THIS FAR AND NO FURTHER
A Timeline of Events Surrounding the Radical Right's Attempt to Subvert American Democracy
Written and Compiled by Black Max
March 2007, Week Three
Page Three
- March 20: American troops deployed in Iraq are angry and disheartened that their tours of duty are likely to be extended, with Bush dismissing troops' concerns by saying it is too soon for them to "pack up and go home."
Iraq war and occupation
Most of the comments from troops assigned to the 9th Cavalry Regiment, interviewed by reporters from Agence France-Presse, are too littered with profanity to be reproduced, but one vehicle commander says, "We just want to get out of here as soon as possible. ...It's because the Iraqi army is so scared that we have to come here to die. Ninety-five percent of Iraqis are good but five percent are bad. But the 95% are too weak to stand up to the five percent." Another soldier says, "Bush should send all the Death Row prisoners here and they can be killed fighting the terrorists. We've had enough." A third adds, "Bush can come fight here. He can take my $1,000 a month and I'll go home." One of the unit commanders, Lieutenant Brian Long, says the anger is understandable. "One of the men has five children, another has three. Another has a boy aged four -- he's missed two of those years. He'll never get them back. It is like the movie Groundhog Day. Each day is the same and nothing ever changes. It's tough. Everyone just wants to get home to their families." - Bush, after speaking to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the top US military commander in Iraq, says that his new plan to pacify war-wracked Iraq would take months. "It could be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude our best option is to pack up and go home," he says. "That may be satisfying in the short run, but I believe the consequences for American security would be devastating." One of the 9th Cavalry's platoon commanders, Captain Christopher Dawson, says he agrees with Bush. "We are starting to make a difference," he says. "The violence is dropping. We are training Iraqis to take over responsibility for their own security. We are helping them see their future ahead of them. It is in their hands."
- But the lower ranks have a different perspective. A recent internationally commissioned poll shows that only 18% of Iraqis want the Americans to stay, while 78% want the Americans to go home. "If no one wants us here we are quite ready to get out tomorrow," says one soldier. (AFP/France24 News
- March 20: The Senate votes 94-2 to end the Bush administration's ability to unilaterally fill US attorney vacancies as a backlash to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' firing of eight federal prosecutors.
US Attorney firings
The Senate passes a bill that cancels a Justice Department-authored provision in the Patriot Act that had allowed the attorney general to appoint US attorneys without Senate confirmation, and sets a 120-day deadline for the administration to appoint an interim prosecutor. If the interim appointment is not confirmed by the Senate in that time, a permanent replacement would be named by a federal district judge. Democrats say the Bush administration abused that authority when it fired the eight prosecutors and proposed replacing some with White House loyalists. "If you politicize the prosecutors, you politicize everybody in the whole chain of law enforcement," says Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy. The bill will move to the House of Representatives for consideration. The bill in essence returns the law regarding the appointments of US attorneys to where it was before Congress passed the Patriot Act, including the unilateral appointment authority the administration had sought in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. (AP/Breitbart, AP/KTVA-TV) - March 20: Bush says he will fight the Congressional Democrats over the calls for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign, saying he will not be part of what he calls "show trials" about the firings of eight US attorneys.
US Attorney firings
He says, "I am confident he acted appropriately" in firing the attorneys, and says the only problem with the firings is that "it turned into a public spectacle." Bush says that after reviewing the matter, "There is no indication that anyone did anything improper." He also says he will fight to keep top political adviser Karl Rove and former White House counsel Harriet Miers from being interviewed under oath. "I will oppose any attempts to subpoena White House officials," he says flatly. - White House counsel Fred Fielding reiterates his offer for Rove and Miers to speak privately to selected members of Congress, with no transcripts and without being sworn in. He says that the offer is final, and Bush warns that the Democrats need to accept the offer as given. "If the Democrats truly do want to move forward and find the right information, they ought to accept what I proposed," Bush says of the offer. "If scoring political points is the desire, then the rejection of this reasonable proposal will really be evident for the American people to see." But Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, after meeting with Fielding, says he will reject Fielding's offer. "It is not constructive and it is not helpful to be telling the Senate how to do our investigation, or to prejudge its outcome," says Leahy. "Instead of freely and fully providing relevant documents to the investigating committees, they have only selectively sent documents, after erasing large portions that they do not want to see the light of day. ...Testimony should be on the record and under oath. That's the formula for true accountability. I hope the president will agree to be forthcoming. The straighter the path to the truth, the sooner we will finally know the facts." House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers agrees. "This investigation has uncovered serious charges of misleading Congress, obstructing justice and abuse of power."
- The proffered deal -- which, in Fielding's words "would be private and conducted without the need for an oath, transcript, subsequent testimony or the subsequent issuance of subpoenas" -- is treated with scorn by Democratic senator Charles Schumer, who calls it unique but "with a lot of pitfalls" that makes it inadequate. "With no transcript, with no oath, with private conversations that can be contradicted, recollections can fail, you're not going to get very far," he says. "Counsel Fielding...said he wanted this to be a conversation rather than a hearing. A conversation's fine. But let's have a conversation under oath with a transcript. ...Mr. Fielding indicated that he did not want to negotiate, but that doesn't mean we're not going to try." And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, "After telling a bunch of different stories about why they fired the US attorneys, the Bush administration is not entitled to the benefit of the doubt. Congress and the American people deserve a straight answer. If Karl Rove plans to tell the truth, he has nothing to fear from being under oath like any other witness."
- Meanwhile, rumors that the Bush administration is privately discussing a replacement for Gonzales are heating up, though White House officials deny it. Right now, says one GOP loyalist close to the White House, the process is temporarily on hold since Bush publicly endorsed Gonzales. "They were reaching out," he says. "Now, we're in lockdown. We're just waiting. They've reached out to everyone they need to reach out to and are waiting to get a 'yes' from someone." The operative says the assumption is that Gonzales will resign, but on his own terms and in his own time. And finding a willing replacement may be tough. "I think it is going to come down to who is willing to take the job," he says.
- Support for Gonzales is dwindling even among Congressional Republicans. One member of the House Republican leadership says that the "drip, drip, drip" produced by the attorney scandal is untenable. "I can't imagine that he's going to be around a whole lot longer," the Congressman says of Gonzales. "It seems like a leak about developing a short list of replacements, combined with a direct call from the president, are sort of the two indications that your days are numbered. I just don't see him lasting through this current maelstrom. There's already Republicans on the Hill calling for him to quit and there's certainly not a deep well of support on the Hill for him." About the administration's dealings with Congress, the leader says, "They're never really reached out."
