Frank Rich: 'Inchoate class war' won't be solved by '12 elections

Many are criticizing OWS for not having a clearer diagnosis of America's problems, and a ready batch of proposed solutions. But that's unfair. The OWS movement was started and continues to be fueled mainly by the young, who can't be expected to know everything. But that doesn't mean they know nothing. Here's their advantage: these young people still retain their acute adolescent sensitivity to unfairness.

For instance, what many of us have come to sigh and take for granted, as just the way of American capitalism -- that big bankers grow rich during the good times, and even richer in bad times -- OWS sees as fundamentally unjust, and a symptom of something deeply wrong with our country. They may not have the experience or erudition to say exactly what is wrong, but they recognize colossal injustice when they see it.

They recognize the unfairness of a system which told them all their lives, "Education is the key to employment and the American dream," and yet they are graduating with huge student loan debt and few job prospects.

They recognize as a baldfaced lie that America is "bankrupt" thanks to "welfare" and therefore cannot offer mortgage relief, student debt relief, invest in infrastructure, or stimulate jobs, and yet America can somehow find $4 trillion for wars in Iraq in Afghanistan, and $16 trillion for bank bailouts (or 111% of U.S. GDP in 2010).

(Indeed, let's pause and remind ourselves that for today's college freshmen, America has been at war half their lives. Since the time they started to perceive the outside world they have known only global terrorism, "the long war," "support our troops," and indefinite U.S. occupation. How that formative experience will affect them throughout their lives no one can tell....)

Pundits like Frank Rich say "the class war has begun." No. It started at least 30 years ago. OWS is just an acknowledgment of hostilities. In their own way the Tea Parties were also an acknowledgment, but they chose to target the wrong elites as Frank Rich points out; or, as I would say, they were right to recognize Washington as the problem, but the TPs were stubbornly blind in ignoring corporate donations and lobbyists as Washington's puppet masters.

OWS may not last through the cold winter, but Americans' "inchoate" class anger isn't going anywhere. The 2012 elections don't promise to resolve anything -- they promise only to be the most depressing political contest in my lifetime. The sad truth is that both Democrat and Republican leaders want OWS to disappear, because that's what their masters want.

The Class War Has Begun

And the very classlessness of our society makes the conflict more volatile, not less.

By Frank Rich

October 23, 2011 | New York Magazine

[...]

Try as polite company keeps trying to ignore it, that war has been building in this country and abroad for much of this decade and has been waged in earnest in America since the fall of 2008. But the crisp agenda demanded of Occupy Wall Street will not be forthcoming. The inchoateness of our particular class war is central to its meaning. America is not Tahrir Square or the riot-scarred precincts of North London, where everyone knows at birth who is in which class and why. We pride ourselves on being a "classless" democracy. We abhor ideology. When Americans left and right, young and old, express anger at an overclass, they don't necessarily agree about who's on which side of that class divide. The often confusing fluidity of class definitions, especially in an America as polarized as ours is now, may make our home­grown class war more volatile, not less.

[...]

Back in 1931, even Hoover worried that "timid people, black with despair" had "lost faith in the American system" and might be susceptible to the kind of revolutions that had become a spreading peril abroad. When Roosevelt took office, he had the confidence that his leadership could overcome that level of despair and head off radicals on the left or right. In 2011, the despair is again black, and faith in the system is shaky, but it would be hard to describe the atmosphere at Zuccotti Park or a tea-party rally as prerevolutionary. The anger of the class war across the spectrum seems fatalistic more than incendiary. No wonder. Everyone just assumes the fix is in for the highest bidder, no matter what. Take—please!—the latest bipartisan Beltway panacea: the congressional supercommittee charged by the president and GOP leaders to hammer out the deficit-reduction compromise they couldn't do on their own. The Washington Post recently discovered that nearly 100 of the registered lobbyists no doubt charged with besieging the committee to protect the interests of the financial, defense, and health-care industries are former employees of its dozen members. Indeed, six of those members (three from each party) currently have former lobbyists on their staffs.

