Late isn't always better than never

The information about the Downing Street Memos has been out for almost a year, but only now that George W. Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet does the New York Times see fit to cover them:

Stamped "extremely sensitive," the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair's most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book "Lawless World," which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president's sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

[snip]

The January 2003 memo is the latest in a series of secret memos produced by top aides to Mr. Blair that summarize private discussions between the president and the prime minister. Another group of British memos, including the so-called Downing Street memo written in July 2002, showed that some senior British officials had been concerned that the United States was determined to invade Iraq, and that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" by the Bush administration to fit its desire to go to war.

[snip]

Mr. Bush was accompanied at the meeting by Condoleezza Rice, who was then the national security adviser; Dan Fried, a senior aide to Ms. Rice; and Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. Along with Mr. Manning, Mr. Blair was joined by two other senior aides: Jonathan Powell, his chief of staff, and Matthew Rycroft, a foreign policy aide and the author of the Downing Street memo.

[snip]

Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised three possible ways of provoking a confrontation. Since they were first reported last month, neither the White House nor the British government has discussed them.

"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."

It also described the president as saying, "The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam's W.M.D," referring to weapons of mass destruction.

A brief clause in the memo refers to a third possibility, mentioned by Mr. Bush, a proposal to assassinate Saddam Hussein. The memo does not indicate how Mr. Blair responded to the idea.

In February 2002, a half-million people marched in New York City because we knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. The denizens of Left Blogistan knew that this president was going to take us into a war based on lies. When the Downing Street memo first came out, the British, and anyone who bothers to read anything other than the New York Post and the New York Sun and watch anything other than Fox News, knew for certain the kind of chicanery in which Bush and Blair engaged in order to get us into this war.

And now the rest of the country should know. The question is whether they will still choose not to know, because to know is to be obligated to get involved with the political processes necessary to do something about it.

A bad day for Howie Kurtz

Wow. First Lara Logan, then Kos. Now, I'm not part of the Markos Moulitsas Admiration Society. I'm not up there with the alpha dogs of Left Blogistan, to be sure, nor do I ever expect to be. And while I admire what he's been able to accomplish, Kos seems a tad too puffed up with his own self-importance -- perhaps understandably so, but still....And his willingness to put women's issues on the back burner is completely at odds with what I regard as progressive.

But all that notwithstanding, he, like Lara Logan, did a heck of a job [Brownie] today on Reliable Sources demolishing Howie Kurtz' vain attempts to:

1) equate Air America's little 2000-watt stations with the Limbaugh/Hannity machine;

2) defend WaPo's hiring of Ben Domenech as "providing balance." Kos pointed out that Dan Froomkin is a long-time journalist at the Post, NOT a blogger; and

3) make Domenech's plagiarism look like just college oversight.

Kurtz doesn't even TRY to not look like a shamelss Bush Administration shill. But he got thoroughly raked over the coals today, both by the traditional media (Logan) and by Kos.

As always, video at Crooks and Liars. And DO toss them some cash, willya? Bandwidth costs money.

The real journalists are finally coming out of the shadows

CBS News' Lara Logan did the smackdown of Howie the Whore Kurtz on Reliable Sources this morning, and gives the odious Laura Ingraham some more of what she so richly deserves.

We're finally starting to see some passion from the journalists who are putting their lives on the line trying to cover Bush's botched Iraq adventure; the journalists who have tried mightily to do their jobs while also obeying their corporate masters' mandate to cover the good news so as to prop up the sagging fortunes of Captain Codpiece.

Crooks and Liars of course has the video; here's a sample of the transcript:

KURTZ: Thank you.

Bush and Cheney essentially seem to be accusing you and your colleagues of carrying the terrorist message by reporting on so many of these attacks. What do you make of that?

LOGAN: Well, I think that's -- that is a very convenient way of looking at it. It doesn't reflect the value judgment that's implicit in that.

