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Petraeus Testifies, McCain Shuts Up |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=22430"><span class="small">Joe Conason, National Memo</span></a>
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Saturday, 17 November 2012 14:47 |
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Conason writes: "On Friday the Republican politicians who had so angrily demanded the testimony of David Petraeus about Benghazi got what they wanted - and what they deserved."
David Petraeus testifies before the Senate. (photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Petraeus Testifies, McCain Shuts Up
By Joe Conason, National Memo
17 November 12
 n Friday the Republican politicians who had so angrily demanded the testimony of David Petraeus about Benghazi got what they wanted - and what they deserved - when the former CIA director set forth the facts proving that their conspiracy theories and witch-hunts are dead wrong.
Appearing behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, Gen. Petraeus, recently resigned from the spy agency over his illicit affair with biographer Paula Broadwell, answered questions from legislators concerning the tragic Sept. 11 assault that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomatic personnel dead.
When the session concluded, Petraeus was spirited away. And Senator John McCain (R-AZ), whose criticism of the Obama administration over Benghazi has verged on hysterical, emerged from the hearing room with very little to say to the reporters waiting outside.
"General Petraeus' briefing was comprehensive. I think it was important; it added to our ability to make judgments about what was clearly a failure of intelligence, and described his actions and that of his agency and their interactions with other agencies," said McCain, adding, "I appreciate his service and his candor" before abruptly fleeing as reporters tried to question him.
McCain's curt statement was in sharp contrast to his voluble remarks on Thursday, when he denounced UN Ambassador Susan Rice for what he and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described as her misleading description of the attack on Sunday television shows a few days after it occurred. (It later emerged, embarrassingly, that his posturing before the cameras on Benghazi had prevented him from attending a scheduled hearing on that subject. He didn't want to to discuss that either.)
Essentially, McCain and Graham, joined by Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), accused Rice on Thursday of lying and covering up the fact that the Benghazi consulate had been attacked by terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda. They vowed to prevent her confirmation as Secretary of State, should the president nominate her to replace Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But with McCain departing so abruptly after the Petraeus hearing, it was left to others, including House Intelligence Committee chair Peter King (R-NY), Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) to reveal what their Arizona colleague didn't care to discuss. In his testimony, Petraeus blew apart the half-baked theories offered by McCain and Graham - and left them looking foolish.
On earlier occasions, King had echoed the same complaints made by McCain and Graham, but after Friday's hearing he reluctantly admitted the truth: Petraeus had confirmed that the CIA had approved the talking points used by Rice, tentatively blaming the incident on a notorious anti-Muslim video sparking demonstrations in Cairo and elsewhere at the time. Although Petraeus said he had believed that terrorists were responsible, that suggestion was removed from the talking points in order to protect the ongoing FBI investigation into Benghazi, which Rice also mentioned.
As King explained in response to reporters' questions, Petraeus not only confirmed that any allusion to al Qaeda had been removed from the talking points given to Rice, but that his agency had consented to that decision:
Q: Did he say why it was taken out of the talking points that [the attack] was al Qaeda affiliated?
KING: He didn't know.
Q: He didn't know? What do you mean he didn't know?
KING: They were not involved - it was done, the process was completed and they said, "OK, go with those talking points." Again, it's interagency - I got the impression that 7, 8, 9 different agencies.
Q: Did he give you the impression that he was upset it was taken out?
KING: No.
Q: You said the CIA said "OK" to the revised report –
KING: No, well, they said in that, after it goes through the process, they OK'd it to go. Yeah, they said "Okay for it to go."
In short, Rice was using declassified talking points, developed and approved by the intelligence community, when she discussed the Benghazi attack. So McCain's nasty personal denunciation of her , along with most of his claims about how the White House handled Benghazi, has been blown out of the water like so much naval scrap. The Arizona senator, his colleagues, and their loud enablers on Fox News and elsewhere in the wingnut media will never apologize to Rice. But that is what they owe her.
