Author: Marty Aussenberg

The
question arises: what is the government’s (and, in particular, the Bush
administration’s) motivation for its domestic surveillance and recently revealed
telephone data gathering programs? Oh sure, they say it’s to catch terrorists
(so much for the validity of the “fighting them over there so we won’t have to
fight them over here” mantra). But it’s pretty obvious by now that the
government hasn’t needed (and doesn’t need) to break the law to catch
terrorists. Indeed, the times it’s broken the law, like

by using torture on the real perpetrators of 9/11 it has in its custody (e.g.,
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad,  it’s tainted its ability to prosecute those
perpetrators, thus

thoroughly botching its “war on terror.” So, what are they really up to?

As reported by the
New York Times several months ago, domestic surveillance has been a
bust. In a January article, the Times reported that

More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counter-terrorism
officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret program and
how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few
potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources
and diverted agents from counter-terrorism work they viewed as more productive.

It also reported that the FBI director, Robert Mueller, had
concerns about the legal underpinnings of the program, but deferred to the
Justice Department’s opinions that it was legal.

So, if all the spooky stuff the NSA is inflicting on us
isn’t helping fight the “war on terror,” what’s it doing? We already know that
our government is spying on political groups it finds objectionable (i.e., ones
that are against the war in Iraq). The Pentagon has been

targeting anti-war groups, including the peace-loving (and therefore
subversive) Quakers, for its own surveillance program. And now we’re finding out
that
the government also has the press under surveillance because, heavens to
Betsy, the press is revealing all the ways the government is violating laws,
invading our privacy, and subverting our entire constitutional form of
government. But that, of course, is also revealing our tactics to the “enemy,”
and compromising our national security, to hear Bush and his flacks (including
the mainstream media) tell it. Never mind that the real compromise of our
national security is precisely the tactics being used by our renegade
government. As Frank Rich put it in

his recent column:

It’s the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press’s exposure of
it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially
sabotaged national security. That’s where the buck stops, and if there’s to be a
witch hunt for traitors, that’s where it should begin.

The pattern is pretty clear, isn’t it? This isn’t about
fighting terror. It’s about fighting a different enemy: dissent. War is good,
for some folks. This one’s been good for the military/industrial complex. Exxon
has made a killing (excuse the expression), as has
Haliburton (and, in the process, its prodigal son, Dick Cheney. So, anyone
who threatens the welfare the war represents must be stopped. Under that theory,
everyone is potentially an enemy of this administration (or at least the 2/3 of
the American populace who oppose the war are its enemies), and therefore many
millions of us are suspected of being terrorists (or terrorist sympathizers),
thus justifying spying on and collecting private data on that many Americans.
This was precisely the MO of the Nixon administration, which had a more or less
formal “enemies list.” But even Nixon, at the height of his schizoid paranoia,
didn’t have tens of millions of people on his list. It did, however, include two
of the biggies on Bush’s list: the New York Times and the Washington Post. Ah
yes…the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Ask yourself, logically speaking, whether the government
really needs to track the phone records of countless millions of people to find
what is, at most, a few hundred “terrorists.” Back in 2003, the FBI director
told Congress that’s

how many al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists were in the U.S.  So even if,
contrary to what our government would have you believe,

the war in Iraq has increased, how many al Qaeda members could there
possibly be in this country by now? 1,000? 1,500? In any event, a lot fewer than
there are Quakers. And the government really expects to find these 1,500 by
getting copies of yours and my phone records?

Finding “terrorists” is no different than finding any
criminal who does’t want to be found. When the police want to find a murderer,
do they spread a dragnet over the whole city and go knocking on every citizen’s
door to see whether he might be hiding there? Let’s not forget, this is the same
NSA that intercepted the al Qaeda message on 9/10 saying “tomorrow is zero
hour,” but didn’t translate the message until 9/12. Should anyone really want
this gang that can’t shoot straight rooting through their phone records to find
a few dozen terrorists who, if they haven’t stopped using telecommunications of
any kind to talk to one another by now, are obviously too stupid to have pulled
off 9/11.

So, are these snoopy techniques really part of the “global
war on terror,” or is the GWT a pretext for something else? Does anyone even
still believe that the war in Iraq is part of a “global war on terror?” Even
Bush stopped believing that when he tried to rename it (the global war, not
Iraq) awhile back. Remember when

he and his flacks started calling it the “global struggle” against, at
first, the enemies of freedom, and then, violent extremism? And even though they
(e.g., Rummy, Gen. Pace, etc.) couldn’t carry off this revised marketing
campaign with a straight face, as a result of which it died a natural death, at
least it told us that what the war is really about is not about finding
terrorists, it’s about finding (with a tip of the hat to old Tricky Dick
himself), enemies. And who could qualify more for that appellation than anyone
who opposes George Bush?

