Author: Joe Conason

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Opinion Viewpoint

Surgin’ General

General David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq, is more candid than his publicists in the media and on Capitol Hill. Unlike the senators and editorial writers who claim that the glorious “surge” should be hailed as one of the most successful military campaigns in history, he warns that the escalation’s achievements are mixed at best — or as he put it, progress on the ground is “uneven,” “fragile,” and “reversible,” with “innumerable challenges” remaining to be addressed.

His caveats cannot dampen the enthusiasm of the politicians and pundits who would maintain the occupation of Iraq and even expand our aggressive presence in the Middle East. Selling that policy requires propaganda proving that the surge is succeeding and that if we only stay long enough, spend enough money, and sacrifice enough young men and women, then someday we will achieve a great victory. We’re “closer,” says the general, carefully.

Yes, everything is getting better and better every day in Iraq, and it will always be getting better and better, even if we have to stay for a hundred or a thousand years.

To promote these illusions, Senator John McCain and his sidekicks, Senators Lindsay Graham and Joe Lieberman, repeatedly cite statistics showing violence has fallen since last summer, a trend that was real, while neglecting to mention the more ominous recent toll, which is equally real. Both American and Iraqi casualties have been rising since the low point in December 2007 and with greater velocity over the past several weeks. A dozen American troops died within the few days before Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker appeared on Capitol Hill to report, an average that harks back to the war’s most lethal months.

The worsening casualties reflect the Iraqi government’s blundering assault on the militias and strongholds of Moktada al-Sadr, which exposed its own military deficiencies just in time for the Petraeus-Crocker show. To McCain and his cohorts, the aborted battle of Basra showed the “progress made by the Iraqi security forces,” as he wrote in the right-wing weekly Human Events, blithely ignoring mass desertions by thousands of Iraqi officers and troops.

With that kind of progress, victory must be only decades away.

Meanwhile, the lives of ordinary Iraqis are hellish, despite the billions of dollars flowing into the government treasury every day from rising oil revenues. Despite the enormous budget surplus enjoyed by the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the United Nations humanitarian agency recently reported that between 4 and 9 percent of Iraqi children under age 5 suffer from malnutrition. More than five years after the invasion, most Iraqis still have no reliable electricity, medical care, employment, or even clean water.

Yet New York Times columnist David Brooks eagerly tells us that the Iraqi people are more optimistic than they were last year, quoting an ABC News poll conducted in March. And nearly half say the U.S. was right to overthrow Saddam, he announced with an air of triumph. He omits the less comforting findings of the poll, which showed that 42 percent of Iraqis still also consider it “acceptable” to attack American troops, 61 percent believe the presence of our troops is making security worse rather than better, and only 26 percent support the occupation.

What the ABC News survey actually reveals is that Iraqis remain profoundly divided along sectarian and ethnic lines. Despite the “awakening” of tribal opposition to al-Qaeda among the Sunni, for example, they remain extremely hostile to the U.S. and the Shia-dominated government, as do the Shia masses loyal to the Sadrist movement.

Those persistent divisions — and the irresistible impulse of every faction to manipulate us to their advantage — have blocked the political reconciliation that was supposed to be the ultimate objective of the surge. Lieberman and Graham praise “benchmark legislation” passed by the Iraqi parliament on amnesty, provincial elections, and other issues. But a recent report issued by the United States Institute for Peace, an official nonpartisan institution funded by Congress, disparaged the supposed advances by the Iraqi government, which it described as “tactical horse-trading” designed to acknowledge those benchmarks as minimally as possible.

The proponents of war and occupation gladly accept this benchmarks charade along with all the other deceptions and corruption because their eyes are fixed on the eastern horizon. McCain and his friends constantly proclaim that our fight in Iraq “cannot be separated from our larger struggle to prevent the emergence of an Iranian-dominated Middle East.” In other words, their remedy for the destructive consequences of this war is a wider and even more dangerous conflict.

Joe Conason writes for Salon.com and The New York Observer.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Whatever their true private beliefs, presidential candidates in America are constantly required to provide proofs of faith, often through their connections with various religious figures. Benedictions from the pulpit bestow an aura of righteousness — except, of course, when the pastor or minister is a disreputable kook whose endorsement should be an embarrassment.

In recent weeks, both Barack Obama and John McCain have suffered exactly this kind of indignity, under very different circumstances. And their contrasting responses revealed not only aspects of their own characters but also the enduring prejudices of the national media covering this year’s campaign.