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FOCUS | The Grenade of Understanding Friedman Winners |
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Saturday, 17 November 2012 13:00 |
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Taibbi writes: "There were so many excellent entries in yesterday's challenge, which asked readers to boil down Friedman's metaphor-jammed column on Syria (which described our Iraq invasion as the U.S. diving on a grenade we ourselves exploded, by pulling out the pin of Saddam Hussein) to a single paragraph, that I couldn't narrow it down to just one winner. So in the end, there will be four winners, each receiving a hand-grenade paperweight trophy."
Matt Taibbi. (photo: Rolling Stone)
The Grenade of Understanding Friedman Winners
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
17 November 12
utstanding responses to yesterday's "Synthesize Tom Friedman" challenge. I feel like the washed-up, aging teacher who takes on a class of initially-bored prep school students who over the course of a semester surprise the old man with their incredible passion for the material - basically I'm Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, only without the depressing Robert-Sean-Leonard-kills-himself ending. I also feel like doing that thing tennis players do after matches, when they walk off the court and applaud the crowd by clapping a hand and a racket together. (With that gratefully serious expression that says, "No, no, you don't clap for me - I clap for you!"). Or maybe I just feel like playing tennis with Robin Williams. It's so hard to know - it all gets so mixed up after a while.
Which brings me to Friedman. There were so many excellent entries in yesterday's challenge, which asked readers to boil down Friedman's metaphor-jammed column on Syria (which described our Iraq invasion as the U.S diving on a grenade we ourselves exploded, by pulling out the pin of Saddam Hussein) to a single paragraph, that I couldn't narrow it down to just one winner. So in the end, there will be four winners, each receiving a hand-grenade paperweight trophy.
Even narrowing it down to four was a tough task. Some comments weren't real entries but just riffs, but they were on the mark; they won't get a grenade, but they deserve mention. For instance, "westcoast" wrote:
Op/Ed Copy desk: "Hey, Kristof missed deadline, what should we do?" Keller: "Do a word-cloud of Friedman Middle East columns."
I doubt that's what took place, but it something like that did happen, we'd have a hard time knowing the difference. Then there was Grione45's deadly-accurate Fargo reference:
To quote Stan Grossman of Fargo fame ... "You're sayin'... What're you sayin"?
We had not one, not two, but three haikus submitted. I'm a strong proponent of the haiku and I think people should communicate by haiku more often, randomly, at all times of the day. I've often thought it would be a good conflict-resolution method: force people to express their grievances in rigid 5-7-5 format. "He who cannot be named" entered the following "Friedku," which I think was outstanding for its Friedmanesque take on the yin-yang concept:
Taxi Driver in Beiruit
Iron Fist for Peace
Midwife Birthing Midwife
"Jalmos" countered with:
Friedman metaphors
more complex than the conflict
sans reality
This is an excellent point: a metaphor is supposed to make things clearer, but it's actually easier to understand Mesopotamian politics than some of these columns. Lastly, "12pounddictionary" used a Byronesque flourish to shave a syllable from the word "exploding" (one of Friedman's favorite words) to create this:
Fists of 'xploding clay
Acid bonds burn Arab lives
Freidman's neocon dreams
And now for the winners. The first grenade goes to "Shlok," whose noir take on Friedman was really stirring - would make a great movie, like an upside-down, on-acid version of Out of the Past:
The same nightmare. 24/7/365. Always her, hopeless and beautiful. Giant sounds and lights mark a fight within the faith. Fire rages across her face. Acid eats her away. I fall on a grenade, then pull the pin. She tears, triggers, explodes. The midwife pounds chainsaw-nails-into-Saddam's-head and suddenly she's back. She's chaos, she's venom unleashed. Too little trust, I know, but I am alone, standing between her and chaos. What to do?
Then there was Robert Green, whom many readers voted for. He gets marks for the sheer ambition of his "quantum entanglement" take on Friedman. It's a bit long, but then again, so was The World Is Flat:
In order to salvage Syria, which is and isn't falling apart, we need to follow and not follow the path we did and didn't follow in Iraq. That requires a hand grenade, both post-explosion and pre-explosion, and a pregnant woman who has and hasn't had a pottery baby. We should allow our enemy, the lawyer Russia, who is our friend, to get and not get involved in the non/crisis.