[...]

Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not. The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won't even be on the table. The structural crises in our economy, our government, and our culture defy any of the glib solutions proposed by current Democrats or Republicans; the quixotic third-party movements being hatched by well-heeled do-gooders are vanity productions. The two powerful forces that extricated America from the Great Depression—the courageous leadership and reformist zeal of Roosevelt, the mobilization for World War II—are not on offer this time. Our class war will rage on without winners indefinitely, with all sides stewing in their own juices, until—when? No one knows. The reckoning with capitalism's failures over the past three decades, both in America and the globe beyond, may well be on hold until the top one percent becomes persuaded that its own economic fate is tied to the other 99 percent's. Which is to say things may have to get worse before they get better.

Over the short term, meanwhile, the Democratic Establishment is no doubt wishing that Occupy Wall Street will melt away with the winter snows, much as its Republican counterpart hopes that the leaderless tea party will wither if Romney nails down the nomination. But even in the unlikely event that these wishes come true, it is not likely to be the end of the story. Though the Bonus Army was driven out of Washington in the similarly fraught election year of 1932, the newsreels they left behind turned out to be previews of coming attractions for the long decade still to come.

Rich: Last chance for Obama to grow a sack

I'm done hoping Obama will realize who his true friends are, and find his manly courage to fight -- not soothe -- his sworn political enemies who are out to destroy him. He is a passive tool of "the best and brightest [Ivy League] white guys" whom he obviously aspired to be like at Harvard: Jamie Dimon, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, and the rest. Obama is a nice guy who means well but in the end toms to his "betters," those NE-coast pedigreed whites.

UPDATE (07.06.11): Matt Taibbi summarized well Obama's "central failure" as described by Rich:

"Rich in this way describes the central failure of the Obama presidency. Obama entered the White House in the middle of a great economic crisis, and his Geithner/Rubin solution was to spend mind-boggling amounts bailing out Wall Street, while extracting no conditions or reforms in exchange, and punishing no one. Then, by abandoning jobs programs and taking up the Tea Party’s 'austerity' model, he essentially asked ordinary Americans to foot the bill for this no-strings-attached rescue program."

Obama's Original Sin

The president's failure to demand a reckoning from the moneyed interests who brought the economy down has cursed his first term, and could prevent a second.

By Frank Rich

July 3, 2011 | New York Magazine

[...]

What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust's innocent victims. As the ghost of Hamlet's father might have it, America will be stalked by its foul and unresolved crimes until they "are burnt and purged away."

After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora's fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). As the indefatigable Matt Taibbi has tabulated, law enforcement on Obama's watch rounded up 393,000 illegal immigrants last year and zero bankers. The Justice Department's bally­hooed Operation Broken Trust has broken still more trust by chasing mainly low-echelon, one-off Madoff wannabes. You almost have to feel sorry for the era's designated Goldman scapegoat, 32-year-old flunky "Fabulous Fab" Fabrice Tourre, who may yet take the fall for everyone else. It's as if the Watergate investigation were halted after the cops nabbed the nudniks who did the break-in.

Even now, on the heels of Bank of America's reluctant $8.5 billion settlement with investors who held its mortgage-backed securities, the Obama administration may be handing it and its peers new get-out-of-jail-free cards. With the Department of Justice's blessing, the Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, is pushing the 49 other states to sign on to a national financial settlement ending their investigations of the biggest mortgage lenders. What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up. Time reported in April that the lawyer negotiating with Miller for Moynihan's Bank of America just happened to be a contributor to his 2010 Iowa reelection campaign. If the deal is struck, any truly aggressive state attorneys general, like Eric Schneiderman of New York, will be shut down before they can dig into the full and still mostly uninvestigated daisy chain of get-rich-quick rackets practiced by banks as they repackaged junk mortgages into junk securities.

