Reagan and Enron

One last note on Reagan, which came to mind while reading the Times editorial on Enron

Reagan is best known for his belief that we should “get government of the backs of the people” and that “government is not the solution, it is the problem.”

Once again, this is a myth that does not stand up to reality, as the Times points out:

One energy trader gloats about cheating "poor grandmothers." Another suggests shutting down a power plant in order to drive up electricity prices. A third, hearing of a fire under a transmission line that caused a power failure, shouts "burn baby, burn." Another says that he would like to see Kenneth Lay — then Enron's chief executive — wind up as energy secretary in the new Bush administration.

An exhaustive study released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in March 2003 confirmed what everyone had long suspected — that Enron and other major energy companies manipulated California's energy markets in 2000 and 2001 in ways that cost the state billions. Now comes the most graphic evidence yet of the cynicism and ruthlessness with which Enron's floor traders, presumably with the endorsement of their superiors, rigged the market.

Yes, Virginia, the government does have a purpose and that purpose is to keep an eye on the private sector which, no matter what Reagan said, cannot be completely trusted.

Reagan Legacy (2)

Another example of Reagan’s myth making was that more people were living below the poverty line, and homelessness became a national concern because they had released many people in mental hospitals. When Mr. Reagan was asked about the problem in 1984, he replied that some needy people might be "homeless by choice." Yeah right. And people get sick by choice, they are poor by choice, and on and on. By sheer force of his personality, he got away with such nonsense.

In foreign policy, before the Iran-contra scandal broke, the biggest setback was the bombing in Lebannon that killed 241 Americans. We hear all kinds of rhetoric today about not “cutting and running” but that’s exactly what Reagan did. He pulled them out in 4 months. And, to get the minds of the public off from this topic, he invaded Grenada. For conservatives, they built up the myth that this was a great military victory, but really, it was the equivalent of the largest army in the world overtaking 12 guys with shovels. It did, of course, make conservatives proud, and served its real purpose – to help us forget what happened in Lebanon.

Then came Iran-contra, where Reagan’s staff set up a secret plans to supply weapons to Iran as ransom for US hostages, and the sales were transferred to the “contras” whose human rights violation were notorious, but that didn’t stop him from indulging in the myth that they were “the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.” I don’t think anybody has insulted our founding fathers as badly, but Reagan got away with it.

At first Reagan denied that we traded arms for hostages and appointed sleaze-bag Ed Meese to investigate. He later resigned in scandal. And also later, Reagan essentially admitted he had lied about this incident, "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true," he said, "but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."

And then he had the courage to say something that Dubya never will, he admitted accountability and came clean by saying that what started as a strategic opening to Iran had "deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages." He said, "This runs contrary to my own beliefs, to administration policy and to the original strategy we had in mind." He accepted "full responsibility" for the Iran-contra affair: "As the Navy would say, this happened on my watch."

Whew. Dubya couldn’t begin to admit such a thing, and that’s why Reagan is a much bigger man than Dubya can ever hope to be.

I’m not sure yet how history will treat Reagan, but it will be better than they treat Dubya. Still, his legacy will always be clouded. The Times quotes Thomas Cronin, the McHugh Professor of American Institutions at Colorado College, who said Americans evaluated the greatness of a president on "criteria that are over and above popularity and re-election."

Cronin credited Mr. Reagan with enhancing national security with the I.N.F. treaty but asked: "Did he expand opportunities for all Americans regardless of race, gender or income bracket? It's my view Reagan has not enlarged the equity factor nor the educational opportunities for most Americans."

“And the Reagan presidency was lacking in moral leadership, he said, an essential quality for greatness. "He was too late, too little and too lame when it came to human rights abuses at home and abroad," Professor Cronin said. "He was not willing to be a leader."

