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Rove: He shall not be moved

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The blog languishes, I know, but it is for the greater good. Book work is intense right now. Regular programming will resume at some point down the road when a first draft is complete or within sight.

In the meantime, a thought for the day: I share the belief of many of my media colleagues that it would be a fine thing indeed for Karl Rove to leave government service, given the now-public record of his dirty trickster-ing, compounded by a White House press office cavalcade of cover-up lies.

But I’m willing to bet that, in fact, Rove is around for the long haul. He’s President Bush’s friend and closest adviser — the man hailed in quasi-Biblical terms by his foremost beneficiary, after last November’s elections, as “The Architect” of right-wing triumph.

If Democrats controlled Congress, they could perhaps make trouble for a public official caught so flat-footedly and foolishly in the machinery of a legally dubious political revenge play. But they don’t. They have no leverage. And the record of the Bush White House is one of digging in heels in the face of moral culpability and ethical collapse.

Accountability is anathema to these men. No one in the Bush administration has seen fit to resign in the face of a torture scandal that has set back the war on Al-Qaeda more than any bloody battle; Donald Rumsfeld is still in charge of the military that his misbegotten strategies have begun to wreck. Alberto Gonzales, who in his service as White House counsel helped approve the legal opinions that made that torture scandal possible, was rewarded with a promotion to the Justice Department, and may well soon sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he can further protect American soldiers from the scourge of the Geneva Convention. Dick Cheney’s escalatingly comical pronouncements on how well the war in Iraq is going have begun to achieve a Lyndon Johnson-esque width of credibility gap, but he doesn’t appear fazed in the least.

President Bush explained the logic here to us all when he declared that his “accountability moment” came and went last November. Karl Rove’s tactical political genius ensured the moment would come out Bush’s way. Now there’s no accountability at all. Unless there is hard evidence of perjury in front of a grand jury, which I doubt Rove was dumb enough to commit, I don’t think The Architect is going anywhere. The White House is his house now.

Your laws? They are for the weak!

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A good companion read to Gary Kamiya’s excellent cri de couer in today’s Salon:

Tony Judt, in the New York Review, writes of the current low ebb of the United States’ moral standing in the world and sees, as he puts it in his conclusion, a “bad moon rising.” It is a tough analysis to read, and a hard one to argue with. (Link via Rafe Colburn.)

This bit is beyond maddening:

  In March 2005 the US National Defense Strategy openly stated that “our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.”

At first I simply could not believe that the official document of our nation’s military strategy would lump “judicial processes” and “international fora” in with “terrorism”, sneering at them all as equally contemptible “strategies of the weak.” But here it is.

Looks like we’re in for nasty weather, indeed.

Anonymous bosh

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In comments below, Scott Butki asked, “Does it seem odd – or hypocritical to you – that the mantra at news organizations in recent weeks has switched from ‘anonymous sources are bad to use’ to ‘Deep Throat was good for doing what he did and Woodstein good to use him,’ ignoring the contradiction between the two?”

Good question, and I’m sure one that many people are scratching their heads over. What’s going on here? Are anonymous sources really the big problem they seem to be in the wake of the Dan Rather and Newsweek/Koran controversies? On the other hand, if news organizations get too gun-shy about anonymous sources, how will anyone ever be able to keep reporting on the buttoned-tight Bush White House?

It’s funny to watch people try to get their heads around the apparent contradictions between “anonymous sources — good!” and “anonymous sources — bad!” Really, they’re only contradictions if you treat the issue as a matter of journalistic technique (the use of unnamed sources) rather than one about the end to which the technique is employed. The distinction that really matters isn’t between “anonymous source” and “named source”; it’s between “good source” and “bad source.” Good sources can be anonymous; bad sources can be on-the-record. What experienced journalists and editors do is assess, assess, assess. Make sure you’re not being used. Double-check your info. Use your sense of smell. The theory is that an on-the-record statement is more reliable than an anonymous statement, since the person quoted has to defend his words in public. That’s a good theory, and it often applies. But it doesn’t seem to stop most public officials from mouthing the most absurd lies, damned lies and statistics on the record. And despite the rule-of-thumb that on-the-record is more reliable, there are some circumstances where unnamed sourcing is the only way to get the truth out.

