Category: Politics

The saga of the anonymous CIA author continues. According to the Boston Phoenix, Michael Scheuer is compelled to publish anonymously because of CIA restrictions. He’d rather let his name out, but can’t.

This means I was more or less wrong in my fevered speculations a couple of weeks ago. He’s pissed off, but he’s not a kamikaze. Although I suppose if he gets fired in the next couple of months, there’s something to be said for the notion that he’s too angry to care about his career.

Nader is cozying up with the far right, yes. He’s cutting into Kerry’s support, yes.

It is still wrong to play legalistic games in order to keep him off the ballot. I don’t doubt that Nader may have violated the letter of the law in Arizona, and maybe he doesn’t yet qualify for the Florida ballot on a technicality. Great. Does that mean it’s morally right to control ballot access?

Fuck no. Controlling ballot access is a method of controlling who can be elected, pure and simple. It is a way to say “minority opinions of a certain size don’t count.” I dislike Nader vastly, but let the hypocritical bastard run.

The Nation provides a hypothetical article on the Bush/career civil servant battles. I say hypothetical because Greider is just guessing, no matter how good the guesses might sound to my conspiratorial nature. It’s a fun hypothesis, though.

Game quotes are a key part of the Ambercon experience. Thusly, my jotted notes from the weekend. They’re all funny from my perspective, and probably from the perspective of those who were in the games. Maybe not so much for others. Also my note-taking is terrible and unreliable.

Bush’s new campaign video, “Kerry’s Coalition of the Wild-eyed,” will certainly inspire his base. It’s a miscalculation nonetheless.

The video opens with Gore asking how we can possibly drag the good name of America through Saddam’s torture prison. This keeps the Abu Ghraib scandal prominent. That’s not so good for Bush; it doesn’t poll well at all. Then you get the cheesy Nazi images which won’t hurt Bush, although their use here implies that Abu Ghraib wasn’t so bad — which, again, people will disagree with.

Next, Howard Dean says he wants his country back. This may be the most effective moment for Bush; the Dean = anger meme is still around. It’s immediately followed by the segment of Michael Moore’s Academy Award speech in which he says that we went to war for fictitious reasons. Hey, if Bush wants to remind a disenchanted public that they may agree with Moore, that’s fine by me.

Then Gephardt calls Bush a miserable failure. 54% of Americans polled by USA Today think that sending troops to Iraq was a mistake. Whoops. More Nazi images in left-wing political ads follow — again, this’ll be pretty effective — and then Gore calls out that Bush has betrayed this country. You know, it’s easier to smear Gore as an out of control maniac when you don’t show him speaking with honest passion.

Finally, Bush kindly presents Kerry’s soundbite about all the people who are unemployed because of Bush’s policies. Ouch.

So yeah — this is going to make anyone who was already going to vote for Bush very happy. But it is not going to persuade fence-sitters. It simply exposes the undecided to 20 seconds of Bush criticism without any response from the Bush campaign other than “wow, aren’t they angry and cynical?” Problem is, it’s a cynicism and anger which is shared by many voters.

(Via rone.)

Kerry grandstands a little and visits the Senate to vote on an amendment which provides more veteran benefits. The Republicans use various procedural tactics to make sure he can’t vote on the bill, delaying it until the next day. Kerry heads back to keep on campaigning. The Republicans vote the bill down.

Of course Kerry was playing political games and manuvering to make himself look good. But it worked. Maybe Bush doesn’t want the military vote.

Reuters happily informs us of the following facts:

John Kerry’s wife inherited $500 million. John Kerry’s Nantucket house is worth $9 million. John Kerry’s boat is worth $150,000. John Kerry’s sporting equipment cost $2,500.

And George Bush has a huge ranch, but for some reason it’s not important how much that cost. Also, he fishes. No news on whether he pays $500 for a fishing rod or not, or how many rods he owns. I dunno — maybe he builds ‘em by hand, and maybe he carved the ranch out of the wilderness with his own two hands.

Josh Marshall’s guest blogger, Spencer Ackerman, interviewed that anonymous intelligence official I mentioned the other day. Some nice insights into the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

We saw al-Qaeda execute the operation of killing one American, kidnapping another, within two days. It reinforces the idea of nearly simultaneous attacks. They posted the information about Mr. Johnson, said what they wanted, said what they were going to do, and did it. Which perhaps is the most important trademark for al-Qaeda: they tell you what they’re going to do and then they do it.

“Section 1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of Louisiana, that no governmental agency, including corporations with corporate authority only as approved by the President of the United States under the provisions of any law or resolution of the Congress of the United States, and no officer, agent or employee thereof, shall exercise in this state [Louisiana] any power not delegated to the United States by the Constitution of the United States, but reserved by the Constitution of the United States to the state of Louisiana.

“Section 2. That any persons who violate any provision of this act shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be fined not less than $100 nor more than $1,000 and imprisoned in the parish jail for not less than three months nor more than twelve months.”

This one never got to the legislature; Huey Long was assassinated before he could introduce it.

Kevin Drum writes about another salvo in the CIA/Bush war. When a high-ranking intelligence officer accuses Bush of “an abject, even wilful failure to recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq,” you know someone’s pissed off.

Especially since he’s got to know he’s going to get outed. Consider that this comes in the wake of the Valerie Plame leak. There’s no doubt that this guy is going to be discovered and his name is going to be published and his career is going to be over. However, he’s unhappy enough that he just doesn’t care. (So why publish anonymously if you expect to be found out anyway? Two reasons: it allows him to delay the inevitable a little while, and it focuses attention on the book.)