Those of you who are in a business where a substantial
portion of your cost is the raw material you use or convert into a finished
product will recognize the concept I’m about to run by you. It’s an elementary
principle, Economics 101 if you will, that, all other things (i.e., occupancy
and personnel expense) being equal, when the price of your raw material
increases, your profit decreases. So, if you’re a shoemaker and the price of
leather goes up, that cuts into your profit. Same for a furniture maker with the
price of wood, a baker with the price of flour, a newspaper with the price of
ink or newsprint, and so on.

But, when you’re an oil company, the ordinary laws of
economics don’t apply, see, because you’ve figured out a way to turn that
economic principle on its head: when the cost of your major raw material (oil)
goes up, so does your profit. In fact, the more the cost of oil goes up, the
more money you make. There are a lot of shoemakers and bakers out there who
would like to know your secret. But, in fact, it’s not that complicated. In
order to compensate for the increased cost of a raw material, all you have to do
is increase the price you charge your customer. In fact, we’ve seen many
companies do that as a result of the increased price of fuel (e.g., airlines and
trucking companies), both of which have started tacking “surcharges” onto the
bills for their services. But, as the economic travails of the airlines
indicates, they haven’t figured out how to actually increase their profits as a
result of increased fuel costs, much less avoid the imminence of bankruptcy.

No, only the oil companies have figured out the secret of
making more money as the cost of your raw material goes up. It doesn’t hurt, of
course, that oil companies, unlike the baker or shoemaker, control the product
they sell from its raw to its finished state. Not too many businesses can say
that. And, of course, many businesses that are hit by increases in their cost of
goods sold recognize they can’t increase their prices, dollar for dollar, to
their customers who won’t put up with that because, in a normal market
environment, if one supplier increases its prices to compensate for increased
costs, they risk losing customers to competitors who choose to absorb some, or
all, of that increased cost in order to maintain those customers. Oil companies,
of course, don’t have to worry about that because, no matter how much they
increase what they charge us for gasoline, we’ll continue to buy it because we
don’t have a choice, since there is no competition between oil companies when it
comes to the price at which they sell us their precious commodity. Can you say
“monopoly?”

Now the government, the oil companies, the politicians and
the corporate media would have you believe the current spike in gas prices is
entirely a function of “the market.” They’re not to blame; it’s all a matter of
supply and demand. It’s the Chinese, the Indians, and ethanol’s fault. And, of
course, it’s our fault as consumers: if we just used less gasoline, the price
would go down (like less sales is what anyone who’s in the sales business wants
to promote). The oil companies are innocent, they tell us. Price manipulation or
collusion? Gouging? Perish the thought. So, how do they do it?

Historically, no matter how much the price of oil goes up,
the price of gasoline goes up more, and sometimes substantially more. That
shouldn’t surprise anyone, given the record profits oil companies are reporting
in an increasing oil price environment. And thanks to this topsy-turvy economic
model, oil company executives enjoy some of the highest annual compensation
packages in the universe (not to mention the generous retirement package given
to Exxon’s CEO, the cost of which exceeds the gross national product of many
countries).

A

recent study by a consumer watchdog group is very instructive on this score.
In that study, The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a California
consumer protection group (and remember, Californians know all about how energy
vendors can rip you off—they learned that lesson the hard way, a multi-billion
dollar ripoff at the hands of Enron), found that 70% of the recent price spike
is attributable to the oil companies increasing their refinery and marketing
profit margins. They found that, contrary to the oil companies’ talking points
(which virtually every story about gas prices on TV or in the newspapers mimics,
sometimes verbatim), oil companies are insulated from the fluctuations in the
spot market by long-term contracts, and by harvesting their own oil. As a
result, they’ve been able to increase their profit margins by spiking the price
of gasoline even more than most people realize, because everyone assumes their
cost is based on the spot market price of oil. The report also goes on to debunk
the “ethanol is the culprit” argument. The FTCR finds that: “Oil companies are
opportunistically using the rising world price for crude oil as an excuse to
excessively raise gasoline prices and pump up their profits, even though the
spot market price for crude has gone up far more slowly than gasoline prices.”

So, what’s our government doing (or going to do) about
this? Up until now, the federal government has been the major enabler of oil
company profiteering. We already know about the influence of the oil companies
on the oil patch duo (Bush and Cheney), and energy legislation that’s resulted
in billions of dollars in giveaways to the oil industry. My favorite partnership
between the government and the oil companies is the Energy Department which
publishes periodic reports on energy prices, and has been doing so since the
first oil crisis in the ’70’s, in which, among other things, it predicts what
the price of gasoline is going to be, for example, next week. And guess
what—in an increasing price environment, like we’re in now, that prediction
almost always comes true. How’s that for cooperation between government and
industry?

Now, if you’re one of those poor saps running a business
and haven’t figured out how to increase (much less maintain) your profit when
your costs go up, I guess the only thing for you to do is sell your business and
buy an oil company. 