- Congressional law expert and Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald says that Bush's invocation of "executive privilege" is a transparent attempt to hide the truth. First, Bush himself admits that his administration's explanations of its actions in firing the attorneys are, in his words, "confusing [and] incomplete" -- in real-world terms, a pack of deliberate lies. So why, Greenwald asks, "would Congress possibly trust Bush officials to provide more explanations in an off-the-record, no-transcript setting where there are no legal consequences from failing to tell the truth? Once a party demonstrates a propensity to issue false explanations and refuses to tell the truth voluntarily, no rational person would trust that party to make voluntary disclosures. One could trust (if at all) only on-the-record testimony, under oath, where there are criminal penalties for lying (if they have questions about that motivational dynamic, they can ask Lewis Libby)."
- Secondly, the precedent set by the attempt by Bill Clinton to invoke executive privilege in his attempts to prevent his aides, Sidney Blumenthal and Bruce Lindsey, and even his wife, from testifying in the Monica Lewinsky investigation, has no basis in the law, as did Nixon's attempt to invoke that privilege to cover his administration's crimes regarding the Watergate scandal. The Supreme Court ruled in US vs. Nixon, in 1974, "The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisors calls for great deference from the court. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide." The district court overseeing the Clinton case made a similar ruling against Clinton.
- Now, Greenwald notes, Bush supporters are gearing up to howl and flail the airwaves in support of Bush's right to unfettered, divine-right privilege. Those same supporters tore Clinton to shreds in 1998. Tony Snow, now the White House press secretary and then a Fox News talk show host and political columnist, wrote on March 29, 1998, in an op-ed entitled "Executive Privilege is a Dodge," that "Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up. Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time. One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold -- the rule of law." Another Bush apologist, the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot, asked then-Democratic senator Robert Torricelli, "Would you define claims of executive privilege as cooperation? ...But aren't claims of executive privilege usually reserved for national security matters -- in particular, matters of state secrets and foreign affairs?" On Snow's Fox show of May 10, 1998, Republican representative Dan Burton said, "You know, the president could solve a lot of this problem if he wouldn't hide behind executive privilege, if he'd just come out and tell the American people the truth."
- Greenwald writes, "In 1998, when Bill Clinton invoked it, 'executive privilege' was a cynical and corrupt tool to prevent Americans from learning the truth about scandal and keep the President above the law. In 2007, now that George Bush has invoked it (and it's hardly the first time, but this time it will likely be tested), it will be a doctrine of the gravest importance and steeped in our most cherished democratic traditions and it must be defended at all costs in order to preserve the Power and Honor of the Presidency. ...For better or worse, not only the right-wing noise machine, but also our nation's media elite, decreed long ago that when 'executive privilege' is invoked for anything other than safeguarding national security or other state secrets, it is a corrupt tool designed to stifle The Truth. Here, it is being invoked by Bush to prevent his political advisor and White House counsel -- with no relationship to national security matters -- from testifying as to the reasons why the administration fired 8 US attorneys and then lied about what they did repeatedly."
- Greenwald also quotes Daily Kos blogger and legal expert "Kagro X"'s own speculations about the reasons behind the invocation of executive privilege: "[I]t is important to them to establish principles which will prevent (or at least substantially delay) any meaningful investigations by Congress into the White House's conduct over the last six years, and creating a privileged buffer around key administration officials and White House documents serves that purpose quite well. For that exact reason, it is absolutely imperative that Congress not acquiesce here, because genuine investigations -- that which the country urgently needs -- will, at some point, require this confrontation." (CNN, AP/Breitbart, Politico, AP/Yahoo! News, Salon)
Fitzgerald possibly considered for firing in US attorney purge
- March 20: Sources in the Justice Department reveal that US attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who successfuly won a conviction against former White House aide Lewis Libby earlier in the month, was downranked by DOJ officials.
US Attorney firings
In a chart sent to the White House in March 2005, Fitzgerald, one of the nation's most highly accomplished criminal prosecutors, was ranked among prosecutors who had "not distinguished themselves. The ranking placed Fitzgerald below "strong US Attorneys...who exhibited loyalty" to the administration but above "weak US Attorneys who...chafed against Administration initiatives, etc." The chart, a plain piece of evidence showing that the 93 US attorneys were being ranked in order of their loyalty to the Bush administration and not by their performance, was the first step in an effort to identify US attorneys who should be removed. Two prosecutors who received the same ranking as Fitzgerald were later fired. It seems clear that at least some at the White House and the DOJ wanted Fitzgerald fired as well as the others. DOJ officials, however, claim that the documents, including the chart, prove that there were no political motivations behind the firings. The chart was drawn up by Gonzales's then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, and sent to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers. The reference to Fitzgerald is one of many documents that the White House has refused to turn over to Congress. - Mary Jo White, who supervised Fitzgerald when she served as the US attorney in Manhattan and who has criticized the firings, says ranking him as a middling prosecutor "lacks total credibility across the board." She adds, "He is probably the best prosecutor in the nation -- certainly one of them. It casts total doubt on the whole process. It's kind of the icing on the cake." Fitzgerald has won accolades for his tenacious pursuit of al-Qaeda terrorists before the 9/11 attack, and it was Fitzgerald who drew up the official US indictment against Osama bin Laden. He won the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service in 2002 under John Ashcroft. But in Sampson's chart, Fitzgerald is characterized as a middling prosecutor. "No recommendation; have not distinguished themselves either positively or negatively," was his category. Two fired US attorneys, Daniel Bogden and Paul Charlton, were given the same ranking. Two attorneys with the highest ranking, David Iglesias and Kevin Ryan, were fired as well.
- Administration sources deny Fitzgerald was ever considered for firing, and say they don't know why Sampson listed Fitzgerald in the "not distinguished" category. Bush said last year that Fitzgerald had done "a very professional job" in the CIA leak investigation. (Washington Post)
- March 20: The departure of another US attorney, Debra Yang, is raising questions with at least one Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein.
US Attorney firings
Yang resigned in October 2006 before eight US attorneys were fired by the Justice Department. "I have questions about Debra Yang's departure and I can't answer those questions right at this time," Feinstein says. "Was she asked to resign, and if so, why? We have to ferret that out." - After Yang resigned, she joined a private law firm, and has said through a company spokeswoman that she left of her own accord. Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse says Yang was not asked to leave. "Debra Yang was a highly regarded and well-respected prosecutor for the Justice Department," he says.