As a journalist, if an American soldier or an Iraqi person dies that day, you have to make a decision about how you weigh the value of reporting that news over the value of something that may be happening, say, a water plant that's being turned on that brings fresh water to 200 Iraqi people. I mean, you get accused of valuing human life in a certain way depending on how you report it.

And also, as -- I mean, what I would point out is that you can't travel around this country anymore without military protection. You can't travel without armed guards. You're not free to go every time there's a school opening or there's some reconstruction project that's being done.

We don't have the ability to go out and cover those. If they want to see a fair picture of what's happening in Iraq, then you have to first start with the security issue.

When journalists are free to move around this country, then they will be free to report on everything that's going on. But as long as you're a prisoner of the terrible security situation here, then that's going to be reflected in your coverage.

And not only that, but their own figures show that their reconstruction project was supposed to create 1.5 million Iraqi jobs. To date, 77,000 Iraqi government jobs have been created. That should give you an indication of how far along they are in terms of reconstruction.

We have to put everything in its context. We can't go to one small unit and say, oh, they did a great job in this village and ignore all the other villages that haven't seen any improvement in their conditions.

KURTZ: There is no question that the dangerous conditions for journalists there are making it much harder to report on some of these signs of progress, as you point out. But I look at just the last couple of weeks of your coverage. Besides covering the Saddam trial, you reported on allegations that U.S. troops had killed a group of civilians. Then you reported an attack on a police station, the bombing of a police convoy, you talked about the threat of a civil war. All legitimate stories. But critics would say, well, no wonder people back home think things are falling apart because we get this steady drumbeat of negativity from the correspondents there.

LOGAN: Well, who says things aren't falling apart in Iraq? I mean, what you didn't see on your screens this week was all the unidentified bodies that have been turning up, all the allegations here of militias that are really controlling the security forces.

What about all the American soldiers that died this week that you didn't see on our screens? I mean, we've reported on reconstruction stories over and over again, but the order to (ph) general for Iraqi reconstruction says that only 49 of well over 100 planned electricity projects happened.

So we can't keep doing the same stories over and over again. When a police station's attacked, that's something new that happened this week. If you had any idea of the number of Iraqis that come to us with stories of abuses of U.S. soldiers and you look at our coverage over the last -- my coverage over the last few weeks, or even over the last three years, there's been maybe two or three stories that have related to that.

So, I mean, we have to do the stories that when we've tested them and tested them and checked all our sources, and that they are legitimate stories on that day, that that is the biggest news coming out of Iraq, then that's what we have to do.

KURTZ: So what you're saying...

LOGAN: I mean, I really resent the fact that people say that we're not reflecting the true picture here. That's totally unfair and it's really unfounded.

[snip]

You don't think that I haven't been to the U.S. military and the State Department and the embassy and asked them over and over again, let's see the good stories, show us some of the good things that are going on? Oh, sorry, we can't take to you that school project, because if you put that on TV, they're going to be attacked about, the teachers are going to be killed, the children might be victims of attack.

Oh, sorry, we can't show this reconstruction project because then that's going to expose it to sabotage. And the last time we had journalists down here, the plant was attacked.

I mean, security dominates every single thing that happens in this country. Reconstruction funds have been diverted to cover away from reconstruction to -- they've been diverted to security.

Soldiers, their lives are occupied most of the time with security issues. Iraqi civilians' lives are taken up most of the time with security issues.

So how it is that security issues should not then dominate the media coverage coming out of here?

You really have to see the video. Logan is PISSED, as are many of the journalists trying to cover this war. These are people who faithfully carried water for the Bush Administration for five years, and now that the war is a botch, the Administration is pointing their fingers in the direction of the media, instead of taking responsibility for its own actions.

Have you ever, outside of a five-year-old, seen anyone as eager to point the finger at other people to avoid culpability, as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Remember when these clowns took office and said "The adults are now in charge"? Well, what adults do is they take responsibility for what they do. Hell, even Bill Clinton apologized for the Lewinsky affair. It was late, and it had to be wrung out of him, but he did it. This bunch decides it's all the media's fault instead of the fault of their own faulty assumptions, faulty implementation, and faulty planning.