It now seems beyond question that, at the very least, Karl
Rove will be indicted for perjury, false statements and/or obstruction of
justice in what’s come to be known as “Plamegate” (the outing of a CIA agent to
extract revenge against her husband, Ambassador Wilson, for challenging the
President’s assertion that Saddam was buying nuclear materials from Africa). The
corporate media and the blogosphere are

abuzz, speculating on the timing of Rove’s indictment, and laying the
foundation for such an indictment

I have been on record for some time as being convinced that
the real crime involved in Plamegate isn’t lying about it (though that, of
course, is a crime), but

the revelation of Valerie Plame’s identity itself. For several months the
pundits have been pooh-poohing the entire investigation, suggesting that since
no crime was committed by outing Plame’s identity,
no foul was committed either, and that it’s a

feeble fallback on Patrick Fitzgerald’s part to go after people for lying
about something that wasn’t a crime in the first place.

We now know, however, thanks to the reporting of David
Shuster on MSNBC, not only that Plame was a covert operative, but that she was
working on issues involving Iran’s nuclear weapons program., a fact to which
even the somnolent Congress has awakened, with Senator Frank Lautenberg
requesting a damage assessment from the CIA regarding

the effect of the Plame outing on our Iran-related intelligence efforts.

Fitzgerald, you may recall, was particularly outspoken at
the press conference http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102801340.html
where he announced the Libby indictment about the damage to national security
inflicted by the leak. He said:

The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It’s important that a CIA officer’s identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation’s
security.

The Libby indictment makes it clear that Cheney told Libby about Plame’s
status at the CIA. Paragraph 9 of the indictment says:

Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United
States that Wilson’s wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the
Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President had
learned this information from the CIA.

And, as I said in one of my earlier stories,

Anyone with knowledge of the CIA’s organizational chart (but particularly Cheney and Libby) knows that the Counterproliferation Division is part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (i.e., where the spooks are), and not where the more benign employees (e.g., analysts) are assigned.

That view was confirmed by a former CIA operative during
the course of the David Shuster report on Plame’s Iran-related duties.

We also know that the original outing of Plame’s identity,

at the hands of Robert Novak, followed his (Novak’s) conversation with a CIA

official who warned him not to reveal Plame’s identity. We also know that
Novak was warned not to reveal Plame’s identity by another CIA operative, who
told him (Novak) that Plame was a specialist in weapons of mass destruction at
the CIA. And, we know from the Libby indictment (Paragraph 11) that he discussed
Plame directly with a “CIA briefer.” 

Given the fact that Cheney learned of Plame’s identity (and
role) from the CIA, and that both of them were well aware of the sensitive
nature of Plame’s role at the CIA, is there  really any doubt that either or
both of them knew she was covered by the

Intelligence Identities Protection Act?

When you work at the CIA, you’re either an undercover
agent, or you’re not, and anyone who knows anything about that entity’s
organization structure knows that the division Plame worked in was an undercover
operation. If that isn’t enough, there is no doubt that every contact between
Libby, Cheney and the CIA (and between Novak and the CIA) about Plame included a
warning, explicit or implicit, that Plame was a covert agent. So, Cheney and
Libby either knew Plame was undercover, or they should have (i.e., they are
chargeable with that knowledge). There is no “oops, I didn’t know she was
undercover” defense available here.

I remain convinced that Fitzgerald, who has, by now, spoken
with whomever it was at the CIA that told Cheney about Plame (and her role), has
got the goods on Cheney, and on Libby, with regard to the underlying crime. It
still remains open to him, and to the grand jury, to seek a superceding
indictment of Libby, and to indict Cheney, who, unlike the President, does’t
enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution. I think the reason he hasn’t indicted
Cheney, or superceded the original Libby indictment is because he’s using the
Libby indictment as a crow bar to get additional damaging information, and
because he’s using that indictment to get Libby to turn on Cheney and others
(which he—Libby—already has started doing in some of the filings his legal
team has made in the document-discovery-related controversies in the case, most
notably the one where he reveals that the President, through Cheney,
authorized him to reveal classified intelligence to debunk Ambassador Wilson’s
attack).

You may recall Fitzgerald’s explanation for why he couldn’t
indict anyone for the underlying crime when he announced the Libby indictment:

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of
justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what
happened and somebody blocked their view.

I think the umpire has finally cleared the sand from his
eyes, and is about to call the pitch as he now clearly sees it, and at least two
batters are about to be called out on strikes.