- But Feinstein notes that there are numerous names blacked out in documents the Justice Department has released in recent days in response to the controversy. She does not specify what her concerns are about Yang, but she has complained repeatedly that six of the eight US attorneys dismissed last year were in the midst of prosecuting public corruption cases, mostly focused on Republicans. About five months before Yang's departure, her office had opened an investigation into ties between Republican representative Jerry Lewis and a lobbyist. Gibson Dunn, the firm that hired Yang, is also the firm where Lewis' legal team works, but government rules required that she step aside in that case or any other she was involved with while a government prosecutor. The Lewis case is connected to the corruption investigation in San Diego that began with the 2005 conviction of former GOP representative Randy Cunningham, who is serving jail time for bribery. Former US attorney Carol Lam in San Diego, who was among those dismissed last year, was prosecuting that case. Feinstein contends that Lam's dismissal had something to do with her role in the Cunningham investigation, though the Justice Department denies it. (USA Today)
- March 20: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office issues a "fact vs. fiction" statement regarding the firings of the eight US attorneys currently under investigation.
US Attorney firings
Reid writes, "Time and again, members of the Bush administration have failed to level with the American people on the events surrounding the dismissal of eight US attorneys. Here are the facts." (Much of this information is spread out elsewhere in this and earlier pages, but this summation adds some facts not previously covered, and serves as a nice compendium of the case against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the Justice Department, and the White House so far.) - The claim that the eight attorneys were all fired for performance reasons has long been debunked, even though both Gonzales and his deputy, Paul McNulty, have made that claim repeatedly, even making the claim under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Reid points out that the performance evaluations of those eight attorneys were almost all positive. McNulty wrote in a December 5, 2006 email to Gonzales's then-chief of staff Kyle Sampson that he never saw the performance evaluations of one of the attorneys, Daniel Bogdan: "I'm still a little skittish about Bogden.... I'll admit have not looked at his district's performance. Sorry to be raising this again/now; it was just on my mind last night and evening." Other similarly positive reviews were given to fired attorneys John McKay, in May 2006; Carol Lam, in 2005; and four others. The one attorney who didn't receive a glowing review, Kevin Ryan, won high marks from Sampson in Sampson's informal but influential "loyalty review." (All of this is documented in earlier items.) And the Justice Department has been forced to admit that performance was never the issue, with a March 3 report from the Washington Post observing, "[O]fficials acknowledged that the ousters were based primarily on the administration's unhappiness with the prosecutors' policy decisions and revealed the White House's role in the matter."
- Karl Rove claimed, falsely, that Lam was fired because she refused to focus on immigration cases, saying on March 8 that she said she didn't want to make such cases a priority in her office. In reality, the Justice Department's assistant attorney general William Moschella wrote to Senator Dianne Feinstein on August 23, 2006, saying, "Please know that immigration enforcement is critically important to the Department and to the United States Attorney's Office in the Southern District of California [Lam's office]. That office is presently committing fully half of its Assistant United States Attorneys to prosecute criminal immigration cases. The immigration prosecution philosophy of the Southern District focuses on deterrence by directing its resources and efforts against the worst immigration offenders and by bringing felony cases against such defendant that will result in longer sentences." Instead, Sampson fixed on the immigration issue as an excuse to justify Lam's firing, writing on May 31, "Has ODAG [Office of the Deputy Attorney General] ever called Carol Lam and woodshedded her re: immigration enforcement? Has anyone? If the AG ordered 20 more prosecutors to the S.D. Cal. To do immigration enforcement only where would we get them from (remember the premise: AG has ordered it)? Please advise?" And convicted felon Randy Cunningham, the former GOP congressman jailed as a result of Lam's investigative efforts, wrote a letter to Gonzales in October 2005, the month before he pled guilty to multiple charges, complaining of Lam's efforts to prosecute him. "Again, we would like to meet to discuss the disparity between crimes committed and prosecutions conducted at your earliest convenience," Cunningham wrote.
- Administration officials told Republican senator John Ensign that Bogden was fired because he didn't prosecute enough "adult obscenity" cases. On March 13, Ensign said, "One is that I was trying to get the specifics of why he was let go. And to be honest with you, this is what I was told. I was told that there were two areas that they didn't feel that Dan was being aggressive enough. One was on obscenity cases -- adult obscenity cases." But Moschella admitted a week before Ensign's press conference that Bogden didn't really display any deficiencies. "The general sense in the department about Mr. Bogden is that given the importance of the district in Las Vegas, there was no particular deficiency," Moschella testified on March 6. "There was an interest in seeing new energy and renewed vigor in that office, really taking it to the next level." In reality, Bogden vigorously prosecuted adult obscenity cases even when the Justice Department gave him little cooperation. On March 19, Salon reported, "A former senior law enforcement official knowledgeable about the work of the Nevada US attorney's office said he was shocked to see the criticism of Bogden.... The case in question, involving adult obscenity on the Internet, was 'woefully deficient' of details according to the official.... The implication that Bogden was refusing to take on a 'good case' in that instance, the official said, 'is totally absurd.'" Ensign now believes he may have been lied to: "I said it before: I was either intentionally misled or somebody was misinformed and unaware of the complete process."
- White House advisor Dan Bartlett claimed that David Iglesias was fired because of complaints on his handling of voter-fraud cases. In reality, Iglesias was so well-regarded in his handling of voter fraud cases that in October 2005, he was asked by the Justice Department to lead a voter fraud seminar for over 100 prosecutors across the country. As Iglesias and other sources have said, he had earned the ire of New Mexico Republicans for refusing to buckle under pressure to bring bogus indictments against state Democrats before the November 2006 elections, including fielding pressuring phone calls from two top Republican lawmakers, Senator Pete Domenici and Representative Heather Wilson. McKay suffered the same fate when he refused to launch a voter fraud probe into the election of Democratic governor Christine Gregoire after she was elected by a razor-thin margin in November 2004. Like Iglesias, McKay says that there was no evidence for indictments. McKay was told after he was fired that he should keep his mouth shut, or Gonzales would publicly besmirch him.
