Day: September 29, 2010

Obama and National Security

This excerpt from Woodward’s (sigh) new book is precisely the sort of thing I was talking about earlier:

In Woodward’s account, even after Obama decided to send 30,000 more troops, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving 40,000. Even after he decided not to pursue an all-out counterinsurgency campaign, the Pentagon kept coming back with plans involving just that.

Obama also kept asking his generals for more options to consider. They were playing the old trick of giving the president three pseudo-options — two that were clearly unacceptable (in this case, 80,000 more troops for full counterinsurgency and 10,000 troops just to train Afghan soldiers) and the one in the middle that they wanted (40,000 more troops). They never gave him another option. When Gen. James “Hoss” Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, drew up a compromise plan involving 20,000 troops (believing the president had a right to see a wide span of options, even if the military didn’t agree with them), Mullen forbade him from taking it outside the Pentagon. Obama never saw it.

In the end, Woodward reveals, Obama devised his own alternative strategy and personally wrote out its terms in a six-page, single-spaced memo that he made his top civilian and military advisers read and sign on to.

Recall that this same group of generals and their proxies were simultaneously waging a press-based war using damaging leaks against the President in the hopes of forcing his hand towards their preferred outcome(s).
Now flip that to an entity that you can’t engage publicly in any way. That only the smallest subset of your advisers can even know about. And that issues you memos each and every day telling you “They’re coming!”, any one of which may turn out to be your “bin Laden determined to strike in US,” so you can’t just shut these folks out, distrustful though you may be of both them and their data, spiteful as you are of their heavy handed and blowback-inducing approaches: they own your ass. That’s what it is to be President. Even when you’re one who knows his Constitution well enough to recoil at the thought of the very extra-judicial extermination of inconvenient citizens these folks are pitching.

The only real option seems to be to contain this apparatus everywhere you can, wait for the excess and overuse to explode, and then try to ratchet this thing down. Or another large-scale attack occurs that ratchets it up even further. Or a military coup when the economy utterly collapses. Whichever.

The “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.” Effect
Plotted in what is, perhaps, my favorite graph ever.

Jimmy “History’s Greatest Monster” Carter recalls it a little differently:

“I dropped 15 percentage points, and I almost lost the election. It was the most copies of Playboy ever sold.”

Wikipedia informs us:

The best-selling Playboy edition was the November 1972 edition, which sold 7,161,561 copies

Jimmy Carter: WRONG on his pre-election tracking polls and WRONG on Playboy circulation. We can’t trust Jimmy Carter in 2012. This message paid for by the Campaign to Reelect Barack Obama President.

What business should want, in theory, is a Republican Party that advocates for its interests. That is to say, a Republican Party willing to send 20 senators and 50 House members to the table when Democrats are writing a huge health-care bill that has the votes to pass. The Democrats would’ve given anything for some votes from across the aisle, and whatever it is that business wanted, it could’ve gotten. But since the Republican Party wasn’t interested in governing or negotiating, business didn’t have that leverage. Insofar as the GOP is the party of business, they failed their constituents: They neither stopped the bill nor – with the exception of Olympia Snowe – fully participated in the process behind it. Or take the stimulus bill, which major business groups like the Chamber of Commerce supported, but which the Republicans abandoned.

Ezra Klein describing some mythical GOP that’s actually interested in governing; the one we haven’t seen in this country in a decade or two.

BBC Reports, You Decide

David Miliband quits frontline politics

David Miliband says he is to quit frontline politics after being pipped for the Labour leadership by younger brother Ed.

Just when you think you’ve made it, somebody comes along and pips you.

pip (5) Brit., informal
verb ( pipped , pipping ) [ trans. ] (usu. be pipped)
defeat by a small margin or at the last moment : you were just pipped for the prize.
• dated: hit or wound (someone) with a gunshot.

I see. Well, one or the other, then. Jolly well played, old sport.

Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’.’ A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage… comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves… That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesin’ and grinnin’ with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise.

President Obama, about meeting Bob Dylan when he did a performance at the White House to celebrate the civil rights movement. (via warispeace)
He must be talking about some other, Gangsta Rap associated “Dylan” here. Perhaps Dyllan, with two Ls, the well known Dutch gangsta rapper?