I can only hope that these journalists have awakened now to whom they're really dealing with, and tear the figurative door off the hinges of the West Wing and tell the American people just who is running this country and what they're trying to do.

What Ben Domenech was taught while home-schooled

Nice article in the LA Times (registration required, or go to Bug Me Not and get a user ID and password) musing on just what kind of ethics and morals were taught by Ben Domenech's mommy at home school, and notes just who was exercising journalistic responsiblity:

In fact, Domenech is something of a poster child for contemporary social conservatism. He was home-schooled by his mother — that's the new right-wing school tie — in the impeccably red states of South Carolina and Virginia, and his father is the White House liaison to the Department of the Interior. The younger Domenech began writing for Human Events at 15. Under the pseudonym "Augustine" — no lack of chutzpah there — he contributes to a variety of rather nasty online discussions in the course of which he has compared the Supreme Court to the KKK because of its abortion rulings, called Coretta Scott King "a communist" and described Teresa Heinz Kerry as resembling an "oddly shaped egotistical ketchup-colored Muppet."

Definitely no manners class in that home school, and he must have had a cold the day mom touched on facts and logic.

By Thursday night, WashingtonPost.com had received more than 1,000 protests over the appointment. Brady told the Post's Howard Kurtz that "Domenech is 'controversial' and the fact that liberals object to his hiring 'shouldn't really be a shock to anybody.' "

What did turn out to be shocking is the fact that the conservative wunderkind is a serial plagiarist with a documented record — turned up by liberal bloggers — stretching back to his undergraduate days at the College of William & Mary. (One of the people he ripped off was P.J. O'Rourke and nobody at his school apparently noticed. Those kids should get out more.)

No ethics class at that home school, apparently.

[snip]

THE most interesting thing about this whole embarrassing incident has to do with the relative exercise of responsibility by the online journalists — and all prissy hand-wringing to the contrary, their number certainly includes independent bloggers —and the mainstream news media, in this case represented by the Post.

Even a casual reading of the facts demonstrates clearly that the online folks — whatever their ideology — performed pretty much as one would wish. In fact, they vindicated many of their medium's claims to be a seedbed to communities of collaborative watchdogs, each building on the other's work to shed light on an issue that engages them.

And, as anyone who's ever owned one knows, the best watchdogs will bite, as well as bark.

While the initial concerns about Domenech were raised by liberal bloggers and online commentators alarmed by the extremity of his politics and the recklessness with which he expressed them, his critics didn't stop there. Because his career — if a 24-year-old can be said to have such a thing — has essentially been conducted online, there was a digital trail to follow through cyberspace. And follow it they did, within hours. What they found was not simply vulgarity and intemperance, but serial plagiarism of an unsophisticated, unimaginative undergraduate sort.

In short order, the evidence was up on the Web for all to see and judge for themselves. That's when something important happened. Now, the Web is about as polarized as a virtual place can be. It doesn't value civility; ideologically, the law of tooth and claw attains. But because the liberal bloggers and commentators had fashioned a convincing and utterly damning case against Domenech out of his own vanity — who in their right mind compiles an archive of his own thefts? — by Friday morning, conservative bloggers, one after another, began calling on the young man to resign.

(Hat tip: Americablog)

Glenn Greenwald on the Administration's power grab

It amazes me that the President of the United States has come out and said point-blank that he doesn't have to obey any laws he doesn't agree with -- and Congress doesn't care, the media doesn't care, Americans don't care.

Glenn Greenwald explains exactly what Bush did:

The Republicans and Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee submitted detailed questions to the Bush Administration regarding the NSA program, and the DoJ's responses to both the Democrats' questions and its responses to the Republicans' are now available.

There are numerous noteworthy items, but the most significant, by far, is that the DoJ made clear to Congress that even if Congress passes some sort of newly amended FISA of the type which Sen. DeWine introduced, and even if the President "agrees" to it and signs it into law, the President still has the power to violate that law if he wants to. Put another way, the Administration is telling the Congress -- again -- that they can go and pass all the laws they want which purport to liberalize or restrict the President's powers, and it does not matter, because the President has and intends to preserve the power to do whatever he wants regardless of what those laws provide.