- On January 18, Gonzales made his famous claim that no US attorney would ever be replaced for political reasons, or to stop politically charged corruption probes, testifying before the Senate, "I would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney for political reasons or if it would in any way jeopardize an ongoing serious investigation. I just would not do it." Like in so many other instances, Gonzales lied. His chief of staff, Sampson, graded the 93 prosecutors on whether they were "loyal Bushies," and wrote on March 15, "As an operational matter, we would like to replace 15-20 percent of the current US attorneys.... The vast majority of US Attorneys, 80-85 percent, I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal bushies, etc." Rove himself apparently intervened to fire Iglesias at the behest of the New Mexico Republican Party, and possibly at the behest of Wilson and Domenici. Lam was targeted for firing only after she served a search warrant on two of Cunningham's cronies, CIA official Kyle Foggo and defense contractor Brent Wilkes. The next day, Sampson warned the White House that they had a "real problem" with Lam. Sampson has already asked the White House to recommend a replacement for Lam, who had just presided over the conviction of Cunningham, by November 18, 2006, when her term expired.
- While Gonzales and his officials have repeatedly denied ever considering using the new Patriot Act provision to subvert the role of Congress in confirming US attorney nominees -- "...I believe fundamentally in the constitutional role of the Senate in advice and consent with respect to US attorneys, and would in no way support an effort to circumvent that constitutional role," Gonzales said on March 13 -- in reality, Sampson and Chris Oprison of the White House Counsel's staff talked openly about using the new provision to install Tim Griffin as US attorney in Arkansas without having to face Senate hearings. "(2) 'interim may be a source of confusion or, worse, a term that Pryor's and Lincoln's office can springboard from to press for their own nominee rather than rallying behind Tim. What are your thoughts? If this is a Section 546 AG appointment for unlimited duration, Tim can call himself 'US Attorney' rather than 'interim' or 'acting' and our talkers should avoid referring to him as 'interim,.'" Sampson wrote Oprison on December 19. "I think we should gum this to death.... There is some risk that we'll lose the authority, but if we don't ever exercise it then what's the point of having it?"
- Gonzales has repeatedly claimed that he had no knowledge of the plan to fire any of the attorneys, and his only recollection was his opposition to a plan from 2004 to fire all of them at the start of Bush's second term. In fact, Gonzales and Rove mutually made the decision to fire the attorneys. According to an e-mail from Colin Newman of the White House Counsel's office to his colleague David Leitch, "David -- Karl Rove stopped by to ask you (roughly quoting) 'how we planned to proceed regarding US Attorneys, whether we were going to allow all to stay, request resignations from all and accept only some of them, or selectively replace them, etc.' I told him that you would be on the hill all day for the Judge's [Gonzales's] hearings, and he said the matter was not urgent."
- One of the first and most pernicious claims from the White House is that neither Rove nor any other White House official had any involvement in the firings. In fact, the White House came up with the plan to fire the 93 attorneys at the beginning of the second Bush term, a plan that morphed into the plan to fire the eight targeted attorneys in December 2006. E-mails show that the idea originated with Rove. ABC reported on March 15, "New unreleased e-mails from top administration officials show that the idea of firing all 93 US attorneys was raised by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove in early January 2005, indicating Rove was more involved in the plan than the White House previously acknowledged. The e-mails also show how Alberto Gonzales discussed the idea of firing the attorneys en masse while he was still White House counsel -- weeks before he was confirmed as attorney general. The e-mails put Rove at the epicenter of the imbroglio and raise questions about Gonzales' explanations of the matter." Rove was the conduit for political complaints about politically uncooperative attorneys from state Republicans. And a capable, well-regarded US attorney, H.E. Cummins, was replaced without cause by a former Rove aide and RNC operative, Tim Griffin.
- The involvement of former White House counsel Harriet Miers is also denied, with Bartlett telling the press, "[W]hat Harriet floated was the idea of saying should we treat the fifth year as the first year -- give new blood -- an opportunity for new blood to come in. Kyle [Sampson], to his credit, and others said, that would be highly disruptive to the process, there are a lot of good US attorneys that are performing; some of them have not served full four-year terms because we hadn't removed them all in the first place. So it was appropriate for Harriet to raise the idea; it was quickly rejected." Again, a pack of lies. Sampson discussed the dismissals with Gonzales in 2004, while Gonzales was still the counsel for the White House. "Judge [Gonzales] and I discussed briefly a couple of weeks ago.... As an operational matter, we would like to replace 15-20 percent of the current US Attorneys -- the underperforming ones," Sampson wrote to Leitch on January 9. White House e-mails show the idea was discussed by Rove and Alberto Gonzales, and neither dismissed it outright. (AP/Yahoo! News)
- March 20: Another issue involving a US attorney is being revisited in the light of the growing scandal about eight fired prosecutors.
US Attorney firings
In 2003, an Asheville, North Carolina lawyer accused the US attorney for that region of personally intervening in the investigation of a local bank-fraud case that involved former Republican House member and multimillionaire Charles Taylor, and stopped investigators from questioning Taylor. US attorneys in North Carolina have frequently gone after Democratic targets, but rarely after Republicans. The Taylor case seems particularly egregrious. - Lawyer Forrest Ferrell, who made the accusation, now asks, "Essentially the question is, 'Why was he not interrogated? Why was he not interviewed?' He knew about it all and should've at least been interrogated about it." Ferrell said then that either the region's then-US attorney, Robert Conrad, or then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, prevented Taylor from being questioned or investigated. (The current attorney for the region, Gretchen Shappert, was originally on the list of attorneys to be fired, but was removed. She later said she has no idea why she was listed to be fired.) "What's most troubling is the pressure [on attorneys] to bring prosecutions or not bring prosecutions," says Erwin Chemerinsky, a Duke University professor of law and political science. "When they're on the job, they're not supposed to act as political officials."
- In 2003, Ferrell was representing a local lawyer, Thomas Jones, caught up in a bank-fraud scandal in which Jones was accused of trying to defraud Blue Ridge Savings Bank of Asheville with bad loans. Taylor, who was then the congressman for the region, owned the bank. Testimony in Jones's trial raised questions about Taylor's own involvement, with Jones and other defendants testifying that Taylor not only knew about the loans, but even encouraged them. Taylor was then the chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee, and held tremendous power over funding matters. But Taylor was never interviewed. Ferrell believes that Ashcroft, Conrad, or someone very high up in the Justice Department prevented Taylor from being contacted. "My information was that the US attorney general in DC prohibited the US attorney's Office in North Carolina from interrogating Charles Taylor," he says. "My information was confidential." Ferrell's motion to investigate his accusation of prosecutorial misconduct was ignored. Conrad, now a district judge, denies any involvement in any effort to protect Taylor. After Jones was charged in an unrelated embezzlement charge, Ferrell withdrew from representing him. Because of the Justice Department intervention, little is known of what, if any, crimes Taylor committed regarding the loans. Taylor was defeated for re-election by Democrat Heath Shuler in November 2006.
