Whizz Kids in Washington

Your tax dollars at work . . . According to the New York Times, President Bush is persisting in his nomination of Steven Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. Bradbury is so toxic on both sides of the aisle -- in a lower job at Justice, he signed off on two secret legal memos authorizing waterboarding at detention camps -- that he's already been rejected twice by the Senate. Yet Bush, who said in December that a president has to have "a sound set of principles from which [he] will not deviate," stubbornly clings to the Bradbury nomination.

The Democratic leadership in the Senate has responded by halting all controversial nominations until Bush drops Bradbury's. Even though this means, according to Politico.com, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board and the National Labor Relations Board do not have enough members to do their jobs; many federal judgeships are vacant; and the Council of Economic Advisers is in singular tense.

Bush has dug in his heels. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid kept the Senate in pro forma sessions over the holidays so Bush could not make Bradbury a recess appointment like he did with (now former) UN Ambassador Bolton.

How high on the tree can we pee, guys?

These Are the Impulses Which Must Be Fought

The following (in italics) is an excerpt from news stories about President Bush's March 8 radio address on why he vetoed a bill barring the CIA from waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques:

Bush, who used his weekly radio address to announce the veto, said the program had helped stop plots against a Marine camp in Djibouti and the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan, and plans to fly passenger planes into a Los Angeles tower or London's Heathrow Airport and city buildings. "Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al-Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland," the president said.

"I cannot sign into law a bill that would prevent me, and future presidents, from authorizing the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence program, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack," Bush said in a statement.


This was my response which appeared as a letter to the editor in the Daily News, Bowling Green KY on March 21:

Even in our hyperpartisan political climate, only the most strident Bush supporters could not be sickened by the president's veto of a bill that would ban the CIA from using torture techniques such as waterboarding. In his March 8 radio address, Bush hid behind the term "lawful" to describe the CIA enhanced interrogation program and continued to claim the widely discredited plot to fly planes into a Los Angeles tower as one of the program's successes.

The presidency that pressured the CIA to produce intelligence findings that supported an invasion into Iraq cannot be trusted when its attorney general calls waterboarding legal, nor can its claims of foiled terrorist plots be taken at face value. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has stated that he knows of no terrorist attack disrupted by the CIA's enhanced interrogation methods. He added, "I do know that coercive interrogations can lead detainees to provide false information in order to make the interrogation stop."

The Daily News endorsed waterboarding "in a time of war" on March 11, and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg characterized U. S. use of waterboarding as a few well-spent minutes. These are the impulses which must be fought. Even if the information obtained is factual, we forfeit our moral standing in the world by sub-human treatment of detainees and create more monsters than we may catch.

Shut Up and Sing?

I was sitting at the computer reading about President Bush calling for greater power in both wiretapping and reading e-mails while also watching the Dixie Chicks on Austin City Limits. I thought of how the Chicks were run over a few years ago for Natalie Maines' comment in London during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. So many in our society condemned them (a few made death threats against them) for expressing an opposition to the President's war in Iraq that most of us feel now, and yet the Chicks are still held in low regard by many who were once rabid fans.

I don't know to what extent this phenomenon is related to a desire among music fans to not hear "political" messages from artists at live performances. A similar thing happened to Linda Ronstadt when she expressed a favorable opinion of Michael Moore onstage and concertgoers walked out. That incident also happened during the height of public sentiment for the Iraq war, so that sentiment could be a factor. Yet the Dixie Chicks lost their spot on the popular music pedestal even after popular opinion turned strongly against the Iraq war.

Personally, I feel the Bush Administration has exceeded politics and conducted itself in a constitutionally dangerous manner, usurping power for the executive branch in the name of fighting terrorism. Having said that, I don't want to hear a political lecture every time I go see a concert - yet the Dixie Chicks have been steamrollered for one comment and not given the benefit of re-acceptance when the public changed its view.