No Mulligan for Mukasey

posted: November 1, 2007 3:58 EST

Senate Dems caught in a water hazard over torture

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly

Driving home from a weekend in the mountains on Sunday, listening to news radio, my wife suddenly asked what the term “waterboarding” means.

I explained the gruesome details, which sounded familiar to her as a Chilean who fled the Pinochet dictatorship.

“Oh, you mean torture,” she said. “Why do they make it sound like some sort of new sport?” At which point I suggested she seek nomination as attorney general of the United States.

Her response to the image of someone being tied to a plank and dunked backward into a tub of water seemed a helluva lot more reasonable and authentic than that of Michael Mukasey, the current nominee chosen by the White House to replace Alberto Gonzales. During two days of questioning last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mukasey was getting along just swimmingly until he got swept away by a simple, straightforward question: Did he or did he not consider waterboarding to be torture?

Mukasey circularly paddled around the query and finally wound up saying: “I don’t know what’s involved in waterboarding.”

My wife has an excuse. She’s a Spanish teacher whose native language isn’t English. But what’s Mukasey’s story? He’s a retired federal judge and former prosecutor from New York handpicked to replace the very man who gained infamy, in part, by authorizing torture techniques. Does Mukasey need a little memory refresher? Would committee chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) have gotten a more forthright answer if, instead of pursuing his polite questioning, he had pushed aside Larry Craig and held down Mukasey’s head in a nearby Senate toilet bowl for 30 seconds?

“If it amounts to torture, it is not constitutional,” Mukasey said. But he refused to say that waterboarding was torture. Then it got worse. When asked by Democrats whether a U.S. president can blithely bypass a statute, if he can put himself above the law as George W. Bush did in authorizing his warrantless-surveillance program, all of a sudden Mukasey regained his legal memory and, essentially, said “Yes.” His affirmative answer was appropriately cloaked in legalese mumbo jumbo, but his endorsement of extralegal powers by an American president was unequivocal.

Kudos, then, to Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, whose third-tier, nothing-to-lose presidential campaign has let him sprout a formidable pair of cojones . Earlier this week, Dodd said he had already made up his mind to vote no on Mukasey’s confirmation.

“That is about as basic as it gets. You must obey the law. Everyone must,” Dodd said, referring to Mukasey’s odd and chilling legal theory that the president of the United States is somehow not bound to respect the rule of law.

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» categories: Bush regime | Iraq war | Marc Cooper

Burn, Baby, Burn

posted: October 29, 2007 9:05 EST

Glenn Beck gloats while L.A. blazes

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly

WHERE I LIVE, ON THE EDGE of Topanga Canyon, our cars are dusted with ash and our nostrils tickled with the scent of charred wood. We’ve got one eye on a darkened skyline and the other on the tube, lest we be warned to get out, and get out now.

It’s hardly the first time much of L.A. or — in this case — entire swaths of California have been ablaze. Every five or 10 years, it seems, some sort of biblical inferno sweeps through and brazenly reminds us who, or what, is really in charge. By nature’s whim, a population sometimes lulled into believing that it alone — or at least its representatives — determines the course of history is humbled by forces it cannot comprehend or properly anticipate.

But this round of wildfires coincides with a time in which more than hillsides and homes are being incinerated. There’s also a part of our national character that’s been consumed. This week’s firestorms bear no blame for the ongoing degradation of our civic culture. They merely and starkly illuminate it.

I refer to the comments made last week by CNN host Glenn Beck on his nationally syndicated radio show. As the news buzzed that flames in Malibu were roaring down the hillsides and licking the Pacific, driving some Hollywood big names into a panicked exile, Beck could hardly contain his delight.

“We all love America. We just disagree on how we should function, what we should do, big government, small government. It doesn’t mean you hate America,” he told his audience. “I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”

Ordinarily, I’d laugh off such a jackass remark. But it’s not so funny when the soot is falling in your own yard, when as many as a half million people in 265,000 households have been forced to evacuate, when a thousand homes have been wiped out, when one victim has died and at least a dozen others have suffered burns, when firefighters say they are stretched beyond limits and are worried about losing further control of the more than 15 separate raging fires, when a state of emergency has been declared, and when the governor has mobilized 1,500 National Guard troops to help stem the disaster.

You really have to wonder what sort of nitwit would get on the radio and gloat over this catastrophe. What sort of pea-brain actually believes that capitalist millionaires like Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen are America-hating firebrands who merit getting burned out of their homes?

Glenn Beck, of course, is the one who really hates America. At a minimum, he openly detests an American democracy that allows the sort of tepid, and — yes — often self-serving, hypocritical and annoying, public political activism of a Barbra, a Cher and some of their beachside neighbors. But they really are a joke, not a threat to be vaguely compared to Osama bin Laden.