For an African-American politician seeking to attract voters of all ethnicities and persuasions, there could hardly be a less desirable supporter than Louis Farrakhan, the aging leader of the Nation of Islam. As the media never tire of reminding us, Farrakhan is a habitual bigot whose utterances have repeatedly denigrated Jews, Catholics, Caucasians, and homosexuals, among others, seeking to inflame his followers against these supposed enemies.

He detects conspiracies of “international bankers,” whose machinations he blames for all the world’s troubles dating back to World War II. He looks forward to a time when the Holy Land will be “cleansed by blood,” as he exclaimed in a sermon not so long ago. He warns that the evil ones ruling the planet will someday be destroyed for their sins, while those who obey his admonishments (and tithe to his organization) will be saved.

Well aware of Farrakhan’s record, since both of them reside in Chicago, Obama forthrightly rejected the support of the unsavory minister. Unfortunately, his own Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has chosen to associate himself with the Nation of Islam, which may well create problems for Obama — but at least he has clearly separated himself from the poisonous Farrakhan philosophy.

By contrast, McCain went out of his way last week to accept the endorsement of a Christian pastor with a deeply disturbing record of bigotry and extremism. That would be John Hagee, a Texas televangelist whose career is chronicled in God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, a new book by investigative reporter Sarah Posner. As Posner reveals, Hagee is the kind of evangelical minister who has anticipated the end of the world for decades now, even as he promises untold riches to those who tithe to his ministry. He is an ardent warmonger who, like Farrakhan, seems to imagine a Middle East cleansed by blood — except that in his fantasies, the Christians will be saved while everyone else burns. (The saved won’t include members of the Catholic Church, however, an institution he despises and denounces as venomously as Farrakhan does.)

But the perspectives of these two self-proclaimed men of God resemble each other even more closely in certain ways. Hagee, too, promotes hatred of homosexuals and demands that women submit to men. And he also imagines a conspiracy by international bankers, the Bavarian Illuminati, the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other shadowy groups to deliver America into the hands of Satan. All that verbiage is merely code for traditional anti-Semitism, as Hagee surely knows, because, like Farrakhan, he blames the Jewish people for their own persecution, including the Holocaust, as he explained a few years ago in his book entitled Jerusalem Countdown.

Yet, for reasons that seem more related to race than reason, the assorted inanities of Hagee are acceptable while those of Farrakhan are not, at least in the higher circles of the Republican Party and the national media. No matter how many times Obama rejects the Nation of Islam leader, a television anchor or debate moderator will demand that he do so again, if only to mention their names in the same breath.

Meanwhile, McCain escapes the hard questions that should be asked about his embrace of Hagee, whose ugly words and mad prophecies ought to repel him. Eight years ago, the San Antonio minister was among the political preachers, including Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, who denounced McCain and proclaimed George W. Bush to be the Lord’s chosen candidate.

Back then, the Arizona Republican proved his maverick courage when he rebuked them all as “agents of intolerance.” He has sought to court their favor ever since — and it is sad to see him genuflect now to the same kind of demagogue he once mocked.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Irritated Democrats — and everyone else who feels that we have heard more than enough from Ralph Nader —cannot help wondering why he would be running for president yet again, at the risk of becoming a permanent national joke. Is he stroking his own ego, as some critics complain? Is he motivated by principle to offer voters a different choice, as he will insist? Both those explanations may still be plausible, although between 2000 and 2004 his support fell from 3 percent to 0.3 percent, which is not exactly an ego boost or an endorsement of third-party politics.

But the evidence suggests another possible motive for Nader to run this year — namely, that he hopes to help his longtime ally John McCain, to whom he owes at least one big favor. Nader is already focusing his fire on the Democrats, with his website featuring dozens of press releases attacking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while none voice the slightest criticism of McCain.

Nader’s proclivity to boost Republicans and blast Democrats has been a matter of historical record ever since the Florida debacle eight years ago, when his 97,000 votes probably deprived Al Gore of victory in that crucial state. Although the consumer advocate and his supporters continue to deny any such culpability, Republicans clearly feel that his presence on the ballot works to their advantage. As Mike Huckabee noted on hearing of Nader’s impending announcement last week, a Nader candidacy tends to siphon votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee. “So naturally,” said Huckabee bluntly, “Republicans would welcome his entry into the race.”

Actually, Republicans have learned to do more than merely “welcome” Nader. Four years ago, Republican officials and activists in certain swing states helped gather signatures to gain ballot access for Nader, while several major Republican donors sent generous checks to his campaign. And no Republican spoke out more forthrightly on his behalf than McCain, who in 2004 urged the authorities in Florida to put Nader on the ballot there despite his failure to qualify — and who sent his own lawyer down to the Sunshine State to fight for Nader in court.