Using (and not using) our Iraq experience, or lack thereof, we mus(n)t continue, or stop, our current path by digging a hole, and filling it in, with the bones of those we saved by being there, as we allowed them all to be killed. We can throw their bones into the hole, which we shouldn't be digging.
If 2006 has taught us anything, it's that 2012 is 2006 on steroids, minus steroids, in 2003. I can sum up by saying I stand by and repudiate all my previous statements about Iraq as regards Syria (as regards Iraq). I have NOT taken this acid that is corroding at my soul, but I am tripping balls.
Schrondinger's columnist
Again, marks for the high-concept approach: layering the uncertainty principle atop a Friedman column is pretty much automatically funny. They should use this as an exercise in a 100-level course at Steven Wright University.
"UVP" was the one that earned the biggest out-loud laugh from me:
Hey man, have you ever noticed how a hand grenade is like a piece of pottery? And this is like what happened in Iraq? Have you ever looked at your hand, man? It looks like a country!
Friedman just always sounds to me like he's completely stoned.
A friend of mine and I discussed this last night. I insisted that I didn't think Friedman smoked weed. My friend, a doctor, just shrugged. "You'd be surprised how many people smoke weed," said the friend, who is only vaguely familiar with Friedman. "A lot of people you'd never expect to smoke weed."
"I just don't think he's that kind of guy," I said. My friend shrugged again, unconvinced. Then I thought about it some. I guess it's possible. The biggest reason I doubt it is that writing that kind of stuff while high would make me depressed - all those images of flying acid and ripped wombs, and cars without steering wheels, and deepening holes and squeezing fists and so on. I couldn't handle that.
Moving on: I loved the entry by "Richard Rollington":
Iraq was fisted by the United States, and on experiencing such explosive pleasure knocked over a china cabinet while ejaculating acid. Syria's on her knees begging to be next.
I started to read this aloud to my wife and she laughed so hard after the first line, I couldn't finish. The thing is, it's metaphorically very close to what Friedman wrote, and it was done in two sentences. Beautiful and concise.
Lastly, I'm going to hand out a bonus grenade, if he/she wants to claim it, to @PaulRyanPeak, who tweeted a totally worthy response:
Friedman is brilliant. Iraq was like the cigarette we had to smoke so we could get cancer so we could cure the cancer.
It wasn't entered formally on this site, but that's a grenade-worthy take.
Winners, please send mailing addresses to
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
. We'll get you your prizes soon, and we'd even appreciate photos of the winners clutching their trophies. Perhaps we'll do a bigger contest next year. A 2013 Mustache International? Who's feeling the poetry?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdXhWS7lLvs
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FOCUS | Why BP Isn't a Criminal |
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Saturday, 17 November 2012 11:00 |
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Robert Reich writes: "It defies logic to make BP itself the criminal. Corporations aren't people. They can't know right from wrong. They're incapable of criminal intent. They have no brains. They're legal fictions - pieces of paper filed away in a vault in some bank."
Portrait, Robert Reich, 08/16/09. (photo: Perian Flaherty)
Why BP Isn't a Criminal
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
17 November 12
 ustice Department just entered into the largest criminal settlement in U.S. history with the giant oil company BP. BP plead guilty to 14 criminal counts, including manslaughter, and agreed to pay $4 billion over the next five years.
This is loony.
Mind you, I'm appalled by the carelessness and indifference of the BP executives responsible for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven people on April 20, 2010, and unleashed the worst oil spill in American history.
But it defies logic to make BP itself the criminal. Corporations aren't people. They can't know right from wrong. They're incapable of criminal intent. They have no brains. They're legal fictions - pieces of paper filed away in a vault in some bank.
Holding corporations criminally liable reinforces the same fallacy that gave us Citizen's United v. the Federal Election Commission, in which five justices decided corporations are people under the First Amendment and therefore can spend unlimited amounts on an election. Even if 49 percent of their shareholders are foreign citizens, corporations now have a constitutional right to affect the outcome of American elections.