It now seems beyond question that, at the very least, Karl
Rove will be indicted for perjury, false statements and/or obstruction of
justice in what’s come to be known as “Plamegate” (the outing of a CIA agent to
extract revenge against her husband, Ambassador Wilson, for challenging the
President’s assertion that Saddam was buying nuclear materials from Africa). The
corporate media and the blogosphere are

abuzz, speculating on the timing of Rove’s indictment, and laying the
foundation for such an indictment

I have been on record for some time as being convinced that
the real crime involved in Plamegate isn’t lying about it (though that, of
course, is a crime), but

the revelation of Valerie Plame’s identity itself. For several months the
pundits have been pooh-poohing the entire investigation, suggesting that since
no crime was committed by outing Plame’s identity,
no foul was committed either, and that it’s a

feeble fallback on Patrick Fitzgerald’s part to go after people for lying
about something that wasn’t a crime in the first place.

We now know, however, thanks to the reporting of David
Shuster on MSNBC, not only that Plame was a covert operative, but that she was
working on issues involving Iran’s nuclear weapons program., a fact to which
even the somnolent Congress has awakened, with Senator Frank Lautenberg
requesting a damage assessment from the CIA regarding

the effect of the Plame outing on our Iran-related intelligence efforts.

Fitzgerald, you may recall, was particularly outspoken at
the
press conference where he announced the Libby indictment about the damage to national security
inflicted by the leak. He said:

The fact that she was a CIA officer was not well- known, for her protection or for the benefit of all us. It’s important that a CIA officer’s identity be protected, that it be protected not just for the officer, but for the nation’s
security.

The Libby indictment makes it clear that Cheney told Libby about Plame’s
status at the CIA. Paragraph 9 of the indictment says:

Libby was advised by the Vice President of the United
States that Wilson’s wife worked at the Central Intelligence Agency in the
Counterproliferation Division. Libby understood that the Vice President had
learned this information from the CIA.

And, as I said in one of my earlier stories,

Anyone with knowledge of the CIA’s organizational chart (but particularly Cheney and Libby) knows that the Counterproliferation Division is part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations (i.e., where the spooks are), and not where the more benign employees (e.g., analysts) are assigned.

That view was confirmed by a former CIA operative during
the course of the David Shuster report on Plame’s Iran-related duties.

We also know that the original outing of Plame’s identity,

at the hands of Robert Novak, followed his (Novak’s) conversation with a CIA

official who warned him not to reveal Plame’s identity. We also know that
Novak was warned not to reveal Plame’s identity by another CIA operative, who
told him (Novak) that Plame was a specialist in weapons of mass destruction at
the CIA. And, we know from the Libby indictment (Paragraph 11) that he discussed
Plame directly with a “CIA briefer.” 

Given the fact that Cheney learned of Plame’s identity (and
role) from the CIA, and that both of them were well aware of the sensitive
nature of Plame’s role at the CIA, is there  really any doubt that either or
both of them knew she was covered by the

Intelligence Identities Protection Act?

When you work at the CIA, you’re either an undercover
agent, or you’re not, and anyone who knows anything about that entity’s
organization structure knows that the division Plame worked in was an undercover
operation. If that isn’t enough, there is no doubt that every contact between
Libby, Cheney and the CIA (and between Novak and the CIA) about Plame included a
warning, explicit or implicit, that Plame was a covert agent. So, Cheney and
Libby either knew Plame was undercover, or they should have (i.e., they are
chargeable with that knowledge). There is no “oops, I didn’t know she was
undercover” defense available here.

I remain convinced that Fitzgerald, who has, by now, spoken
with whomever it was at the CIA that told Cheney about Plame (and her role), has
got the goods on Cheney, and on Libby, with regard to the underlying crime. It
still remains open to him, and to the grand jury, to seek a superceding
indictment of Libby, and to indict Cheney, who, unlike the President, does’t
enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution. I think the reason he hasn’t indicted
Cheney, or superceded the original Libby indictment is because he’s using the
Libby indictment as a crow bar to get additional damaging information, and
because he’s using that indictment to get Libby to turn on Cheney and others
(which he—Libby—already has started doing in some of the filings his legal
team has made in the document-discovery-related controversies in the case, most
notably the one where he reveals that the President, through Cheney,
authorized him to reveal classified intelligence to debunk Ambassador Wilson’s
attack).

You may recall Fitzgerald’s explanation for why he couldn’t
indict anyone for the underlying crime when he announced the Libby indictment:

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of
justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what
happened and somebody blocked their view.

I think the umpire has finally cleared the sand from his
eyes, and is about to call the pitch as he now clearly sees it, and at least two
batters are about to be called out on strikes.

Civil war? What civil war?

            In a page taken from the Clinton “it depends on
what the meaning of ‘is’ is,” the powers that be in the Bush Administration are
bending over backwards to deny that the sectarian violence which has been
racking Iraq for months, suddenly ratcheting up in recent weeks with

the bombing of a mosque in Samarra, and hundreds of Iraqis turning up dead in
execution-style killings, constitutes a civil war.

Dick Cheney, 

Donald Rumsfeld, 

and his military minions have all denied the existence of a civil war.
Remember what they say about not believing something until it’s officially
denied?

