Cheney and Other Republican Liars and Hypocrites

Since 2002, no government official lied about the war in Iraq more than Dick Cheney. In a different era, the vice president would have been impeached and sent packing. Cheney's outing of a CIA officer whose husband's factual report on Niger yellowcake disagreed with Cheney's self-serving fantasies should have been enough to send the vice president to jail. Dick Cheney's authoritarian and anti-social character has been on display repeatedly but in no case was it more obvious than when he shot a friend of his in the face with a shotgun and it was the friend who was obliged to apologize. Strange man, Dick Cheney.

I am proud to be yet another blog linking to Larry Wilkerson's article in The Washington Note:

...when Cheney claims that if President Obama stops "the Cheney method of interrogation and torture", the nation will be in danger, he is perverting the facts once again. But in a very ironic way.

My investigations have revealed to me--vividly and clearly--that once the Abu Ghraib photographs were made public in the Spring of 2004, the CIA, its contractors, and everyone else involved in administering "the Cheney methods of interrogation", simply shut down. Nada. Nothing. No torture or harsh techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator. Period. People were too frightened by what might happen to them if they continued.

What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009.

(snip)

Likewise, what I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002--well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion--its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa'ida.

(snip)

There in fact were no such contacts.

It's a national disgrace that right-wing Republicans continue to coddle such liars as Dick Cheney. But Cheney wasn't the only liar. We have to include such 'stalwart' Republicans as Donald Rumseld, Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzalez, Douglas Feith, and yes, George W. Bush. There were plenty of others. The fact remains that the Bush Administration felt comfortable lying to Congress for eight years. But they didn't stop there. They lied to the American people.

Now Nancy Pelosi is accused of lying about what she was told by an administration that had little credibility. Our country needs a reliable non-political CIA but Bush and Cheney were doing everything they could to politicize parts of the government that had always been nonpolitical and bipartisan. As an example, the Bush Administration promoted people like Dusty Foggo to the number three spot at the CIA:

Foggo is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria after pleading guilty to a single count of fraud as part of a plea bargain. He is the highest ranking CIA officer ever to be convicted of a federal felony.

The fraud was part of a bribery ring that included Foggo's old friend, contractor Brent Wilkes, and former [Republican] Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, both of whom have been sentenced to years in prison.

Court papers filed this week offer the most detailed glimpse yet of Foggo's misconduct, which included getting his mistress hired to a $100,000 a year job at the CIA and steering millions of dollars in CIA contracts to Wilkes.

Even in the CIA there were people under Bush who were feeding at the public trough.

Again, most people in the intelligence community are competent professionals. But Bush and Cheney were not shy about bending the rules and finding people who would do the same. Here's another example of life under Bush by way of Talking Points Memo:

Adm. Mike McConnell came in as the Director of National Intelligence with a rep for being professional and non-partisan, a calling card the Bush Administration has put to its own uses.

(snip)

In his first months as DNI, McConnell did plenty to undermine that rep. He told Congress that three German terrorism suspects had been arrested due to intercepts made possible by the then-new Protect America Act when in fact they were obtained under the old FISA law. Soon after, McConnell offered a especially misleading account to Congress of a supposed FISA Court ruling that had delayed the U.S. from spying on the kidnappers of U.S. troops in Iraq. And throughout congressional debate on a surveillance law he claimed that the debate itself endangered American lives.

Then earlier this year, he suggested that a questioner at a public event at Johns Hopkins was "disappointed" that the U.S. hadn't suffered additional terrorist attacks. And now McConnell has really let lose, framing the Senate debate on the surveillance bill as being between those who think "we shouldn't have an Intelligence Community" and those who do. That has prompted a letter from Sen. Russ Feingold demanding an apology for those false characterizations of the debate.

There were other people besides McConnell who served at Bush's pleasure and thought nothing of lying to Congress. We know Cheney and others were liars. We know they lied to people like Pelosi. Until proven otherwise, I think we already know who the liars are. In the current political climate, Dick Cheney will never be prosecuted and sent to jail for his crimes. At the very least, he should go home and the news media should stop paying attention to a man who lied his way into a war our nation did not need.

The Dangerous Games of Bush and Company

I sometimes suspect that President Bush is quietly trying to back away from and clean up the worst of his crimes in an effort to stay out of jail when he leaves office and the records of his tenure are exposed for the next president to see. Who knows? But the signs continue to grow that Bush will go down as the worst president in American history. And the most dishonest.