One reason people are getting confused is that Woodward and Bernstein’s use of Deep Throat was a fundamentally different kind of anonymous sourcing than we typically see in today’s Beltway. Mark Felt/Deep Throat fed information to Bob Woodward because (a) there were profound dangers to the nation in play — we had a president who was, among many other outrages, ordering his political opponents burglarized — and (b) going to the press was the only option, because the idea of “going to the authorities” is laughable when the authorities are the wrongdoers and they’ve corrupted the system from the top.

I’m not belittling the complexity of Felt’s choice; and obviously the man was conflicted for the rest of his life. It’s never easy to be a whistleblower, and if you’re an unconventional whistleblower stuck in a duel with All the President’s Men, you’ve got to be careful as well as right. Felt is certainly no pure hero, but the derision he’s received from the surviving coterie of Nixon loyalists is beneath contempt. This old guard of die-hard Nixonians still haven’t gotten it through their heads that their former boss actually stole an election (if it weren’t for all the dirty tricks employed against Democrats in 1972, who knows where the vote would have gone?) and, left unchecked, might well have destroyed the American system of government. Their complaints against Felt today only demonstrate how lucky we were that there was at least one “disloyal” Deep Throat willing to say, this nonsense stops here.

Today’s anonymous sources are, for the most part, different. They’re not risking anything by speaking up. Generally, they are choosing to be anonymous to avoid taking a risk. They want to float a trial balloon but don’t want their name attached. They want to undermine a political rival. They want to state something a little politically inconvenient without leaving it on the record.

Anonymous sourcing evolved in the years since Watergate from an extraordinary tactic for an extraordinary time into a depressingly routine way of doing business for the political elite. The Bush administration itself has been extravagantly dependent on the opaque cloak of anonymity — the “highly placed White House official” who assures us that the war is going better, or the economy’s on the mend. This is the sort of anonymous sourcing that ombudsmen and editorial editors and journalism pundits are right to say should be banned. There’s no need for it.

As for the Watergate tradition of anonymous sourcing: every time there’s a president who’s illegally abusing power, let’s hope there’s a Deep Throat ready to talk, a Woodward ready to take notes, and a Ben Bradlee ready to run the stories. Oh, yeah — it also helps if the opposition party controls at least one house of Congress. Otherwise, you could catch the President himself robbing a hotel room — or starting a war under false pretenses — and it wouldn’t matter.

Deeply Felt

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Since I spent a good couple of months in 2002 editing John Dean’s e-book “Unmasking Deep Throat,” I had my own interest in today’s news unveiling former FBI honcho Mark Felt as the original deep-background source for Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate reporting. But if this outcome felt anti-climactic, it’s not just because the conclusions Dean so painstakingly reached — among other things, that Deep Throat was almost certainly an attorney, and that he couldn’t have been at the FBI — were simply wrong (to be fair, it appears that the bobbing and weaving Woodward and Bernstein have done through the years. and Felt’s own vehement disavowals, left a somewhat deceptive trail for the attentive sleuth). And it’s not just because Felt has been the “most likely suspect” for over a decade now.

It’s really because it marks the end of the mystery at the heart of the investigative-reporting act that inspired my generation of journalists. I was 15 years old in 1974; I listened to the Watergate hearings in the car radio every morning as I rode with my dad on the way to my summer job. I chose to become a journalist at perhaps the one moment in American history at which the public’s trust in reporters was higher than its faith in political leaders. The naming of Deep Throat represents the final coda to this old story — and reminds us of how much things have changed.