Unlike Bush, Reagan worked with our allies and he even had Democrats as friends such as Tip O’Neill. But the most negative part of Reagan’s legacy may be Dubya and the extremists in this administration, who have taken their cues from extremists in the Reagan White House like James Watt, or Gary Bauer ..... and the list goes on.

Reagan will be remembered as being well-liked and a likeable man, but I don’t think that Bush will be able to even claim that, Bush will be remembered as the legacy of all the negative things of Reagan and none of the positive.

Reagan's Legacy (1)

Not long ago, Dick Cheney was quoted as saying, “Ronald Reagan taught us that deficits don’t matter.”

Will that be Reagan’s legacy? It will be part of it, that is for sure, just as the current occupant in the White House and the extreme right wingers who are also there will be part of his legacy.

But there are some big differences between Dubya and Reagan. Reagan’s rhetoric was more extreme than the way he governed, and the opposite is true with Bush, who tries to put a moderate face on some very extreme policies.

And while there are similarities in the personalities of both, there are differences as well. As Billmon pointed out in his post on Reagan, even many Democrats found it hard to hate Reagan, “Yes, he was as ignorant and stubborn and incapable of rational thought as our current president, but he wasn't arrogant - or at least, he didn't come across as arrogant. He lacked Bush's infuriating sense of entitlement, and his nasty temper. Reagan smiled, he didn't smirk.” Yes, and that’s a big difference, and it’s also why many people absolutely hate Bush.

Conservatives have been indulging in myth-making about Reagan for years, and many of them have come to believe their own propaganda that Reagan was the greatest president ever and was single handedly responsible for winning the Cold War. That of course is myth, but myth is really what the Reagan Presidency was all about. From “freedom fighters” to welfare queens who drove Cadillacs. Reagan often confused myth with facts, fantasy with reality, and movies with real life. And he firmly believed these myths, he believed they were true.

As Patrick Buchanan put it as quoted in the The Times "For Ronald Reagan, the world of legend and myth is a real world,"... "He visits it regularly, and he's a happy man there." That was one of the things so frustrating about Reagan, he simply believed things that weren’t true, and no one could convince him otherwise.

And while many conservatives believe that Reagan caused the sun to come up in the morning, there were many flaws to this man, and his administration. For example, we know now that while Reagan refused to name names in front of the House un-American Committee investigating Hollywood, he did give them names in secret. This is not exactly a profile in courage.

He also was not honest about many of his policies. Dubya’s dad correctly called his “supply side” economic policies "voodoo economics." and, with more than a bit of irony these policies have adopted by his son. Eventually, Reagan's own director of the budget, David A. Stockman, suggested that the president “was simply proposing a repackaging of economics intended to favor the rich, whose gains would ultimately trickle down through the rest of the economy.”

“After he left government, Mr. Stockman wrote a book, "The Triumph of Politics" (Harper & Row), in which he described how, on behalf of Mr. Reagan's programs, he had exaggerated the administration's success in reducing spending and minimized the projected deficit. He said he invented the "rosy scenario," making optimistic assumptions about future growth, inflation and interest rates.

"If the Securities and Exchange Commission had jurisdiction over the White House," Mr. Stockman wrote, "we might have all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood penitentiary."

As the Times points out, “Within six years the deficit more than doubled, from $79 billion in Mr. Reagan's first year in office to $173 billion. In the 1987 fiscal year it dropped back to $150.4 billion but edged up again in 1988.”

“But by the middle of 1982, with a recession continuing and deficit projections soaring, Mr. Reagan grudgingly agreed to a $98.6 billion increase in excise and other taxes. But he refused to call them taxes, insisting on the term "revenue enhancers."

Other repercussions of his plans resulted in “Middle-income college students became ineligible for government-backed loans and more than a million people lost their food stamps. In 1981, the Department of Agriculture proposed that ketchup be considered a vegetable in calculating the nutritional values of school lunches. The suggestion caused such an uproar that the rule was never instituted.”

Bush's erratic behavior?

