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The GOP's Iraq ProblemGeorge W. Bush's damn-the-torpedoes determination to stay the course in Iraq has thus created an excruciating dilemma for the GOP. By sticking with the White House, Republicans in Congress can block the Democrats' efforts to end the war, either by filibuster or by upholding an almost certain veto of any bill challenging the war. But any such victory will be Pyrrhic, costing them dearly in next year's election. Between now and then, they'll remain trapped between a White House that isn't ready to give an inch and a Democratic caucus in the House and Senate that can force them to cast vote after embarrassing vote in defense of Bush's war over the next thirteen months, in full public view.
Subverting Majority RuleThe Republican obstruction campaign continues. Yesterday, the Republican minority in the Senate filibustered and blocked two measures that had majority support in the House, and bipartisan majority support in the Senate. Republicans continue to filibuster at a pace three times anything ever seen before, in a systematic effort to block popular reforms.
Fifty-six Senators, including six Republicans, supported the resolution offered by Sen. James Webb, D-Va., and Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to guarantee the soldiers fighting in Iraq adequate home rotations. This sensible bill - vital to the mental health and readiness of the soldiers on the front line - was blocked because the remaining Republican senators lined up with their leadership to filibuster it.
Similarly, 56 Senators, including six Republicans, supported the legislation introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Arlen Spector, R-Pa., to restore the fundamental right of court review for those detained under suspicion of terrorism. Once more the will of the bipartisan majority was subverted by the filibuster strategy of a partisan minority.
Republicans are filibustering so many bills that the press has begun to cover this extreme tactic as business as usual. The front-page Washington Post story covering the Webb proposal is headlined "Senate bill short of sixty votes needed." The article says the proposal "failed on a 56 to 44 vote, with 60 votes needed for passage." The article never tells the reader that the reason majority rule was frustrated was because of a Republican filibuster that requires 60 votes to overcome.
Republicans decide to punish the troops for their failuresLate Update: The roll call is here, and it confirms that the only change in voting was that John Warner decided to vote against it this time, a change that was offset by Dem Tim Johnson's return into the Senate. Also, GOP Senators David Vitter and Sam Brownback, who were no-shows last time, showed up to vote no this time.
Bottom line: Not a single Republican moved from the No to the Yes column. In fact, the only Republican movement was towards the "No" column. As Atrios put it, "welcome to September.
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Glenn Beck -- apparently referring to Democratic donor William Paw -- falsely stated that Paw, who Beck said had an income of $46,000, sent Clinton "I think $200,000 in donations." In fact, according to the Federal Election Commission's donor database, William Paw himself donated $4,200 to Hillary Clinton's campaign and $11,800 to all Democratic candidates beginning in October 2005, while, according to the Los Angeles Times, the seven members of the Paw family "gave $213,000, including $55,000 to Clinton and $14,000 to candidates for state-level offices in New York." Beck's guest, American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., stated that Norman Hsu, a businessman and Clinton "bundler," is one of several "shadowy Asian figures" who have been involved with campaign finance violations associated with the Clintons.
As Media Matters documented, Tyrrell has a long history of making wild claims about the Clintons in the Spectator and in anti-Clinton books he has written, including The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After The White House (Nelson Current), which Tyrrell hyped during his appearance. Under his watch, the Spectator, once a little-known conservative monthly, used tabloid journalism to smear the former president and first lady on a regular basis with no evidence. In his October 20, 1997, "Media Notes" column, Washington Post staff writer Howard Kurtz wrote:
The magazine has been staunchly conservative since Tyrrell and [co-founder Ronald] Burr launched it while they were at Indiana University. But in recent years, as its circulation has mushroomed from 30,000 to more than 200,000, the Spectator has dived headfirst into the scandal-mongering business, fueled in part by the [right-wing philanthropist Richard Mellon] Scaife donations.
Now the magazine, which broke the "Troopergate" story, runs such pieces as "Boy Clinton's Big Mama," "The Clintons' Brewing Micro-Scandal," "Hillary, the CIA & the Iraq Cover-Up" and "Fast Times at White House High." Tyrrell himself has weighed in with two pieces on Bill Clinton's supposed ties to drug-running at the Mena, Ark., airport and another titled "Is Clinton on Coke?"
DNI McConnell: I Lied To The Senate
Committee, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell claimed the new expansive FISA legislation passed by Congress prior to the August recess — the so-called Protect America Act — had helped to thwart a an alleged terror plot in Germany.
A government official later told the New York Times that McConnell was wrong, and that the intelligence had been collected under the old FISA law which required warrants. A chorus of House Democrats immediately raised concerns about McConnell's claims.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) demanded McConnell back up his sworn statement. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) said the Protect America Act "played no role in uncovering the recent German terrorist plot." House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes urge McConnell "to issue a public statement immediately" correcting his remarks.
Denying the Truth: Petraeus, Iraq, and Our Pontius Pilate PressI was in Miami last night for the Univision-hosted Democratic debate. Listening to their responses on Iraq left no doubt that the candidates have gotten the message that, no matter what Gen. Petraeus says during his testimony, the American people — including the Hispanic community — are done with this war.
"We need to quit refereeing their civil war and bring our troops home as soon as possible," said Hillary Clinton.
"I believe no political progress [in Iraq] means no funding without a timetable for withdrawal," said John Edwards.
"I'm calling on Republican congressmen and legislators to overturn the president's veto of a timetable," said Barack Obama.
Later, after the debate, Chris Dodd told me he had made it clear to Harry Reid: "As you are trying to get Republican votes for a compromise bill, don't count on my vote on any legislation that doesn't include a clear withdrawal date."
I asked freshman Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey if he felt the same way. "I voted against the war as a Congressman," he told me. "I've been in favor of a definite withdrawal date for a long time. I don't close the door on a bill that, like the Webb amendment, would achieve the same results by making troops unavailable. But it's time for America to stop enabling Iraqis' refusal to come to terms with what they need to do."
So the American people get it, and the Democrats running for president and trying to win their votes get it. Then why do so many in the media still not get it?
In Sunday's New York Times, Michael Gordon, Judy Miller's former partner in the Ahmed Chalabi vaudeville production of "Saddam's Got WMD," served up a fact-challenged piece of administration propaganda in which he asserted, "The most comprehensive and up-to-date military statistics show that American forces have made some headway toward a crucial goal of protecting the Iraqi population."
Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid. Nowhere does Gordon point out that the methodology the Pentagon uses to arrive at the comprehensive stats he cites has been thoroughly discredited, as shown by the Washington Post. Instead he asserts:
"Data on car bombs, suicide attacks, civilian casualties and other measures of the bloodshed in Iraq indicate that violence has been on the decline, though the levels generally remain higher than in 2004 and 2005."
Violence In Iraq Is Beyond Our Control
One might also compare the civilian fatality reports from Iraq with the reliably documented details of violence in Baltimore. In 2006, there were 275 murders in the city, which has a population of about 650,000. The same murder rate, scaled up to the Iraqi population of 27 million, would produce 11,500 violent deaths per year and 45,500 killed over four years of conflict.
Reports based on Pentagon and Iraq Body Count sources estimate that about 75,000 civilians were killed in Iraq over the first four years of the conflict. This suggests that Iraq is less than twice as violent as Baltimore. In stark contrast, the Johns Hopkins estimate of 600,000 violent deaths over four years suggests that Iraq is 10 to 15 times more violent than Baltimore. The latter is intuitively more consistent with qualitative impressions.
Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destructionOn Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.
Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.