McCain launched that intervention from his perch as chairman of the Reform Institute, a Washington think-tank funded by corporate soft money and liberal foundations and staffed by McCain staffers and partisans. On the surface, at least, the Arizona senator was pursuing a principled defense of open ballot access. He sent Trevor Potter, a prominent attorney and former Federal Election Commission member who has long represented him, to assist the Nader forces in Tallahassee. It was an inspiring story of shared democratic values that crossed the ideological spectrum.

But as The New York Times reported in September 2004, there was a political back story behind McCain’s assistance to Nader. According to the Times, “Mr. Potter said that the Nader campaign first sought Mr. McCain’s backing in the case last week and that subsequently the Bush campaign also asked him to get involved.” (Candidate Nader and his running mate, Peter Camejo, issued a statement thanking McCain and the Reform Institute that is, for some reason, no longer available on the Nader campaign website.)

That tantalizing sequence of events suggests McCain’s motive in backing Nader may well have been partisan as well as principled, since the “maverick” senator had only weeks earlier sworn his fealty to George W. Bush on the dais at the Republican National Convention. Certainly the Bush campaign would have felt reassured knowing that Nader would be on the ballot again in Florida, like a lucky rabbit’s foot.

The Naderite connections with McCain go back many years, to the era when the Arizona senator displayed real maverick tendencies in jousting with corporate interests in the tobacco, telecommunications, and automobile lobbies, as well as his strong support for campaign finance reform. Nostalgia for the old McCain may explain why Joan Claybrook, who directs the Nader-founded Public Citizen organization, stepped forward to defend him against the Times exposé of his relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. Meanwhile, Claybrook, Nader, and other reformers have said little or nothing about McCain’s gaming of the public campaign finance system while voicing sharp criticism of Obama for waffling recently on his commitment to accept public financing.

Nader may occasionally tweak McCain over the war in Iraq or the Canadian health-care system, but they both know that that won’t matter. Watch while Nader blisters Obama or Clinton and McCain smiles. Wait to see whether McCain tries to insist that Nader, whose support is minuscule and shrinking, deserves to appear on the debate dais with him and the Democrat. Look for Republicans to prop up Nader with ballot signatures and campaign cash. And remember that this time Nader’s candidacy, having descended from tragedy to farce, may simply be an inside joke.

Joe Conason is a columnist for The New York Observer and Salon.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Straight Talk?

As a presidential candidate, John McCain stands out not only for his vocal endorsement of the unpopular war in Iraq but also because one of his own sons is a Marine Corps officer on active duty there. He supports the war even at the price of his own career or the life of a child he loves.

Yet although the senator from Arizona is obviously no chicken hawk, he carefully avoids “straight talk” about the real costs of this war in dollars and debt. Like every other politician who agrees with the Bush policy of prolonged war and occupation, he still pretends that we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this endless misadventure without collecting enough tax revenue to pay the actual costs.

Hundreds of billions? Sorry, but that vague estimate is probably far too modest, according to a new book by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. In The Trillion-Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, they warn that the war’s “true budgetary cost,” excluding interest, “is likely to reach $2.7 trillion.” Aside from the price of munitions, contractors, transport, fuel, and other fixed costs, their calculations are based on the government’s continuing obligation to provide medical care and disability payments for the thousands of wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans over the coming decades.

Those costs represent a moral debt on which we cannot default — and they will grow larger every day that we maintain the occupation. Even if the war could be ended immediately, the fiscal obligations incurred by the invasion and occupation will continue. Beyond the mandatory disability payments, medical and psychiatric care, and additional benefits to which our vets are entitled, the nation will face years of increasing military budgets to restore the equipment and readiness of our battered armed forces, especially the Army and the National Guard.

Even in the “best case” scenario envisioned by Stiglitz and Bilmes, with our troop presence declining rapidly, the U.S. commitment in Iraq is still likely to cost no less than $400 billion over the next several years, on top of the $800 billion or so that we have spent to date. Those figures, which don’t include veterans’ benefits, add up to $1.2 trillion. What the authors call their “realistic-moderate scenario” for a prolonged presence in Iraq will cost twice as much or more.

Having served at the highest levels of the federal government, both authors understand that the Bush administration’s war budgeting has been a travesty — aided and abetted by lawmakers such as McCain, who have gone along all the way. Instead of accounting honestly for the war’s costs and requesting the necessary funds to pay for them, the White House has routinely used “emergency” supplemental requests as a device to hide the truth. The emergency process prevents the Office of Management and Budget as well as congressional staff from thoroughly reviewing the data. Inevitably, they explain, this lack of transparency and competence has resulted in waste, fraud, and corruption in payments to contractors, most of them politically wired, while essential equipment and veteran care remain underfunded.

