Above All Laws, or, It doesn't take a Weatherman...
The overreaching and grabbing of large hunks of power by the current administration in ways formerly not allowed or never before excercised in such a manner, all ostensibly to "protect America from Terror", goes on at such a pace that it's hard to keep up with it all - heck, it's hard to keep up with the parts of it that those few remaining unfettered investigative reporters, and the multitudes of determined amateurs, manage to expose.
But there are two things in particular I want to bring up, one of which which has been out for a while and kind of lost in the shuffle because it seems kind of trivial and the other of recent disclosure which has not perhaps sunk in because it seems rather arcanely boring - but both of which are in themselves rather dire and also point to the depths to which the administration - and all its enablers regardless of party - have sunk, and are willing to sink below.
The first is a tidbit which was so overlooked that it was even hard for me to track it down via google, even though I remembered pretty well the keywords involved - it was just so little commented on even in the blogosphere, pretty much a "Wha? sheesh!" and move on to bigger things. But "for want of a nail" &c - this thing hit me as being so typical, on so many levels, that it amazed me that it didn't bring more outcry from all around - particularly at the Post itself.
This is what happened: A Washington Post columnist named Al Kamen got hold of an internal memo from the USDA - that's the US Dept of Agriculture, for readers abroad, a federal agency which holds the conflicted mission of protecting people who buy food and people who produce food from each other, a conflict made more complicated by the fact that the people who produce food have a lot more money in big single gobs, ergo a lot more political clout, while the people who buy food but don't grow or package it are the ones who, as a whole, pay their salaries and hold their chargéd fealty - yes, there's always been corruption at Ag, thus the simmering Mad Cow crisis they are trying to stuff back into the barn, but also people trying to do their jobs honestly, too - so anyway, a memo went out to the undersecretaries etc from the upper eschelons, telling them to work official Presidential talking points re Iraq and the Global War On Terror™ into each and any speech they give on any topic whatsoever - with their compliance being monitored by the White House:
Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration "talking points" - saying things such as "President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq" - in every speech they give for the department.
"The President has requested that all members of his cabinet and sub-cabinet incorporate message points on the Global War on Terror into speeches, including specific examples of what each agency is doing to aid the reconstruction of Iraq," the May 2 e-mail from USDA speechwriter Heather Vaughn began.
The e-mail, sent to about 60 undersecretaries, assistant secretaries and other political appointees, was also sent to "a few people to whom it should not have gone," said the department's communications director, Terri Teuber. The career people, we are assured, are not being asked to spread the great news on Iraq in their talks to food stamp recipients, disadvantaged farmers, enviros or other folks.
The e-mail provided language "being used by Secretary [Michael O.] Johanns and deputy secretary [Charles F.] Conner in all of their remarks and is being sent to you for inclusion in your speeches."
Another attachment "contains specific examples of GWOT messages within agriculture speeches. Please use these message points as often as possible and send Harry Phillips, USDA's director of speechwriting, a weekly email summarizing the event, date and location of each speech incorporating the attached language. Your responses will be included in a weekly account sent to the White House."
This scoreboard, of course, will ensure you give it your best shot.
Now, you might still be scratching your heads, trying to figure out how this is going to work when people expect a talk about agriculture issues. Not to worry. The attachments - which can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/fedpage - show how easy it is to work a little Iraq happy talk into just about anything.
There's a sample introduction: "Several topics I'd like to talk about today - Farm Bill, trade with Japan, WTO, avian flu ... but before I do, let me touch on a subject people always ask about ... progress in Iraq." See? Smooth as silk.
--How, with a government that is doing this, can anyone continue to have any respect for them, and to take anything they say without the full saltshaker, or give them the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to actually take care of the country-as-a-whole, and not just lull or distract enough of the population so that they can finish picking the national pocket? It's not just "don't trust them about the War" - it's clear that they have no regard for anything but their own image. None. Whatsoever. They've coopted the entire apparatus of the organization which is supposed to be administering everything else into running around shouting "How beautiful the Emperor's new clothes are!"
