Everything is Connected
That is the somewhat annoying tagline to the movie, SYRIANA. But it's true not only for SYRIANA'S portrait of the oil industry and foreign affairs, but it's a good place to begin when unpacking our current economic, political, and foreign policy woes.
It's also a good place to begin when promoting alternative solutions. Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect makes the case for Democrats to rally around the common good.
Courtesy of the washington monthly, we have a lovely vision of the Republican response to the gas price crisis.
On Scarbrough Country last night, Chris Matthews and Joe Scarbrough mocked the Republican plan to give Americans a $100 gas rebate. Matthews said it smacked of 'let them eat cake.'
Here, I should give credit to Matthews for being tenacious about the Bush Administration's policies while often fawning over the president personally. Matthews definitely gets wound up in the political cult of personality, but he was constantly challenging the intel on Iraq, and the lack of real debate on the issue in the lead up to the war - not just afterward. Hardball has lately been ahead of the pack in highlighting new details on the CIA leak case and in the Duke Cunningham/Watergate/Hooker scandal. Between Hardball, and Countdown with Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's prime time is the place to go if you're sick of Fox and the ineffectual CNN.
Recently on Hardball, Howard Dean connected the high gas prices with the Iraq debacle.
Chris Matthews also had a terrific interview with Tyler Drumheller and Gary Bernstein, two former CIA officials with troubling accounts of working with the administration.
Steve Clemons of the Washington Note explores the our current Iran strategy here and here.
Never rule out the possibility that Bush will escalate the tensions with Iran to put the Democrats on the defensive in the midterm elections. This happened in 2002. This doesn't require Bush to actually attack Iran, it just means he has to push the issue, and make Democrats pick a side. The problem with all this is, if Bush goes that route, it will have implications our standoff with Iran. Even if you have little or no intention of invading, there is a momentum of events in foreign affairs that can have dire consequences.
Democrats need to come out unified and opposed to any escalation in hostilities with Iran. It's not the non-issue that Social Security Reform was, but with Iran being unable to procure nukes until at least 5 or 10 years, and the fact that our military is stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, Dems need to rally against this like they did last year against Bush's Social Security scheme.
Dems have to get their house in order as they ask voters to connect the dots on the Republican "culture of corruption." They need to not cover for Rep. William Jefferson who's been accused of accepting a $400,000 bribe from a telecommunications firm. Today, Nancy Pelosi called on the House ethics committee to investigate Jefferson, but yesterday she left a different impression.
This probably won't help either, but it should be easy enough to isolate a story about drunk driving and special treatment when the congressman in question is a Kennedy.
A post from me would be incomplete without some mention of the CIA leak case. Newsweek has a great piece on how Fitzgerald zeroed in on Rove.
And finally, a former CIA analyst gives Rumsfeld the business. Notice how Rumsfeld is still hiding behind Colin Powell's credibility. More on the CIA analyst here.
The lies begat the mess in Iraq, which begat the gas prices, which are further aggravated by our saber rattling toward Iran, which is clouded by the mess in Iraq, which begat the leaks to cover for the lies about Iraq, which hampered our ability to track the progress of Iran's nuclear
program.
I haven't yet connected all this to Patrick Kennedy's car crash or Duke Cunningham's hooker parties in Watergate, but maybe Stephen Gaghan can explain it all in SYRIANA II.
Whoa - breaking news - CIA director Porter Goss has resigned. There have been rumors about his possible involvement in the Duke Cunningham/Hookergate scandal. Could this be the final connection I was looking for?
posted by Christopher @ 10:18 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Hey, can someone send me an invite to this?
I like politics and stuff.
How about an invitation to comment to your heart's content?
Some updates on the Porter Goss resignation.
Laura Rozen of warandpiece.com writes that Goss may be getting forced out due to his hiring of Kyle "Dusty" Foggo who was links to the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal. Duke was bribed by Brent Wilkes in exchange for "help in landing millions of dollars in federal contracts." - american progress action fund.
Foggo is an "Executive Director . . . and the agency's (cia) third ranking official." Foggo "admitted he attended the poker parties thrown by Wilkes . . . though he denies ever seeing prostitutes at the gatherings."
More from the American Progress Action Fund:
"The alleged links between Goss, Foggo, and Wilkes have led some to return to questions raised when Goss initially selected Foggo to be executive director in November 2004."
CR (can I call you CR?), that was an excellent post, almost poetry, that paragraph of connections.
On Goss, this quotation from the BBC story nicely illustrates, or so it seems, the dangerous nature of the ineptitude of this Administration:
There have also been rumblings of discontent at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
He upset some staff by bringing in several top aides from Congress, who were thought by some in the CIA to be too political.
Several high-level CIA staff have resigned recently.
Jane Harman, the leading Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said last week: "The CIA is in a free fall."
"I've never been as concerned about our nation's security as I am this week," she said.
Now, is his resignation necessarily good? It all depends, I suppose, on the replacement.
Loved the hydrogen car/SUV photo; Emily's one-word reaction: "disgusting."
You know, the "common good" seems too saccharine for me, and I am not familiar with the philosophical underpinnings to which Tomasky appeals. Now this may sound simplistic, but "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is the phrase, right? I don't hear self-sacrifice or the common good there, though I do distinctly hear mention of rights. . . .
For my money the Beinart piece I mentioned the other day gets it much closer to right: what liberals can offer are two valuable insights. First, economic security is a pre-condition for democracy, not a result of it (compare China and India if you don't believe me). Liberals, then, ought to work to promote economic security around the world. As Beinart puts it, "liberals have traditionally distinguished themselves from conservatives by insisting that to promote liberty, America must promote opportunity as well." Here here.
Second, being open to correction (or, as it is derisively known, self-doubt) is a virtue. A foreign (or domestic, for that matter) policy predicated on a dogmatic certainty in being right (sound familiar?) is a bad policy. Not only does it alienate other nations, it both denies the possibility of improvement and fails to separate, in Beinart's terms, idealism from fanaticism.
One crucial feature of this virtuous, non-dogmatic idealism is that the US ought not see itself as fit to tell other nations what to do; countries must be allowed to make their own choices--dogmatically to assert the rightness of our way of life is, again, bad policy. A great Truman quote in the Beinart article: "We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength . . . that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please."
In other words, a platform focused around these values (idealism instead of fanaticism, and a recognition that economic development is of key importance) is a platform that I like quite a bit, and one that, I suppose, might even be nicely sound-bitten into a paean to the common good. . . .
Goss lasted way longer than anyone expected because there was a firestorm within months of his appointment when he started ignoring 'super agents' comments, suggestions and intel; and in fact many of the most highly trained agents left because of his political motivations including most department heads.
The only reason one can give to his remaining of the job (?) so long is Bush's inability to fire anyone until the mud turns into quicksand...another story, but illustrates why he (Bush) is sinking into the quicksand himself.
--rmfd
On the subject of Hastert's phony energy efficiency photo-op, it should be noted that Democrats in Congress have been guilty of similar hypocrisies.
(Thanks to YHD for helping me re-post this).
I may be wrong, but I didn't see anything about Democrats making a show of driving a particular kind of car to an event only to switch cars a block away.
Obviously, these are publicity things, and people would rather not pull up in their big suv's (although one democrat did) but to make a show of pulling up in hybrids, and get caught switching to an suv a block away, is funny.
Riding in the hybrid is about the picture. But a different picture will be remembered.
Cheney on Goss:
"He didn't have to take the job. He took it on at a very difficult time, and I think he's done a reasonably good job at it, too."
from the washington post
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