            However, most of the people either “on the
ground,” or with their ears to it, seem to disagree. Ayad Allawi, the U.S.’s
hand-picked interim prime minister of Iraq, has been quoted as

saying the country is in the midst of a civil war. The New York Times’
bureau chief in Baghdad, John Burns,

has said the country has been in a civil war for some time,. The prominent
(and militarily well-connected) Democrat, John Murtha,

has said the same thing as has at least one outspoken Republican war
veteran, Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator from Nebraska, who

said the following:

The former prime minister [Allawi] is correct. I think we have had a low-grade
civil war going on in Iraq, certainly the last six months, maybe the last year.
Our own generals have told me that privately. So that’s a fact.

            I agree that there is not a civil war in Iraq,
since there is nothing civil about the conflict between the Shi’ite and Sunnis
that is killing,

according to Allawi, 50 to 60 people every day, and well over 1,000 so far.
All this denial and avoidance by the administration made me think the only thing
Rummy and Co. would recognize as a civil war in Iraq was if the factions came
out one day dressed in the costumes so popular with re-enactors of the American
civil war, the Sunnis in Blue and the Shiites in Grey.

            But then Rumsfeld appeared to debunk that
notion when

he said (about a civil war in Iraq), “I don’t think it’ll look like the
United States’ civil war.”. His statement, hedging as it did about his
uncertainty that the combatants in an Iraqi civil war might look like the ones
at Gettysburg or Shiloh, reinforces my belief that’s exactly what it will take
for the likes of Rummy to admit the existence of a civil war in Iraq.

            No one questions that the conflicts involving
the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, the Christians
and Muslims in Lebanon, or for that matter, the war between the North and South
Vietnamese, were all civil wars. They all had common elements, whether
conflicting political ideologies, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or claims to
territory or governance, which are also present in the Iraqi civil war, and they
all involved the killings of and by fellow countrymen. The other common element?
To one degree or another, most foreign civil wars have been either the cause or
effect of American meddling.

            So what’s the problem with admitting Iraq has
fallen into a state of civil war? Well, it’s the same reason the administration
has difficulty admitting that the presence of American troops not only has
failed to stem the tide of terror, but has actually increased and served as a
spawning ground for it. If our war president and his stooges can successfully
deny the existence of a civil war, he can avoid taking any responsibility for it
(an evasion he has raised to a high art). But more importantly, once it is
generally accepted that Iraq has degenerated into a state of civil war, any
remaining rationale for a continued American presence evaporates, as does what
little public support remains for that intervention. It’s one thing to build a
nation; it’s quite another to have to dodge IED’s, RPG’s and bullets just to
preside over its self destruction.

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BIll Frist

Loath as I am to make predictions about almost anything,
having missed every prediction I’ve made in the last year from my homies’ (the
Pittsburgh Steelers’) victory in the Super Bowl to the price of a gallon of gas,
I am also a big believer in that old saw about the past being prologue. So it is
with some fear and trepidation that I make the following prediction: There will
be a terrorist attack, or at least dire warnings about one, in this country,
sometime within the next several months (and certainly before the November ’06
mid-term elections) .

The circumstances are ripe either for another terrorist
attack or for the removal of the cobwebs from

the terrorist warning system. No, it’s not because our  preparedness for an
attack is non-existent, because security at our ports (both sea and air) has
been shown to be about as tight as a sieve, because FEMA has been shown to be
utterly incompetent, or even because our National Guard, which would have to
respond in the event of a domestic terrorist attack, has been

decimated by its repeated deployment to Iraq. It’s because the political
climate dictates a return to a tactic that’s been successful for this
administration in the past. 

With the president at an all-time low in popularity, and an

all-time high in disapproval, the Republican party in a shambles (thanks, in
part to the Dubai ports debacle), and the country starting to believe that
Democrats are

more worthy of confidence on the Republicans’ go-to issue of national
security, there is only one thing that will save the President, and his party: a
terrorist attack, or at least sounding the alarm bells that one is imminent. 

It’s no secret that

the terrorist alert/warning system has been manipulated to benefit the
popularity rating of the administration. In a well-documented study of the
confluence of political conditions and the issuance of terrorist warnings,
entitled “The Nexus of Politics and Terror,” Keith Olberman, the articulate host
of the MSNBC show “Countdown,” revealed on the show, and in a

posting on his blog that on at least 13 occasions, the issuance of terrorist
“alerts,” had coincided with events he called “political downturns” for the Bush
administration. He summarizes the findings by saying:

But, if merely a reasonable case can be made that any of these juxtapositions
of events are more than just coincidences, it underscores the need for questions
to be asked in this country – questions about what is prudence, and what is
fear-mongering; questions about which is the threat of death by terror, and
which is the terror of threat.