We already know that Bush and his White House colleagues lied their way into a war with Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction despite the claims of Bush and a host of neoconservatives. Other claims about Iraq were also proven false. For two years now, Bush and company, with the paranoid Dick Cheney being the loudest voice, have been making claims about Iran that also turn out—surprise!—to be false. Iran apparently discontinued its barely begun nuclear weapons program back in 2003. Oops.

Now some of the same neoconservative clowns who were screaming for war in Iraq in 2002 and couldn't understand why so many analysts in the CIA and State Department were so reluctant to see weapons of mass destruction that we now know did not exist are now claiming the CIA is again botching the intelligence. If neoconservatives don't hear what they want to hear, they are nevertheless adept at blaming the messenger. Think Progress has the story:

Norman Podhoretz, widely reputed to be the “godfather” of neoconservatism, has been one of the most aggressive hawks clamoring for war with Iran. Podhoretz laid out the “The Case For Bombing Iran” in a June cover story in the right-wing Commentary Magazine. He insisted that the Iranians were very close to developing a nuclear weapon...

(snip)

Yesterday’s NIE proved Podhoretz’s claims were false. Rather than modify his views on Iran, Podhoretz — who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 — aired a nasty conspiracy theory yesterday, attacking the authors of the NIE and accusing the intelligence community of deliberately “leaking material calculated to undermine George W. Bush:”

Podhoretz is one of those fellows who insisted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the situation required an American invasion. He has no evidence to back up his current claims about Iran but obviously the CIA is lying. It's a strange world many of these right-wingers live in.

As for Bush and Cheney, how long have they known their claims about Iran have been, to put it politely, somewhat off the mark? Obviously Bush is being less than truthful when he says he didn't know. The president of the United States doesn't know what his own intelligence agencies are saying? Now that's embarrassing, criminal or just plain weird.

Lying, however, is not unknown to Bush and his advisers. Even out of office, Karl Rove still runs interference for his boss. Think Progress has that story too:

With an appearance on Fox News Sunday this weekend and an op-ed in the Financial Times on Sunday, former Bush political adviser (and new Newsweek contributor) Karl Rove has been busy injecting himself into the public discourse this week. Rove drew “a range of protesters” to a speech at Duke University last night, where he claimed “the United States has nothing to apologize in its conduct in the world."

These are the words of a man who led the White House Iraq Group whose purpose it was to sell a war the United States did not need based on justifications that were false. If nothing else, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush owe an apology to the American people.

Rove only last week claimed that the Bush Administration did not pressure Congress to back him up on Iraq just prior to the 2002 election. A number of Democrats who were in on the discussions and even some Republicans dismiss Rove's fabrication. Rove, of course, is a serial liar and a calculating one at that. He believes that if you lie often enough and loud enough, a fair number of foolish people may believe you. He also noticed a long time ago that the Washington press corps loves controversial lies, even if it is too lazy in this era to correct those lies. Rove's methods certainly worked in the beginning. But most of America has caught on to Karl Rove and the many other lies emanating from the Bush White House.

The election is a year away and it's not certain how the American people will vote. There is a new set of Republican presidential candidates who are just as right-wing as Bush, but several have an advantage over the current president: as wrong as they are for America, three or four of them are a bit more competent than Bush and would quite ably continue the damage that has been done to our nation in the last seven years.


**Personal Note. I haven't posted much lately because of a large and very interesting editing project I've been working on. I will try to do better.

Paul Wolfowitz Explained

Before he was hired by the Bush Administration, Paul Wolfowitz was not known as a particularly competent individual. He's still not known as a particularly competent individual. He wasn't competent in the few real responsibilities he had in the running of the war in Iraq. He also hasn't been competent as the president of the World Bank. In the case of Iraq, it was only necessary for Wolfowitz to be the theorist for the rationale behind Bush's war. His theory, it turns out, was not competent either. But he was effective on those 'news' shows with all the talking heads. He had a gift for sounding sincere while not having the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

What Wolfowitz was not known for, before he came to work for Bush, was a little streak of corruption and excessive self-importance. That became evident in the case he made for war in Iraq, a war that makes no sense, a fiasco, a consequence of broad incompetence and recklessness rarely seen in modern industrialized countries. The incompetence of Wolfowitz was little noticed at the time: there was too much incompetence to go around. And the media was overwhelmed by a noise machine coming from the White House and was oblivious to its own incompetence as fairy tale after fairy tale was being spun by the president and his advisers. Wolfowitz, another spectacular example of the Peter Principle in the Bush Administration, moved on to bigger things and became president of the World Bank.