Meanwhile, the current generation of executive malfeasance awaits its comeuppance. Which public servant will step forward, in shadows, pseudonymously or not, to blow a loud whistle on this decade’s lies? Or has the Deep Throat of the George Bush White House already fed his tips — say, to Seymour Hersh — but we’re simply too fatalistically inured to the “disassembling” of our leaders to do anything about it?

Poor David’s almanac

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Poor David Brooks — the guy’s timing is simply awful. Here he is, offering a column — “Meet the Poor Republicans” — that tries to explain why a particular contingent of not-so-well-off voters has lately been voting for the GOP. His answer? Unlike the poor folks who vote for the Democrats, these poor people “agree with Horatio Alger”: they believe that they’ve got a reasonable shot at moving up the ladder, living the American dream, making a fortune and leaving that word “poor” behind. Poor Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be people who think that the cards are stacked against them.

Unfortunately for Brooks, his column ran on the very same day that the Times kicked off a mega-series on “Class in America” — the central premise of which is that there’s a lot less class mobility in America than people believe. (Lest you conservatives fear that this is simply a plot by that filthy liberal Times rag to fill our heads with lies, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story last week reporting pretty much exactly the same thing.)

This juxtaposition of material couldn’t possibly have been intended by the Times’ news editors to make Brooks look like a condescending idiot or a closet Democrat, but that’s the result. Because there’s no way to put these two articles together without concluding that those poor people out there who vote Republican because they think they have a chance to get ahead, those people whose praises Brooks are singing, are, sadly, chumps. They have been sold a bridge. They believe in something that, like creationism or Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal, is contra-factual. On the other hand, those poor Democrats, however unfashionably glum and not-with-the-morning-in-America program they may be, seem to have a clearer picture of the state of the union.

One could go further and begin to lay out how the policies of the Bush-era GOP, supported by Brooks’ “poor Republicans,” are only further locking in the sort of class immobility the Times (and Journal) articles note. But let’s not kick Brooks while his own paper has tripped him sprawling, face-down, on the political floor.

The parting on the left are now parting on the right

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The heart of conservatism, as elucidated by its progenitor, Edmund Burke, is a healthy respect for the messy, inconsistency-laden reality of human institutions as they have actually evolved across generations. Such institutions are necessarily imperfect, but have value by the simple virtue of having withstood pressure over time. You discard such institutions only with great caution; what is destroyed overnight can take decades to rebuild. This is where we get the very term “conservative”; conservatives believe in the conservation of human institutions and values. Conversely, the word “radical” derives from the Latin for “roots,” because radicalism is all about digging things up at the roots and starting over.

Both impulses have their place in society. But our national politics have reached the strange tipping point at which the two labels have become reversed: they now hang from the necks of our politicians and parties like mixed-up nametags.

The Republican, “red state” agenda can be called “conservative” only by force of habit. Abroad, President Bush pursues a messianic vision, one part religious war and one part democratic crusade, neither pursued with any consistency but both leading to regime changes, bloodshed and the casual abandonment of carefully built institutions and alliances. At home, Bush, having enacted massive changes to the federal tax structure that are steadily bankrupting the government, seeks to scuttle Social Security, the most successful social program in American history.

The president is a radical. It is his Democratic opponents, fighting a rearguard action to protect the institutions of the liberal state that their predecessors built over the last century, who are now conservatives.

I’m thinking in this framework as I ponder the Senate’s “nuclear option” mess. (For a guide to the intricacies of this contorted political conflict, there’s no better starting point than Tim Grieve’s Q&A in today’s Salon.) What’s interesting about the Senate’s procedural civil war is how completely the Republicans, in their triumphant eternal Now, have taken their eye off the past and the future. The past tells us that every party in power sooner or later falls out of the majority. In the future, the Republicans will surely want and need the filibuster that they are so gung-ho to eliminate today.

