Apr 2, 2008 at 11:50 PM by David Pleasant
Update: I’m bumping this up so that anybody who missed it earlier will get an opportunity to see it. Also it is currently #3 on Amazon’s Non-Fiction List and #14 overall.
Glenn Greenwald’s new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, is available for ordering online and will be in stores beginning April 15. I have not read the book yet, but if his prior works (A Tragic Legacy and How Would a Patriot Act?) are any indication, it will indeed be must reading.
Following is an excerpt from Glenn’s post today announcing the book’s availability.
From the time I began blogging in October, 2005, I’ve written about many different topics, but almost all have a similar undercurrent: the Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox-News right-wing faction that controls the Republican Party and has dominated our political life for the last 15 years, and the multiple ways that our political institutions — and particularly the Drudgified establishment press — enable them. Marketing packages aside, this book is about them; how they function; the weakness-driven bloodthirstiness, dishonesty and sleaze which defines them; the indispensable eagerness of the establishment media to be used by them; and what can be done by those opposed to them to change all of that.
All of the radical and reprehensible events of the last eight years — the commencement and endless prosecution of an indescribably disastrous war, the accelerated dismantling of our Constitutional framework, the creation of a lawless Surveillance State and a virtually omnipotent President, the legitimization of truly grotesque torture and detention regimes, the complete corruption of our political discourse — have individuals and a political movement behind them, causing all of that to happen. They have cultivated the ability to manipulate media behavior, largely as a result of a media eager to help. But what they do not have is popular support for virtually anything they are doing. And yet they continue to win elections.
How and why that happens — the deceitful electoral tactics and manipulative personality-based myths the Right has perfected and continuously deploys to win elections, and the ways in which our slothful, vapid and complicit establishment press propagates those myths — is the principal subject of this book. And understanding and exposing that right-wing/media partnership is a necessary precondition for weakening it.
(emphasis in original)
Apr 2, 2008 at 11:02 AM by David Pleasant
After years of Congress demanding the Bush administration release documents on torture, the Justice Department finally released a legal opinion John Yoo wrote March 14, 2003 as head of the Office of Legal Counsel. Just reading this memo shocks the conscience, and it is the declassified version. When I read it, I cringed and thought about my father and the horrific torture he endured as a POW in then-Yugoslavia during WW II. Were he alive today, reading this would pain his heart deeply; a response much more substantial than any cringed-reaction I might have. He knew intimately what torture was like and lived with its aftermath until the day he died. At best, I can only guess.
My father’s pain would be discovering that his country, at the highest level, not only sanctioned, but promoted inflicting the atrocities he endured.
The memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president’s inherent wartime powers.
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national and international version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations — that it must "shock the conscience" — that the Bush administration advocated for years.
"Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.
Apr 2, 2008 at 2:54 AM by Political Chase
(updated below)
Dan Calabrese at North Star has a disturbing piece on Hillary Clinton’s tenure as a staffer on the House Judiciary Committee during Richard Nixon’s Watergate hearings. Given the hour (2:45 AM), I am going to reserve judgment and commentary for now, with one exception. If this holds up to scrutiny, it is very, very bad news for Clinton; and, why did this not break years ago.
Read it and weep:
Watergate-Era Judiciary Chief of Staff: Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior
As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.
The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.
Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.
Why?
“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”
Accuracy in Media has an exclusive on Zeifman’s story. Here’s an excerpt from their site (read full article article here).
After hiring Hillary, Doar assigned her to confer with me regarding rules of procedure for the impeachment inquiry. At my first meeting with her I told her that Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, House Speaker Carl Albert, Majority Leader “Tip” O’Neill, Parliamentarian Lou Deschler and I had previously all agreed that we should rely only on the then existing House Rules, and not advocate any changes. I also quoted Tip O’Neill’s statement that: “To try to change the rules now would be politically divisive. It would be like trying to change the traditional rules of baseball before a World Series.”
Hillary assured me that she had not drafted, and would not advocate, any such rules changes. However, as documented in my personal diary, I soon learned that she had lied. She had already drafted changes, and continued to advocate them. In one written legal memorandum, she advocated denying President Nixon
representation by counsel. In so doing she simply ignored the fact that in the committee’s then most recent prior impeachment proceeding, the committee had afforded the right to counsel to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.
I had also informed Hillary that the Douglas impeachment files were available for public inspection in the committee offices. She later removed the Douglas files without my permission and carried them to the offices of the impeachment inquiry staff — where they were no longer accessible to the public.
Hillary had also made other ethical flawed procedural recommendations, arguing that the Judiciary Committee should: not hold any hearings with – or take depositions of — any live witnesses; not conduct any original investigation of Watergate, bribery, tax evasion, or any other possible impeachable offense of President Nixon; and should rely solely on documentary evidence compiled by other committees and by the Justice Departments special Watergate prosecutor.
Although Zeifman does not have conventional permalinks, which may make it a tad cumbersome to find, his web site is here.
Update: Just an FYI. I made a few minor changes to the links in this post, but nothing worth mentioning with respect to the content.