Does anyone now fail to recognize how important a sign this was of the utter malign buffoonery of Bushco? It isn't something to be shrugged off as "oh, those sillies!"
It's just like Ron Suskind said back in 2004 - they don't live in the reality-based community. And, by their own boastful admission, they're not even trying.
--Interestingly, and perhaps merely coincidentally, I couldn't get to the WaPo original of that story this am - although you can still get to the pdf of the suggested examples...for the moment. I've saved it down and will post it to my site if I find out it's gotten minitrued. I could only find it via google through Dan Froomkin's subsequent discussion of it, in response to a reader's comment on the story, on his White House Talk reader chat page. Given the So-Called Liberal Media's penchant for Orwellizing things that aren't flattering to the administration, it's a good thing that Truthout and other sites didn't just quote extracts but mirrored the article.
Even more interestingly, Froomkin - who has been a thorn in the side of the Post's heirarchy before, as their token "radical liberal" who had to be counterbalanced by Ben "Box Turtles" Domenech - made a jab at his own higher-ups by noting that as of that posting, the New York Times - the Post's greatest rival from of old - had beat them to commenting on it editorially, "An Agriprop Guide to Cluck and Awe",here on May 10. And yet they just laughed it off - oh, aren't they so silly in the Forbidden City with their games! - as if these jokers weren't committing mass murder and grand larceny on a daily basis.
And not just disregarding the laws, and sneaking around breaking them, either. No, claiming the right to do so, in the name of the Law. This is not exactly a new thing: Nixon did it, Orwell described it, every tyrant who's ever tossed out the traditional checks on state power in the name of necessity from the time of the Romans thru the Stewarts down to the present has done it. What's new - for us, at least - is the combination of shifty, underhanded secrecy (your traditional law-breaker's SOP, deeds of darkness &c) with the overt "we can do whatever we want cuz we're in charge, nyah nyah!" brazenness when ever they get caught at it.
But that was all the talk I could find about this new Komissariat policy, except on the blogs and alternative web-based media like Truthout and others, and even then just a little, and mostly the same "good grief!" snarkage and comments on how much like their supposed enemies, the Commies, the Conservatives have become/are becoming. And the Post's higher-ups, afaik, just let it go by without comment.
And yes, there are more important problems, and bigger hills of beans, including the long-known information that the WH was replacing people at all these various general historically and intrinsically non-partisan federal agencies with their own hand-picked Party Loyalists.
But this is a crucial window into the character of the people running the government and how they think. They're not just evil. They're not just clowns. They're Evil Clowns, okay? They do nothing for any reason except to try to bolster their own power. And they do objectively stupid things because they're not in the reality based community, they don't believe in objective reality, they believe that the universe is like the mob, which can be swayed and distracted and directed by words fashioned by the subtle and crafty, the true humans in their minds who deserve to rule over the men of the belly and the heart.
But it isn't - and even us hoi polloi can't be absolutely controlled by words, as the residents of Versailles and many another palace have learned over the ages. (And many an animal trainer and plant cultivator, too, eaten or overrun by "irrational" nature escaping control by people who didn't really understand what they were dealing with.)
The Nixonites, as I've found, were so obsessed with image and controlling the leaks that tarnished their image that they screwed up pretty much everything else, sleepwalked or careened through foreign policy and domestic alike, blowing it because they couldn't be arsed to do their jobs, oh no, all that mattered was the illusion of competence so that they could get elected and re-elected and given free rein to play at the Presidency, leaving a grand legacy of "World Leadership" without having to pay attention to the nitty-gritty, the real work of governing. (Yes, it is weird that I wrote so much about that in fictional guise without having read the details of any of it...) It wasn't just Nixon, remember - it was Haldeman and Alexander Haig and Pat Buchanan and John Dean and a whole corps of staffers all down the line, all suborned or seduced by power - remember too that it started with lower level minions getting spooked or revulsed and beginning to whisper, to break the wall of Watergate silence, before the big fish like Dean found remnants of conscience - or recognized their own self-interest lay in putting distance between.