Wolfowitz's self-importance and little streak of corruption grated on people as he waved his finger at them while talking about the need to control corruption. It tends to grate on people when they have to listen to a hypocrite. As Brad DeLong notes, Wolfowitz simply whines that he's being treated unfairly. After all, special people, particularly precious intellectuals for right wing movements, are not quite subject to the same rules as everyone else. One ought to be able to take care of one's girlfriend with a little financial help; or a lot, if one has power which everyone else doesn't. It's jealousy to demand that special people be held to the same rules as everyone else.

Paul Wolfowitz is not expected to last much longer as president of the World Bank.

More on Paul Wolfowitz and Alberto Gonzales

Four years ago, when I first started devoting considerable time to writing about Bush's flawed war plan for Iraq and the various wrongdoing that was coming to light, I was somewhat in despair because too many people writing about these things on the left were so shrill it was highly unlikely that they would get the attention of most Americans who very much needed to know about the nonsense that was becoming increasingly obvious. And the mainstream media was either drinking the Kool Aid like Judy Miller of The New York Times or they were shrugging as if they were watching some vaguely interesting but ultimately unimportant drama (Ted Koppel, as one example, though normally a very fine reporter was infuriating at times: it's a business, it's process, we have to make money, blah, blah, blah). Times have indeed changed. I don't know how much hope there is to change things but at least in 2007, as bad as things are, there is a glimmer of hope. When people begin to recognize we have a problem there is always a glimmer of hope because if you have the facts, there is a chance you can begin to change things for the better.

Indeed, things are bad and there are a growing number of people focusing on the catastrophe that is the Bush presidency. Frank Rich of The New York Times has an article (via Truthout) on some of this and, like me, he's now unavoidably using multiple adjectives and descriptive nouns that still aren't adequate for describing Bush and his presidency (bold emphasis mine):

...the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer's metastasis - the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.

Yet each man's latest infractions, however serious, are mere misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What's being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.

In another article on Truthout, Elizabeth de la Vega, "a former federal prosecutor with over 20 years' experience, was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California," explains what's supposed to happen and why the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzalez and his White House handlers has become so dysfunctional and politicized:

Then there's the "Urgent Report" system instituted at DOJ in recent years. Section T3-18.200 of the US Attorney's Manual requires US attorneys' offices to send immediate reports to the highest levels of the Attorney General's Office whenever there are "major developments" - defined to include even procedural motions - in "important cases," which include any cases that present a "high likelihood of coverage in news media, or Congressional interest."

For cases involving public figures, the US Attorney's Manual requires that "appropriate officials, including the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division, the associate attorney general, the deputy attorney general and the attorney general" be advised of the initiation of any case "in which public figures or entities are subjects of the investigation." Bottom line? The attorney general is notified immediately, not just when charges are brought in a public corruption case, but when the file is opened and every time that any activity, even procedural, occurs in the case. It was precisely such an Urgent Report that former San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam used to notify the Attorney General's Office on May 10, 2006 that search warrants were going to be conducted in the Randy "Duke" Cunningham case. The next day, of course, was when Alberto Gonzales's top aide wrote an email talking about the "very real problem we have right now" with Carol Lam.

Think about this for a moment. San Diego County is a generally conservative county, mostly Republican, with several Republican-leaning newspapers, including the San Diego Union Tribune, which broke the story on Duke Cunningham. The last time I looked most Republicans frown on bribery and corruption as much as anyone else, particularly when it is so blatant as it was in the case of Duke Cunningham. When Carol Lam, a Republican by the way, opened an investigation into Duke Cunningham, much of the evidence of corruption was already laid out by the newspapers. Opening the case and beginning the investigation was a no brainer and would be obvious in virtually any district in the nation where there is respect for the law. But Alberto Gonzales's top aide suddenly said they have a problem. If you're a criminal or trying to politicize everything, I suppose that would be one way of looking at it.

America's Lunatic Far Right Wants Third War

Advice: just as a precaution, it would not be a bad move to keep a full gas tank for the next few weeks. War is not inevitable but the recklessness of the far right continues and the Republicans in Congress are still playing rubber stamp to Bush and Cheney's fear mongering. Bush has already committed the greatest strategic failure in American history with his war in Iraq. The war in Iraq will become the second greatest strategic failure if Bush launches a war with Iran. These guys have no end game. Let me repeat that: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have no end game. Americans need to understand that. The media needs to understand that and a few voices are finally beginning to speak up. Already there are Republicans who are breaking ranks in Congress. More Republicans need to follow.