We don't know exactly how much corporate money was spent on the last election but it's a fair guess that were it not for Citizen's United, the House of Representatives might now be under control of Democrats, and Senate Democrats might have a filibuster-proof majority.
The perfidious notion that corporations are people can lead to even more bizarre results. If corporations are people and they're headquartered in the United States, then presumably corporations are citizens. That means they have a right to vote as well.
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.
Can we please get a grip? The only sentient beings in a corporation are the people who run them or work for them. When it comes to criminality, they're the ones who should be punished.
Punishing corporations as a whole almost always ends up harming innocent people - especially employees who lose their jobs because the corporation has to trim costs, and retirees whose savings shrink because their shares in the corporation lose value.
Remember the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, convicted in 2002 of obstruction of justice when certain partners destroyed records of the auditing work they did for Enron as the energy giant was imploding? After the firm was convicted, its clients abandoned it and the firm went under. The vast majority of its employees had nothing to do with Enron but lost their jobs anyway. Yet the real perpetrators came out fine. Anderson's CEO moved to a lucrative job in a private-equity firm, and other senior partners formed a new accounting firm.
Likewise, the people responsible for BP's deaths and oil spill weren't BP's rank-and-file employees or its shareholders. They were the executives who turned a blind eye to safety while in pursuit of their own rising stock options, and who conspired with oil-services giant Halliburton to cut corners on deep water drilling when they knew damn well they were taking risks for the sake of fatter profits.
They're the ones who should be punished. Failure to punish them simply invites more of the same kind of criminal negligence by executives more interested in lining their pockets than protecting their workers and the environment. (Today brought another tragedy in the Gulf when an oil rig exploded off the Louisiana coast - killing at least two workers and sending four others to hospitals Friday while two others were believed to be missing.)
But the Justice Department's criminal settlement with BP gives these top executives a free pass - allowing the public to believe justice has been done.
Instead of going after the real criminals, the Department has gone after the schleps who got caught up in the mess. It's filed manslaughter charges against two BP rig supervisors for allegedly ignoring warning signs of the blowout that set fire to the rig, which later sank. And against a former BP vice president who allegedly lied to Congress when he repeated BP's public claim that the leak was limited to 5,000 barrels of oil per day when in fact it was more than 60,000 barrels.
The Department's $4 billion criminal settlement with BP isn't big enough to affect the oil giant anyway. BP's market capitalization is $128 billion. Yesterday, BP's stock price closed at $40.30 a share, up 0.35 percent from the day before the settlement was announced.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
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Why the 2012 Election Was a Vote for Democracy |
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Saturday, 17 November 2012 09:02 |
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Nichols writes: "It was easy to imagine, going into the November 6 election, that the fix was in. But the people pushed back, giving President Obama a 3.4 million popular vote victory, a 332-206 Electoral College landslide, a Senate that is more Democratic and more progressive, and a House with considerably fewer Tea Party extremists."
Long lines reigned on election day despite Republican efforts to discourage voting. (photo: Michelle McLoughlin/Reuters)
Why the 2012 Election Was a Vote for Democracy
By John Nichols, Nation of Change
17 November 12
 emocracy has taken quite a beating over the past several years, with the blows raining down from an increasingly activist and obsessively pro-corporate Supreme Court, voter-ID promoting Republican governors and legislatures, and Karl Rove's empire of influence. It was easy to imagine, going into the November 6 election, that the fix was in. But the people pushed back, giving President Obama a 3.4 million popular vote victory, a 332–206 Electoral College landslide, a Senate that is more Democratic and more progressive, and a House with considerably fewer Tea Party extremists. Reversing the pattern of the 2010 Republican wave, voters chose labor-backed Democrats in seven of eleven gubernatorial races and handed key legislative chambers in New York, Maine, New Hampshire and other states to Democrats.