- Interestingly, Taylor, who in September 2006 was named by the watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) as one of the "20 most corrupt members of Congress," made part of his personal fortune from his bank's financing of a series of construction projects in Russia, in partnership with former KGB colonel and Supreme Soviet deputy Boris Bolshakov. Taylor purchased an 80% interest in the Commercial Bank of Ivanovo along with Bolshakov. While Taylor has said the Russian bank isn't particularly profitable, in mid-2006, Bolshakov said the bank had over $22 million in hard currency and over $18 million in its loan portfolio. Taylor's connections with convicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff have also raised questions, but Taylor has so far refused to admit any connection with Abramoff -- other than accepting donations from the lobbyist and power broker which he has refused to return. He also garnered negative press coverage when in 2005 and 2006, he personally blocked a plan to federally fund a memorial to the victims of 9/11's United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.
- In North Carolina, US attorneys have spent most of their time investigating Democrats. The former US attorney for the eastern part of the state, Frank Whitney, who left his job as the chairman of the Mecklenburg County Republican Party to take the position, has investigated and ultimately jailed a number of state Democratic officeholders, most notably former Agriculture Secretary Meg Scott Phipps (convicted of fraud in selecting a firm to conduct the annual state fair), and led the investigation of North Carolina Speaker of the House Jim Black for a variety of fraud and corruption charges. Whitney was rewarded with a judgeship of his own, and his successor, Republican George Holding, who himself has contributed thousands of dollars to GOP candidates and committees, is continuing the investigation into Black's alleged crimes. (In fairness, Whitney has also prosecuted a handful of state Republicans.)
- Shappert has spent most of her time prosecuting drug and fraud cases. Last week's "document dump" of Justice Department e-mails contains a reference to Shappert being shortlisted for firing, listed in the category of "USAs [U.S. attorneys] We Now Should Consider Pushing Out." Her name was removed from the list after an official said she didn't merit removal.
- In North Carolina, Republicans have long controlled the appointment of judges and US attorneys for the state. Senators Richard Burr and Elizabeth Dole frequently recommend fellow Republicans for the positions. Former senator Jesse Helms chose then-judge Anna Mills Wagoner to be the US attorney for the state's Middle District; Wagoner has largely focused on drug, terrorism, and child pornography cases. Helms protege Sam Currin, a former US attorney, was indicted last year on charges of tax-fraud conspiracy, pleaded guilty to three charges in November 2006. (McClatchy News, Wikipedia)
- March 20: The New York Times's Nicholas Kristof asks, only somewhat facetiously, if Dick Cheney isn't Iran's "mole" in the White House.
War with Iran
Looking at Cheney's actions as vice president, Kristof says the idea is more tenable than one might think. The Bush administration's first major military action was to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan, and its second, to overthrow Iraq's Saddam Hussein -- both intractable enemies of Iran. "Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down," Kristof writes. "The US dismantled Iraq's army, broke the Ba'ath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran's ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn't have done better -- so maybe they did write the script.... We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that's just another coincidence?" - Cheney has also led the Bush administration's refusal to continue the Israel-Palestinian peace process, backing Israel's right-wing hardliners and leading the administration's unswerving support for Israel's calamitous invasion of Lebanon to battle Hezbollah. That invasion, Kristof writes, "turned Iran's proxies in Hezbollah into street heroes in much of the Arab world." And Cheney had been at the forefront of the administration's alienation of America's European allies, "undermining chances of a united front to block Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Mr. Cheney may nominally push for sanctions against Iran, but by alienating our allies he makes strong sanctions harder to achieve." Cheney's unrelenting support for torture and illegal detentions in Guantanamo have antagonized and inflamed Muslims around the world, gutting any moral authority the US had for criticizing Arab and Iranian human rights violations. When Cheney endorsed waterboarding, saying, "It's a no-brainer for me," Kristof writes, "The torturers in Iran's Evin prison must have cheered. They got a pass as well." The Bush-Cheney foreign policy of bluster, braggadocio, and belligerence has bolstered Iran's own leadership within their country, shoring up the unpopular regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
- Kristof writes that Cheney, even more than Bush, "has systematically pushed an extreme agenda that has transparently served Iranian purposes. And domestically, his role in the Scooter Libby scandal -- and his disgraceful refusal to explain just what he was doing at the crime scene -- ended up paralyzing executive decision-making and humiliating our government. Is that really just one more coincidence? Or could it be another case of Mr. Cheney's following instructions from his Iranian bosses to damage America?"
- Kristof acknowledges that the idea of Cheney being an actual Iranian operative is "absurd." He continues, "Nor is he a North Korean mole, though his we-don't-negotiate-with-evil policy toward North Korea has resulted in that country's quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. It's also unlikely that he is an al-Qaeda mole, even though al-Qaeda now has an important new base of support in Iraq. Like Kennedy and Johnson wading into Vietnam, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney harmed American interests not out of malice but out of ineptitude. I concede that they honestly wanted the best for America, but we still ended up getting the worst. So what are the lessons from this episode? Our national interests are as vulnerable to incompetence as to malicious damage. So we must identify and abandon the policies that backfired so catastrophically. The common threads of those damaging policies are clear: a refusal to negotiate with 'evil'; an aggressive willingness to use military force to solve problems; contempt for our allies; and the bending of legal and moral principles to allow indefinite detention and even torture, particularly for anyone with olive skin and a Muslim name. Whenever we've suspected a mole in our midst, we've gone to extreme lengths to find the traitor. This time, betrayed not by a mole but by failed policies, let's be just as resolute. It's time to uproot policies that in the last half-dozen years have damaged American interests incomparably more than any mole or foreign spy ever has in the last 200 years."