You can't memoryhole stuff like that. I mean, you can, or they can, the PTB and the SCLM, just ignore it and not talk about it even after it's gotten out, and in the old days that was enough. But these days, they can't manage a total blackout, once one kitten gets out of the bag, because if we put our minds to it we Proles can break the wall of silence. That's the point of Pelican Brief, and why it doesn't work today: firstly, the realistic part, the fact that the arrogant would-be Princes of the Beltway disregard their underlings so totally, and that they assume that mere gophers or, gods forbid, still-lower janitors, not even white, will either be too loyal and/or greedy to object, or too stupid to understand, let alone care - that's all still true; but the idea that the SCLM will do anything about it these days, will fight tooth and claw to expose and spotlight the PTB's malfeasance? Gimmeabreak! --But today, Darby would just post her theory online, with links to the relevant cases online, or her friend would - there'd be no need for all those efforts to "go through channels" and subsequent suppression of it by the White House exerting a chokehold on parts of the Intelligence services. Ordinary blokes with binoculars were the key to tearing open the CIA's kidnap-torture ring, aviation fans - and the internet. Not that that is enough to stop the juggernaut, alone. But if enough of the country turns against them, not just from moral revulsion but also from the incompetence - and if we can continue to work this wedge in deeper, splintering out those who have no morals to revulse but do get the danger of being splashed with the stupidity-and-incompetence, like Pat Buchanan has, and more every day of the old-guard Conservatives, we can cripple them at least. Then it will be up to us to a) make sure they don't ever get back into power, b) put something positively better to replace, not just Lesser Evil And Not Quite As Dumb.
--How can any of the Neoconned, the gulled-but-still-proud "old fashioned small-government strong-defense balanced-budget law'n'order personal-liberty conservatives" continue to support Bushco with this kind of pantomime, charade, security-theatre going on, where all federal employees are required to insert a "Praise Bush!" into unrelated public information sessions, as if they endorsed all the foreign policies of the administration, and dissent is no longer an option for any civil servant? I guess if even the avowed and longstanding adversaries of the Hegemony, as well as the Corporate-Flack media gatekeepers, let it blow past, perhaps it isn't so surprising that Mr. & Mrs Joe Security can be somewhat oblivious to it.
But the conservatarian blogosphere is simply in denial and humming loudly. To which I just wonder -- why? It's like Jerry Pournelle admitting that the Iraq War was dumb and is a clusterfuck, but claiming it's our duty to support the war because we have to Support The Troops™ regardless.* My response to betrayal, and the realization of betrayals, was revolt; and anger not at the messenger but at the agents of betrayal. There's something obscure about the cores of personal identity and self-identification going on there, and I intend to tease it out shortly, after I finish with these issues.
And I've got to run, so I'll get to the other Big Thing in the US govt news later on. Perhaps you can guess what it is - it's something that wouldn't have registered at all if I hadn't read Chanur so long ago...
* Of course, Pournelle is a clueless fathead, for all his erudition, revealed by the footnoted fact that he thinks that nobody except the soldiers who have been killed and wounded and their families are suffering because of the war. He honestly doesn't realize that taking billions and billions that could have been spent to repair the infrastructure, protect and/or restore NOLA, feed the hungry clothe the naked heal the sick give justice to the tens of thousands of people imprisoned without trial because there isn't enough money to process them AND the stupid War on Some Drugs - is a hardship. He thinks that's all "inconvenince". He sees all those core components of civil society as "Welfare state entitlement" - and has no clue why ordinary humans would rather have peace and prosperity, and thinks that's selfishness and decadence, and that if we were only Putting Out More Flags, like in his fantasy remembrance of WWII, everything would be so much more noble and full of arete. He's most definitely Part Of The Problem, oh yeah.
