Letters to the Editor
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My fingers are crossed
I am hoping, hoping against hope that this story may get some of the attention it deserves. Thank you Glenn.
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Goldsmith .. Comey .. and Ashcroft ..
are not heroes at all ... but they are .. compared to the rest of the Decider's administration .. which is a pretty sad statement .. the only three guys that have their reputation somewhat intact
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Jesus
This sort of mentality leads me to think they may not necessarily mean one more bomb from the terrorists.
Any ole bomb may do.
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Call It What It Is
Sitting around the White House dreaming of all the great new powers they will have once the new terrorist attack occurs -- as Addington was doing -- is nothing short of deranged.
Wrong. It's nothing short of treason.
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I will faint if I see Goldsmith's info highlighted in the Post or Times
The press will ignore it – after all, it’s old news (yawn), and who wants to dredge up such messy details so close to Holy 9/11, especially when to do so would expose the media’s own abject failure to cover these issues back then, not to mention their actual cheerleading of such authoritarian behavior. If there is blood on anyone’s hands, it’s on those of these hateful goons in office and the sycophant, compliant media who lined up behind them (and also now our spineless Dem leadership.
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Won't Get Fooled Again
"the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands"
Let's do everything we have to do to make sure that when the attack they so desperately want and need does happen, we all see just whose hands are bloody and whom to blame.
Next time, the bushies' claims of innocence will be a lot harder to believe.
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Nick R:
I will faint if I see Goldsmith's info highlighted in the Post or Times
The article I am citing here, the source of the revelations from Goldsmith's book, is from the cover story of the upcoming New York Times Magazine.
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But, but, but................
He is donating all the proceeds from the book to charity to prevent the standard integrity attacks which Bush followers launch at any ex-officials who commit such blasphemy.
So who will be the first attacker to use the argument that this book will make him more well known and then he can enrich himself with the next book?
Yes, my cynicism about the Bushies really runs that deep.
1.20.09
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Where's The Explosion?
It is simply astounding that the enormous increase in news outlets in modern America has failed to produce what one might reasonably expect to be an "explosion" of intellectual entrepreneurship. While there are sources of aggressive political journalism at the national level, the public is usually treated instead to an ongoing parade of the most hackneyed sort of journalistic herd behavior. The prime suspect in this is the corporate business culture as most vividly embodied by the dead, amoral hand of Rupert Murdoch who views news simply as a malleable product to interleave between advertisements. However, given the competition for this advertising revenue and given the staggering nature of the corruption and genuine hatred for our republican form of government exhibited by this administration, one might think that you would see another Woodward and Bernstein coming to the fore and alerting the public to our country's need for their moral outrage. However, except for voices such as yours, we apparently wait in vain. It is all very discouraging.
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Psychopaths
I almost thought that Glenn's excellent post on Podhoretz was a hair over the line in calling him a "psychopath," but after reading this blog in particular for the past six months, I've come to believe that it's an accurate description of not only Podhoretz, but a large contingent of the current Republican political leadership. Name-calling isn't debating, but of course it's difficult to debate someone who is neuro-chemically atypical. When public figures exhibit the combination of a horrifying lack of empathy and a habitual need to lie and manipulate, I think it's appropriate to step back out of the "debate" that they want, and engage in a little bit of behavioral analysis. And under such an analysis people like Addington are clearly psychopaths. It's not productive to debate them, any more than it's productive to debate an unmedicated schizophrenic, and it's terribly dangerous to put them in positions of authority where their potential lethality is pronounced. Goldsmith may be a right-wing authoritarian, but the fact that he had a problem with the deception and manipulation that was being asked of him, and that he had a moral line he would not cross, suggests that he doesn't share the psychopathic tendencies of Addington, Cheney, Bush, and others. Yet Goldsmith was given his walking papers in nine months and Bush and Cheney are still around. It says a lot that a "normal" right-wing authoritarian ideologue just wasn't "enough" for the Bush White House.
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These tinpot bureaucrats only flinch when it bites them back
Notice that Goldsmith was fine with abuse of power until either his ego or his actual skin were somehow threatened. He was happy to man the guillotines, but his heart fluttered if any of his co-conspirators looked at him sideways.
Cowards, all of them.
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Addington said:
"We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court," .
You suggest that the Bush administration is interested in exploitation of terrorism. There are many academics, former government and military leaders, who think it isn't just exploitating something done by others. Polls suggest that a majority of people believe that the Bush administration is covering up the true story of what happened on 9/11.
Exploitation, or facilitation? After all, that next bomb could be just what the administration ordered...
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Mote, beam, eye
On July 31, 2007 Glenn loudly complained that
Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon were paraded across virtually every network and cable news show and radio program and heralded as "war opponents" and "Bush critics"
Today, failing to see the irony, Glenn writes:
Jack Goldsmith -- a right-wing lawyer with radical views of executive power and long-time friend of John Yoo
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Michael Isikoff: Goldsmith to testify in September
Michael Isikoff wrote some predictions, 8 days ago, when Gonzales announced his resignation.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20465741
Newsweek / Web exclusive
Gone, But Hardly Forgotten
Embattled attorney general Alberto Gonzales finally calls it quits. But Justice Department investigators and Democrats in Congress aren't nearly done with him yet.Web exclusive
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Updated: 4:22 p.m. ET Aug 27, 2007[...] Gonzales’s departure will likely not stop Congress from continuing to hold hearings that are likely to raise still more questions about Gonzales’s credibility on a range of matters, including his central role in the controversies over the president’s warrantless surveillance program. The Senate Judiciary Committee, for example, has already planned a hearing next month featuring the first public testimony of former Office of Legal Counsel chief Jack Goldsmith. A one-time administration stalwart, he became convinced that Gonzales and other administration officials were breaking the law in eavesdropping on conversations of U.S. residents without judicial warrants, according to multiple former department officials.
It was Goldsmith’s advice that prompted then–deputy attorney general James Comey in March 2004 to refuse to approve a continuation of the surveillance program. That prompted Gonzales (then White House counsel) to make an extraordinary nighttime visit to Attorney General John Ashcroft’s hospital room in an unsuccessful effort to convince him to overrule Comey.
Democrats have already seized on apparent discrepancies between intelligence community documents and Gonzales’s testimony to demand the appointment of a special counsel. (Recently released notes by FBI Director Bob Mueller seem to contradict Gonzales’s testimony that Ashcroft was “lucid” and fully able to discuss the matter when the two visited Ashcroft in the hospital room. Mueller in his notes described Ashcroft as “feeble, barely articulate, clearly stressed.”)
The upcoming account by Goldsmith was expected to provide Democrats fresh ammunition in their campaign for a special prosecutor. Those demands are hardly likely to go away just because the chief target is leaving the scene. In fact, Democrats—like Senate Judiciary Committee chair Patrick Leahy—have already signaled that they won’t drop their probes just because Gonzales has resigned. One White House fear is that they will demand the appointment of a special counsel into Gonzales’s conduct as the price for confirming whomever Bush selects as his successor. “It’s going to be very tough,” said David Rivkin, a former White House lawyer under President George H.W. Bush, who is close to officials in the current White House. “What [Gonzales’s resignation] is going to do is frontload a lot of battles on a number of issues: the appointment of a special counsel, document production, FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act)—that otherwise would have been spaced out over the next year.”
Rivkin, who has publicly defended Gonzales, said that he believes that it would be “political blackmail” for the Democrats to hold up the appointment of a new attorney general [...]
- - Michael Isikoff, Monday, August 27, 2007