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» categories: Marc Cooper | The press

General Hillary

posted: October 22, 2007 5:54 EST

Clinton skips over the primaries and toward the next war

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly

It’s one thing that the national calendar of presidential primaries leapfrogs forward with every passing day. It’s quite another that the leading Democratic contender, Hillary Clinton, now wants to hopscotch over the whole mess. To heck with actually getting elected to be the nominee — Hillary simply wants to be appointed.

So in case you haven’t noticed it already, let me fill you in. Senator Clinton has already jumped from a primary-election posture to a general-election strategy. She’s no longer bothering to run against Edwards or Obama. She’s already taking on Rudy. Which means, in turn, that if you consider yourself anywhere vaguely to the left of Clinton, she’s already taking your vote for granted. You’ve got nowhere to go, she figures, and now she’s free to shore up her right-wing flank.

No better proof of my theory than Clinton’s ominous recent vote in the Senate endorsing a measure that declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a part of the Iranian armed forces, a “foreign terrorist organization.” The nonbinding resolution, endorsed by about half of the Senate Democrats (but none of the other presidential contenders), helps pave the way for any eventual U.S. military intervention against Iran. Supporting a bill that clearly delights the Bush White House and that was sponsored by conservative Republican John Kyl and non-Democrat hawk Holy Joe Lieberman sends a very clear message: At the risk of inching us even closer to a needless war with Iran, Ms. Clinton is inoculating herself against the inevitable Republican general-election accusation that she’s some sort of Berzerkeley Defeatocrat.

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» categories: Hillary Clinton | Marc Cooper | Presidential campaign

Petrae-ified

posted: September 17, 2007 1:43 EST

Iraq report reveals a failed state

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly

General David Petraeus’ long-awaited report back to Congress has confirmed the worst fears of the Bush administration. Six years after 9/11 and nearly five years into the occupation of Iraq, we have been unable to prevent the creation of a failed state. I’m not talking about the one with its capital in Kabul, or even Baghdad; I mean the one with its capital in Washington, D.C.

Seems like it was yesterday, but in a few weeks it’s going to be a full year since a majority of the American people voted to start ending this war. Since then, such sentiment has grown to include about two-thirds of the population — 63 percent to precisely cite the latest polls.

And what do we have to show for that? An increase, not a wind-down, in troop levels; a new White House/Pentagon PR campaign that eerily evokes memories of the Saigon Five O’clock Follies; and a Democratic Congress unwilling to act on its anti-war mandate and make the only morally and politically possible move, which is to begin severing funds for the war. This is what political scientists call a crisis of representation: when a majority of a nation’s electorate no longer recognizes itself in its elected political class. It is, to be precise, a failed state.

General Petraeus’ testimony before Congress made another point starkly clear. We still have years ahead of us, perhaps many years, of U.S. combat troops fighting in Iraq. Pull down his charts and graphs, strip away his rhetoric, and the general’s numbers are as simple as they are staggering: one year from now — in the summer of 2008 — we will be back down to the 130,000 troop level that we were at in January of this year. The New Strategy, then, is but one more way to stay the course.

That ghastly course has now led to about 5,000 American deaths (if we count the untallied fatalities among “private contractors”) as well as a half-trillion dollars down the rat hole — so far. Yet, thanks to the rank cynicism of the Bushies and the fecklessness of the Democrats, the Iraq debate has been reduced to pointless bickering over nothing but the surge itself.

Larry Korb, Ronald Reagan’s former assistant secretary of defense, quickly scratched out a short list of all the inconvenient facts missing from Petraeus’ presentation and just as gingerly sidestepped by most of his congressional questioners: overall civilian deaths in Iraq are increasing, not decreasing; May was the deadliest month this year; the Pentagon’s scorecard of sectarian murders no longer includes Shia-on-Shia killings, Sunni-on-Sunni violence, car bombings or — can you believe this? — people being shot in the head from the front. Call the Baghdad coroner and tell him to pass on the good news to all the cold corpses he has stacked up like firewood.

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» categories: 9/11 | Bush regime | GWOT | Iraq war | Marc Cooper | Unfounded Optimism

Straw Men

posted: August 16, 2007 10:12 EST

Republican candidates pander to baseless base in Iowa.