But there are two things in particular I want to bring up, one of which which has been out for a while and kind of lost in the shuffle because it seems kind of trivial and the other of recent disclosure which has not perhaps sunk in because it seems rather arcanely boring - but both of which are in themselves rather dire and also point to the depths to which the administration - and all its enablers regardless of party - have sunk, and are willing to sink below.
The first is a tidbit which was so overlooked that it was even hard for me to track it down via google, even though I remembered pretty well the keywords involved - it was just so little commented on even in the blogosphere, pretty much a "Wha? sheesh!" and move on to bigger things. But "for want of a nail" &c - this thing hit me as being so typical, on so many levels, that it amazed me that it didn't bring more outcry from all around - particularly at the Post itself.
This is what happened: A Washington Post columnist named Al Kamen got hold of an internal memo from the USDA - that's the US Dept of Agriculture, for readers abroad, a federal agency which holds the conflicted mission of protecting people who buy food and people who produce food from each other, a conflict made more complicated by the fact that the people who produce food have a lot more money in big single gobs, ergo a lot more political clout, while the people who buy food but don't grow or package it are the ones who, as a whole, pay their salaries and hold their chargéd fealty - yes, there's always been corruption at Ag, thus the simmering Mad Cow crisis they are trying to stuff back into the barn, but also people trying to do their jobs honestly, too - so anyway, a memo went out to the undersecretaries etc from the upper eschelons, telling them to work official Presidential talking points re Iraq and the Global War On Terror™ into each and any speech they give on any topic whatsoever - with their compliance being monitored by the White House:
Career appointees at the Department of Agriculture were stunned last week to receive e-mailed instructions that include Bush administration "talking points" - saying things such as "President Bush has a clear strategy for victory in Iraq" - in every speech they give for the department.
"The President has requested that all members of his cabinet and sub-cabinet incorporate message points on the Global War on Terror into speeches, including specific examples of what each agency is doing to aid the reconstruction of Iraq," the May 2 e-mail from USDA speechwriter Heather Vaughn began.
The e-mail, sent to about 60 undersecretaries, assistant secretaries and other political appointees, was also sent to "a few people to whom it should not have gone," said the department's communications director, Terri Teuber. The career people, we are assured, are not being asked to spread the great news on Iraq in their talks to food stamp recipients, disadvantaged farmers, enviros or other folks.
The e-mail provided language "being used by Secretary [Michael O.] Johanns and deputy secretary [Charles F.] Conner in all of their remarks and is being sent to you for inclusion in your speeches."
Another attachment "contains specific examples of GWOT messages within agriculture speeches. Please use these message points as often as possible and send Harry Phillips, USDA's director of speechwriting, a weekly email summarizing the event, date and location of each speech incorporating the attached language. Your responses will be included in a weekly account sent to the White House."
This scoreboard, of course, will ensure you give it your best shot.
Now, you might still be scratching your heads, trying to figure out how this is going to work when people expect a talk about agriculture issues. Not to worry. The attachments - which can be viewed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/fedpage - show how easy it is to work a little Iraq happy talk into just about anything.
There's a sample introduction: "Several topics I'd like to talk about today - Farm Bill, trade with Japan, WTO, avian flu ... but before I do, let me touch on a subject people always ask about ... progress in Iraq." See? Smooth as silk.
--How, with a government that is doing this, can anyone continue to have any respect for them, and to take anything they say without the full saltshaker, or give them the benefit of the doubt that they are trying to actually take care of the country-as-a-whole, and not just lull or distract enough of the population so that they can finish picking the national pocket? It's not just "don't trust them about the War" - it's clear that they have no regard for anything but their own image. None. Whatsoever. They've coopted the entire apparatus of the organization which is supposed to be administering everything else into running around shouting "How beautiful the Emperor's new clothes are!"