Those in executive suites at the top of that chain have long since fled the scene with the proceeds, while bleeding shareholders, investors, homeowners, and ­cashiered employees were left with the bills. The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords. The administration's much-hyped Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is being sabotaged by Washington Republicans intent on blocking any White House nominee, whether Elizabeth Warren or some malleable hack, to lead it. "We can't let special interests win this fight," said Obama when he proposed the agency in October 2009. Well, he missed his moment to fight for both it and Warren, and the special interests won without breaking a sweat.

Rather than purge the crash's crimes, Wall Street's leaders are sticking to their alibi: Everyone was guilty of fomenting this "perfect storm," and so no one is. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and ­Masters of the Universe swagger is back. Even Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, about the only bank chief not to be caught with a suspect balance sheet or a $1,400 office trash can, has taken to channeling Schwarzman. In June, he publicly challenged Ben Bernanke about the intolerable burdens of potential regulation—this despite a 67 percent surge in JPMorgan's first-quarter profits and a 1,500 percent raise in his own compensation from 2009 to 2010. As good times roar back for corporate America, it's bad enough that CEOs are collectively sitting on some $1.9 trillion in cash—much of it parked out of the IRS's reach overseas—instead of hiring. (How many jobs can you buy for $1.9 trillion? America's total expenditure on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars over a decade has been $1.3 trillion.) But what's most galling is how many of these executives are sore winners, crying all the way to Palm Beach while raking in record profits and paying some of the lowest tax rates over the past 50 years.

The fallout has left Obama in the worst imaginable political bind. No good deed he's done for Wall Street has gone unpunished. He is vilified as an anti-capitalist zealot not just by Republican foes but even by some former backers. What has he done to deserve it? All anyone can point to is his December 2009 60 Minutes swipe at "fat-cat bankers on Wall Street"—an inept and anomalous Ed Schultz seizure that he retracted just weeks later by praising Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein as "very savvy businessmen."

Obama can win reelection without carrying 10021 or Greenwich in any case. The bigger political problem is that a far larger share of the American electorate views him as a tool of the very fat-cat elite that despises him. Given Obama's humble background, his history as a mostly liberal Democrat, and his famous résumé as a community organizer, this would also seem a reach. But the president has no one to blame but himself for the caricature. While he has never lusted after money—he'd rather get his hands on the latest novel by Morrison or Franzen—he is an elitist of a certain sort. For all the lurid fantasies of the birthers, the dirty secret of Obama's background is that the values of Harvard, not of Kenya or Indonesia or Bill Ayers, have most colored his governing style. He falls hard for the best and the brightest white guys.

[...]

Not until March 2010 did the White House get its first explicit, modest jobs bill through Congress. [...] The White House's repeated argument that the stimulus saved as many as 3 million jobs, accurate though it may be, is another nonstarter when 14 million Americans are looking for work.

[...]

There's not much Obama can do to alter the economy by 2012, given the debt-ceiling fight, the long campaign, and nihilistic Capitol Hill antagonists opposed to any government spending that might create jobs and, by extension, help Obama keep his own. But the central question before the nation couldn't be clearer: Who pays? The taxpayers bailed out the elite; now it's the elite's turn to return the favor. Massive cuts to the safety net combined with scant sacrifice from those at the top is wrong ethically and politically. It is, in the truest sense, un-American. Obama knows this, and he hit a welcome note last week when he urged some higher corporate taxes for hedge funds and the like. But his forays in this direction are tentative and sporadic. You have to wonder why he isn't seizing the moment to articulate and fight for the big picture instead of playing a lose-lose game of rope-a-dope with the Republicans on their budgetary turf.

[...]