More Please

Rand Paul: The real answer to Medicare would be a $2,000 deductible.
KY Senior 1: A $2,000 deductible?
KY Senior 2: Rand Paul wants us to pay $2,000 just to get Medicare?
KY Senior 3: That’s crazy.
KY Senior 4: I can’t afford that.
Rand Paul: The real answer to Medicare would be a $2,000 deductible.
KY Senior 1: I don’t know what planet he’s from.
KY Senior 5: Rand Paul is off the wall with a $2,000 deductible.
KY Senior 6: Doesn’t he know that we can’t afford that.
KY Senior 3: The more we learn about Rand Paul, the worse it gets.
Attorney General Jack Conway: I’m Jack Conway. I approve this message.

What are your thoughts on third parties? I’d prefer Obama to any of the floated Republican candidates, but I don’t think I can bring myself to vote for a man that thinks extra-judicial targeted killings are a good idea.

All for them but doubt their viability. Even at the Congressional level, true “something elses” (as opposed to, say, Connecticut for Joe Lieberman partiers) are vanishingly rare, and if there were a real third-party groundswell, you’d expect to see real evidence of it. Yes, Perot got ~18% of the popular vote with no national apparatus and none of this “prior evidence” I’m calling for, but he still managed a grand total of zero in the Electoral College. The game is rigged towards the bigs (and they like it that way).
Certainly such an outsider candidate is not going to win the Oval Office in 2012 unless there is an epic upheaval between now and then. Even that person would have to be on the scene by now in order to benefit from said upheval. Though I don’t doubt Palin may run as a Tea Klanner before she ever runs as a GOP nominee (and no, I don’t think she will ever have the GOP nomination), I see her as a cosmically unlikely third-party winner of the Presidency.

But I honestly don’t think Obama is for extrajudicial targeted killings. The larger security apparatus is for them, and taking on that system is essentially suicide. Even pairing back small parts of it that everyone could agree are redundant or outdated in some way is probably politically impossible in this environment. The sad truth is that zero effort has been expended in building the national conversation towards some future reassessment (maybe even a Blue Ribbon commission!) of this idiotic state of affairs in which we have a security state no one understands and certainly no one (in power, anyway) wants to questions much. The Washington Post, of all institutions, did at least make a pass at moving discussion in that direction, and it largely fell on deaf ears. And that is the true sound of our Republic dying.

Obama’s secret assassination program against US citizens

jonathan-cunningham:

jonathan-cunningham:

At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record.  In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims.  That’s not surprising:  both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.  But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”:  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

I never thought I could seriously type the title above.  It sounds crazy right?  The President running an assassination program where he can, without judicial or legislative oversight, kill any US citizen.  If Greenwald didn’t link to the legal document above, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Nothing can be done so long as the court sees it as a “state secret” so the only recourse is to elect another President in 2012.

Except that “electing another President” won’t help either. Implicit in the election of Obama (or any Democrat who ran in 2008, for that matter) was the notion that, leaving aside every other possible policy decision that might come up in their term, said Democrat would be working to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush/Cheney “Security State.” That this has not happened is an understatement. From what I can see, the Obama administration has largely embraced and extended the Bush/Cheney security state.
Electing “another President” won’t help either. Your choices come 2012 are going to be a) Obama (again, forgetting everything else that has happened by 2012: on the essential freedoms that were formerly implicit to citizenship he is a failure thus far and shows no sign of changing) or b) Palin/Romney/Pawlenty/whoever. Do you really think anyone the GOP runs is going to be to the left of Obama on basic freedoms and the rights of a citizen? I, for one, do not. Because, honestly, there is no way they let any Democrat seize the security state thing from them. It won’t even come up if they think they can’t get sufficiently far to the right of him.

One can only conclude that these policies are then, for all intents and purposes, permanent. You get one chance to roll them back: when the next person comes in. And Obama’s administration has decided they like them just fine. It would be one thing to charge and try Awlaki in absentia, and then issue the orders as something along the lines of “look, he’s a convicted criminal in a war zone; we’re bringing him to justice; he may well die in that effort, but we hope to bring him to face his sentence.” There are very few people who would argue with such a truly conservative approach. Instead: no charges, no trial, everything made a “state secret,” and not even a passing effort made at even implying that there’s a real, legal case that even can be made against this guy. He’s delivered some strident sermons. That’s the full case against him in five words. On those grounds, the future GOP-in-charge could choose to round up Jeremiah Wright. Is that a country we want to live in?

And yet the Tea Klan screams tyranny because they are still going to buy their health insurance from a private company come 2014 and the top marginal rates might rise slightly. Indeed they have their fingers on the pulse of The Founders’ deepest wishes.

Obama’s secret assassination program against US citizens