Compounding the disgrace is the fact that the Bush administration and Congress financed these “emergency” budgets by borrowing, rather than raising taxes, as the United States has traditionally done in times of war. The Bush administration has insisted on reducing taxes, with most benefits accruing to the wealthiest individuals, while piling on debt for succeeding administrations and generations (and leaving the nation’s infrastructure to rot away, too). The politicians who have cooperated in this outrage, such as McCain, should tell us why they still call themselves “conservative.”

Back in 2001, when he was still in his maverick phase, the Arizona senator voted against the Bush tax cuts. Today he says that he objected to the budgetary flimflam that cut taxes without reducing program costs, but at the time he claimed to worry about the excessive premiums for the very rich. Now he runs around promising “no new taxes” just like every standard right-wing Republican.

In an unguarded moment, McCain once confessed that he doesn’t know much about economics. Even he should be able to comprehend the disastrous fiscal effects of the Iraq war, which its proponents originally promised would cost us almost nothing. Perhaps he should ask an economist to calculate the real cost of occupying Iraq for a hundred years, as he imagines — and how many generations will pay dearly for this mistake.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer and Salon.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Happy Huck?

Behind the happy, healthy, guitar-strumming campaign style that has so besotted the national press corps, Mike Huckabee looks like something considerably less charming — a zealous proponent of the “biblical” reformation of every aspect of American society.

If that sounds too extreme to describe the smiling Huck — who introduced himself to the country as “a conservative, but I’m not angry about it” — then consider how he explained his urge to revamp the nation’s founding document. At a public forum on the eve of the Michigan primary, while mocking Republican opponents who don’t want to append a “marriage amendment” or a “life amendment” to the Constitution, he said: “I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards.”

The next day, Republican speechwriter and strategist Lisa Schiffren complained: “Mike Huckabee is going to force those of us who have wanted more religion in the town square to reexamine the merits of strict separation of church and state. He is the best advertisement ever for the ACLU.”

Not so long ago, Huckabee attributed his rising political fortunes to the hand of the Almighty. “There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one,” he said. “It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000 people, and that’s the only way that our campaign could be doing what it’s doing … That’s honestly why it’s happening.”

He later denied that he meant to suggest that God wants him in the White House. But his deliberate reference this week to conforming the law to “God’s standards” sounds uncomfortably like the ideology sometimes known as “Christian dominionism” or “Christian reconstructionism,” which declares that America, indeed every nation on earth, is meant to be governed by biblical law.

Back in 1998, when he was still serving as governor, Huckabee helped write Kids Who Kill, a short book purporting to analyze the outbreak of school shootings by teenagers. His coauthor was George Grant, a well-known militant Christian reconstructionist author, activist, and educator. That same year, the libertarian Reason magazine published an exposé of reconstructionism titled “Invitation to a Stoning,” which identified Grant and quoted him on the movement’s ambition for “world conquest.” Scorning the moderation of other conservative Christians, Grant explained, “It is dominion we are after. Not just a voice … not just influence … not just equal time. It is dominion we are after.”

Of course, Huckabee must have had no illusions about Grant’s baroque worldview, since it is clearly reflected in their book. The school shootings were mere symptoms of American civilization in decline, they thundered, with communities “fragmented and polarized” by “abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism.”

As governor, he also promoted the faith-based programs of a reconstructionist minister named Bill Gothard, and even boasted that he had gone through Gothard’s “basic program” himself. More reputable evangelicals consider Gothard to be a cultish fringe character, but he has built an enormous empire, which depends on funding from local and state governments to bring his authoritarian version of the Gospel to prisoners, police officers and welfare recipients, among others.

Huckabee’s rhetoric has surely changed, if not his views. He no longer denounces environmentalism, for example, at least not publicly. But he still maintains contact with reconstructionist leaders, some of whom are supporting his presidential candidacy. Just last month, Huckabee attended a campaign fund-raiser at the Houston home of Steven Hotze, who became one of the nation’s most notorious advocates of dominionist ideology when he led the religious right’s takeover of the Texas Republican Party. Huck’s old friend Gothard was also at Hotze’s home, along with a bevy of extremists including Rick Scarborough, author of Liberalism Kills Kids.

Does Huckabee still believe that his narrow version of Christianity must dominate every detail of human existence in this country? He doesn’t like to answer hard questions about the intersection of his faith and his politics, but it is long past time that somebody demanded a straight answer.

Joe Conason writes for Salon.com and the New York Observer.