"A nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous," Obama declared at his inauguration. What he said on that bright January morning is no less true or stirring now. For all his failings since, he is the only one who can make this case. There's nothing but his own passivity to stop him from doing so—and from shaking up the administration team that, well beyond the halfway-out-the-door Geithner and his Treasury Department, has showered too many favors on the prosperous. This will mean turning on his own cadre of the liberal elite. But it's essential if he is to call the bluff of a fake man-of-the-people like Romney. To differentiate himself from the discredited Establishment, he will have to mount the fight he has ducked for the past three years.

The alternative is a failure of historic proportions. Those who gamed the economy to near devastation—so much so that the nation turned to an untried young leader in desperation and in hope—would once again inherit the Earth. Unless and until there's a purging of the crimes that brought our president to his unlikely Inauguration Day, much more in America than the second term of his administration will be at stake.

Rich: Beyond the deficit, extreme inequality threatens our society

You know, I agree with Frank Rich and I've argued the same: taxing the top 1% of income earners to cut the deficit is more than just the obvious way to close our fiscal deficit; Gilded-Age levels of income inequality are also a moral and social issue that portend political instability and social unrest.

However, I have to side with Obama's "moderate" approach: It's not about class, it's about math.

Too large a proportion of the electorate has been successfully brainwashed into voting against their own economic interests (although some, having parsed the numbers, disagree). Moreover, Americans rightly distrust the virtue of their Congress to spend any additional tax revenue prudently. And so any talk of what's right, fair, or socially stable can too easily be twisted into "class warfare" accusations from the Right. We can't undo their warped programming in an acceptable timeframe.

For us to win the debate, we must keep it simple and make the choices clear, like this poll did: either A or B: either tax the top 1% or cut everybody's Social Security. Then we'll see how the Teabaggers and Red State zombies like them apples.

Who Will Stand Up to the Superrich?

By Frank Rich

November 13, 2010 | New York Times

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/opinion/14rich.html

Rich: Health bill not real cause of right-wing rage

Frank Rich says that conservatives' outrage at the health care bill isn't about health care, it's about teabaggers (many of their grassroots leaders unemployed), feeling insecure about their future place in America. That is, they're scared of ascendant non-whites.

Is that an unfair accusation? As a blanket statement, yes. Surely not all teabaggers are racists. But look at it another way: Why are there are no black Republicans in Congress; and almost all teabaggers are white? Do white people know something the rest of America doesn't?

If you're a teabagger (aka Republican) who is not racist and believes in the righteousness of your movement, let me ask you: Do you think the GOP and Tea Parties deliberately exclude non-whites? Strategically, is there something you could say or do, or stop saying or doing, that would attract non-whites to your cause without sacrificing your core principles? Because intentionally or not, you have scared them away. Because the rest of America (which is about 50%, demographically, and about 70%, ideologically), wants nothing to do with you.

If you want your movement to have staying power and lasting influence, you should be interested in this question. If you just want an excuse to repeat what you heard them yelling on FOXNews and talk radio so that everybody nods and says, "I know!", or a reason to get out of the house, carry signs and chant like you chose not to in the 60's, then forget about it. Your anger -- and your movement -- will peter out anyway. Likewise your true party -- the GOP -- will become less relevant.

The Rage Is Not About Health Care

By Frank Rich

March 27, 2010 | New York Times

["..."]

If Obama's first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It's not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend's abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan "Take our country back!," these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can't. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven't had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

["..."]

Rich: Conservative hawks' Killeen-Kabul disconnect

Rich makes the simple but brilliant point that the same U.S. conservatives who say you can't trust any Muslim, even a U.S.-born Muslim in American uniform, are the same ones totally committed -- no matter what the cost in U.S. lives or treasure -- to continuing the futile effort to win over Muslim hearts and minds in Iraq and especially Afghanistan.

See the disconnect?

(That feeling you're feeling in your head right now is called "cognitive dissonance." Don't fear it. Learn from it. Let your brain do its thing and then do what it tells you.)

The Missing Link From Killeen to Kabul

By Frank Rich

November 14, 2009 | New York Times

[...]

