Left Flank

I'm not going to belabor the point, but bureaucratically, keeping Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is probably a better choice than Hank Paulson at Treasury, if smooth transitions in key posts is the criterion. Yet, like considering Lawrence Summers and Tim Geithner (and whatever is happening with his end of the Fed bailout), I have reservations about past performance on all three counts. And, Hillary Clinton just doesn't deserve to run a department after botching both health care and her campaign. But, for the sake of this post, I'll be consistent, and agree Gates is a decent, and politically prudential, pick. Cenk Uygur puts this issue front and center: «...being right is never rewarded.» When is a decision career-ending, or merely a lesson learned?

John Brennan is getting savaged, and again, insiders are prudent picks. The Economist just piles on. McClathy reports that Brennan's withdrawal has nothing to do with his resolve to serve in an Obama administration.

Obama is under pressure from liberal lawmakers and others to replace Hayden, a retired Air Force general, for overseeing and defending the Bush administration's program of eavesdropping on Americans' telephone and e-mail communications without court warrants while he was the head of the National Security Agency.

Obama voted in the Senate against Hayden's nomination to the CIA post in May 2006 to protest the eavesdropping program.

A former senior intelligence official familiar with the matter said that Brennan made his decision after he received signals from senior Obama transition officials that they were reconsidering his nomination because of the criticism of his tenure at the agency by liberal commentators, bloggers and others.

«The decision not to fight would not have been Brennan's,» said the former senior intelligence official, who asked to remain unnamed because of the sensitivity of the issue. «He's not the kind of guy who would run away from a fight.»

(...)

In his letter to Obama, Brennan denied involvement in the decisions implementing the policies, and asserted that his internal criticism of the practices prompted the White House to twice block his promotion to more senior intelligence community positions.

Finding people who both know intelligence and covert operations and can work in a Democratic administration might be like squaring a circle, if progressives are going to forgive mistakes, like Clinton's, yet tear Brennan a new hole. I guess it counts for little, that Brennan's positions are quoted in the past tense, and that perhaps Barack H. Obama is the only person with the knowledge and resume to judge his worthiness. If progressives force another unappreciated CIA director, John A. McCone, consciences might be salved, but dealing concretely with the monster at CIA, or creating anything worthwhile of the DNI will not advance in any positive direction.

Glenn Greenwald is not my moral conscience, and I didn't vote for him to be Obama's. But, if Greenwald or Andrew Sullivan want to tackle conumdrums, then figure out how to recycle a shrinking number of bureaucrats with an increasing amount of dirty laundry.

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All presidents keep secrets, and just about all of them lie as well. This is unfortunate, but not a source of scandal...Yet during the Bush era, America entered a period I call «the Post-Truth Presidency» during which it mattered little to almost anyone whether the president and his representatives accurately represented reality in their statements to the press and the public. What mattered was what they thought it reasonable to try and get away with. They used their newly discovered power of audacity to rewrite the rules of political discourse and badly weaken the foundation of our democratic discourse. The attack was waged on numerous fronts simultaneously; indeed that was part of its genius. Even the most conscientious media watchdog had a hard time keeping up.

Eric Alterman and George Zornick do try to list some of the offensives the Bush administration launched against press inquiry and FOIA requests, from the amply-scorned Cheney file cabinet to Susan B. Long's legal battles with the IRS. It's much more troubling than George W. Bush's silver spoon-addled oratory.

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Woodward, in this first installment, provides a different account of the George W. Bush White House, where a president leery of interpersonal conflict, never learned about the entire truth surrounding his war in Iraq. According to Woodward, President Bush, like President Lyndon B. Johnson, lacked the «temperament and experience» to be a leader.

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Joseph E. Stiglitz compares progressive and conservative notions of how the state should work with a prospering society.

The left understands that the government’s role in providing infrastructure and education, developing technology, and even acting as an entrepreneur is vital. Government laid the foundations of the Internet and the modern biotechnology revolutions. In the nineteenth century, research at America’s government-supported universities provided the basis for the agricultural revolution. Government then brought these advances to millions of American farmers. Small business loans have been pivotal in creating not only new businesses, but whole new industries.

The final difference may seem odd: the left now understands markets, and the role that they can and should play in the economy. The right, especially in America, does not. The New Right, typified by the Bush-Cheney administration, is really old corporatism in a new guise.

These are not libertarians. They believe in a strong state with robust executive powers, but one used in defense of established interests, with little attention to market principles. The list of examples is long, but it includes subsidies to large corporate farms, tariffs to protect the steel industry, and, most recently, the mega-bail-outs of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. But the inconsistency between rhetoric and reality is long-standing: protectionism expanded under Reagan, including through the imposition of so-called voluntary export restraints on Japanese cars.

By contrast, the new left is trying to make markets work. Unfettered markets do not operate well on their own ‫ a conclusion reinforced by the current financial debacle. Defenders of markets sometimes admit that they do fail, even disastrously, but they claim that markets are “self-correcting.” During the Great Depression, similar arguments were heard: government need not do anything, because markets would restore the economy to full employment in the long run . But, as John Maynard Keynes famously put it, in the long run we are all dead.

«Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh believes that the United States may be closer to armed conflict with Iran than previously imagined. He writes about Congress' funding of covert military operations in the upcoming issue of The New Yorker.» Also, be sure to listen to Hersh discuss the article on NPR's Fresh Air.

One other alarming conjecture involves DPRK, and the recent destruction of an abandoned Yongbyon cooling tower and the subsequent release of its nuclear declaration on its plutonium program, all of which resulted in Washington's decision to de-list DPRK from the roster of states sponsoring terrorists. Brendan Keefe paraphrases:

Hersch sees Bush's recent easing up on North Korea as possibly part of the this plan, speculating that Bush will attempt to spin this as North Korea was reasonable, so we were able to come to an accommodation. Iran, on the other hand …

...did the Bush administration secure its right flank for the left hook into Iran?

I'm always astounded that there's money for these adventures. Alexander Cockburn, in a May 2, 2008 Counterpunch article, to which Hersh alludes in his New Yorker piece also brings up the issue of America's «financial weakness»:

Sometime in the next two weeks, fleet radar operator may notice a blip on their screens that represents something rather more profound: America's growing financial weakness. The blip will be former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's plane commencing its descent into Abu Dhabi. Rubin's responsibility these days is to help keep Citigroup afloat despite a balance sheet still waterlogged, despite frantic bail out efforts by the Federal Reserve and others, by staggering losses in mortgage bonds. The Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund injected $7.5 billion last November (albeit at a sub-prime interest rate of eleven percent,) but the bank's urgent need for fresh capital persists, and Abu Dhabi is where the money is.

Even if those radar operators pay no attention to Mr. Rubin's flight, and the ironic contrast it illustrates between American military power and financial weakness, others will, and not just in Tehran. There's not much a finding can do about that.

I've lately taken comfort from the hope, that the US can survive the Bush administration and reach the general elections and the next inauguration without another incident of its own misguided design. I never thought, as someone for whom President Nixon's resignation was the catalyst for my political consciousness, that I would ever see those depths again.

Please contact your congressional representatives at Congress.org, to voice your opposition.

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