Let’s not forget the effect the Bin Laden tape that was
revealed (again, no doubt fortuitously) just before the 2004 presidential
election had on the outcome of that election.
Even President Bush has acknowledged that probability.

It continues to amaze me that, despite the overwhelming
evidence of this administration’s incompetence in the “war on terror,” the
country has, at least until recently, continued to believe that Bush is their
man when it comes to protecting them from a terrorist attack. I commented about
this in an earlier piece entitled “Who
You Gonna Call,” in which I said:

But how stupid do you have to be to believe that a man who’s demonstrably
incapable of prosecuting a successful campaign to bring down (“dead or alive”)
our avowed “Public Enemy Number One,” [Bin Laden] is the man for the job, or
worse, that even if we’re attacked again, he still deserves to be considered our
protector. How many more times do we really need to be fooled?

And so, with
the prospect that the Republicans will be brought down in the upcoming elections
by their, and their leader’s, tanking popularity ratings, the imminence of
additional disclosures of ethical scandals in the Congressional (read:
Republican) bribery investigations (read: Abramoff), the likelihood that Patrick
Fitzgerald will bring his other shoe down, hard, on Karl Rove in the continuing
“Plamegate” investigation, and the general implosion by spontaneous political
combustion of the Republican party as we know it, the harbingers are clear. The
only thing that may save Bush and his party is their time-tested go-to tactic:
Be afraid, be very afraid.

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The latest gift Republicans have given Democrats in this,
an election year, is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s refusal to initiate an
investigation of the secret, warrantless NSA spying fiasco. I say “gift”
because, in spite of their fecklessness in standing up to Republican domination
of all three branches of government, the fact is the GOP is playing right into
the Democrats’ hands (if only that were truly the Democrats’ tactic).

On issue after issue, from the “Phase II” investigation of
the intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq (which Pat Roberts, the
chair of the intelligence committee
has been promising for nearly two years) to investigations of Abu Ghraib,
secret prisons, torture, Katrina, congressional ethics, oil company gouging,
etc., the Republicans, including the president, have stonewalled and obstructed,
because, quite simply, they can.

But the Democrats need to be careful not to bray too loudly
about the Republicans’ cover-ups (e.g.,

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/) lest the party in power take their
protestations seriously, and actually appear to do something of an investigative
nature with regard to so many of their, and their fearless leaders’, screw-ups.
The Dems are far better off, politically, with a party that refuses to hold
anyone accountable for the vast and far-reaching excesses and serial
incompetence of the government they control than they would be with sham
investigations which would end up being nothing more than window dressing
anyway. What use would another Republican-led congressional “investigation” be,
given that party’s reluctance to swear witnesses who testify before it, or to
issue subpoenas to recalcitrant administration minions, as has been the case
with so many prior investigations, and given the Democrats’ status as eunuchs on
any investigating committee anyway.

The failure to investigate, however, gives Democrats a
powerful stump theme, both in the upcoming mid-term elections and in the ’08
presidential contest. Not only, they can say, are the Republicans responsible
for a “culture of corruption,” they are also responsible for a culture of deceit
and obfuscation.

The reality is that with the hegemony enjoyed by the
Republicans, nothing meaningful would be likely to come of any investigations
anyway. The only time congressional investigations have meant anything was when
the parties shared power. The prime example of that, of course, is during
Watergate, when the investigation that revealed so many crucial facts about the
Nixon White House came as a result of the Democrats’ control of Congress.

That and the fact that there were Republicans who were
willing to jump on the “get Nixon” bandwagon (a “do-right” philosophy that is
completely absent from the current crop of kowtowing Republicans) resulted in an
investigation that actually accomplished something (most notably, the revelation
of the Nixon tapes). The Democrats should hope that the Dubai ports deal doesn’t
completely wake the Republicans from their robotic obeisance to their leader, or
at least that it doesn’t translate into party defections on other issues (as it
seems unlikely to, given the party line vote on the NSA investigation question).

The Democrats
need to keep their powder dry for when it will count—the upcoming elections.
In the meantime, and as

I’ve predicted before, the only meaningful accountability this
administration is likely to suffer will be at the hands of the federal judiciary
which, as we speak, is handling lawsuits covering virtually every
Bush/Republican excess, from

the NSA debacle to

prisoner abuse/torture to

Katrina. I’m still holding out hope that Henry Whittington will realize he’s
a lawyer, not a priest, and change his apology for getting in the way of
Cheney’s shotgun into a big fat personal injury suit, since that too is the only
way we’ll ever find out what really happened that fateful day on the real-life
Ponderosa.

I know I’m probably late to this dance, but am I the only one hearing alarm bells over the serenade being sung by an out-of-town enterprise promising to make Memphis the tourism capital of the world by resuscitating that hole in the
ground we call the Pyramid?