The Senate leadership’s inability or unwillingness to imagine a future shoe-on-the-other-foot scenario has an analogue in the administration’s casual attitude toward the Geneva Accords and other safeguards against torture. The military has traditionally understood the vital importance of sticking to these agreements, even with despicable and immoral enemies, because it’s the only way you have any hope of insuring that your own people won’t be tortured when they end up in the other side’s prisons. But the Bush administration’s end-justifies-the-means thinking has left this tradition in tatters.

Having squeaked into the White House twice in a row, these guys, it seems, can’t picture a future in which they are no longer running the world. And their short-sightedness is not only beginning to wreck the government; it’s trashing their own conservative tradition. I can’t claim to understand why. Perhaps the millennarian streak of the religious right provides those under its sway with a sort of safety hatch: Like Jim Morrison said, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near. If the end times are nigh, then why worry about the Democrats regaining the majority in a de-filibustered Senate? But I think it’s less likely that the Republican leadership is counting on the apocalypse than that they’re just slaves to short-term thinking.

Bombs away

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If a suicide bomber attacks and the media don’t cover it, are the victims still dead?

Today the New York Times’ rookie conservative columnist, John Tierney, offers a variation on the See No Evil argument about Iraq (itself a variation of the Blame the Messenger gambit). The real problem with Iraq, Tierney argues, isn’t that the nation is drifting into civil war and that two years after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow the U.S. still can’t provide any measure of personal safety for those Iraqis brave enough to volunteer to serve in the new government, or show any sign that it has begun to figure out how to reduce the level of violence in the country. The problem, says Tierney, is that the U.S. media is too darn determined to report on the Iraqi rebels’ attacks.

Tierney spins his case by donning the cape of a crusader for media quality: Sensationalist journalists are just too easily distracted by gory photo opportunities. There’s no news here, the columnist argues; seen one suicide bombing, seen ’em all. “How much shock value or mystery is there anymore to suicide bombings? How intrigued are people by murders when the motive, the weapon and the murderer’s fate are never in doubt?”

In this view, the bombings in Iraq are context-free acts of brutality set apart from any historical continuum. Tierney thinks the media should show “a little restraint” and “reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings.” In his formulation, everything that’s happening in Iraq — all the complex interaction between Sunnis and Kurds and Shiites and American forces, all the ethnic and religious cross-currents, all the backdrop of oil politics and the post-9/11 war with al-Qaeda — gets reduced to the phrase “suicide bombings.” Don’t think that we’re dealing with the latest chapter in a war started by our own government; it’s just a strange rash of “suicide bombings.” Putting the bombers on TV only encourages them! But if we stop the cameras, maybe they will go away.

Tierney’s column is self-evidently ridiculous, but it’s worth noting that it also represents an odd twist in conservative rhetoric. Before the Iraq war, it was liberals who argued that there was no compelling reason to send an army into Iraq — that the equivalent of international police action was doing the job and would continue to do so. (Some liberals also argued for the “police action” approach against Al-Qaeda: Frame the 9/11 attackers as criminals, not as wartime enemies. But the president’s religio-apocalyptic “War on Terror” rhetoric became America’s marching orders instead.) Now that there really is a sad, bloody, endless war in Iraq, the conservatives’ line is shifting: They don’t want us to think of it as a war at all. It really is policing, now, even though we’ve still got a few divisions in the field and soldiers are dying every day. We should deal with it, Tierney says, the way Rudy Giuliani dealt with criminals. Cutting out the press worked in New York City; let’s try it in Baghdad!

The trouble is, while obviously the bombers in Iraq treat media coverage as a part of their strategy, every CNN camera could switch off and every American reporter could come home — you could have a complete blackout of U.S. coverage of every bombing — and the Iraqi rebels would continue to pursue their goals. The U.S. is only one part of a bigger game to them. The horrific bombing attacks in Iraq are not random acts of brutality; they are part of a calculated war plan aimed at undermining any chance of success for the Bush administration’s project in Iraq.