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly

Des Moines, Iowa — When you start reporting on presidential campaigns, you notice occasional pivotal moments, veritable epiphanies, when everything suddenly snaps into place. I remember, for example, attending the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston, fireworks booming over the press bleachers, while Pat Buchanan thunderously delivered his now infamous culture-war speech, vowing to "take back America block by block, street by street, house by house." As the crowd mightily roared its approval, I realized right there that poor Poppy Bush didn't stand a chance of re-election. The Republicans had completely misjudged the national mood. They wanted Kulturkampf when, in fact, it was all about the economy, stupid.

I had the same sort of realization this weekend while attending the circuslike GOP Iowa Straw Poll held right up the road in Ames. For $35 a pop, Republican Party members got to roam the grounds of Iowa State University, wolf down tons of barbecue pork, beans and watermelon provided for free by the various campaigns, sample the live country and rock bands, listen to three hours of speechmaking by the candidates, and then cast a "vote" for their favorite choice. About 14,000 did so. With McCain and Giuliani sitting it out, Mitt Romney spent more than $2 million on the effort and easily won with 32 percent of the vote.

But like Buchanan's speech 15 years ago, there were two moments during the weekend that, for me, spelled impending doom for the Republicans in the coming election. Romney, looking like he just walked out of a Ralph Lauren layout in Town and Country magazine, began his speech saying: "What brought us here is that change begins in Iowa and change begins today!" But there is no such change being offered by Romney or any of his major rivals. He proceeded to approve and even celebrate every major measure of the Bush administration: uncritical support of the war, the use of abominable interrogation techniques against terror suspects, walling off the southern border, repeal of abortion rights, more tax cuts for the wealthy and privatization of some portion or another of Social Security.

And Romney was the most mainstream of the candidates participating. On his right fringe was the guy who's now being advised by Pat's sister Bay Buchanan, none other than Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, the fulminating anti-immigrant xenophobe, who brought with him his small but fervent "Tom's Army Against Amnesty." Tancredo's speech wasn't surprising in itself — it was his usual mean-spirited rant about militarizing the border, deporting 12 million illegals and saving "our culture." But there was that special moment when his rhetoric veered into a critique of the war on terror, accusing the pantywaist Pentagon of employing limp-wristed "multicultural rules of engagement" that let the terrorists off easy. "In a Tancredo administration," he then exclaimed, "there will be only one rule of engagement: We win — you lose!" The ovation was earsplitting, not just from the wing-nut militia he had brought in tow, but from the entire arena of assembled Republicans. At that moment, I knew the GOP fate for '08 had been sealed. Not so much by that speech, but by how broadly it resonated with the GOP base and by how much all of the candidates are pandering to that base. Just at a time when they have come to represent a very small slice of the electorate.

One shrewd local GOP strategist, Allan Hoffenblum, shares those fears for his own party. "With the exception of Giuliani," Hoffenblum told me this week, "all the Republican candidates . . . have moved so far to the right, trying to appeal to the so-called base voters, especially on the immigration issue, and just when the Latino vote will be imperative, that there is no easy way they can get any crossover votes come November. I can easily envision a possible Democratic landslide equal to 1964."

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» categories: Immigration | Marc Cooper | Romney | Rudy Giuliani | The press | Tom Tancredo

Governator 2: Rise of the Girly Man

posted: May 20, 2007 12:20 EST

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly

Uh-oh. What’s happened to that loopy green giant of a governor who recently endeared himself by blazing down the center of the hydrogen-powered highway of reasonable political post-partisanship? Bat your eyes for a moment and — shazam! — that grinchy steel-hearted Terminator has pushed him aside. Just as he once promised onscreen, he’s back. And you better look out.

For the aficionados of Sacramento’s obscure inside-baseball fungo, it’s what’s called the May budget revision. For the rest of us, it simply means that Arnold Schwarzenegger has once again started whacking away at the poor.

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Stacked Deck: Indian Gaming's Powerful Allies

posted: April 26, 2007 10:15 EST

By Marc Cooper, LA Weekly A million six is how much a conglomerate of wealthy Indian gambling tribes spent on recent campaign contributions to key members of California's Democratic leadership, and it garnered an almost instant return.

The Morongo tribe's casino near Palm Springs.

These deals, if ratified by the Assembly, would constitute one of the largest expansions of legalized gambling in the history of America, opening the floodgates to tens of thousands of new slot machines (added to the current state fleet of 60,000), and would pave the way for a number of new Nevada-class casinos.

All these goodies would be showered on the handful of California tribes already marinating in millions of annual gambling dollars, so one thing’s for sure: This has nothing to do with giving a helping hand to poor, underprivileged Native Americans. The California Indian gaming industry now takes in more than $7 billion in revenue, outstripping the collective intake of Las Vegas Strip casinos.

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» categories: Indian casinos | Marc Cooper