Bass Pro Shop chain is promising to turn the Pyramid into a Super Wal Mart on steroids for the “outdoors” (read: gun-rack-equipped, pick-’em-up-truck-driving) set. How rich is it that the building they’re promising to make as popular as its namesake in Giza was itself originally the result of a Music Man-like scam which, among other things, saw the building built in a 10 story hole in the ground instead of on the bluff where it belonged, and promises of an “inclinator” and an observation deck on the top
disappeared like so much fairy dust.

Can you say (or even remember) Sydney Shlenker? He must be guffawing in his grave at this proposal. And speaking of graves, maybe this
latest plan for the reincarnation of our Pyramid is appropriate, given that
pyramids are, basically, burial grounds. How better to bury the original intent and purpose for this landmark than making it a monument to blue collar consumption.

I probably don’t need to remind you that Memphis has a history of being the bridesmaid and never the bride, of settling for what it can get rather than holding out for what it needs or deserves. We lost out to Cleveland (you know, the city on the banks of the river that caught fire) for the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, only to get the consolation prize of a mini-music
museum tucked as an afterthought into the Gibson guitar factory, itself a
satellite of its main facility.

We lost out to Nashville for an NFL franchise, even though as the bridesmaid we did at least get to sleep with the groom for a couple years before that marriage was consummated. And now, apparently, we’re going to allow a store named for a fish take over our most visible landmark.

It’s like St.
Louis allowing McDonald’s to paint the arch orange and project a holographic
image of Ronald McDonald on its side.

Now we’re being told that the facility which was built as a
multi-functional sports, cultural and entertainment center can do no better than becoming a mall for the NASCAR crowd. And how are the powers-that-be putting lipstick on this pig? Why of course by touting the tourism potential of this commercial endeavor, telling us that folks will come from miles around to shop in the Pyramid. If they really wanted to make the Pyramid a shopping Mecca, they would have put a big-time (no, not like the one in Lakeland) factory-outlet complex in there, like the one that has  so successfully turned Chattanooga into a tourist hub.

Even though I have to admit there is some demographic
synergy between the patrons of Graceland and the potential patrons of a tricked out bait shop, who do you suppose does more shopping, folks looking to buy waders and portable duck blinds, or the ones looking to buy Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger duds?

I know it was too much to expect the holy rollers ever to permit casino gambling to take place in Memphis, one of the original proposals for adaptively reusing the Pyramid. Why would the same folks who legislate
against beer sales on Sunday mornings (because they’re afraid beer would beat
out church in a head-to-head competition) ever allow Memphis to become another sin city? They’d rather allow that role to be outsourced to Mississippi.

Hunting and fishing are, I will admit, probably more reputable activities than gambling (unless you belong to PETA), but then again you’re not as likely to be
“peppered” with gambling chips as you are by wayward shotgun pellets.

Someday this
city’s leaders will stop selling the city short by being willing targets for the bills of goods that so many vendors of pipe dreams see them as being susceptible to buying. In the meantime, I’m going to see if the city would be interested in turning the Mid-South Coliseum into a gigantic Pets ‘R Us.

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The man the Vice President shot last week said, during his remarks to the press upon leaving the hospital, that “we all assume some risk in what we do, no matter how careful we are,” the implication being that by going hunting he was assuming the risk that he would be shot by a fellow hunter. I understand the need for this die-hard Republican to be obsequious in the face (excuse the expression) of Cheney’s assault, but what I don’t understand is his utter mischaracterization, especially given his training as a lawyer, of a long-standing legal doctrine to justify that kind of brown-nosing.

The doctrine known as “assumption of the risk,” is a legal construct, established in the common (i.e.., court-made) law which says, in essence, that someone who is injured in an activity that is inherently dangerous can’t claim damages from being injured during that activity. So, for example, if you’re beaned by a foul ball that hits you while you’re a spectator at a baseball game, you’re SOL (another legal construct, loosely translated as “sadly out of luck”) as far as being able to sue anyone for your injuries. Similarly, if you’ve served honorably in the armed forces and decide to run for public office against a Republican opponent, you’re not going to be able to complain when s/he questions your service and suggests you were actually a coward, because being “Swift-boated” is just a risk you assume when you take on a Republican opponent.

There are many other things we do where we assume the risk of something bad happening. Running with the bulls in Pamplona, riding one of those “crotch rocket” motorcycles down a city street at 100 plus miles per hour, and jumping out of an airplane from 20,000 feet with nothing more than a few yards of silk to slow your fall all come immediately to mind. But there are some consequences of potentially risky activities we all undertake which we definitely do not assume the risk of. Food preparation, electricity and driving all involve elements of risk, but none of us assumes the risk of contracting salmonella from eating in a restaurant, being electrocuted by our computers or being run into by an 18-wheeler on the road. When any of those things happen, it’s not because of a risk we assumed, it’s because someone screwed up royally, which is what Mr. Cheney did when he shot Mr. Whittington.