I’m not sure what to make of this article but it sure has a ring of truth to it, at least my worst suspicions about Bush anyway.

The article talks about Bush’s repeated references to doing “God’s will” and how he views those who disagree with him, and it is messianic to say the least. If you haven’t read this, do.

It concludes, “The mood here is that we’re under siege, there’s no doubt about it,” says one troubled aide who admits he is looking for work elsewhere. “In this administration, you don’t have to wear a turban or speak Farsi to be an enemy of the United States. All you have to do is disagree with the President.”

If these claims are true, this is very scary, especially if we have another major terrorist attack in this country.

More "faulty" intelligence

We saw with Tenet how intelligence was manipulated at the CIA, and it now appears that something similar happened at the FBI with the Brandon case.

The New York Times has put forth some new information today the bears closer scrutiny.

And learned in interviews this week that, “Spanish officials vehemently denied ever backing up that assessment, saying they had told American law enforcement officials from the start, after their own tests, that the match was negative. The Spanish officials said their American counterparts relentlessly pressed their case anyway, explaining away stark proof of a flawed link — including what the Spanish described as tell-tale forensic signs — and seemingly refusing to accept the notion that they were mistaken.”

"They had a justification for everything," said Pedro Luis Melida Lledo, head of the fingerprint unit for the Spanish National Police, whose team analyzed the prints in question and met with the Americans on April 21. "But I just couldn't see it."

We also now learn that, “But after conducting their own tests, Spanish law enforcement officials said they reported back to the F.B.I. in an April 13 memo that the match was "conclusively negative." Yet for for five weeks, F.B.I. officials insisted their analysis was correct.”

And once again, we see a bit of US heavy-handedness in this case, "The Spanish officers told them with all the affection in the world that it wasn't him," said a Spanish police official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We never wanted to simply come out and say the F.B.I. made a mistake. We tried to be diplomatic, not to make them look bad, so we just said the case is still open."

There is probably more to come out about this, but in the meantime it has done more damage to US credibility, and in fact to the credibility of fingerprinting itself. The Times puts it this way, “A Senate aide who also attended a Congressional briefing said there was great concern about the impact the Mayfield mistake would have. "This is going to kill prosecutors for years every time they introduce a fingerprint ID by the F.B.I.," the aide said. "The defense will be saying `is this a 100 percent match like the Mayfield case?' "

Tenet's Departure

I don't subscribe to some of these conspiracy theories about Tenet's departure that have to do with Chalabi. Instead, I suspect that Bob Dreyfus views are a little closer to the truth.

First, he points out that Tenet is responsible for his own problems by caving into the neo-cons who wanted distorted intelligence. He writes, “His own CIA analysts didn’t believe that Iraq was a threat (nor did they believe that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda or WMD), but Tenet added the White House’s preferred political spin onto his agency’s estimates. And he sat stony-faced behind Colin Powell during the latter’s ill-fated (and lie-filled) UN speech in February 2003, effectively giving CIA endorsement to the misinformation that Powell spewed forth. So Tenet was caught in his own web.”

“But when the going got rough, Bush and Co. pointed their fingers at Tenet and the CIA, blaming that agency for the errors, even though those “errors” were forced on it by Cheney, the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and the White House itself. When the finger-pointing got bad, Tenet hit back, giving a speech  in which he declared that the CIA never said that the threat from Iraq was “imminent.” In other words, Bush had rushed into a war that could well have waited.”

He concludes, “So, in my opinion, Tenet was just sick and tired of battling the White House, the neocons and the Congress—and he’d lost support inside the agency because of his decision to abandon principle and sign on to the Big Lie over Iraq.”

That, I think, is right on the mark. I’m less sure whether or not Tenet’s departure will either hurt or help Bush. Bush needs somebody to go, and a new face, but with the upcoming reports and investigations, it going to take a lot more than Tenet’s departure to restore confidence in this administration.