As their Fort Hood rhetoric made clear, McChrystal's most vehement partisans don't trust American Muslims, let alone those of the Taliban, no matter how earnestly the general may argue that they can be won over by our troops' friendliness (or bribes). If, as the right has it, our Army cannot be trusted to recognize a Hasan in its own ranks, then how will it figure out who the "good" Muslims will be as we try to build a "stable" state (whatever "stable" means) in a country that has never had a functioning central government? If our troops can't be protected from seemingly friendly Muslim American brethren in Killeen, Tex., what are the odds of survival for the 40,000 more troops the hawks want to deploy to Kabul and sinkholes beyond?

Obama can't ignore Bush Admin.'s past

Part of me wants to ignore all this because it could distract from achieving Obama's legislative priorities.  But another part of me wants truth and justice.  In any case, it looks like "the truth will out," as the cliche goes. 


Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush

By Frank Rich

May 16, 2009  | New York Times

TO paraphrase Al Pacino in "Godfather III," just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can't. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration's high ambitions.

That's why the president's flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool's errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven't started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here's a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld's corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of "Dead Certain," the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld's monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America's most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper's biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go." (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

What's up with that? As Draper writes, Rumsfeld is not known for ostentatious displays of piety. He was cynically playing the religious angle to seduce and manipulate a president who frequently quoted the Bible. But the secretary's actions were not just oily; he was also taking a risk with national security. If these official daily collages of Crusade-like messaging and war imagery had been leaked, they would have reinforced the Muslim world's apocalyptic fear that America was waging a religious war. As one alarmed Pentagon hand told Draper, the fallout "would be as bad as Abu Ghraib."

The GQ article isn't the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.

What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon's internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective "military analysts."  Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement.  Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press.  Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these "analysts" appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call "the real situation on the ground in Iraq."

When Barstow's story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon's inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld's current spokesman cited the inspector general's "exoneration" to attack the Times articles as fiction.

But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general's report, not The Times's reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow's charges. The inspector general's office had barely glanced at the 8,000 pages of e-mail that Barstow had used as evidence, and interviewed only seven of the 70 disputed analysts. In other words, the report was a whitewash. The Obama Pentagon officially rescinded it — an almost unprecedented step — and even removed it from its Web site.

Network news operations ignored the unmasking of this last-minute Bush Pentagon cover-up, as they had the original Barstow articles — surely not because they had been patsies for the Bush P.R. machine. But the story is actually far larger than this one particular incident. If the Pentagon inspector general's office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?

In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated (and ultimately canceled) $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn't buy the heavily redacted report's claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called "the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history." The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.

But the new administration doesn't want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general's report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. "Sometimes I think just keep walking," she said on ABC's "This Week" as the torture memos surfaced. "Some of life has to be mysterious." Imagine if she'd been at Nuremberg!

The administration can't "just keep walking" because it is losing control of the story.  The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president's "left-wing base" want accountability, but that's not the case.  Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month's Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into "confirming" a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture "worked," and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the "bad apples" made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. "Did President Bush know everything you knew?" Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on "Face the Nation" last Sunday.  The former vice president's uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — "I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew..." — suggests that the Bush White House's once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I'm not a fan of Washington's blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney's watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Truth's out: 9/11 was preventable

The Real-Life '24' of Summer 2008
By Frank Rich
July 13, 2008 | New York Times

[Excerpt:]

'By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.'s inspector general, "50 or 60 individuals" in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, '"I don't want to hear about that anymore!"'

9/11 tradition: USG propagandists & MSM lapdogs unite

As the Iraqis Stand Down, We'll Stand Up
By Frank Rich
September 08, 2007 | The New York Times

It will be all 9/11 all the time this week, as the White House yet again synchronizes its drumbeating for the Iraq war with the anniversary of an attack that had nothing to do with Iraq. Ignore that fog and focus instead on another date whose anniversary passed yesterday without notice: Sept. 8, 2002. What happened on that Sunday five years ago is the Rosetta Stone for the administration's latest scam.

