Richard Milhouse Obama

Or George Walker Obama, if you prefer. Once one president snatches powers not granted to him by the Constitution, all others will keep it:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

MIssion Accomplished

No, not the U.S. mission in Iraq, or even the one in Afghanistan. The only mission that's been accomplished is the one by Osama Bin Laden and others like him to bring a once-great nation to its knees. And I'm glad someone with the stature of Ted Koppel had the guts to say it:

America's war on terrorism is widely perceived throughout Pakistan as a war on Islam. A muscular Islamic fundamentalism is gaining ground there and threatening the stability of the government, upon which we depend to guarantee the security of those nuclear weapons. Since a robust U.S. military presence in Pakistan is untenable for the government in Islamabad, however, tens of thousands of U.S. troops are likely to remain parked next door in Afghanistan for some time.

Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, "black sites," extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it -- more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military is so overstretched that defense contracting -- for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence -- is one of our few growth industries.

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy's intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. "All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."

Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald's. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?

Because Sarah Palin turned out to be a train wreck, and because they have no one else

Who are the Republicans going to run for President in 2012? With Mark Sanford having fallen from grace, and Newt Gingrich not catching on because too many people DO remember 1994, and Tim Pawlenty trying to paint himself as Jefferson Davis along with Rick Perry, and Sarah Palin proving to be every bit the train wreck we knew she was, the Republicans are left with Mitt Romney, who will give the Christofascist Zombie Brigade fits, or -- whom?

The Wall Street Journal thought that Dick Cheney should run, but since The Dickster's health is questionable (especially without a regular supply of freshly dead human souls to feed him) perhaps another Cheney, equally adept at lying and fabricating and bellicose rhetoric against everyone east of Greenwich Mean Time would fit the bill:

Liz Cheney looks nothing like her father, but it is clear who he is. She was introduced as “our favorite vice president’s daughter” at a recent gathering of conservative women here. She kept invoking him in her speech, conveying his best regards, and likes to share cute stories about Dad trying to master his new BlackBerry.

Like her father, Ms. Cheney speaks in understated, almost academic cadences, head veering down into her notes. She also shares his willingness to pummel President Obama in stark, disdainful tones, not so much criticizing as taunting him.

“Mr. President, in a ticking time-bomb scenario, with American lives at stake,” she said, “are you really unwilling to subject a terrorist to enhanced interrogation to get information that would prevent an attack?”

By speech’s end, the crowd was standing, and the former vice president’s daughter was being mobbed for photos and hounded to run for office.

Liz Cheney is “a red state rock star,” declared Rebecca Wales, one of the organizers of this event, the “Smart Girls Summit.”

“The future of the Cheney message,” added a conservative blogger who goes by the name of Fingers Malloy (a rare man in this crowd, and even rarer, one with a Mohawk). He also called her “one of the fresh faces of our movement.”

The Republicans are desperate, and only when they're desperate do they bring out the women. The continued adoration of Sarah Palin by so many Republican men even after she's proven herself to be nothing more than the aging beauty queen and aspiring stylista on other people's money that the sane among us always knew she was shows just how clueless they are. Put something with tits out there, their thinking goes, and we'll get the women and show how with-it we are at the same time.

But I think we underestimate the money machine behind the right wing, and how much the military-industrial complex has to gain from a return to a Cheney foreign policy. Liz Cheney may look like her mother, with that blonde sunniness that hides an appallingly empty heart, but her worldview is decidedly that of her father. She both literally and figuratively is Cheney-in-a-dress.

Why we can't let Joe Scarborough get away with saying idiotic things

Because every now and then he shows that he's NOT the idiot he seems to be most of the time:

Here's what the stakes are, and why John McCain simply cannot win this election if we care about the future

I'm under no illusions that Barack Obama is a progressive dream candidate. But I fear for the future of this world if the lunatic pair of John McCain and Sarah Palin is elected:

(h/t)

Who the hell in Congress authorized this?

The expansion of the war into Iran is approaching:

The Bush administration has launched a "significant escalation" of covert operations in Iran, sending U.S. commandos to spy on the country's nuclear facilities and undermine the Islamic republic's government, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.

White House, CIA and State Department officials declined comment on Hersh's report, which appears in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Hersh told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that Congress has authorized up to $400 million to fund the secret campaign, which involves U.S. special operations troops and Iranian dissidents.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have rejected findings from U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran has halted a clandestine effort to build a nuclear bomb and "do not want to leave Iran in place with a nuclear program," Hersh said.

"They believe that their mission is to make sure that before they get out of office next year, either Iran is attacked or it stops its weapons program," Hersh said.

The new article, "Preparing the Battlefield," is the latest in a series of articles accusing the Bush administration of preparing for war with Iran.

He based the report on accounts from current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. Watch Hersh discuss what he says are the administration's plans for Iran

"As usual with his quarterly pieces, we'll decline to comment," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told CNN.

More, including video, at Crooks and Liars.

Sy Hersh's article is here. So in answer to my question, yes, Virginia, the fucking weasel Democrats sold us down the river again:

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.” The Finding provided for a whole new range of activities in southern Iran and in the areas, in the east, where Baluchi political opposition is strong, he said.