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News News Feature

Get Real

For most Americans, who now wish we had never invaded Iraq, the notion of expanding that extraordinarily lethal mistake into neighboring Iran and Syria must seem insane. Yet those same brilliant neoconservative strategists who brought us the war in Iraq and constantly urge its escalation exist in their own special reality. They speak of military hostilities against Iran and Syria with anticipation rather than apprehension. As we have learned over the past four years, their dreams often turn out to be our nightmares.

For four brief hours on Memorial Day, however, the neoconservative drive toward a wider conflagration in the Middle East stalled when ambassadors from the United States and Iran met in Baghdad.

The historic significance of that meeting should not be underestimated, even though U.S. officials emphasized that no further meetings would necessarily occur. Convened under the auspices of the Iraqi government, which maintains close relations with Tehran as well as Washington, the meeting represented the first substantive bilateral discussion between American and Iranian officials in three decades.

Relations with Iran have been poor ever since the mullahs seized power from the U.S.-sponsored shah in 1979, but in recent months the increasing strains between us have brought armed conflict closer. Longstanding grievances against Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism in the region have been exacerbated by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear arsenal and allegations about Iranian agents supplying weapons to the insurgents in Iraq.

As these problems worsened, American policy toward Iraq has vacillated between “containment” and “regime change,” applying economic sanctions and threatening rhetoric in varying degrees. That policy cannot be described as a great success. Iran has become more aggressive and more influential in the region as a direct consequence of the violent regime change that we inflicted on Iraq.

What we have not tried, until now, was talking to the Iranian leaders. Breaking the taboo against speaking directly with them represents the change that the Iraq Study Group urged six months ago as the most promising path toward disengagement from that bloody quagmire, when its report highlighted the need for regional talks including Iran and Syria.

Naturally, such signs of sanity were immediately met with furious denunciations from the far right, echoing the shrill attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and several congressional colleagues who dared to visit the Syrian leadership in Damascus. When the Pelosi trip was followed weeks later by overtures from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to both the Syrians and the Iranians, it became plain that U.S. policymakers were considering a sensible shift.

The real danger is that whenever we start talking with our enemies, we may discover potential areas of compromise or even agreement. Progress would undermine the arguments of politicians and pundits who prefer a policy of permanent war.

But we already know that both Syria and Iran have cooperated with us in the past when they believed that their interests coincided with those of the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Syrians were obliging enough to accept a Canadian citizen whom we deported and to torture and interrogate him on our behalf. (Unfortunately, he was innocent.) During that same period, the Iranians were helpful in western Afghanistan when the U.S. and its allies overthrew the Taliban.

There is no reason to pretend that the Syrian and Iranian regimes are anything but deplorable in their domestic conduct and foreign policy. But it is also true that those governments and the societies they control are more complex than our warmongers would tell us. Close observers of Iran, for instance, believe that our threatening attitude actually weakens the democratic forces in their struggle with the mullahs — and that improved relations, including normal diplomatic exchanges, could only strengthen reformers.

Is there reason to believe that negotiating with the Iranians or the Syrians would lead to any worthwhile result? Our allies in the Iraqi government — whose survival we have ensured with thousands of American casualties and hundreds of billions of American dollars — certainly think so. The Iraqi diplomats talk with their counterparts in Damascus and Tehran every day.

Those facts won’t dissuade the neoconservatives both within and outside the Bush administration from maligning any gestures toward realism. We are still living with the terrible consequences of the last great neoconservative triumph — the war in Iraq — and the enhanced power that their errors have bestowed so ironically on Iran. In coping with that reality, it is long since time that we learned to ignore their bad advice.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer and Salon.com.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Falwell’s Legacy

For more than three decades, the Reverend Jerry Falwell guided the white evangelical masses of the South into the Republican Party, culminating in the most outwardly pious presidency in modern American history. Having first gained notoriety as a hard-line segregationist in rural Virginia, he won power as the televised prophet of a political gospel. Scarcely had he gone to his ultimate reward, however, before his friends and allies threatened to dismantle his legacy — and the dominance of the party to which he had devoted his ministry.

The late preacher can hardly be blamed, of course, for the ruinous condition of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. But with the tandem rise of Rudolph Giuliani, a pro-choice Catholic, and Mitt Romney, a highly flexible Mormon, to the forefront of the party’s potential presidential nominees, Falwell’s old flock is feeling deeply alienated. Within days after his death, the leaders of the movement he symbolized began to proclaim a message of dissension.

The most significant voice raised against the notion of a Giuliani nomination belongs to James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, which is now widely reckoned to be the nation’s largest religious-right organization. On May 17th, Dobson declared that he could not support the candidacy of the former New York mayor under any circumstances.