This has led some commentators to imagine that a template has been developed for defending the will of the people in the face of unprecedented financial and structural assaults on the democratic process. But that's a naïve assumption. It obscures the fact that a combination of gerrymandering and right-wing Super PAC money prevented Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats from regaining control of the House, and that many state capitols are still dominated by anti-union die-hards like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich and their allies. And just because an incumbent president, reasonably well-funded Democrats, and fully mobilized labor, reproductive rights and civil rights activists were able in 2012 to push back against an unprecedented onslaught of right-wing Super PAC money does not mean they will be able to do so when more sophisticated and ever more abundantly financed conservatives return in 2014 or 2016 - as they surely will.
The better lesson to take from 2012 is that voters really do want a fair and functional democracy, and that Democrats and their allies should use the authority they have been handed to fight for it. Americans do not want to cede control of their communities to austerity appointees, as evidenced by Michigan's rejection of the emergency manager law that Republican Governor Rick Snyder deployed to overrule local elected officials. Americans recognize the danger of GOP-backed barriers to their right to vote, as Minnesotans showed by rejecting a constitutional amendment mandating photo voter IDs. And they do not want corporate money to dominate our politics any more than they want corporations to dominate our lives.
In Montana and Colorado, voters overwhelmingly supported calls for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling - and with it, the fantasy of "corporate personhood." That ruling, decried even by Senator John McCain as the "worst decision ever" from the High Court, ended a century of controls over the corporate dominance of politics. The Montana and Colorado votes align those states with California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Vermont - all of which have passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. And dozens of communities across the United States - including Chicago, San Francisco and conservative Pueblo, Colorado - have backed local resolutions promoted by groups like Common Cause, Public Citizen, Free Speech for People, and Move to Amend. Most did so by margins as wide as the 3–1 statewide votes in Colorado and Montana.
Montana went a big step further, electing as its governor Steve Bullock, the crusading attorney general who waged the boldest battle against the use of Citizens United to wipe away state laws that bar corporations from buying elections. Bullock lost that fight before the same Supreme Court that handed down the initial ruling, but his gubernatorial victory - after a campaign that declared, "If you believe elections should be decided by Montanans, not out-of-state corporations, stand with Steve Bullock" - offers a reminder that advocacy for real reform is smart politics.
That was especially evident in Senate elections, where some of the biggest winners were outspoken backers of a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders made his stance a central theme of a re-election that secured 71 percent of the vote; he's proposing a Saving American Democracy Amendment that says: "Corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people. Corporations are subject to regulation by the people. Corporations may not make campaign contributions or any election expenditures. Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances." Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who beat back an unprecedented Super PAC assault, led his campaign website with a petition to "OverturnCitizens United." Newly elected Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin supports an amendment, as does Maine Senator-elect Angus King, an independent who is likely to caucus with the Democrats.
They're not alone. President Obama argued in an online conversation shortly before the Democratic National Convention that "we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United," and the Democratic platform declared: "We support campaign finance reform, by constitutional amendment if necessary." The president may have an opportunity to appoint several Supreme Court justices who will recognize the need to reverse not only the Citizens United ruling but a series of decisions that handed overwhelming power to those with overwhelming amounts of money.
But presuming that the courts can quickly or certainly be repurposed as defenders of democracy is another naïve assumption. The president is right to argue that the movement to amend "can shine a spotlight on the Super PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change." And the voters are right to say, as they have with their ballots in states and communities nationwide, that corporations are not people. Democracy is popular, so popular that it beat back plutocracy in 2012. Those who won have a democracy mandate; they should use it to repair the damage done and usher in a new era where money is controlled and the popular will is unleashed.
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s America faces the so-called "fiscal cliff," let's turn our attention to our country's systemic tax problem. To paint a picture, imagine our country as a mine car with its brake lines severed, barreling toward an uncertain fate. In this metaphor, the brake lines are represented by the U.S. tax code -- all 7,500 pages of it -- long the victim of severe tampering and perforating by corporate lobbyists and tax attorneys and unattended to by inadequate IRS enforcement. What is troubling is that these metaphorical brakes have been damaged for years, and only now, with an economy fitfully recovering from recession and the livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake, are the dangers ahead becoming headlines.