- A commentator on the Welcome to Pottersville blog, which reprints the Kristof editorial (allowing access to the editorial for those unwilling to purchase access from the Times), writes, "This article is on track until Kristof writes, 'of course Cheney is not a mole.' Cheney is indeed a mole. Not an Iranian mole, but a Halliburton/Exxon-Mobil/Carlyle Group/etc. mole. That is all Cheney has ever been. Kristof has always struck me as unbelievably naive. That a person could exhibit a keen intellect as Kristof does, but nevertheless fail to recognize what our federal 'government' has become under the Bush-Cheney junta, is puzzling. ...Cheney and his junta are not interested in public service, public policy, or 'foreign policy.' The junta has no 'foreign policy' other than this: to use US military power and all other US assets to amass wealth and power for the junta's cronies (eg, Halliburton, Blackwater, the Carlyle Group, the Republican Party, etc.). Cheney's primary objective throughout his political career has been to consolidate all economic and political power in the hands of the military-industrial-media-corporate elite that has dominated America since WWII. No, Cheney is not an Iranian mole. That is absurd because Cheney would never lend his services to anyone except corporate elites. But the way in which the hapless, naive Kristof frames his argument leads him to conclude that Cheney is not a mole at all. This is equally false. Ignorance and incompetence cannot possibly account for what the Bush-Cheney junta have done to the US and to the world." (New York Times/Welcome to Pottersville)
- March 20: Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, who has just written the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, discusses the "security firm" in an interview with the liberal news site Buzzflash.
Mercenaries and "private armies"
Scahill says that the extensive outsourcing and privatization of the Iraq and, to a lesser extent, the Afghan wars and occupations to firms like Blackwater "represents the life's work of the neoconservative core that has guided the Bush administration since it first took power in 2000." When Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under the elder Bush, he worked to privatize the military through the firm he would go on to head, Halliburton. With his mentor Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney worked with the neoconservative Project For the New American Century and the American Enterprise Institute to push "this privatization agenda while they themselves were not in government." On September 10, 2001, Rumsfeld, the new Secretary of Defense, told the group of corporate CEOs and executives that he was bringing in to make up the core of the Pentagon's civilian leadership, "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself." Rumsfeld meant that he would revolutionize the American military: to increase the reliance on special forces units as opposed to large numbers of ground troops, increase the privatization of the military, and increase the reliance on private soldiers and contractors in future wars. The day after his speech, the 9/11 attacks occurred, giving Rumsfeld and the administration what Scahill calls "a blank slate on which to paint its radical overhaul of how the United States wages its wars. Now, six years later, we have upwards of 100,000 private contractors in Iraq. They are subjected to no effective laws. There's almost no oversight. They operate with almost no transparency. What's the difference between having covert operators in clandestine operations, and overt operators over which there's no oversight or transparency, or effective legal mechanisms to control what they're doing? It really boils down to an absolute subversion of the nation-state and what little semblance of democracy we have in this country. The American people are against the war. But the administration no longer needs to turn to the army of the country to fight its wars. It can now hire mercenaries from all over the world. So we really are seeing a subversion of democratic processes, a subversion of the electoral system in this country, and a waging of aggressive, offensive wars using private soldiers." - According to the GAO, of the over 100,000 private contractors in Iraq, 48,000 of them are soldiers. The actual numbers are far higher: perhaps as high as 70,000. Blackwater is the single biggest provider of mercenaries to the US government, and has been paid $750 million since the summer of 2004 to guard senior US officials in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scahill says, "They are really the Praetorian Guard of the occupation in Iraq. This is an incredible revolution in the waging of US wars."
- And, like almost everything connected to the Iraq occupation, the use of mercenaries and outsourced security personnel is about profiteering. "We're talking about a company that was founded by a man named Erik Prince, who comes from a family that was one of the top bank rollers of, not only the 'Republican revolution' of the 1990s that brought Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America to power, but also the rise of what we now know as the religious right or the Christian conservative movement." Scahill says. "Erik Prince's family helped James Dobson found Focus on the Family. Erik Prince's family gave the seed money for Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Erik Prince himself is a major bank roller of President Bush, his allies, and the Christian conservative movement in this country. Someone who is deeply linked to the Christian right, and to the current administration, has turned around and started what has become the world's most powerful private mercenary army. These guys are like neo-Crusaders. To have them on the government payroll to the tune of $750 million, operating in a Muslim country, should be frightening to everyone who understands that. The fact of the matter is that this administration has hired what is effectively a Christian army to operate in Muslim countries. This is very frightening to anyone who cares about civil liberties and the future of democracy and democratic processes. The fact is that these contractors provide the Bush administration with an extraordinary level of political expediency. Their deaths don't get counted. Their crimes don't get reported or prosecuted. They're effectively a shadow army operating at the behest of an administration waging a rogue war."
- And Blackwater and other firms like it do not operate only in Iraq. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, as Scahill says, "Blackwater started a domestic operations division of its company, and it began seeking greater contracting opportunities domestically inside of the United States. At one point, the federal government was paying Blackwater about $240,000 a day for Hurricane Katrina. The company was billing the government $950 per day, per Blackwater man deployed in the hurricane zone. They had about 600 guys stretched from Texas all the way through the Gulf region. Now Blackwater's been in negotiations with several state governments in the United States. Blackwater met recently with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about doing disaster response in California. They're opening up a new private military base in San Diego. Another one is in Mount Carroll, Illinois. They have applied for operating licenses in every coastal US state. This is the expansion of a privatized army." Scahill continues, "Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, speaks boldly about Blackwater being the FedEx of the national security apparatus. They're manufacturing surveillance blimps and trying to market them to the Department of Homeland Security to use to monitor the US-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Blackwater and its executives continue to pour money into these Christian conservative causes, conservative politicians' campaign coffers. This is really the embodiment of everything that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, when he talked about the dangers of unchecked power of the private sector, and the rise of the military-industrial complex."
- Not only is Blackwater costing American taxpayers a huge amount of money, with the US government bankrolling Blackwater's payout of up to $1,000 a day per mercenary, but the use of Blackwater mercenaries is forcing a real drain on the US special forces community. Scahill says, "Special operations commanders have spoken quite openly about this, saying that they're in a real crisis right now for numbers. US taxpayers are spending tens of millions of dollars, in some cases, to train US Navy SEALs, or Delta Force, or Army Rangers, or Green Berets. The taxpayers shoulder the financial burden of training these elite forces, and then Blackwater and other companies come around and hire them away. Then they repackage them to the federal government and say it's much cheaper to pay our guys because you don't have any of the overhead of deploying them. We'll absorb the cost of that. But they never take into account that they're essentially taking money out of the public sphere that was spent on these soldiers in the active duty military. They're taking all of that training that US taxpayers have paid for, taking it away from the military, and repackaging it as a privatized entity. That is essentially a bilking of the US taxpayer. The whole model of these privatized armies really is a rip-off of the American taxpayer. It's ridiculous when the industry lobbyists say they're a cheaper alternative to the bloated military. They're taking advantage of what they called the bloated military."