Think Progress has the story on right wingers aiding and abetting the possible extension of the Bush/Cheney foreign policy fiasco:

McClatchy [Mercury News]: “‘I still believe, at the end of the day, that he will bomb the Iranian (nuclear) facilities,’ said Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank with close ties to the Bush administration.

Think Progress also quotes Rush Limbaugh who claims Americans will cheer the beginning of Bush's third war. This American will not be cheering. Bush and Cheney have no concrete accomplishments to their name in the last six years and yet their friends are urging them to compound their blunders with more war. Properly speaking, such a war would call for impeachment. With or without a third war, impeachment is not going to happen any time soon. Given that we can't call back the missiles once they're launched, I would settle for Congress immediately restricting the war powers of these two very reckless and very arrogant right wing politicians with their imperial pretensions. Congress has the authority. It's time for the adults to step forward.

The Shifting Nature of Blogs

Update 5P.M. 2/7: Welcome to Luskin readers. The original post was simply about blogging but I feel compelled to add this update. I'm glad Luskin 'trawls' liberal blogs though I should point out that I don't 'hate' Bush, I just don't respect the president's incompetence and recklessness. Lushkin obviously doesn't like Krugman but here's a link to Krugman's February 2004 article and a quick excerpt:

Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction."

To verify the 'tip' only required a copy of Mylroie's book or a good memory.

The original post now follows:

I notice the audience for some of the big blogs is beginning to level off and I notice it's getting increasingly difficult to find a niche for oneself. I suspect it's simply in the nature of these things. Here's what Chris Bowers of MyDD has to say:

... here is Feldman's comment:

I think what you're describing is the transition from an open to a competitive market dynamic. Price of entry is now high enough that solo bloggers are not quite making it in, and established bloggers are innovating to retain their share.

I think this is exactly right. When the progressive, political blogosphere began, it was structured in pretty much the same fashion as the conservative political blogosphere. Almost every single major progressive blog was founded and operated by a single individual. However, starting in late 2003 with the introduction of a scoop platform to Dailykos, a process began where highly trafficked, highly linked progressive blogs continued to innovate far beyond the structure of a single blogger sole, mainly punditry oriented, content provider. Virtually everyone supplemented their writing staffs with guest bloggers, or even new, full-time bloggers. Virtually everyone started moderating their comments or requiring registration in order to post. Many blogs became community sites, with greatly enhanced user-generated content. Video, radio and other forms of multimedia became the norm. Many websites enhanced their political capability by starting Act Blue pages, founding PACs, or starting nationwide activist campaigns. Investigative journalism and live, on the ground reports from important events became commonplace. People scored interviews with, or even blog posts by, major figures in the progressive ecosystem and Democratic leadership. Bloggers themselves started appearing in a variety of high visibility media locations, including hosting radio programs, television interviews, meeting with former Presidents, and speaking before major conferences. Revenue streams were added, from Blogads, to Feedburner, to fundraisers, to consulting gigs, to sponsorships. Many are even publishing books. Now, more than three years later, it has come to the point where the early structure of the progressive political blogosphere has been almost entirely done away with. The days of the major, solo content generator, pundit blogger are all but over.

From 2000 to early 2004, I wasn't even aware of blogs and spent a lot of time on message boards, particularly on the AOL political message boards (that was a political education in itself). I became aware of blogs like many other people when Paul Krugman of The New York Times did a column on Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo in early 2004.

Krugman's column interested me because at that time the Bush Administration was claiming that the CIA had overhyped the war when in fact six to eight months earlier a book, How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror, by Laurie Mylroie made almost the opposite complaint that the CIA had been slow to admit some of the WMD claims that Cheney and the neocons had been promoting. Well, the CIA was right to discredit some of the claims though much of this was happening quietly in the back pages of different newspapers. But Mylroie's book jacket had plaudits by various prominent neocons so it was clear the book was a big deal and that they too thought the CIA had refused to accept viable evidence of WMDs.

At the time, in the spring and early summer of 2003, of course, we were failing to find any significant WMDs and Mylroie's book was a bit of a gamble that we would find those WMDs; it was also a bit of Bush propaganda. I wrote about this on AOL in the message boards under a pseudonym called Fishhawk (given the hysteria of the time, it was unwise to use real names on AOL).