[snip]

The reality is that the Administration has been making clear for quite some time that they have unlimited power and that nothing -- not even the law -- can restrict it. But here, they are specifically telling Congress that even if Congress amends FISA and the President agrees to abide by those amendments, they still have the power to break the law whenever they want. As I have documented more times than I can count, we have a President who has seized unlimited power, including the power to break the law, and the Administration -- somewhat commendably -- is quite candid and straightforward about that fact.

I believe that even people who are aware of these facts have not really ingested or accepted the reality that we have an Administration that has embraced this ideology of lawlessness. Yesterday, I received numerous e-mails from people asking why I had not written about this report from the Boston Globe, which reported:

When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act's expanded police powers.

The reason I didn't was because, as extraordinary as this signing statement is in one sense, it really reveals nothing new. We really do have an Administration which believes it has the power to break all laws relating, however broadly, to defending the country. It has said this repeatedly in numerous contexts and acted on those beliefs by breaking the law -- repeatedly and deliberately. They are still breaking the law by, for instance, continuing to eavesdrop on Americans without the warrants required by FISA.

This is not theory. The Administration is not saying these things as a joke. We really do live in a country where we have a President who has seized the unlimited power to break the law. That's not hyperbole in any way. It is reality. And the Patriot Act signing statement only re-iterates that fact.

[snip]

Put another way, the Administration has seized the power of Congress to make the laws, they have seized the power of the judiciary to interpret the laws, and they execute them as well. They have consolidated within themselves all of the powers of the government, particularly with regard to national security.

You know, the next big secular holiday in this country is Memorial Day. For most of us, that means the day we officially fire up the grill, open up the pool, listen to a baseball game, take a day off and enjoy the unofficial beginning of summer. But even if we don't do it most years, this year I think we all ought to attend a Memorial Day parade and buy the poppies -- not as a jingoistic celebration of some Riefenstahl-esque ritual of American chest-beating, but to remind ourselves of particularly the men who died in WWII fighting the fascism of Germany and Italy. Those men, perhaps more than in any other war, died to defend freedom against power-mad dictators who believed themselves to be larger than any state or any country. I don't think any of the young American men who died in Europe or Japan from 1941-1945 died so that an underachieving cokehead could be appointed president by a partisan Supreme Court, seize a re-election by smearing a decorated war veteran and keeping black people out of the polls in Ohio, cynically use an attack on American shores to lie us into a war to enrich his family and friends, and then unilaterally claim he has dictatorial powers and that the Constitution is null and void.

The next secular holiday after that is Flag Day -- June 14. If you have children, they will be drawing flags in school that day. When they bring home their flag drawings and flag stickers, think for a moment about what that flag means -- and then think about the aforementioned president deciding that our entire system of government as set forth by the Founding Fathers who originated that flag is no longer applicable -- because he says so.

Is that the America we now live in? And are we going to put up with it?

Truth is truth

It seems that Tweety has had a moment of sanity, realizing how he's allowed himself to be duped by the Power of the Presidential Codpiece. I don't expect it to last, but for one brief and shining moment, there was clarity from Chris Matthews.

Amidst all the hue and cry and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments about how it's all the media's fault that Americans no longer support the war, because the media are only showcasing the bombings and deaths instead of the three people that managed to have a hummus in a pita without being blown to bits, one little tidbit gets lost as Howard Kurtz and his ilk spin away: Perhaps the "bad news" is the largest component of the truth.

If you want to see what's being done in our name, go take a look at this.

The Grey Lady loves the smell of schädenfreude in the morning

The sordid saga of Ben Domenech hits the New York Times (a paper that has dealt with its own scandals of late), and now there's additional news: It seems that Not-So-Gentle Ben is just unable to tell the truth. He hasn't learned that it doesn't matter if you can spin faster than a centrifuge; if people are actually looking for the truth, it won't work:

But by late Thursday, the bloggers had found instances of what appeared to be plagiarism, including an article by Mr. Domenech in The New York Press that contained passages resembling an article that ran on the front page of The Washington Post.