- Blackwater's mercenaries have suffered high losses in Iraq, with Department of Labor numbers placing the number killed at around 770 so far. The actual numbers are far higher. Many of Blackwater's mercenaries suffer the same lack of body armor, armored vehicles, adequate weaponry, and ammunition as the US soldiers. "So many contractors are dying in Iraq because of not being in armored vehicles, or being in helicopters with inadequate tracking devices or defense mechanisms," he says. "It really is a scandal. We've had families of US soldiers sending armor over to them in Iraq, and these mercenaries have all the money in the world to spend on this stuff, yet they still cut corners in the interest of profits. That's why their guys are getting killed."
- So why are Cheney and his neoconservative allies still advocating the expansion of the use of private mercenaries and private logistical and supply operations for the military? Scahill says that while he cannot even pretend to get into their mindsets, they have always advocated "running the government like a corporation. At one point, Donald Rumsfeld said that because governments can't die, you have to find other incentives to sort of keep competition alive. This administration brought in an incredible number of people from corporate America to run the Pentagon. You have the neoconservative ideologues, on the one hand, and then you have the weapons manufacturers on the other hand. That made up the core of the Pentagon leadership. They're obsessed with running government like a venture capital firm. And that has a number of benefits to it. It really removes the Congressional oversight factor from the equation when you're operating with an increased presence of the private sector. Also, you keep corporations alive and profitable. You're able to keep the businesses of your friends and your political supporters alive. We've seen an absolute revolving door between the weapons manufacturers, the war servicing companies, the mercenary companies, and the Republican Party and the Republican leadership, and this administration. This is part and parcel of running the government like a corporation, where the citizens are essentially subjects of this privatized government. The military is perhaps the most prominent example of that right now, but we also see it in our schools, prisons, state and local governments, and in law enforcement agencies. The fact is, in the United States right now, there are more private security operators than there are actual police officers. That's an extraordinary development in the history of privatization."
- Scahill says that Blackwater and other firms were brought into Iraq after the Bush administration failed to build a large international coalition to pour soldiers from other countries into Iraq. Instead, Blackwater and its competitors "aggressively recruited people from their special forces community, from their military, and then deployed them to Iraq as part of this private force, in some case, in contravention of their local laws. Blackwater and other mercenary companies brought over 750 Chilean mercenaries to operate in Iraq. Some of them had trained and served under the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, which I document in my book. In Honduras, another American mercenary company recruited soldiers that had actually been withdrawn from Iraq by the Honduran government after John Negroponte was named Ambassador to Iraq. This company then rehires them -- those exact soldiers -- and sends them back to Iraq. That is a total subversion of the nation-state. It's flushing the constitutions and governments of these countries down the toilet. And many of these Latin American countries have suffered before under the hegemonic policies of the United States, where you had death squads, neo-liberal economic policies, military juntas. These are already victimized states, and then the United States further stomps on their rights by subverting their local democratic processes and sending their soldiers to Iraq in contravention of the will of their people and government."
- Some of the security firms operating in Iraq and Afghanistan report to civilian overseers in the Pentagon, but Blackwater's contacts are primarily within the State Department. "Blackwater is guarding not just the US ambassador, and the various US occupation outposts around the country," Scahill says, "but also ninety Congressional delegations that have gone in and out of Iraq, including Nancy Pelosi. So the United States has outsourced the protection of its most important officials. Blackwater has been paid over $750 million just to do those services for the State Department. But you have contractors working at every level of the occupation, guarding food convoys, guarding Iraqi officials, protecting people from corporations. It's like the Wild West over there. And there are numerous reports of extraordinary violence being committed on the part of contractors. Yet there are no prosecutions. It is really a devastating blow to democratic processes, and an ominous development in world history."
- Scahill says that the most infamous instance involving Blackwater mercenaries, the four men who were killed in Fallujah in 2004 and then hung from a bridge, was not only a tragedy, but a military travesty that incited the Iraqi insurgency to new heights of insurrection and violence against American occupation forces. The four entered Fallujah in badly armored Humvees at a time when American forces were proscribed from entering the city, on a mission to bring back some kitchen equipment. They were cut down at a roadblock, slaughtered, and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River, with Iraqi civilians dancing in celebration and calling Fallujah the "graveyard of the Americans." Scahill calls the incident "the Mogadishu moment of the Iraq war. Except in this case, unlike the Clinton administration, which pulled out of Somalia in the early 1990s after US troops were killed there and dragged through the streets, the Bush administration determined to absolutely crush the resistance in Iraq. And this was over the deaths of four private contractors, not active duty soldiers. The US laid siege to Fallujah a few days later, killing hundreds of Iraqis, forcing thousands and thousands from their homes. It was the first of what would be several sieges of Fallujah. And the killing of those Blackwater men and the subsequent revenge attack by the United States really was what gave tremendous spark to the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day. It was absolutely a turning point."
- The families of the four soldiers are suing Blackwater, asking for an explanation as to why their loved ones were on an expedition to gather up kitchen equipment in one of the most dangerous locales in Iraq when they were supposed to be guarding American civilians like Paul Bremer. "They all viewed their loved ones as patriotic soldiers," Scahill says. "They didn't view them as contractors. Just because they were working with Blackwater instead of being in the Navy SEALs didn't really matter. They were still serving their country. These families thought that their loved ones were working for a patriotic American company. ...As they asked those questions, they say they were stonewalled by the company. At one point, they were flown to Blackwater for a memorial service for their loved ones, and one of the mothers asked to see an incident report of what happened. She claims that a Blackwater representative said, 'That's classified information. You'll have to sue us to get it.' She then stood up and said, 'Well, then we're going to sue you.' ...In January of 2005, after investigating it and getting a very high-powered law firm to take the case, they filed a wrongful death case against the company alleging that Blackwater cut corners, didn't provide their loved ones with their contractually guaranteed weapons, adequate personnel, or armored vehicles. The case is being heavily monitored by the war industry. In fact, KBR has filed an amicus brief on behalf of Blackwater in the case. This could be like the tobacco litigation of several years ago, where it just sends shockwaves through the war profiteer community." The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, where Chief Justice John Roberts personally rejected it. "Blackwater's original lawyer on this case was Fred Fielding, who is now Bush's White House counsel. And their current lawyer, as of today, is Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater prosecutor. The fact that Blackwater was shot down by the Supreme Court means it is very likely that the case of these four families versus Blackwater is going to proceed in the North Carolina state court, where a jury could find Blackwater liable for the deaths of those four men."