In bending over backwards (or maybe forward) to kowtow to the Vice President, Mr. Whittington would have us believe that hunters assume the risk of being shot. Yes, hunting entails a certain amount of danger, if for no other reason than that lethal weapons are involved, but a steak knife is a lethal weapon, yet no one assumes the risk that they’ll be stabbed by one while having a steak dinner with friends. The worst a hunter anticipates is wetting himself because the zipper on his hunting garment jammed at an inopportune moment. Strangely enough, statistics show that fewer people are injured in hunting accidents than in dozens of other activities, from taking a bath to playing golf.

Now maybe it’s a different matter if one of your hunting companions is taking a potent mix of pharmaceuticals to keep his heart from stopping, has a history of alcohol abuse, and is willing to admit he only had “a beer” shortly before he slung his shotgun over his shoulder. If being shot while hunting were as risky as Mr. Whittington would have us believe, then hunting attire would be made with kevlar (which it isn’t), and hunters wouldn’t be able to get life insurance (which they can). No, the only risk Mr. Whittington assumed by hunting with Dick Cheney was that if he was shot, someone would try to blame him for it.

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Imagine this: a
snake crawls into your house in the middle of the night and bites your child,
injuring her seriously. What do you do about it (the snake, that is)? You call a



snake exterminator, right? He
tells you he’s going to get the snake, “dead or alive,” and as he goes into your
basement in pursuit of the snake, you even hear him taunting the snake with the
words, “bring it on.” You pay him a lot of money, and you feel good about the
prospect that he’ll eliminate the problem. Then, a month later, the snake is
back, but this time he bites one of your friends’ children. Your confidence in
the exterminator is shaken (wouldn’t it be?), and you even think about calling a
different snake expert, but you call the same one (after all, he’s told you he’s
a man of faith), and he charges you more money to go after the snake again
(there’s no money-back guarantee with snakes, he tells you). A month later,
guess what—that’s right, the snake shows up in your kitchen, and scares the
holy you-know-what out of you.

Now the question
is, do you still feel the exterminator is worthy of your confidence, and second,
are you going to trust him to go after the snake the third time, having already
violated your belief in the old “fool me once, fool me twice” bromide. The
answer to both questions should be obvious. Not only are you going to feel like
the exterminator was incompetent, you might even feel like he bamboozled you. In
any event, you’re certainly not going to make the mistake of relying on him
again. You might even sue him for snake malpractice, or try to get his
exterminators’ license revoked.

And yet, when the
snake is named Osama
bin Laden, and the exterminator is named George Bush, for some stupefying reason
I have yet to fathom, our elected snake buster still inspires public confidence
in his ability to accomplish the mission. Even though this particular snake has
only struck in our house once, he’s struck our friends, we know he’s capable of
striking us again, and based on


his latest media performance,
we know he’s planning on it. And yet, after more than four years, and many
billions of dollars fighting a war on a tactic for which bin Laden is,
literally, the

poster child, polls continue
to show that Americans trust Bush on issues of national security. Remember, this
is the same President who acknowledged, a year after 9/11 (i.e., in the 
“post-9/11 world”) that he was

not all that concerned about bin Laden
or his whereabouts.

The Republicans are
so confident in their strength on this issue, they’ve even trotted out
“typhoid
Karl,” to speak to his
party’s faithful about hammering on this issue in the coming election campaign.
Astonishingly, the conventional wisdom is that if there were to be another
terrorist attack in this country, it would end up benefiting this administration
in opinion polls, and Republicans at the election polls, something “Bush’s
Brain” is relying on. This in spite of this administration’s demonstrated
incompetence, on any objective basis (wouldn’t bin
Laden’s
nose-thumbing audio tape be evidence of that?), when it comes to effectiveness
in its “war on terror.” It is beyond challenge at this point that our
President’s misbegotten policies in his war have actually resulted in the
proliferation of terrorists and of their activities. The war in Iraq has
increased the number of terrorists, and has


served as a training/recruiting ground for terrorists,
worldwide. And most tellingly, available studies show that


the incidence of terrorism has dramatically increased,
51% in just the last year, and a whopping 250% during the five years of our
current commandant in the “war on terror.”
Heckuva
job, Georgie.          

And where are the
Democrats, the party of the only true, effective war presidents of this century
(e.g., Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman)? AWOL. Mostly running and hiding, afraid of
their shadows, or worse, trying to out-Republican the Republicans.

My contempt for the
intelligence of the American public (shared with
H.L.
Mencken) is well documented in some of my


earlier pieces. But how
stupid do you have to be to believe that a man who’s demonstrably incapable of
prosecuting a successful campaign to bring down (“dead or alive”) our avowed
“Public Enemy Number One,” is the man for the job, or worse, that even if we’re
attacked again, he’s still deserves to be considered our protector. How many
more times do we really need to be fooled?

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