If you were an Iraqi contemplating whether to run for office or serve in the Iraqi police force, you might be reasonably afraid of being targeted by a fanatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. You might overcome your fear; you might choose the better part of valor. One thing I seriously doubt you’d consider was whether said fanatic’s bomb attack was going to get U.S. press coverage or not. Life might be a little easier for the Republicans in Washington if the American media paid less attention to Iraqi suicide bombers, but things wouldn’t get any better for Iraqis.

It’s true that the Bush administration has had some success in applying a See No Evil strategy to U.S. casualties in Iraq. Not allowing the American media to show pictures of American coffins returning home really has helped the administration keep the lid on domestic discontent with its policies. So we might expect White House officials to like the idea of extending the tactic more widely to the Iraq field of operations. What’s hard to fathom is why a journalist would propose anything of the sort.

A cure for Mad Boss Syndrome

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With the controversy over John Bolton’s nomination to become Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., it’s been possible for the administration’s supporters to paint Bolton’s opponents as whiners. The Democrats, it seems, don’t like Bolton because he’s, you know, tough. Raises his voice. Pushes around his inferiors. Well, ask the Republicans, what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t we want a tough guy at the U.N.? We’re the strongest nation on the planet! Why should we care if one of our diplomats is a hardass? We’re supposed to reject an appointment because the guy yells?

Of course, if you’ve been following the story, you may understand that the issue here isn’t one of bad manners — it’s about bad management and bad judgment. Bolton isn’t just a tough guy; he’s a tough guy who apparently used his ire to bludgeon intelligence reports into the shape he sought. It’s one thing to push around your subordinates; it’s quite another to push around the information on which the lives of Americans and American troops depend. The reason Bolton’s nomination strikes so many observers, including me, as so profoundly wrong is that it’s precisely Bolton’s management style — one shared by, and endorsed by, the Vice President’s office — that led to the debacle of American intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion.

In the “whatever happened to those WMD?” game, the Bush team has been pretty successful at shrugging off blame or diverting it at the intelligence community: Darn that CIA! How could they have misled us so badly? But Bolton’s confirmation hearings stand as a blunt reminder of what really happened: Bush’s men hammered the intelligence “community”, raged at their troops, threw fits and tantrums and delivered threats and ultimatums until the information flowing up from the field matched the fantasy their ideology dictated. When that fantasy collided with the reality on the ground in Iraq — look, ma, no WMD after all! — these men turned around and said, well, we acted on the best information we had at the time. First they pushed around their subordinates; then they blamed their subordinates. Classy! And, sadly, genuinely dangerous in the realm of national security, which is why the intelligence field has a strong tradition of trying to keep its reports insulated from the political tide — one more tradition, like the Senate filibuster, that the pseudo-conservatives of the Bush cadres are casually tossing overboard.

The Bolton saga strikes a chord with the American public because we’ve all worked with, and most of us have worked for, a Bolton or two in our time, and we know how it goes: Mad Boss shouts at the top of his (it’s usually, though not always, a male phenomenon) lungs until the things people say to him match the things he wants to hear.

I first encountered the world of Mad Bosses in various jobs I held as a college kid and later as a fledgling journalist. I assumed that this was the way of the world — that somehow the role of Being In Charge carried with it a dose of generic rage, and that all bosses would inevitably, at some point, explode and abuse their employees. The macho culture of old-school American newsrooms certainly spawned its share of Mad Bosses, and I’d have my run-ins with them. For me, one of the grand things about leaving the comfortable nest of the newsroom and helping found a company was doing my small part to shape a different, more civilized workplace culture, in which people treated each other — superior and subordinate alike — as colleagues, not kicking posts.

I came to realize that Mad Bossism was not an inevitability; it is, in fact, an anachronism. It flows less from power than from frustration at powerlessness. The boss explodes because the world won’t bend to his will — and it’s supposed to! What good is being boss if it won’t?