Does anyone now fail to recognize how important a sign this was of the utter malign buffoonery of Bushco? It isn't something to be shrugged off as "oh, those sillies!"
It's just like Ron Suskind said back in 2004 - they don't live in the reality-based community. And, by their own boastful admission, they're not even trying.
--Interestingly, and perhaps merely coincidentally, I couldn't get to the WaPo original of that story this am - although you can still get to the pdf of the suggested examples...for the moment. I've saved it down and will post it to my site if I find out it's gotten minitrued. I could only find it via google through Dan Froomkin's subsequent discussion of it, in response to a reader's comment on the story, on his White House Talk reader chat page. Given the So-Called Liberal Media's penchant for Orwellizing things that aren't flattering to the administration, it's a good thing that Truthout and other sites didn't just quote extracts but mirrored the article.
Even more interestingly, Froomkin - who has been a thorn in the side of the Post's heirarchy before, as their token "radical liberal" who had to be counterbalanced by Ben "Box Turtles" Domenech - made a jab at his own higher-ups by noting that as of that posting, the New York Times - the Post's greatest rival from of old - had beat them to commenting on it editorially, "An Agriprop Guide to Cluck and Awe",here on May 10. And yet they just laughed it off - oh, aren't they so silly in the Forbidden City with their games! - as if these jokers weren't committing mass murder and grand larceny on a daily basis.
And not just disregarding the laws, and sneaking around breaking them, either. No, claiming the right to do so, in the name of the Law. This is not exactly a new thing: Nixon did it, Orwell described it, every tyrant who's ever tossed out the traditional checks on state power in the name of necessity from the time of the Romans thru the Stewarts down to the present has done it. What's new - for us, at least - is the combination of shifty, underhanded secrecy (your traditional law-breaker's SOP, deeds of darkness &c) with the overt "we can do whatever we want cuz we're in charge, nyah nyah!" brazenness when ever they get caught at it.
But that was all the talk I could find about this new Komissariat policy, except on the blogs and alternative web-based media like Truthout and others, and even then just a little, and mostly the same "good grief!" snarkage and comments on how much like their supposed enemies, the Commies, the Conservatives have become/are becoming. And the Post's higher-ups, afaik, just let it go by without comment.
And yes, there are more important problems, and bigger hills of beans, including the long-known information that the WH was replacing people at all these various general historically and intrinsically non-partisan federal agencies with their own hand-picked Party Loyalists.
But this is a crucial window into the character of the people running the government and how they think. They're not just evil. They're not just clowns. They're Evil Clowns, okay? They do nothing for any reason except to try to bolster their own power. And they do objectively stupid things because they're not in the reality based community, they don't believe in objective reality, they believe that the universe is like the mob, which can be swayed and distracted and directed by words fashioned by the subtle and crafty, the true humans in their minds who deserve to rule over the men of the belly and the heart.
But it isn't - and even us hoi polloi can't be absolutely controlled by words, as the residents of Versailles and many another palace have learned over the ages. (And many an animal trainer and plant cultivator, too, eaten or overrun by "irrational" nature escaping control by people who didn't really understand what they were dealing with.)
The Nixonites, as I've found, were so obsessed with image and controlling the leaks that tarnished their image that they screwed up pretty much everything else, sleepwalked or careened through foreign policy and domestic alike, blowing it because they couldn't be arsed to do their jobs, oh no, all that mattered was the illusion of competence so that they could get elected and re-elected and given free rein to play at the Presidency, leaving a grand legacy of "World Leadership" without having to pay attention to the nitty-gritty, the real work of governing. (Yes, it is weird that I wrote so much about that in fictional guise without having read the details of any of it...) It wasn't just Nixon, remember - it was Haldeman and Alexander Haig and Pat Buchanan and John Dean and a whole corps of staffers all down the line, all suborned or seduced by power - remember too that it started with lower level minions getting spooked or revulsed and beginning to whisper, to break the wall of Watergate silence, before the big fish like Dean found remnants of conscience - or recognized their own self-interest lay in putting distance between.