“Speaking as a private citizen and not on behalf of any organization or party, I cannot, and will not, vote for Rudy Giuliani in 2008,” he wrote in an essay on WorldNetDaily, a right-wing Web site. “It is an irrevocable decision.”

Richard Viguerie, the aging but still influential right-wing direct-mail impresario, shares Dobson’s disgust at the prospect of a Giuliani ticket but goes even further in his anathema. Having always preferred to identify himself as a “movement conservative” rather than a party-line Republican, Viguerie is on the verge of urging his right-wing comrades to abandon the Grand Old Party. “If the Republican Party nominates Rudy Giuliani as its candidate for either president or vice president, I will personally work to defeat the GOP ticket in 2008. … It will be time to put the GOP out of its misery.”

As a veteran of the George Wallace campaign on the American Independent Party in 1968, Viguerie certainly knows how to make mischief for the major parties. Back then, the Wallace candidacy badly harmed the candidacy of Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Forty years later, a third-party crusade on the right would do far more damage to the Republican nominee. The same Republicans who encouraged (and financed) Green candidate Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004 just might find themselves facing the business end of a spoiler campaign in November 2008. The most appropriate vehicle is the Constitution Party, a far-right, theocratic outfit that claims to be the biggest of the nation’s third parties.

Still, the Republican apocalypse is not here yet and may not arrive next year. Despite Giuliani’s momentary popularity, the party’s primary voters could find many reasons to reject him — including such colorful episodes as his humiliating flight from Gracie Mansion to the luxury apartment of gay friends who sheltered him from his wronged wife. His personal behavior and associations, notably with the corrupt former Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, may be as unacceptable as his issue positions on guns, gays, and abortion.

For Dobson, a ticket led by Mitt Romney might seem like salvation — but other evangelicals are repelled by the former Massachusetts governor’s membership in the Mormon Church, which they have been taught to regard as a satanic cult. Besides, Romney is a recent convert to the tenets of the religious right and one whose eagerness to please is anything but pleasing. His nomination too could provoke a split from the right.

Now this isn’t the first time that Dobson or Viguerie have issued angry warnings to the Republican establishment about dire consequences if the party departs from righteousness. Such jeremiads are always heard in the election-year cacophony and are always dismissed as meaningless cant. Power reliably overcomes principle for these moral absolutists.

But next year might be different. For many of the true believers of the religious right, the nomination of either Giuliani or Romney would represent the ultimate humiliation. Should either of these events come to pass, then the Dobsons and the Vigueries and their followers at last will have to validate their ideological posturing with independent action. They will have to put up or shut up.

Joe Conason writes for Salon.com and The New York Observer.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Poor, Poor Alberto

If the House Judiciary Committee session last week starring Attorney General Alberto Gonzales produced few revelations about the suspicious dismissal of eight (or nine or more) U.S. attorneys, the hearing did clarify a critical political reality: No matter how discredited he is and no matter how much damage he continues to inflict on the Justice Department, this attorney general will not resign.

What the hearing established most clearly is that most Republicans remain united behind Gonzales despite the clear evidence of his incompetence, dishonesty, and contempt for Congress. Unlike their counterparts in the Senate, none of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee even posed a sharp question to him, let alone urged his resignation. Instead, they acted in partisan lockstep, expressing sympathy for the poor attorney general’s ordeal, pretending that there is no scandal and no stonewall, and insisting that the investigation should end.

The Senate Republicans who upbraided Gonzales last month, such as Arlen Specter and Tom Coburn, certainly have their faults. But they and their colleagues cut an Athenian profile compared to the Republicans in the House, who cannot seem to comprehend why a politicized law-enforcement system is a danger to them as well as their enemies.

Obviously, Republicans have paid no attention to the eloquent warnings of their committee’s chairman, John Conyers, explaining why this scandal jeopardizes the most important asset of the Justice Department — namely, “its reputation for integrity and independence.” Then again, listening to them for hours was a powerful reminder that many of them may simply be too stupid to comprehend what Conyers was talking about.

Consider Florida representative Ric Keller: “Tell me what your top two priorities are going to be over the next 20 months that you’d like to accomplish,” he inquired sunnily.

“I’ll give you three,” answered Gonzales, who went on to recall his meeting with the president on September 11, 2001, which made him want to keep America safe. He also mentioned his aversion to violent crime and gangs and then held up his arm to show a wristband that was given to him by a man whose daughter had been murdered by a sex offender. That wristband reminds him that he wants to keep America’s children safe, too.

Keller followed up with equal rigor: “As a prominent Cabinet member, U.S. attorney, or U.S. attorney general, you could leave today and make $1 million a year at a law firm pretty easily, but you’re staying on and want to stay on. Is it because of your passion for those three things, violent crime, terrorism, and getting after child predators?”

