't you listen in on any calls made? Wouldn't it be madness not to?
Most Americans agree with this kind of stuff. A poll come out a few weeks ago that showed about a third of Americans thought the Govt. had gone too far in its efforts on the war on terror, one third thought the level of its efforts v loss of privacy etc. was about right, and about a third thought it hadn't gone far enough. Bet you didn't read that info in NZ did you?
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Clarke
Occam's Razor suggests that the simple explanations tend to be the correct ones. And surely the real reason America hasn't suffered a wave of Al Qaeda attacks after 9/11 is because Al Qaeda no longer has the capability.
Or alternatively the reason is that "freedom hating" Al Qaeda hasn't bothered attacking America because America seems to be perfectly capable of tearing apart its freedoms without any assistance required.
James,
The level of understanding of American politics has improved immensely thanks to the web. Hence the moderately informed people you find around here.
If when visiting home you find the average Kiwi understanding of US culture and motivations lacking it is possibly because our media are completely hopeless at reporting it.
Our Newspapers carry middle of the road wire copy. Metro Magazine has recently sacked its award winning feature writer Jon Stephenson to concentrate on reporting Auckland.
Radio NZ interviews are better but this mornings post election coverage was fairly terrible, the conservative from central otago wasn't to bad but if you want to find out about a remarkable victory for the left in US politics the Rand Corporation is a strange place to seek out an informed opinion.
Meanhwile TV is inherently facile and tries but 5 minutes with Tim Wilson on the late news can't go that far.
Prime TV is better. Fox News & David Letterman.
I just wish we had The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
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Alistair,
Or alternatively the reason is that "freedom hating" Al Qaeda hasn't bothered attacking America because America seems to be perfectly capable of tearing apart its freedoms without any assistance required.
You're probably right. Alternatively, perhaps Osama should take the long-term view and simply invest in all those delightful US food companies that think putting high-fructose corn syrup in every food type is A Good Idea.
No suicide bombers required - America will voluntarily eat its way to health-care bankruptcy and premature death!
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Russell:
I'm not going to argue with you on that score, but I very much doubt the next Congress is going to be substantively as opposed to rhetorically different. Depending on what yardstick you move, between 80-90% of the seats contested yesterday weren't even competitive in any meaningful sense of the word - which shouldn't be any surpise in a political culture where the only certain ground for real bipartisanship is gerrymandering electoral districts to protect incumbents, and dozens of seats each electoral cycle aren't contested at all by one or the other major party.
If Perlosi and whoever the next Senate Majority Leader is put up the 'no peddler' signs on their office doors, derail the Gravy Train (as opposed to tweaking the timetable), broker meaningful compromises on trade, immigration etc., and reassert the separation of federal and state government and other tiresome Constitutional principles even when it's politically inconvenent then I'll give credit wherre credit's due. And believe it or not, I'd love to be proved unduly pessimistic.
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What about the UK plane plot that was uncovered a few months back? There was a plot to blow up the Brooklyn bridge in 2002 or 2003 that was uncovered due to intelligence sharing enabled by the Patriot Act.
Well that was the Brits. And because they never suffered from Watergate and McCarthur their willingness to be spied upon is considerably greater than that of the US public.
Interestingly there is nothing to stop UK spooks (or US spooks seconded to MI6) using NSA Echelon's system to spy on yanks to their hearts content anyway.
If you capture a bad guy in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq who has a bunch of US phone numbers on his laptop or written down somewhere, why an earth wouldn't you listen in on any calls made? Wouldn't it be madness not to?
You miss the point. James. Its not the spying. Its the illegal spying. The FISA warrant system allows the NSA to seek warrants retrospectively to tap as many US phones as they want to. But the FISA warrant system has oversight. What Bush did was ignore the law that says - because of exceesses in the past - that spying requires oversight and bypassed it illegally.
Ditto torture.
Ditto Gitmo.
Ditto the signing statements referred to by David Slack above in which Bush signs legislation and then - sometimes secretly - instructs the executive to ignore it or interpret it in ways which on their face do not seem supportable.
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From Russell's post:
The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."
Simply not true. In the session just finished, the Repub House bucked Bush on his two biggest initiative this session, Social Security Reform and Immigration reform/amnesty.
I will read the RS article, but I read and hear that stuff all day long, that kind of stuff is nothing new. Some of it is has a basis and some of it may well be correct, but most of it isn't. Bush does seem to have a strange characteristic about him; he brings the worst and most delusional in his opponents.
I made the point yesterday; do you remember all the BS about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame? It went on not for months, but for several years. It was all a Rovian conspiracy to punish an administration critic by outing his under cover wife, Rove was going to be frog marched out of the White House etc. etc. Turns out Richard Armitage accidentally let the name slip to Bob Novack. There was no "there" there, I mean nothing, nada, zip, it was all hype and bullshit. So many of the charges leveled at Bush and Co. are like this, bullshit and hot air. It is mostly just politics, trying to distract and tie up an administration so it can't advance its agenda. Pathetic in many ways, don't these people have something more useful to do than dreaming up nutty Rovian conspiracy theories?
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And, Russell, I might give the story another go. But I think you know why I zoned out as soon as I hit the analogy of a Democratic staffer "his eyes wide and full of astonished, impotent rage, like a rape victim." WTF? Trying to out-Coulter Coulter doesn't work for me.
You wonder why, if I was an American, I'd probably spend every election season watching Lost re-runs and wondering how the hell I could get on that island...
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