That was the morning when the Bush White House officially rolled out its fraudulent case for the war. The four horsemen of the apocalypse — Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice — were dispatched en masse to the Washington talk shows, where they eagerly pointed to a front-page New York Times article amplifying subsequently debunked administration claims that Saddam had sought to buy aluminum tubes meant for nuclear weapons. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Condoleezza Rice on CNN, introducing a sales pitch concocted by a White House speechwriter.

What followed was an epic propaganda onslaught of distorted intelligence, fake news, credulous and erroneous reporting by bona fide journalists, presidential playacting and Congressional fecklessness. Much of it had been plotted that summer of 2002 by the then-secret White House Iraq Group (WHIG), a small task force of administration brass charged with the Iraq con job.

Today the spirit of WHIG lives. In the stay-the-surge propaganda offensive that crests with this week's Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, history is repeating itself in almost every particular. Even the specter of imminent "nuclear holocaust" has been rebooted in President Bush's arsenal of rhetorical scare tactics.

The new WHIG is a 24/7 Pentagon information "war room" conceived in the last throes of the Rumsfeld regime and run by a former ABC News producer. White House "facts" about the surge's triumph are turning up unsubstantiated in newspapers and on TV. Instead of being bombarded with dire cherry-picked intelligence about W.M.D., this time we're being serenaded with feel-good cherry-picked statistics offering hope. Once again the fix is in. Mr. Bush's pretense that he has been waiting for the Petraeus-Crocker report before setting his policy is as bogus as his U.N. charade before the war. And once again a narrowly Democratic Senate lacks the votes to stop him.

As always with this White House, telegenic artificial realities are paramount. Exhibit A, of course, was last weekend's precisely timed "surprise" presidential junket: Mr. Bush took the measure of success "on the ground here in Anbar" (as he put it) without ever leaving a heavily fortified American base.

A more elaborate example of administration Disneyland can be found in those bubbly Baghdad markets visited by John McCain and other dignitaries whenever the cameras roll. Last week The Washington Post discovered that at least one of them, the Dora market, is a Potemkin village , open only a few hours a day and produced by $2,500 grants (a k a bribes) bestowed on the shopkeepers. "This is General Petraeus's baby," Staff Sgt. Josh Campbell told The Post. "Personally, I think it's a false impression." Another U.S. officer said that even shops that "sell dust" or merely "intend to sell goods" are included in the Pentagon's count of the market's reopened businesses.

One Baghdad visitor left unimpressed was Representative Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Chicago, who dined with her delegation in Mr. Crocker's Green Zone residence last month while General Petraeus delivered his spiel. "He's spending an awful lot of time wining and dining members of Congress," she told me last week. Though the menu included that native specialty lobster tortellini, the real bill of fare, Ms. Schakowsky said, was a rigid set of talking points: "Anbar," "bottom up," "decrease in violence" and "success."

In this new White House narrative, victory has been downsized to a successful antiterrorist alliance between Sunni tribal leaders and the American military in Anbar, a single province containing less than 5 percent of Iraq's population. In truth, the surge had little to do with this development, which was already being trumpeted by Mr. Bush in his January prime-time speech announcing the surge.

Even if you believe that it's a good idea to bond with former Saddamists who may have American blood on their hands, the chances of this "bottom up" model replicating itself are slim. Anbar's population is almost exclusively Sunni. Much of the rest of Iraq is consumed by the Sunni-Shiite and Shiite-Shiite civil wars that are M.I.A. in White House talking points.

