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Political Rantings

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Dick Cheney and the Dangling Participle

Monday, November 21st, 2005

Vice President Dick Cheney::

“Although our coalition has not found WMD stockpiles in Iraq, I repeat that we never had the burden of proof. Saddam Hussein did. We operated on the best available intelligence gathered over a period of years and within a totalitarian society ruled by fear and secret police.”

A quick note to Jeff Porten, among others: the totalitarian society he refers to here is Iraq, not the United States (at least I hope that’s what he meant…)

:-)

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The Shame of the Plame Game

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

They’re saying the special prosecutor is going to announce indictments in the Valerie Plame matter tomorrow, so before it all starts, allow me to go on record: Shame on us all. To wit:

Shame on the American people for not seeing what is coming a mile away, and rising up as one to say, “Enough already!” This has got Lewinsky-gate written all over it: an investigation about one thing, yielding charges about something else, all in an effort to punish people for a third thing (which isn’t illegal, but has really ticked people off). The last time we allowed this to happen, we got so distracted as a nation that the mainstream media was actually debating whether or not bombing Osama bin Laden might have been a diversionary tactic to take the focus off the President’s legal troubles. What will we let slide this time?

Shame on Republicans like Kay Bailey Hutchison, who are refuting all charges before they’re even made, suggesting that there’s no reason to, you know – actually examine the charges before declaring them bogus. I’m sure some spin doctor out there has indicated the need for positive voices to counter all the negative voices out there, but IMHO, doing this only weakens the case later if the charges are bogus. Also, how in the name of all that is holy can she say something like this:

I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn’t indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.

Tim Russert took the words right out of my mouth:

But the fact is perjury or obstruction of justice is a very serious crime and Republicans certainly thought so when charges were placed against Bill Clinton before the United States Senate.

Check out the whole conversation if you like – perhaps Clinton was charged with more than just perjury, but perjury was the main charge (certainly the one most people remember), and to suggest now that perjury doesn’t warrant the indictment of a government official is so hypocritical that it’s almost impressively so.

Shame on the media (and not just the mainstream this time – bloggers too!) who talk about the crime as theoretical, but discuss the rationale behind it as fact. I’ve yet to read that Rove & Libby are accused of “disclosing the name of a CIA agent.” Instead, I read that they are accused of “disclosing the name of a CIA agent in order to get revenge on her husband for publicly criticizing the President’s main justification for going to war in Iraq.” Not that I put revenge past these guys, but I can easily see a scenario where the crime was committed but the rationale was different. Consider: Wilson writes his Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. High ranking government officials get deluged with questions about his trip to Africa – Why was he there? Who did he talk to? What did he find out? At some point, one of them tells a reporter that the CIA sent him there (as opposed to the White House or anyone else), and mentions that his wife works for the CIA and maybe that had something to do with why he was selected. The crime (disclosing her name) is still present, but let’s face it – this could have been background data run amok just as easily as it could have been revenge.

And finally, shame on the Democrats who’ve been planning this since the day Clinton was impeached. Obviously, I can’t prove this, but I’ve always had the feeling that there were folks out there vowing to impeach the next Republican President for something, either for pure revenge or to lessen the historical importance of Clinton’s impeachment. The war in Iraq felt like the right venue for such a stunt (and yes, it’s a stunt), but the war has yet to produce an actual crime among the executive branch – just a lot of decisions that royally pissed off those who disagreed with them.

The constant repetition of the rationale (to get revenge on her husband for publicly criticizing the President) strikes me as the tell-tale sign of game at hand. The “linking” game also seems to point that way. For example, Tuesday’s NYTimes reported on the front page that Libby had learned about Plame from Dick Cheney, rather than from a reporter. This strikes me as an excuse to mention Cheney’s name in conjunction with the whole affair, even though speaking to his own Chief of Staff hardly sounds like a crime of any kind.

Bottom line: if crimes were committed, the guilty should be punished in accordance with the severity of their crimes. But we’ve been through the process of turning the executive branch into a hot, new reality show. We know the downsides. And if we do it again, then shame on us all.

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Miers cleans up the mess

Thursday, October 27th, 2005

Harriet Miers has withdrawn her name from consideration.

As I wrote earlier, this sounds like exactly what the senate was trying to do – give her a way out that didn’t embarrass herself or the President (much), without having to vote her down.

Right result; wrong reasons.

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Getting out of the Miers Mess

Friday, October 21st, 2005

I haven’t written anything here about the Miers (or Roberts) nomination because, quite frankly, I don’t know much about Supreme Court Justices or how they should be chosen. I will say this, though:

It shocked me that there is no law (or at least an unbreakable tradition) that states that Supreme Court Justice nominees must be judges by profession. I’m told other non-judges have been appointed in the past, but on the face of it, it seems to suggest that there isn’t a single judge working in the U.S. today that is more qualified to be on the Supreme Court than this non-judge.