You can't memoryhole stuff like that. I mean, you can, or they can, the PTB and the SCLM, just ignore it and not talk about it even after it's gotten out, and in the old days that was enough. But these days, they can't manage a total blackout, once one kitten gets out of the bag, because if we put our minds to it we Proles can break the wall of silence. That's the point of Pelican Brief, and why it doesn't work today: firstly, the realistic part, the fact that the arrogant would-be Princes of the Beltway disregard their underlings so totally, and that they assume that mere gophers or, gods forbid, still-lower janitors, not even white, will either be too loyal and/or greedy to object, or too stupid to understand, let alone care - that's all still true; but the idea that the SCLM will do anything about it these days, will fight tooth and claw to expose and spotlight the PTB's malfeasance? Gimmeabreak! --But today, Darby would just post her theory online, with links to the relevant cases online, or her friend would - there'd be no need for all those efforts to "go through channels" and subsequent suppression of it by the White House exerting a chokehold on parts of the Intelligence services. Ordinary blokes with binoculars were the key to tearing open the CIA's kidnap-torture ring, aviation fans - and the internet. Not that that is enough to stop the juggernaut, alone. But if enough of the country turns against them, not just from moral revulsion but also from the incompetence - and if we can continue to work this wedge in deeper, splintering out those who have no morals to revulse but do get the danger of being splashed with the stupidity-and-incompetence, like Pat Buchanan has, and more every day of the old-guard Conservatives, we can cripple them at least. Then it will be up to us to a) make sure they don't ever get back into power, b) put something positively better to replace, not just Lesser Evil And Not Quite As Dumb.
--How can any of the Neoconned, the gulled-but-still-proud "old fashioned small-government strong-defense balanced-budget law'n'order personal-liberty conservatives" continue to support Bushco with this kind of pantomime, charade, security-theatre going on, where all federal employees are required to insert a "Praise Bush!" into unrelated public information sessions, as if they endorsed all the foreign policies of the administration, and dissent is no longer an option for any civil servant? I guess if even the avowed and longstanding adversaries of the Hegemony, as well as the Corporate-Flack media gatekeepers, let it blow past, perhaps it isn't so surprising that Mr. & Mrs Joe Security can be somewhat oblivious to it.
But the conservatarian blogosphere is simply in denial and humming loudly. To which I just wonder -- why? It's like Jerry Pournelle admitting that the Iraq War was dumb and is a clusterfuck, but claiming it's our duty to support the war because we have to Support The Troops™ regardless.* My response to betrayal, and the realization of betrayals, was revolt; and anger not at the messenger but at the agents of betrayal. There's something obscure about the cores of personal identity and self-identification going on there, and I intend to tease it out shortly, after I finish with these issues.
And I've got to run, so I'll get to the other Big Thing in the US govt news later on. Perhaps you can guess what it is - it's something that wouldn't have registered at all if I hadn't read Chanur so long ago...
* Of course, Pournelle is a clueless fathead, for all his erudition, revealed by the footnoted fact that he thinks that nobody except the soldiers who have been killed and wounded and their families are suffering because of the war. He honestly doesn't realize that taking billions and billions that could have been spent to repair the infrastructure, protect and/or restore NOLA, feed the hungry clothe the naked heal the sick give justice to the tens of thousands of people imprisoned without trial because there isn't enough money to process them AND the stupid War on Some Drugs - is a hardship. He thinks that's all "inconvenince". He sees all those core components of civil society as "Welfare state entitlement" - and has no clue why ordinary humans would rather have peace and prosperity, and thinks that's selfishness and decadence, and that if we were only Putting Out More Flags, like in his fantasy remembrance of WWII, everything would be so much more noble and full of arete. He's most definitely Part Of The Problem, oh yeah.