Truth in Advertising

The New York Times had a great line in an editorial today about Bush’s determination for more tax cuts, and the ever-changing reasons for them:

It's certain that Mr. Bush will continue to credit his tax cuts for the comeback. These are the same cuts, you may recall, that were first designed as a means of "giving back" part of the mounting surplus to the public. Then, as the surplus evaporated, they were relabeled a stimulus plan. Now, with no surplus and no slump — and with looming deficits a threat to long-term growth — it's hard to think of what Mr. Bush can call his tax cuts to justify their renewal. The administration could go with truth in advertising, and simply relabel them a handout to wealthy families at a time of war and deficits.

Blowback

Juan Cole had an interesting column yesterday where he discusses how the situation in Iraq instead of increasing Israel’s security has actually weakened it – the exact opposite of what was supposed to have happened.


He points out that despite some rewards for terrorists, “Saddam never did anything practical to help the Palestinians. At some points, as in the late 1980s, he reportedly made behind-the-scenes overtures to the Israelis to arrive at some sort of a deal. He did not allow Palestinian radicals to launch operations against Israel from Iraq. By the late 1990s, Iraq had no nuclear or biological weapons program, and had destroyed its chemical weapons stockpiles. Its ramshackle army had virtually collapsed before the American invasion in 2003.”

In contrast, he says, “If it is hard to see how Baathist Iraq posed any real threat to Israel, it is not so difficult to see a menace in the current instability.”

“Anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian feeling is strong among several major Iraqi ideological groups and currents. The more radical Shiites, who generally follow the theocratic notions of Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, routinely chant and demonstrate against Israel.”

“Sunni Arab fundamentalists deeply sympathize with the Palestinians and with Hamas, and those in Iraq have deep historical inks with fundamentalists in Jordan and Palestine.”

“Whereas Saddam Hussein's dictatorship ensured that such populist currents were kept firmly under control, they are now free to organize. An Iraq in which armed fundamentalist and nationalist militias proliferate is inevitably a security worry for Israel. If even a modicum of normality and security can be returned to Iraq, its citizens will be able to benefit from the country's petroleum reserves. That private wealth can easily be funneled into aid for the Palestinians and for Lebanese Shiites.”

“Israel's security interests are best served by peace with its neighbors, which can only be achieved by trading land for peace with the Palestinians. Ariel Sharon's aggressive near annexation of almost half of the occupied West Bank and his indefinite postponement of any Palestinian state have created unprecedented rage and violence. The anger has spread throughout the Muslim world, including Iraq. The promotion by the pro-Zionist right of twin occupations - in the West Bank and in Iraq - has profoundly weakened, not strengthened, Israeli security.”

I think the same thing has happened here in this country. Getting rid of Sadaam, while in a vacuum is certainly a good thing, but the political repercussions of how we did it, makes us less safe and has greatly increased terrorism around the world. And I’m afraid rather than learning that Israel’s hard-line policies rather than making them more secure has made them less, that we will adopt similar policies by “pre-emptively” striking Arab/Muslim nations and rather than decreasing terrorism, we will only engender more.

Padilla and our rights

Jonathon Turley, Law Professor at George Washington University, has some interesting comments on the Padilla case today: You Have Rights -- if Bush Says You Do

“The court is currently reviewing the Padilla case, with a decision expected in the next few weeks, and there is a growing question of whether a majority can be found to support President Bush's claims of absolute authority to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely without filing charges.”

And he very eloquently sums it all up this way, “There is something far more unsettling in this scene than an administration openly playing to the Supreme Court. It was a reminder that we are morally adrift, abandoning legal principle for the proceeds of arbitrary power.
We have lost that moral distinction between ourselves and our enemies if we believe that our success is measured by the confessions that we coerce rather than the civil liberties that we defend.”

The "suckered" U.N.

It’s always interesting when conservatives say something that demonstrates that they really don’t believe a word Bush says.

