The Manchurian Presidency
Paul is, again, too modest to trumpet his epistolary prowess, so I will do so in his stead, thanks to the editors at the Financial Times.
Sir, I have enjoyed your recent coverage of our White House run amok, including Jurek Martin's piece "A scandal that broke loose and ran riot at the White House" (October 22). The volume on this story needs to be turned up on both sides of the Atlantic.
Writing in his blog, Altercation, Eric Alterman has given Judy Miller the apt moniker "Manchurian Reporter" for her participation in selling the invasion of Iraq to the American people.
Alterman's theory is that Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, "Scooter" Libby, and others within the administration wanted to invade Iraq but did not have a reason the US public would swallow, so they just came up with evil Saddam packing weapons of mass destruction, running a nuclear programme and working with al-Qaeda.
These evil geniuses used an all too willing Judith Miller to get their fiction into the paper and their war started. Sounds like a pretty good theory to me.
I do have one question: Does that make Tony Blair the "Manchurian prime minister"?
To which, I can only add that it is a bit of shame that Harriet Miers will not be on the Supreme Court anytime soon, because Angela Lansbury would have been a casting coup in an echo of her role as Mrs. Iselin.
The Reason for the Cover Up?
As Bob Somerby has consistently noted at his pleasingly contrarian Daily Howler site, the idea that Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger contradicted the infamous 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address. To wit, the sentence—"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa—is couched thrice over. Not only does it place the question of truth onto the shoulders of British intelligence, and not only does it claim that Iraq merely sought uranium, but it is ever so vague about where it was doing the seeking.
A truthful administration could have parried Wilson's public condemnation by noting that his findings about an Iraq-Niger connection did not, and could not, invalidate the claim made in the address.
But the supposed evidence behind Bush's claim was always suspect: some suspect documents with suspect provenance. The cast of characters includes civilians in the Pentagon, Italian intelligence agents, and even Iran-Contra veteran Manucher Ghorbanifar.
Imagine, if you will, that the forged Nigerien documents led not only to the Bush-friendly Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi, but to the highest levels of the Bush administration. In that case, it would be incumbent upon Scooter Libby to do whatever he could to discredit Joseph Wilson before the press connected too many dots.
Last week, La Repubblica published a troika of fascinating articles about the role of the Italian government in fabricating evidence against Iraq. If you read Italian, go check them out.
And this evening, Josh Marshall has the first in what promises to be an exciting series of articles about the forged documents and where they came from. Heads should roll.
It's All Greek to Them
In the 31 October version of Newsweek's snarky but often too vapid Conventional Wisdom Watch (sorry, no link yet available), the oh-so-clever editors make me wonder what they were doing in college.
After Wilma, this season's hurricanes will be named with the letters of the Greek alphabet. Let's hope we don't see zeta.
Three problems in two sentences is not bad for a major American publication. First, only Atlantic hurricanes are subject right now to the Greek-letter treatment—in the Eastern Pacific, the storms this year have strecthed the alphabet only to O, and nine more troopical storms need to emerge before Greek letters appear there. Second, the naming of systems includes both hurricanes and tropical storms. Third, zeta is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, not the last one.
Memo to Newsweek editors: just because it begins with zee does not make it a zee.
Hey, Hey, LBJ...
Why are the conservatives in the Republican Party so angry?
The president:
The problem with those flashbacks to the is that they make reality seem so derivative.
Muck and Miers
Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect magazine is generally worth reading, but his take on Thursday of the downside of not having Harriet Miers to kick around anymore contains a serious solecism. After mentioning that Alberto Gonzales would probably get confirmed, he worries about another path that the White House could take.
[Bush could play] it safe and appoint a popular conservative senator from a very Republican state, who would sail through confirmation. Of Judiciary Committee members, Orrin Hatch is too old. Sam Brownback is under 50, but he's not a lawyer. Bush also has to be peeved at him for his role in the Miers debacle. Ideal candidate: Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, is 58, two years younger than Miers, and a lawyer. He'd be pretty awful, too, and would probably get confirmed. If we can think this up, so can Rove. You heard it here.
When Ronald Reagan had a vacancy to fill in 1987, the scuttlebutt of the time had Orrin Hatch being nominated and a pliant Senate confirming him because he was one of their own. Strangely enough, Hatch never got nominated.
(I do not think that Gonzales will get nominated—how good a candidate can he be if Bush thought that Miers was more qualified? The original nomination said on its face that Gonzales was not even the most qualified aide to the President!)
The Ineligibility Clause of the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 6, Clause 2) prohibits members of Congress from certain jobs:
No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the authority of the United
States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have
been encreased during such time...
Sessions is a sitting Senator, who was re-elected in 2002, so the time for which he was elected began in early in January 2003.
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court is a civil office under the authority of the United States.
In February 2003, Public Law 108-6 authorized salary increases for federal judges, including Associate Justices of the Supreme Court.
But could a suddenly relativist right wing argue that the Ineligibility Clause only applies to prevent clear instances of graft and corruption by members of Congress? No one could argue that an ordinary pay increase for Supreme Court justices constitutes an effort to unjustly reward a sitting Senator.
Case law suggests otherwise. In 1999, Republican governor Cecil Underwood sought to appoint John Kiss, the sitting Speaker of the state's House of Delegates, to the vacant position of Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court. The State Supreme Court, upon petition, ruled that Kiss was constitutionally ineligible.
The relevant clause of the state constitution (at Article 6, Section 15) reads:
No senator or delegate, during the term for which he shall have been elected, shall be elected or appointed to any civil office of profit under this State, which has been created, or the emoluments of which have been increased during such term, except offices to be filled by election by the people.
The only real question in the ruling, in fact, was whether the phrase "by election by the people" applied, since Underwood was duly elected and was making an appointment that his gubernatorial powers allowed him. The court ruled, however, that appointment and election are two different concepts. That the $10,000 raise in salary during Kiss's term in the House of Delegates could trigger the state's emoluments clause was never in doubt.
So, yes, it is right to worry about who would replace Harriet Miers. And Jeff Sessions will be involved—but as a Senator, not a nominee.