Much of the Republican questioning was similarly unedifying. Texas representative Louie Gohmert, a former state judge, spent his time rehashing the false comparison to the Clinton administration’s request for the resignations of all of the U.S. attorneys after Bill Clinton took office in 1993. “Was that a crime?” he demanded indignantly. “No,” said Gonzales.

And let’s not forget Virginia’s Randy Forbes. Apparently, Forbes meant to arouse sympathy for the beleaguered attorney general because he has so many, many employees to oversee. First, he asked how many people work for the Justice Department, and the attorney general replied that there are about 110,000. Then he asked how many of those employees are lawyers — and inadvertently revealed that Gonzales did not know this most basic fact about his department.

“Ten thousand to 15,000,” said the attorney general — a differential of 50 percent. But then again, his entire defense, as he reiterated repeatedly under questioning from the Democrats, is that he didn’t know what his former aides Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling had done in his name when they compiled the hit list of U.S. attorneys. After all, he had signed a secret document turning over his authority to those two junior political operatives, whose only qualification to bully their betters was their connection to Karl Rove.

Before last week’s hearing, The New York Times reported that Gonzales believes he has “weathered the storm” and can continue in office despite his diminished status in the White House and on Capitol Hill and the widespread public belief that he is covering up a serious scandal. And he is right, unless Democrats and the handful of responsible Republicans have the courage to press their investigation to its logical conclusion: Gonzales’ impeachment.

Joe Conason writes for Salon.com andThe New York Observer.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Iraqis and Americans alike were stunned by the audacity of Senator John McCain’s heavily publicized (and heavily armed) excursion through Baghdad’s Shorja market last weekend. There was the leading proponent of the war on Capitol Hill, setting out to confirm his recent claim that the escalation of U.S. forces is greatly improving conditions on the ground, accompanied by a handful of congressional colleagues. He seemed to think nobody would notice that their little shopping trip also included a platoon of soldiers, three Black Hawk choppers, and two Apache gunships.

Neither the Iraqi merchants used as props in this strange exercise nor the American voters who were its intended targets could possibly have been deceived by such a charade. So the question that inevitably arises is whether McCain & Co. are still attempting to dupe us — or whether they have finally duped themselves.

Consider the happy talk from Representative Mike Pence, an ultraconservative Indiana Republican who has visited Iraq on several occasions. At the press conference that inevitably followed the Shorja photo op, Pence said he had been inspired by the opportunity to “mix and mingle unfettered among ordinary Iraqis,” drinking tea and haggling over carpets. To him, the Baghdad shops were “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.” Senator Lindsey Graham, another McCain sidekick, boasted of buying “five rugs for five bucks,” marveling that “just a few weeks ago, hundreds of people, dozens of people were killed in the same place.”

Then they climbed back into the armored vehicles that served as their tourist buses and returned to the Green Zone.

Aside from the theatrics of the Shorja excursion, however, the message delivered by McCain, Graham, and Pence was scarcely different from what each of them usually says after visiting Iraq. In February 2005, for instance, when McCain made his famous trip with Senator Hillary Clinton, he claimed to believe that “the dynamic [of the war] has changed from Iraqi insurgents versus the U.S. … to Iraqi insurgents versus the Iraqi government.” Back then, he declared himself “far more optimistic” than he had previously felt, adding: “I think we have an opportunity to succeed.”

According to McCain, there is always an opportunity to succeed, provided that we are willing to sacrifice more young Americans and hundreds of billions more dollars. But then again, this is a man who thinks we didn’t expend enough lives and dollars in Vietnam — although he would be hard-pressed to explain why the world would be better today if 100,000 Americans and another million Vietnamese had died in that war.

As for Pence, the only conceivable purpose of his latest trip was to pick up those rugs. His sunny comments were as predictable this time as when he visited Iraq in September 2005, when he told The Indianapolis Star that spending two days there had convinced him the United States was “winning the war.” General John Abizaid, then the commander of U.S. forces, had assured him there was a viable plan and that the plan was working, all of which Pence dutifully repeated to the folks back home.

On this trip, none of these jolly politicians mentioned the rise in killings across Iraq during the past month. None of them even seemed aware that the temporary reduction of violence in Baghdad appears to have driven even greater carnage outside the capital — such as the bombing in Kirkuk that slaughtered a group of schoolgirls the same day that Graham and Pence got their bargain carpets.