Not long ago, Bush said,"Brahimi was the person who put together the group," Now no one really believes that, including conservatives that are positively giddy over how the U.S. “suckered” the U.N in this deal.

David Warren makes this case very clearly, “No one else will say this, so I will. The Bush administration has handled the transfer of power in Iraq more cleverly than anyone expected, including me. The summoning of the U.N. envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, looked like very bad news (a poisonous old Arab League chauvinist who brokered the sell-out of Lebanon to Syria in 1982). In grim moments, I believed the Bush people were cynically using him to wash their hands of Iraq, and as it were, dump the quagmire back in the swamp of the U.N. Instead, they froze the ground beneath Brahimi's feet, and skated rings around him, haggling behind his back with Iraq's new political heavyweights to leave him endorsing a fait accompli. If it were not vulgar, I would say the Bushies suckered the U.N. into signing on to the New Iraq through Brahimi.”

“The Americans have moreover done a superb job of playing politics, intra-Iraqis: a job of horse-trading beyond anything achieved by British imperialists in the past. I didn't agree with all the dirty tricks (and especially not with the CIA's unconscionable settling of accounts with Ahmed Chalabi, getting the Iraqis to raid his headquarters to bring him down to size), but we have a presentably benign government at the end of the day.”

But Warren forgets two very important things. First, that we are about to rely on the “swamp” of the U.N. to help us give legitimacy to Iraq’s elections. Is it really wise policy then, to undermine the U.N.’s credibility with the Iraqis? Think about that for a moment and what that says about conservatives view of the upcoming elections.

Secondly, the Iraqis are not completely buying into this government yet at all. There are some positive elements to it, but they don’t trust Allawi and as a former CIA operative, he’ll have difficulty gaining that trust.

If conservatives really believed that these upcoming elections were to be truly democratic then they would be very hesistant to destroy the U.N’s credibility. But that wouldn’t concern them if they thought the election outcome could be presented as a fait accompli just as the new interim government was.

Not a comforting thought.

The "Blame Game"

It’s easy to blame Bush for everything that’s gone in Iraq, but as Moisés Naím the editor of Foreign Policy magazine points out, there’s a lot of blame to go around.

In his commentary in the LA Times today, Naim also shows that the media, Democrats, Republicans, anti-corruption groups, human rights groups, international leaders, Arab leaders, and others also share the blame.

He writes, “It is important to learn that whatever the threat — terrorism included — no government should be afforded the latitude enjoyed by the Bush administration. The media — both reporters and commentators — are among the prime culprits here. The promise that democracy would spread from a liberated Iraq, for example, was as poorly scrutinized as the notion advanced by the administration that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the war against terror.”

“It is not just that intelligence agencies were too willing to confirm the "facts" that their political bosses wanted to hear. Many Democrats were too frightened of appearing "soft on terror" and thus signed political and military blank checks to an administration prone to overdrafts. Blinded by partisanship, congressional Republicans were subservient to the White House's wishes even when these wishes contradicted age-old Republican values such as fiscal conservatism. Fearing irrelevance, U.S. diplomats were too quick to accept the notion that negotiated approaches on Iraq had run their course. Some journalists were so deferential to official sources that their reports seemed almost stenographic.”

He concludes by saying, “but perhaps the ultimate enabler was the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. In the U.S., the shock and pain caused by the attacks fed the widespread notion that "business as usual" in American foreign policy was no longer an option. They also led to the renouncing of fundamental principles that never should have been abandoned. Many basic rights, including safeguards against indefinite detention without charges, were cast aside as obsolete notions for a nation fighting a global war on terror.”

This is a very good point. After 9/11 this country was in a state of shock, and this enabled Bush to get away with what he did, even to the point of undermining our basic fundamental values.

America is now slowly waking up and realizing that we’ve been had. Once again, people are starting to ask some very serious questions.

But what happens if (when) we have another terrorist attack in this country. Have we learned from our mistakes in how we reacted the first time?