I’ve also been amazed at the reaction to Ms. Miers from those who call themselves conservatives. The concern seems to be primarily around her lack of qualifications as a conservative and her lack of stated conviction that Roe v. Wade must be overturned. Those who do mention her lack of experience as a judge tend to do so glancingly, either as an intro to the above two points, or as an afterthought. It makes me think that Bush could nominate a trained monkey for the court, and some people out there would complain that the monkey isn’t sufficiently pro-life.

Then there’s this (hat tip: InstaPundit). By asking Bush & Miers to violate attorney/client priviledge as part of the confirmation process, it seems as though Miers has to decide her first case before even broaching the confirmation hearings. The irony, of course, is that if she exhibits a strict belief in the right to privacy (which many advocate in a Supreme Court justice), then she’s forced to withdraw her nomination. If she’s willing to violate that right, then it could be used against her during the confirmation process as evidence of her willingness to legislate from the (hearing room) bench. All in all, a pretty slick political move for Graham & Brownback.

Finally, a question: if everyone (and it really does seem like everyone) thinks she’s a bad choice, shouldn’t the senate, who is hired to represent us, reject her nomination in a vote that resembles 100-0? Doesn’t the fact that, despite all the dissatisfaction, she still stands a pretty good chance of being confirmed bother anyone? To me, it calls into question the purpose of the confirmation process in the first place.

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Perhaps a giant India-shaped blanket?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2005

It seems the President of India is worried that terrorists will use Google Earth to attack his country:

High-resolution pictures are freely available on the Internet and are provided by many sites in addition to Google Earth, Kalam said. He cautioned officers during his speech to be aware of emerging “open-source intelligence.” He also showed the audience aerial pictures of some of the sensitive locations in India.

“When you look deeper into it, you would realize that the specific laws in some countries, regarding spatial observations over their territory and UN recommendations about the display of spatial observations, are inadequate,” he noted.

I thought we were past the days of “the Internet is only good for porn” and “How did kids survive before electric typewriters?” Look – all good technologies have the potential to be used for evil. The problem, in every one of these cases, is the evil. Not the technology.

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Al Qaeda – Take Your Business Elsewhere

Friday, October 7th, 2005

I’m writing this from on board the uptown E train, which started at the World Trade Center station and is heading toward my office in midtown Manhattan. This is the same subway I rode on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Apparently, Al Qaeda would prefer that I be too scared to ride this train today

Well, consider this a big, old fashioned !#*@(‘ Off, Al Qaeda. Take your terror threats someplace where people care, OK? It’s our subway, and we know better than to run scared from the likes of you

There’s my stop – I gotta go. You lose this round, guys…

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Helping the People Who Can’t Leave…

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

Here’s how Texas is dealing with the people who can’t afford to transport themselves out of harm’s way.

Again: Note the absence of the federal government in the picture. Note the absence of FEMA. Note the basence of state and local officials waiting for help to arrive.

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Evacuating the hospitals

Monday, September 19th, 2005

Tropical Storm Rita could potentially be a Category 1 Hurricane by the time it reaches the Florida Keys, so Florida is taking standard precautions:

Officials ordered [40,000] residents evacuated from the lower Florida Keys on Monday.

The state was sending a National Guard cargo plane to evacuate 22 patients from Key West’s hospital to Sebring, near Lake Okeechobee. Several critically ill patients already had been evacuated to hospitals in Miami.

Gov. Jeb Bush declared a state of emergency.

This is because a Category 1 hurricane MIGHT hit the Florida keys in a couple of days. Note the absence of the federal government. Note the absence of FEMA. Note the absence of state and local officials waiting for help to arrive.

Now, one would assume that Louisiana, who’s largest city is below sea level would have a similar plan – at least for the hospitals, right? But then there’s this on the front page of the New York Times:

Of the dead collected so far in the New Orleans area, more than a quarter of them, or at least 154, are those of patients, mostly elderly, who died in hospitals or nursing homes, according to interviews with officials from 8 area hospitals and 26 nursing homes.

There were piecemeal plans. Hospitals were required to have enough emergency provisions to operate for two to three days during a disaster. State officials said it was their responsibility to evacuate patients if necessary. Nursing homes were required to have their own evacuation plans, complete with contracts with transportation companies.

In two public hospitals that primarily treat the poor, emergency generators and wiring were located on the ground floor, vulnerable to flooding, because state legislators had repeatedly refused to pay for upgrades. Both washed out in the storm.