Even if the “surge” succeeds in suppressing violence in Baghdad for a few weeks or months by pouring in tens of thousands of American troops, what would that mean? Do McCain and his colleagues actually believe that we can somehow provide enough soldiers and Marines to achieve the pacification of every city and town in Iraq? If so, how long would our troops be expected to police the terrorist incidents and revenge attacks that now occur every day in this civil war?

Congressional hawks like McCain echo President Bush’s complaint that the Democrats are undermining the war by seeking to set a date for an American withdrawal. They insist that the war’s critics should simply shut up and send more money and more soldiers while we see whether this “plan” works better than the previously discarded plans.

But the truth is that the president and his echoes are merely playing for time with American lives. They have no plan because there is no military solution to this war. The war propaganda doesn’t work any better than the war plan — which is why the Democrats have been emboldened and why McCain’s presidential prospects are rapidly declining.

Joe Conason writes for Salon and The New York Observer.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Someday, historians will wonder why the highest officials in the Bush Justice Department believed that they could inflict heavy-handed political abuse on federal prosecutors and get away with it. The punishment of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys betrays a strong sense of impunity in the White House, as if the president and his aides assumed that nobody would complain about these outrages or attempt to hold them accountable.The precedent for this misconduct was set long ago.

There was once another Republican prosecutor who insisted on behaving professionally instead of obeying partisan hints from the White House. His name was Charles A. Banks, and the Washington press corps said nothing when he was punished for his honesty by the administration of the first President Bush.

The cautionary tale of Chuck Banks begins during the summer of 1992, as the presidential contest entered its final months with Arkansas governor Bill Clinton leading incumbent President George H.W. Bush.

At the time, Banks had already served for five years as the U.S. attorney in Little Rock. As an active Republican who had run for Congress and still aspired to higher office, he counted Clinton among his political adversaries. The first President Bush had recently selected him as a potential nominee for the federal bench. Nothing could have better served Banks’ personal interests than a chance to stop the Clintons and preserve the Bush presidency.

In September 1992, Republican activist L. Jean Lewis, who was employed by the Resolution Trust Corporation, provided that opportunity by fabricating a criminal referral naming the Clintons as witnesses in a case against the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association (the small Arkansas savings and loan owned by Whitewater partner and Clinton friend James McDougal).

The referral prepared by Lewis lacked merit — as determined by both Banks and the top FBI agent in his office — but Lewis commenced a persistent crusade for action against the hated Clintons. The FBI and the U.S. attorney repeatedly rejected or ignored her crankish entreaties.

Eventually, however, officials in the Bush White House and the Justice Department heard whispers about the Lewis referral. Obviously, that document had the potential to save the president from defeat in November by smearing the Clintons as corrupt participants in a sweetheart land deal.

That fall, Edith Holiday, secretary to the Bush cabinet, asked Attorney General William Barr whether he knew anything about such a referral. Although Barr knew nothing, he quickly sent an inquiry to the FBI. Weeks later, the president’s counsel, C. Boyden Gray, posed a similar improper question to a top Resolution Trust Corp. official.

The queries and hints from above created intense pressure on Banks to act on the Lewis referral despite his opinion, shared by the FBI, that her work was sloppy and biased. After Barr ordered him to act on the referral no later than two weeks before Election Day, he replied with a roar of conscience.

“I know that in investigations of this type,” he wrote in a remarkable memo to his boss, “the first steps, such as issuance of … subpoenas … will lead to media and public inquiries of matters that are subject to absolute privacy. Even media questions about such an investigation in today’s modern political climate all too often publicly purport to ‘legitimize what can’t be proven’ …

“I must opine that after such a lapse of time, the insistence for urgency in this case appears to suggest an intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election. … For me personally to participate in an investigation that I know will or could easily lead to the above scenario … is inappropriate. I believe it amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Department of Justice policy.”

The Whitewater case didn’t save the first President Bush, but it was later revived as a pseudo-scandal. More pertinent today is what happened to Banks and Lewis — and the U.S. attorney’s office in Little Rock.

Banks forfeited his promised judgeship and returned to private practice with his political career ended. The incompetent Lewis appeared before the Senate Whitewater Committee, where she lied repeatedly before “fainting” under examination by the Democratic counsel. She then disappeared from public view until 2003, when the White House rewarded her with an important federal job. Those who had observed Lewis in action were astonished when she was named chief of staff to the Pentagon Inspector General, at a salary of $118,000 a year.

An ugly sequel occurred in December, when the Justice Department ousted H.E. (Bud) Cummins III — another upstanding and competent Republican prosecutor in Little Rock — so that a crony of Karl Rove could replace him in the U.S. attorney’s office.

Was this what George W. Bush meant when he promised to return “honor” and “integrity” to the Oval Office?

Joe Conason writes for Salon and The New York Observer.