About three days later, I was surprised to see my 'story' in Paul Krugman's column except that he had seen it on Talking Points Memo where a reader had passed the information on to Josh Marshall (TPM, of course, is known for its great readers and their attentiveness to good tidbits to pass on). My version was first. Some extra details were added by Marshall and Krugman but what the reader passed on to Marshall was very much what I wrote. I honestly didn't mind because I became a steady reader of Talking Points Memo and about two dozen other blogs and left the growing chaos and frustration of the AOL message boards behind.

I watched the numbers for blog readership explode. In June of 2004, I started a blog, then realized I didn't have the time to devote to it at that point. As everyone knows who writes them, it's a lot of work. For the next eighteen months, blog readership continued to explode and I then finally committed to doing one in late 2005; I was never built to be a workaholic but I quickly noticed it was getting harder to build up the numbers like others had done. I was a little late to jump in and I confess I'm not much interested in spending my time adding bells and whistles, though I admit I had aspirations of finding a niche for myself. . I'll keep writing but I have no illusions about how big an audience I'm likely to have though my numbers keep climbing at modest levels.

I enjoy writing and I find the issues I'm writing about compelling. As I said, I wasn't built to be high energy, so I also enjoy being sly at times and letting other people do the hard work of following up a story or pursuing a possible angle or thinking about an issue in a different way, though admittedly much of my slyness occurs when I comment on other sites or write e-mails. Blogging is an adventure and I've had many adventures in my life and there will come a time to move on to do other things. To be honest, despite my interest in politics, I really would rather be talking about literature and philosophy. In a year or two or three, a small new blog may appear somewhere in the blogosphere. Maybe I'll talk about the disastrous ethical dimensions of George W. Bush's notion of free will.

George Soros and the Neocons

One thing I have grown to dislike about neoconservative ideologues is the pretense that they had some worthwhile ideas about bringing democracy to the Middle East while refusing to deal with the impact of issues likes Abu Ghraib. George Soros, no friend of neoconservatives, is a worthy critic of the Bush Administration and has said some interesting things from time to time; I would quote him more but I'm not always comfortable with his language and analogies. But Steve Clemons of The Washington Note reminds us that methods of helping other countries achieve democracy has existed in several peaceful forms:

Soros is worth something around a couple or few tens of billions of dollars and donates through his charities half a billion dollars a year, most of this to help cultivate civil society development in former Soviet bloc countries. Recently, he has broadened his arena of concerns -- particularly in the area of global warming/climate change and doing something to help shore up global resistance to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He has also invested a lot in trying to help us to get rid of or to get beyond the Bush presidency.

But the right wing hates George Soros. And the NeoCons (on the right or the left) hate him more.

I just don't get it though because he has actually helped change societies successfully and is a hero in much of the world. The necons too have wanted to change the world -- albeit with guns, while Soros did it through education and political and civil institution buildng. One must surmise then that they are both jealous of his success and have a counterproductive obsession with military-driven social change, something that rarely if ever works.

Inattention to the balance between means and ends can have profound consequences as we are witnessing every evening as we watch the news coming out of Iraq. At the end of the day, the neoconservatives are nothing more than what they always were: Cold War intellectual warriors looking for a new fight to exercise their military and foreign policy fantasies on.

As Clemons reminds us, the intellectual neoconservative movement isn't purely a Republican or conservative movement. In his first two years, Bill Clinton had James Woolsey working for him as the head of the CIA; and Woolsey, when it comes to international issues, is sometimes as neoconservative as they come and apparently, if something I read recently is accurate, a Democrat. Few neoconservatives pushed the notion of WMDs in Iraq more than Woolsey, despite evidence to the contrary. I highly recommend reading Scott Ritter more closely. Without question, the Republicans are primarily responsible for the fiasco in Iraq but there are threads going back into the 90s that suggest that both Republicans and Democrats were inattentive to a number of foreign policy issues and how those issues were manipulated in the media (mainly by the Republican Noise Machine) until they became 'conventional wisdom.'

There's no question both sides of the aisle need to do a better job of working together—and working together is important—but a calculated bipartisanship is worthless if it allows—unchallenged—false assertions, false analysis and false stories. I don't think we've heard the end of this saga that more or less began with the fall of the Soviet Union. If we're to understand the failures of our post-Cold War foreign policy, at some point we're going to have to take a look at the years before George W. Bush's failed presidency. I'll leave that for another day—or to someone else.