This has given me a tad more empathy for the bulging-veined, red-faced bosses of my past, though I’m firm in my determination never to work anywhere near the type again. The truth is, it’s no longer as easy as it used to be to get away with this kind of behavior: Joe or Jane Subordinate is going to be blogging every last twitch of Mad Boss’s tantrums. Just look at what’s happened to the director of Los Alamos National Labs, G. Peter Nanos. If the postings about him on a largely anonymous Los Alamos insiders’ blog are true, he’s a classic Mad Boss. Yet the scientists and engineers who work for him, having reached their limit, aren’t giving up; they’ve used the Web to shame him. Mad Boss may have met his match in Mad Blogger.

I can’t say I’m sad to see the field so leveled. The Web is criticized, and often rightly so, for the incivility of so much of its dialogue. But here’s one instance in which it can actually help counter the sort of offline incivility that for too long has been simply a given of the workplace.

Terri Schiavo, political football

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It’s difficult to express just how outrageous and surreal are the antics of Congress and the president this weekend around the Schiavo case. It’s like something out of DeLillo, a sickening mixture of TV-fueled tabloid theater and heartland hokum dressed up in a high moral dudgeon that can’t fully conceal the crude political agenda at work. (See the GOP talking points on the issue if you really want to retch.) We wind up with a bizarre, unsettling misfiring of our constitutional system, in which two branches of government punch a ragged hole through the barrier between federal and state affairs and rudely throw their weight onto the scales of justice in one family’s grieving dispute.

Our nation does, of course, possess a perfectly functional legal system that handles the sad and difficult details of cases like Terri Schiavo’s. For anyone who wants more information about those details, I recommend a careful reading of this page (thanks to Rafe Colburn for the link) — a thorough, dispassionate accounting of the facts of the case from a Florida attorney/blogger. To the extent this source is accurate, and it seems to be — it’s far better documented than TV news, tabloid articles and even what you will get from a serious newspaper — the Schiavo case has run its course and more through the Florida courts. The legal record does not suggest even the thinnest reed of hope for a recovery. (“At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid.”) In a case like this, we’re all entitled to our opinions, of course. But only if you’re a congressman or a president do you get to ignore the courts, overrule judges and have your opinion trump the law.

So to hell with the courts, to hell with the evidence, and to hell with the careful determination of Terri Schiavo’s wishes that the courts have made. Bush and his supporters aren’t happy with the outcome, so they’re going to federalize the case! The president himself — who has, through international crises thick and thin, been unable to rouse himself from those long, long vacations at his Texas ranch, even when hundreds of thousands were killed by the Indian Ocean tsunami — will fly back to Washington to sign the bill! Sanctity of life? The hypocrisy would be ludicrous if the case weren’t so heart-rending. We will turn our backs on the myriad deaths in Sudan, we will pay any price in casualties to root out phantom weapons of mass destruction, we will execute the mentally retarded without lifting a pardoning executive finger — but heaven forbid the courts from concluding that one poor woman whose brain shut down many years ago would have preferred her relatives let her die in peace. No, that cannot stand; we must bend or break our system of government to stop it.

This is a decadent circus the right has cooked up for us, worthy of that Late-Roman-Empire feeling that ever more deeply enshrouds the Bush era with each new turn of the news cycle. It is also a neon display of the contempt President Bush and his party hold for our legal system (I guess that when it comes to meddling with Florida courts, their track record is successful), and of their willingness to trample on due process and individual rights for the sake of a cause celebre cherished by the Base That Must Be Obeyed.

I keep thinking, in this dark time, that sooner or later Bush, DeLay & co. will cross the line of political propriety so blatantly and incontrovertibly that they will, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, find their ertswhile allies turning away from them in disgust. Maybe transforming the private conflict of a family dispute into grotesque public spectacle will be that sort of Rubicon for them. But I’m afraid that such an outcome would require a stiffer spine and a braver soul than most Democrats seem able to muster.

In the meantime, clearly, everyone who doesn’t want George Bush and Congress to overrule relatives, doctors and courts to make those bedside end-of-life decisions for them needs to draw up that living will, pronto.