It goes on and on – hospitals and nursing homes were not clear about whether Mayor Nagin’s evacuation order applied to them. Private hospitals, which could afford to do so, hired buses and helicopters, but when the time came, the bus companies had no drivers.

At HCA Healthcare (a large, for-profit hospital), the president had to be awoken at 3AM to be told the water was rising in the building. He had leased 20 helicopters, but the helipad wasn’t accessible from the hospital. He tried to turn Tulane University Hospital’s parking garage into a helipad, but Tulane was evacuating their staff before the other hospital’s patients. Tulane denies this, but most of the staff did get out before some of HCA’s incubator-ridden babies. You do the math.

Virginia McCall, director of the ICU at Methodist Hospital (who got all their patients out) says that Universal Health Services, the company that runs the hospital, told her that they had rented trucks, but that the trucks were commandeered by FEMA for other priorities. The company has no comment, and FEMA denies the accusation. FEMA, of course, has been roundly criticized for having no one on the ground until several days after the storm had passed. Again, you do the math.

People have argued with me recently that there’s no way a city can effectively evacuate 100% of its citizens in an emergency. There will always be people who don’t get the message, or who refuse to leave. I’ve argued that regardless of this, a plan should be in place. Even if it doesn’t work, at least there’s a plan, and people know what to expect.

But the hospitals and nursing homes? No bed-ridden patient is going to refuse to leave if his doctors and nurses tell him he has to. The lack of a plan for these people epitomizes the extent to which the city let its people down.

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I Couldn’t Have Said it Better Myself…

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

You know, whenever I get it in my head that I’m halfway decent at putting words down on a page, I read something from a guy who really knows what he’s doing, and then crawl back to my safe little world, where I spend most of the day talking to computers. In this case, it was James Lileks covering the same ground as my Blame Bush First post, but with infinitely more style & grace.

Highly recommended reading. Here are some highlights:

I am somewhat surprised that RIGHTEOUS ANGER is now the default mode in situations like this – but not too surprised. If the biggest problem in the world is Bush, then everything is naturally his fault.

But wait, there’s more!

Oh, the lessons we learned from Katrina. Bush’s refusal to invade New Orleans tells everything you need to know about Republican racist perfidy. The local government’s incompetence tells you nothing whatsoever about Democrats ability to govern at the micro level. Lethal storms can be turned aside months in advance by signing the right treaties. Or so they’re saying in the reality-based community.

And then finally, some lessons for us to take away:

Lesson one: Don’t rely on the government. Four years after 9/11, it’s apparent that some local governments are not well-oiled machines when it comes to disasters – more like a box of sand and busted gears. Blame for that can be promiscuously distributed.

Lesson two: the next terrorist attack will not unite us for a warm hug-filled fortnight. The hard left won’t wait 24 hours before blaming President Bush, and the country will enjoy the sight of prominent pundits angrier at the President than the men who nuked Des Moines.

Well said, Mr. Lileks. Well said.

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New Orleans’ leaders finally wake up…

Thursday, September 8th, 2005

C. Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, has finally decided to make the evacuation of New Orleans mandatory:

Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered law officers and the military late Tuesday to evacuate all holdouts – by force if necessary. He warned that the combination of fetid water, fires and natural gas leaks after Hurricane Katrina made it too dangerous to stay.

I, for one, view this as a positive step. Alas, there are still issues. The military personnel have said they have no plans to use force. The National Guard has said that they don’t take orders from the mayor, which seems like an almost unbelievably blatant challenge to the governor (should we or shouldn’t we?). Local police are also hesitant to use force, hoping that the threat of force would be enough in most cases.

The article says that Eddie Compass, the police chief, is “mindful of the bad publicity that could result from images of weary residents dragged out of their homes at gunpoint.” Seriously? He’s worried about bad publicity at this point? Maybe he’s afraid the focus will come off the White House & FEMA and people will start asking him what the cops were doing in the days before the storm?

More on Eddie Compass: it seems teams of workers trying to repair cell phone towers in the area have been fired upon “on almost a daily basis.” It took “100 officers and seven armored personnel carriers [to capture] a suspect in a housing project who had been firing on workers trying to restore cell phone towers.” The police chief’s reaction?

The police chief boasted that 7,000 more military, police and other law officers on the streets had made New Orleans “probably the safest city in America right now.”

Again, I say, seriously? There are thousands of dead bodies floating in the streets. The amount of sewage-related bacteria in the floodwaters is at least 10 times higher than acceptable safety levels. Workers trying to restore basic communications are being fired upon daily. This is the safest city in America?

On the political front, more encouraging news:

Given the extent of the misery, Louisiana’s two U.S. senators

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