The "decrease in violence" fable is even more insidious. Though both General Petraeus and a White House fact sheet have recently boasted of a 75 percent decline in sectarian attacks, this number turns out to be as cooked as those tallies of Saddam's weapons sites once peddled by WHIG. As The Washington Post reported on Thursday, it excludes Shiite-on-Shiite and Sunni-on-Sunni violence. The Government Accountability Office, which rejected that fuzzy math, found overall violence unchanged using the methodology practiced by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

No doubt General Petraeus, like Dick Cheney before him, will say that his own data is "pretty well confirmed" by classified intelligence that can't be divulged without endangering national security. Meanwhile, the White House will ruthlessly undermine any reality-based information that contradicts its propaganda, much as it dismissed the accurate W.M.D. findings of the United Nations weapon experts Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei before the war. General Petraeus intervened to soften last month's harsh National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq (.pdf). Last week the administration and its ideological surrogates were tireless in trashing the nonpartisan G.A.O. report card that found the Iraqi government flunking most of its benchmarks.

Those benchmarks, the war's dead- enders now say, are obsolete anyway. But what about the president's own benchmarks? Remember "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down"? General Petraeus was once in charge of the Iraqi Army's training and proclaimed it "on track and increasing in capacity" three years ago. On Thursday, an independent commission convened by the Republican John Warner and populated by retired military officers and police chiefs reported that Iraqi forces can take charge no sooner than 12 to 18 months from now, and that the corrupt Iraqi police force has to be rebuilt from scratch. Let us not forget, either, Mr. Bush's former top-down benchmarks for measuring success: "an Iraq that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself." On that scorecard, he's batting 0 for 3.

What's surprising is not that this White House makes stuff up, but that even after all the journalistic embarrassments in the run-up to the war its fictions can still infiltrate the real news. After Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, two Brookings Institution scholars, wrote a New York Times Op-Ed article in July spreading glad tidings of falling civilian fatality rates, they were widely damned for trying to pass themselves off as tough war critics (both had supported the war and the surge) and for not mentioning that their fact-finding visit to Iraq was largely dictated by a Department of Defense itinerary.

But this has not impeded them from posing as quasi-journalistic independent observers elsewhere ever since, whether on CNN, CBS, Fox or in these pages, identifying themselves as experts rather than Pentagon junketeers. Unlike Armstrong Williams, the talking head and columnist who clandestinely received big government bucks to "regularly comment" on No Child Left Behind, they received no cash. But why pay for what you can get free? Two weeks ago Mr. O'Hanlon popped up on The Washington Post op-ed page, again pushing rosy Iraq scenarios, including an upbeat prognosis for economic reconstruction, even though the G.A.O. found that little of the $10 billion earmarked for reconstruction is likely to be spent.

Anchoring the "CBS Evening News" from Iraq last week, Katie Couric seemed to be drinking the same Kool-Aid (or eating the same lobster tortellini) as Mr. O'Hanlon. As "a snapshot of what's going right," she cited Falluja, a bombed-out city with 80 percent unemployment, and she repeatedly spoke of American victories against "Al Qaeda." Channeling the president's bait-and-switch, she never differentiated between that local group he calls "Al Qaeda in Iraq" and the Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't even exist on 9/11, may represent as little as 2 to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency, according to a new investigation in The Washington Monthly by Andrew Tilghman, a former Iraq correspondent for Stars and Stripes.

Next to such "real" news from CBS, the "fake" news at the network's corporate sibling Comedy Central was, not for the first time, more trustworthy. Rob Riggle, a "Daily Show" correspondent who also serves in the Marine Reserve, invited American troops in Iraq to speak candidly about the Iraqi Parliament's vacation.

When the line separating spin from reality is so effectively blurred, the White House's propaganda mission has once more been accomplished. No wonder President Bush is cocky again. Stopping in Sydney for the economic summit after last weekend's photo op in Iraq, he reportedly told Australia's deputy prime minister that "we're kicking ass." This war has now gone on so long that perhaps he has forgotten the price our troops paid the last time he taunted our adversaries to bring it on, some four years and 3,500 American military fatalities ago.