Or will such an act result in a Bush re-election and the continued abandonment of our principles?

The answer to that question may come quicker than we’d like.

France's "real" motives

Peter Brookes of the Conservative Heritage Foundation has written an opinion piece for the New York Post exposing what he says are France’s real motives for U.N. involvement in Iraq, but inadvertently he exposes why conservatives don’t want the U.N. involved – and it all has to do with oil.

He writes, “but what's gone unnoticed is why France, Germany, Russia and China are pressing for full Iraqi sovereignty as early as possible: They want to emasculate the Coalition that freed Iraq (the one they never joined) so they can be the first to get their hands on the potential bounty of the new Iraqi economy - especially its oil and gas reserves (the world's second and 10th largest).”

But if this is actually true, wouldn’t it also be true that the reason that the US wants to avoid “full sovereignty” is because they want to keep the oil for themselves and keep it out of the hands of France, Germany and those other countries who didn’t help us. If Iraq was really in control it would mean a level playing field for who could bid lucrative contracts, and the U.S. would no longer have a lock on Iraqi oil. Now we couldn’t have that could we?

Brooks basically exposes that the overtures to the U.N. should be just for public relations and we need to remain in control, he writes, “It's fine for America to play nice with the United Nations to the extent it supports our interests. The U.N. can be a value-added in conducting humanitarian operations, running elections, helping draft an Iraqi constitution and assembling a new government.”

“But we shouldn't allow ourselves to be shanghaied by amendments that undermine American interests. The United States and its Coalition partners did the heavy lifting in freeing Iraq from the grips of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and our interests in Iraq's future must be preserved.”

Let’s be very clear here. When he refers to “our interests in Iraq’s future” he isn’t talking about “democracy” - he’s talking about oil.

He continues, “the U.N. resolution is a first step in launching Iraq in the right direction. But it's also an entirely optional step. The Coalition can transfer sovereignty to Iraq directly without U.N. involvement.”

So, if it looks like working with the U.N. could compromise our control of oil, we need to get rid of U.N. involvement.

It’s nice that he was so clear about that.

Memorial Day Words

Right-wing columnist Mark Steyn could not honor our troops who have sacrificed their lives for this country without smearing Al Gore and John Kerry.

In his Memorial Day column he compared the number of troop deaths with those in the Civil War, and wrote about “the difference between then and now: the loss of proportion. They had victims galore back in 1863, but they weren't a victim culture. They had a lot of crummy decisions and bureaucratic screwups worth re-examining, but they weren't a nation that prioritized retroactive pseudo-legalistic self-flagellating vaudeville over all else. They had hellish setbacks but they didn't lose sight of the forest in order to obsess week after week on one tiny twig of one weedy little tree.”

So, in effect the soldiers we lost in Iraq are insignificant a “tiny twig of one weedy little tree.” I bet those words did not give much comfort to the family of Pat Tillman and the many other families who have lost their love ones recently.”

He then goes on to dismiss the importance of US troops being caught torturing Iraqis, and incident which at least should have brought shame to our country, but certainly doesn’t concern people like Mark Steyn who writes, “There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites -- from the deranged former vice president down -- want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we're supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.”

Steyn has it exactly backwards, it is troops who engaged in torture who dishonor the memory of our lost troops, not the ones who criticized their behavior.

He concludes, “Playing by Gore-Kennedy rules, the Union would have lost the Civil War, the rebels the Revolutionary War, and the colonists the French and Indian Wars. There would, in other words, be no America. Even in its grief, my part of New Hampshire understood that 141 years ago. We should, too.”

Steyn should read the comments of WWII veterans who have been outraged by the behavior in Iraqi prisons and point out how differently they treated prisoners. The troops that exposed these atrocities our heroes, and the people like Steyn who try to minimize the import of what happen do a great disservice to those troops who are serving honorably in Iraq.

Here is a far more eloquent Memorial Day statement.