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.) Meanwhile, the Administration also revived charges that the Iranian leadership has been involved in the killing of American soldiers in Iraq: both directly, by dispatching commando units into Iraq, and indirectly, by supplying materials used for roadside bombs and other lethal goods. (There have been questions about the accuracy of the claims; the Times, among others, has reported that “significant uncertainties remain about the extent of that involvement.”)

[snip]

Senior Democrats in Congress told me that they had concerns about the possibility that their understanding of what the new operations entail differs from the White House’s. One issue has to do with a reference in the Finding, the person familiar with it recalled, to potential defensive lethal action by U.S. operatives in Iran. (In early May, the journalist Andrew Cockburn published elements of the Finding in Counterpunch, a newsletter and online magazine.)

The language was inserted into the Finding at the urging of the C.I.A., a former senior intelligence official said. The covert operations set forth in the Finding essentially run parallel to those of a secret military task force, now operating in Iran, that is under the control of JSOC. Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.

And they gave him Congressional cover anyway. Unbefuckinglievable.

The defensive-lethal language led some Democrats, according to congressional sources familiar with their views, to call in the director of the C.I.A., Air Force General Michael V. Hayden, for a special briefing. Hayden reassured the legislators that the language did nothing more than provide authority for Special Forces operatives on the ground in Iran to shoot their way out if they faced capture or harm.

The legislators were far from convinced. One congressman subsequently wrote a personal letter to President Bush insisting that “no lethal action, period” had been authorized within Iran’s borders. As of June, he had received no answer.

Wonderful. Another "sternly worded letter." Like that's ever done a lot of good with this bunch of criminals.

On March 15, 2005, David Obey, then the ranking Democrat on the Republican-led House Appropriations Committee, announced that he was putting aside an amendment that he had intended to offer that day, and that would have cut off all funding for national-intelligence programs unless the President agreed to keep Congress fully informed about clandestine military activities undertaken in the war on terror. He had changed his mind, he said, because the White House promised better coöperation. “The Executive Branch understands that we are not trying to dictate what they do,” he said in a floor speech at the time. “We are simply trying to see to it that what they do is consistent with American values and will not get the country in trouble.”

Obey declined to comment on the specifics of the operations in Iran, but he did tell me that the White House reneged on its promise to consult more fully with Congress. He said, “I suspect there’s something going on, but I don’t know what to believe. Cheney has always wanted to go after Iran, and if he had more time he’d find a way to do it. We still don’t get enough information from the agencies, and I have very little confidence that they give us information on the edge.”

Figure that out all by yourself, Einstein? So why the fuck did you give these people authorization to do this?

None of the four Democrats in the Gang of Eight—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman John D. Rockefeller IV, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Silvestre Reyes—would comment on the Finding, with some noting that it was highly classified. An aide to one member of the Democratic leadership responded, on his behalf, by pointing to the limitations of the Gang of Eight process. The notification of a Finding, the aide said, “is just that—notification, and not a sign-off on activities. Proper oversight of ongoing intelligence activities is done by fully briefing the members of the intelligence committee.” However, Congress does have the means to challenge the White House once it has been sent a Finding. It has the power to withhold funding for any government operation. The members of the House and Senate Democratic leadership who have access to the Finding can also, if they choose to do so, and if they have shared concerns, come up with ways to exert their influence on Administration policy. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said, “As a rule, we don’t comment one way or the other on allegations of covert activities or purported findings.” The White House also declined to comment.)

A member of the House Appropriations Committee acknowledged that, even with a Democratic victory in November, “it will take another year before we get the intelligence activities under control.” He went on, “We control the money and they can’t do anything without the money. Money is what it’s all about. But I’m very leery of this Administration.” He added, “This Administration has been so secretive.”

But THEY GAVE THIS ADMINISTRATION THE FUCKING MONEY TO DO THIS ANYWAY.

I don't even know what to say. It isn't that I didn't know that Our Democratic Party was a bunch of craven, weak-kneed pushovers. It isn't that I didn't know that they work for the same corporate masters that the Republicans do, only they don't even have enough self-respect to ask for the big bucks, being content instead to settle for the scraps left over after the Republicans have gorged themselves till their buttons are popping.

Why the fuck are we even bothering to participate in this charade of an election, when our own party has told us that there is absolutely zero air space between themselves and the Republican agenda of police state and bankrupting the country through endless war? What the fuck's the point?

Monday Big Blue Smurf Blogging: What They Said

Today's honoree: Mustang Bobby, for having the intestinal fortitude to take on William Kristol's sputteringly preposterous op-ed piece in today's New York Times.

Money quote:

William Kristol, who has never had a problem heating up the war rhetoric to get someone else to go fight a war for some neo-con vision, never chose to serve either; growing up the only person he ever saw in uniform was the doorman at the Waldorf Astoria. He glorifies the service of others as if he was re-enacting some G.I. Joe Saturday-morning cartoon fantasy, doing the bidding of the nation's leaders. He serves as the chief cheerleader of sending others, including the sons and daughters of the keepers of BlueStarChronicles.com, to fight his wars, but never thought of doing it himself, and when he was faced with it during the time he was eligible for the draft, he found a way to avoid it. Someone else served instead of him. And he has the nerve to chastise MoveOn for pointing out that there are some people who don't want their child to go to war.

Your Democratic Senate

...has today taken us a step closer to war with Iran.

Schmucks.