The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that George Bush set very low standards for our men and women in Iraq.
And in order to placate the critics and the cynics about intentions of the United States, we need to produce evidence. And I fully understand that. And I'm confident that our search will yield that which I strongly believe, that Saddam had a weapons program. I want to remind you, he actually used his weapons program on his own people at one point in time, which is pretty tangible evidence. But I'm confident history will prove the decision we made to be the right decision.
That's setting the bar awfully low—not finding actual weapons, or proving that operational weapons were nearly ready, but finding that Iraq at one time had a nuclear weapons program. If that's the impetus for regime change, then the United States would be awfully petty not to target a regime like that running Sweden, a country that for many years certainly "had a [nuclear] weapons program."
Photoshop Wizards Wanted
Can anyone do some photoshop magic for me?
At yesterday's press gaggle, Scott McLellan was asked an actual pointed question from a member of the Washington press corps.
Q: Go back to the Iraq situation. Is the President afraid to take the responsibility what he said before Congress to the American people, or is the White House planning to use the White House as a scapegoat for the blame this scandal that around the world doesn't have any sense of what are you telling us today?
MR. McCLELLAN: The President takes responsibility for the decision he made to confront a grave and growing threat rather than ignore it. And America is safer for it. That's what the President believes. And he made the right decision. And, again, there are some that are trying to simply rewrite history here.
Here's the picture from the White House site with the caption "working at his desk in the Oval Office, President Bush reviews the State of the Union address line-by-line and word-by-word. " Can anyone tell me what portions of the State of the Union address Mr. Bush is reviewing here?
Divide and Conquer
George W. Bush will break with tradition and meet with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas next week. Despite the obvious flaws in the "road map" for peace in the Middle East, the Bush administration is heading in the right direction by actually meeting, albeit separately with the leaders of Israel and Palestine. But it is folly to expect much to happen until some structural changes happen in Palestine, and by structural, I mean just that.
A strange political consensus in Israel has supported the construction of a partially complete barrier between Israel and the West Bank. The Israeli left has supported it because it roughly lies along the "Green Line"—the legal border— the right supports it because it puts some settlements on the Israeli side. The latest Los Angeles Weekly has a fascinating article on just how the fence is being built.
So far, about 24,000 acres of Palestinian land have been cut off from the rest of the West Bank and are now on the western (Israeli) side of the barrier. President George Bush is against all this construction, but so far that hasn't mattered.
The indispensible Amira Hass of Ha'aretz emphasizes that the thing in question is much more than a fence:
Israelis still use the convenient and misleading term "fence" to describe the system of fortifications that is currently being erected on Palestinian lands in the West Bank. Even "wall," the term more commonly used in foreign-language reports, is insufficient to describe what is really being built at this very moment: A concrete wall eight meters high, wire fences and electronic sensors, ditches four meters deep on either side, a dirt path to reveal footprints, an area into which entry is forbidden, a two-lane road for army patrols, and watchtowers and firing posts every 200 meters along the entire length. These are the components of the "fence."
The fence is just another way for Israel to maintain control of the West Bank by hook or crook. There can be no effective autonomous rule in the West Bank until Palestinians actually control a contiguous polity there. As you can see from this map from 2000, there is really no hope for the Palestinian Authority to have any real political authority when its territory resembles more an archipelago than a large tract of land.
Traitors! In the White House!
A few weeks ago, someone in the Washington press corps did some actual research and asked Ari Fleischer, the press secretary to George W. Bush, a tricky question.
Q: And also in the last, 2000 and coming up, the President will accept federal funds in the general election.
MR. FLEISCHER: Correct.
Q: Is there any dash of hypocrisy in that he doesn't contribute to that fund when he files his tax returns?
MR. FLEISCHER: Well, interestingly, we talked before about taxpayer-financed elections, and while for the congressional races, Senate races and House races, and for overwhelming majority of the funds that go to presidential races is voluntary, there is that check on the tax reforms. And the best I remember this from IRS data is something like only 12 percent, or down to 8 percent of the American people check that box. So I think the President is in pretty good company with a number of American people who do not check that box.
Q: Why would he take the money, then?
MR. FLEISCHER: As you know, he's not taking the money for the primary campaign; he will take it for the general.
Later, another reporter followed up.
Q: Several questions on fundraising. First of all, why is it that the President checks the "no" box? Does he have a philosophical rejection, or what's his reason for doing that?
MR. FLEISCHER: No, I think the President views campaign funding as a voluntary matter, as the American people do, where people want to support the candidate of their choice. We have on the presidential level a somewhat mixed system where there is some level of taxpayer support. And the President, as you know, in the primary is not going to accept any taxpayer support, he will raise funds privately -- which means he will get support as the American people see fit to give it.
Q: But why does he -- why does he check the "no" box?
MR. FLEISCHER: Because I think the President's approach is that from him, personally, that he believes in personally financing the causes in which he believes.
The good folks at the Tax History Project have been compiling presidential tax returns for some years now. Indeed, for the last three years, George W. and Laura Bush have not contributed to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund.
I wonder if George W. Bush realize how his closest allies do not believe in "personally financing the causes in which he believes." First, we have Dick and Lynne Cheney, who contributed $3 each to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund in both 2002 and 2001. The Cheneys did not release any part of their 2000 tax return to the public, so it is unclear whether this traitorous box-checking dissent started with the 2000 returns. Second, we have the continued and habitual contributions of George H. W. and Barbara Bush, who brazenly contributed to the fund in 1991 and in 1990 and in 1989. Does Ann Coulter know about this treason?
(Of the presidential tax returns available on the Tax History Project site, only those of Ronald and Nancy Reagan show an election not to contribute to the fund. None of Gerald and Betty Ford's returns are there, and the only return for Richard and Pat Nixon predates the inception of the fund.)
Warren Buffett for President (Part Three)
In late May, Paul and I wrote a couple of entries about why Democrats should draft Warren Buffett for President.
We did not realize then that Mark Anderson of The American Sentimentalist had similar thoughts in a splendid essay back in March. He wrote with a lot more care than we did about Buffett's deserved reputation for transparency and responsibility, both characteristics lacking in both business and politics nowadays.
Prosperity is Just Around the Corner
Kudos to the New York Times for putting this chart on the front page: it shows the annual jobs growth for each American president since Harding.
At this point, George W. Bush is the only president since Herbert Hoover to have a net decrease in jobs since the start of his administration. Yes, some of this is due to back luck—a recession that started some two months into his administration and the terrorist attacks of September 2001 that affected business spending.
But the status of Republicans as the party of Capital is hard to ignore. Is it really not for nothing that every Democratic president in the past 80 years had job growth of at least 2.4% per year and every Republican president in the past 80 years had job growth of at most 2.2% per year? Perhaps, just perhaps, the benefits that trickle down from giving tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans don't trickle down very far.