- Scahill says that the use of mercenaries in Iraq, and perhaps elsewhere, will only increase as the unpopularity of the Iraq occupation increases, and countries like Great Britain pull out their troops. "There are reports as the British pull their troops out, they're going to be replaced by mercenaries. So it's only on the increase," he says. "And I think we're going to see a real turn toward Africa with these mercenaries. They're trying to attach themselves onto the multi-billion-dollar peacekeeping budget at the UN. I think Latin America has a lot to fear from mercenaries. This has really been a very sophisticated rebranding campaign aimed at radically changing the image of mercenaries and calling them private security companies. These mercenaries are operating in countries that don't want them."
- The only real accountability that mercenary forces with such firms as Blackwater must observe is a code of conduct mandated by the firms' trade association, the International Peace Operations Association. Scahill says, "The logo [for the IPOA] is a sleeping cartoon lion that looks like it could be from, you know, Lion King II, or something. They have a code of conduct that all their members are required to sign. It looks very good on paper. It's totally unenforceable. It has no legal standing whatsoever. The mercenaries have all sorts of things that look fantastic on paper. We're accountable. We could be prosecuted. It's bad for our business if we act like rogue operators. But in reality, not a single one of them has ended up being prosecuted, and that's a huge problem." (Buzzflash)
- March 20: Conservative hate maven Rush Limbaugh smears Democratic senator and presidential candidate Barack Obama, channeling the days of Al Jolson and "Stepin Fetchit" by singing a parody song entitled "Barack, the Magic Negro."
Conservative smear campaigns
The parody is sparked by a March 19 Los Angeles Times editorial that says Obama, whose father is African-Americans, is "running for an equally important unelected office, in the province of the popular imagination -- the 'Magic Negro'...." The term "Magic Negro" is used by critics of pop culture to describe certain benevolent African-American characters. Limbaugh tells his listeners, "The term 'Magic Negro' has been thrown into the political presidential race in the mix for 2008. And the term 'Magic Negro,' as applied to Barack Obama has been done by an L.A. Times columnist, David Ehrenstein. ...I'm going to keep referring to him as that because I want to make a bet that by the end of this week I will own that term." He ads, "If I refer to Obama the rest of the day as the 'Magic Negro,' there will be a number of people in the drive-by media and on left-wing blogs who will credit me for coming up with it and ignore the L.A. Times did it, simply because they can't be critical of the L.A. Times, but they can, obviously, be critical of talk radio." Limbaugh uses the term 27 times throughout his broadcast, and sings the parody song to the tune of "Puff, the Magic Dragon." He defends his racist slur by saying, "Well, that's what we always do here. We do parodies and satires on the idiocy and phoniness of the left." - Ehrenstein writes, "The Magic Negro is a figure of postmodern folk culture, coined by snarky 20th century sociologists, to explain a cultural figure who emerged in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education. 'He has no past, he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist,' reads the description on Wikipedia. He's there to assuage white 'guilt' (i.e., the minimal discomfort they feel) over the role of slavery and racial segregation in American history, while replacing stereotypes of a dangerous, highly sexualized black man with a benign figure for whom interracial sexual congress holds no interest. As might be expected, this figure is chiefly cinematic -- embodied by such noted performers as Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Scatman Crothers, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Smith and, most recently, Don Cheadle. And that's not to mention a certain basketball player whose very nickname is 'Magic.' ...Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn't project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him."
- Many will undoubtedly find Ehrenstein's claims disturbing, but Limbaugh twists Ehrenstein's words out of their original meaning, first by accusing Ehrenstein of being racist, then adding, "The left's saying all these things. Now he's the 'Magic Negro,' which is a convenient trick for the L.A. Times to blame a bunch of white people for being racist. OK. Let's find out who the -- just get an auction block and grab as many blacks as you want to put them up there and let's start the sales, L.A. Times, and let's see who it is that fetches the highest prices. Isn't that essentially the way they're approaching this? ...In order to be a real black, you've got to be a [Reverend Al] Sharpton, you've got to be a Snoop Dogg, you've got to be a [rapper] Ludacris or something like that. Obama can't possibly fill this role because nobody knows anything about him, and we don't want to know anything about him. The only thing that matters is that he's black and he sounds good and it allows you white racists to assuage your guilt. Well, there is white racism out there. Much of it is on the left where the plantation mentality still resides." (Media Matters)
- March 20: California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, says conservative pundit and talk show host Rush Limbaugh is "irrelevant."
Conservative media slant
Schwarzenegger makes his characterization of Limbaugh after the radio host termed Schwarzenegger a "closet liberal." Schwarzenegger says of Limbaugh, "I'm not his servant. I am the people's servant of California." - Limbaugh has said of Schwarzenegger, who has fluctuated between hewing a centrist, bipartisan path as governor and flirting with the values of Limbaugh's far right, "I don't know what happened to Arnold. He obviously didn't have the leadership skills to articulate conservative principles and win over the public as Reagan did."
- Many see Schwarzenegger's casual slapdown of Limbaugh as the latest sign that Limbaugh is not the dominant conservative voice he once was. Limbaugh began his political talk-show career as virtually the only national conservative voice on the airways (in fact, one of the only national political commentators at all on the radio). Now, he is one voice among many, of many political stripes and variations. Some say that Limbaugh's influence has always been exaggerated: "For all of his power and all of his fame, Rush Limbaugh, during his ascent in the '90s, bashing Bill Clinton on a daily basis, hours on the radio every day coast to coast, was not able to un-elect Bill Clinton," says Michael Harrison of the talk radio trade magazine Talkers. Limbaugh can be best credited with helping Newt Gingrich and his stable of right-wing fanatics take over Congress in 1994. But with Democrats in control of Congress, Bush's approval ratings in free fall, and Limbaugh struggling with his own problems of drug addiction and overt racism, he is becoming less relevant by the day. Still, most Republican politicians -- especially the ones running for president -- will not dare risk earning Limbaugh's ire and offending his followers. (CNN)