Evidence of one instance of plagiarism first surfaced on the liberal blog Daily Kos on Thursday. A comment posted on the blog said a passage from an article by Mr. Domenech was nearly identical to a chapter from P. J. O'Rourke's book, "Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People."

Other articles that contained passages that appeared to be copied were published in National Review Online, The New York Press and The Flat Hat, the student newspaper at the College of William and Mary, which Mr. Domenech attended.

Jim Brady, the executive editor of The Washington Post Web site, said that he knew that Mr. Domenech would be controversial but that a background check before he was hired did not reveal plagiarism.

"We've been catching a lot of grief on the blogs for not catching this ourselves, but obviously plagiarism is hard to spot," Mr. Brady said. He said The Post planned to hire another conservative blogger in Mr. Domenech's place.

In an interview, Mr. Domenech said he never "purposefully" plagiarized but admitted that some passages in his articles were identical to those previously published elsewhere.

He said one instance was the fault of an editor at the student newspaper, who he said inserted a passage from The New Yorker in an article without his knowledge. In a staff editorial posted on the Web site of The Flat Hat, the student newspaper, the editors called Mr. Domenech's actions, if true, deeply offensive.

Mr. Domenech also said that he may have mixed up his notes with articles from other authors.

"Frankly, if I had been less of a sloppy writer," he said, "this wouldn't be a problem."

He explained the passage that appeared to be copied from Mr. O'Rourke's book by saying that Mr. O'Rourke gave him permission.

Contacted at his home in New Hampshire, Mr. O'Rourke said that he had never heard of Mr. Domenech and did not recall meeting him.

"I wouldn't want to swear in a court of law that I never met the guy, Mr. O'Rourke said of Mr. Domenech, "but I didn't give him permission to use my words under his byline, no."

Meanwhile, Domenech's employer has decided that ideology trumps honesty and integrity at all times. He's still employed at Regnery Press, which is hardly surprising, given that particular house's rather lax standards about the truth. The rest of wingnuttia has a mixed response. This may be the only time I'll give props to Michelle Malkin for anything, but yesterday she found the evidence compelling and advocated Domenech's resignation.

Other reactions:

Glenn Reynolds, who writes the blog Instapundit, said the bloggers were "motivated by a desire to get" Mr. Domenech.

"They didn't like him because he was a conservative and he was given real estate at The Washington Post," he said. "Their goal was to find something they could use to get rid of him, and they succeeded."

Mr. Domenech addressed his detractors yesterday in a blog post on RedState.com, where he will remain a contributor. "To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America," he wrote.

Delusions of grandeur much, Ben? Perhaps a shade of Narcissistic Personality Disorder? I hate to tell little Ben this, but the whole mess played out over three days, not the entire week, and those who were on the case from the beginning had plenty of time left over for the many horrors of the Bush Administration.

John Aravosis and his compatriots at Americablog, for instance, has noted Barbara Bush earmarking her much-ballyhooed tax-deductible contribution for Katrina relief specifically for a company owned by her son, Neil the Thai Hooker Fucker; Bush's "We don't need no es-teenking badges" signing statement over the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act; and Senate races that are problematic for Republicans.

Pam's House Blend has reported on the outcry over Wal-Mart stocking the Brokeback Mountain DVD; the lovely blue color covering more and more of the map of the U.S.; and Mitt Romney's metaphorical act of fellatio performed on the Christofascist Zombie Brigade. ShakesSis reports on Madeline Albright's smackdown of Bush's foreign policy.

So I hate to puncture little Ben's balloon any further, but he is just a small cog in the vast wingnut machine; and today he's an even more insignificant one; another sexually-repressed little tightassed prig in a cheap suit trying to take the fast track to the top by sucking up to the powerful. Every generation has these guys. Little Ben, contrary to his puffed-up view of himself, is nothing special.