Now Republicans Turning on Republicans

The major voices in the Republican Party who still support George W. Bush are running out of people to scorn. However flawed the report from the Iraq Study Group may be, it is a major, overdue indictment of Bush's foreign policy. The principles of unilateralism and preemptive military action are dead. Just about every policy Bush favors concerning Iraq has been a fiasco.

Committee reports, particularly bipartisan committee reports with ten members who decide on a unanimous position, are often a compromise that satisfy few people, but the Iraq Study Group report is damning and it dispels any illusion that Bush may still manage to grab and hide behind in order to avoid reality. Reality has come home to Washington and is now sitting like vultures in the trees in sight of the White House. That's an ugly metaphor but scratch the surface of Bush's public relations paint job and there's rot underneath.

The neoconservatives are watching their power decline and they don't like it. They've been wrong about so much it's a bit hard for them to swallow their saliva, and so they and their right wing enablers are still making plenty of noise. The neoconservatives who still defend Bush, or support more war but blame Bush's poor performance, still have the arrogance to ignore reality. Baker and his bipartisan report is now their latest target. Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory has some useful points to make:

The one positive aspect of the Baker-Hamilton report is that the reactions it is provoking -- both positive and viciously negative -- have shed as bright a light as one could hope for on our current predicament. Never before have the reasons we are in Iraq -- and staying indefinitely -- been as clear as they are now.

(snip)

As I argued immediately after the election, the disaster of the Iraq War and the resulting rejection of Bush-Republican policies presents a real opportunity to isolate, and relegate back to the fringes, the neoconservatives and more generic crazed warmongers who have dictated our foreign policy over the last five years -- the Bill Kristols, Rush Limbaughs, John McCains, Charles Krauthammers, Joe Liebermans, American Enterprise Institutes and Rich Lowrys, who have an insatiable appetite for endless wars that degrade America's credibility, resources, strength, security and national character.

At a time when most Americans have recognized that this war is a disaster and want to withdraw, this group of radical warriors continues to insist not only that the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, but that we need more of it -- more troops, more fighting, more threats, less diplomacy, less concern for world opinion, more regime change, more wars. John McCain and Bill Kristol favor a policy -- i.e., deploy as many more American troops as possible to Iraq -- which only a tiny percentage of Americans (ranging from 8% to 16%) support. Although the media has yet to realize it, this group is already on the outer fringe of our political spectrum.

Greenwald goes on to discuss the obsession the neoconservatives have with Israel. I don't have much to say on that issue except to point out that it's astonishing to me that anyone would allow another nation, even an ally, to overly influence our foreign policy. We should help Israel when it makes sense and, frankly, when their own policies make sense, but there are far too many other issues involved to allow our foreign policy to be obsessed with what Israel wants. It's a mystery to me why the media hasn't challenged neonconservatives on that issue.

There's nothing new about the neoconservatives and their right wing allies. There have been ultraconservative intellectuals and right wing blowhards since the 1930s selling a strange mix of nationalism and xenophobic isolationism at the same time. And there have also been bandwagon hawks of both parties who fear they might lose an election if they aren't hawkish enough. None of this is a way to run a foreign policy.

The other day Rumsfeld talked about the need for patience, but the lack of patience is exactly the single greatest flaw in Bush's foreign policy. You can't impose democracy in the space of a year or two; you can't launch an optional war without take time to figure out what happens after the country is occupied; you can't rush to war because you don't want to negotiate with the UN or because you don't want to let the weapon inspections process be finished. Unilateralism implies a president too impatient to build alliances. Preemptive strikes (or preventive war, whatever semantics one prefers) suggest a president too impatient to allow diplomacy to do its work and too impatient to continue working on containing people like Saddam Hussein.

The one opportunity Bush completely blew was the year after the fall of the Taliban. He had the attention of every nation in the broader Middle East and could have used the period even up to now to accomplish much without war, including real progress towards democracy. But the war in Iraq now appears to have been about making a point that was utterly without value and that had little to do with democracy.

Should I also mention that Bush and the neoconservatives are too impatient to be imaginative or to understand the real powers of the United States? I'm not a pacifist but it seems fundamental that military force should be pursued as a last resort. There are good reasons why people in the last sixty years have worked hard to develop the broad tools of diplomacy and international engagement. Easy answers from the radical right only cost us more in the end. That is why rational Republicans (even if they are conservative) are now turning on Republican ideologues.