Probably the Only Thing Dick Cheney and I Will Ever Agree On

With the death of President Ford it seems the nation is revisiting his pardon of Nixon. Many on the left link Bush's near absolute power in the bungling of Iraq, and there is a connection there. Those on the right like Cheney view the pardon as an act of national healing, a way to cleanse the national psyche. If that had occurred, we wouldn't be discussing it still today, but it was the right thing to do.

What Ford did was preserve the Presidency, if Nixon had gone on to do prison time it would have minimized the Presidency for decades. Quite possibly it wouldn't have regained its stature until September 11th, you could argue that it would have required an attack on such large proportions to bring the presidency back to relevancy. Whether or not that would have happened, the country would have been a quasi-parliamentary government for 25 plus years. Do you really think Denny Hastert would've been a better leader then Bush? Me neither.

What the left misses when it says that Ford beget Bush is this, if Ford had allowed Nixon to go through the legal system, if he had allowed the nation to accept that the Office of President could be convicted along with the man who had held it, then Bill Clinton would have surely been impeached and convicted. Once you've been down that road it is so much easier to go down it again, and there were plenty of Republicans who would have loved to see Clinton go down, to become the disgraced poster boy of all the thing the "Moral Majority" says we stand for in the Democratic Party. You think there favorite phrase is "Yeah but Clinton..." now, just imagine if they had removed him from office.

So while Cheney thanks Ford for allowing him and the President to expand the powers of the Executive Branch to an overwhelming degree, I thank him for preserving the relevancy of the Presidency, we'll undue the damage of Bush more quickly then we would've undone the damage of an irrelevant President.

What Can Big Blue do for You? Apparently Not Much.

A lot has been said about the failure of Texas' efforts to privatize their welfare system under Accenture. So how has IBM faired at privatization?


"An $80 million contract to build a gigantic data repository for over 1 million students and teachers in North Carolina has ended acrimoniously, turning into a war of words between contractor IBM Corp. and state officials.
“We have told IBM that we’re terminating the project for failure to perform,” says Vanessa Jeter, public information officer at the state’s Department of Public Instruction. She would not reveal specific details.
The initiative, called the North Carolina Window of Information on Student Education (NC WISE), is a Web-based system for collating and analyzing student data, such as report cards and transcripts. But the system -- developed by IBM -- has been dogged by systems crashes and major delays."

Mitch can talk about incompetence and fraud within FSSA all he wants, but replacing it with privatized incompetence and fraud isn't a solution. And for what its worth, all these "dirty" departments of state government that Mitch railed against, what has he done to clean them up?

Ask the Joint Chiefs

Its telling that less then a week after Rumsfeld's last day that the Joint Chiefs are telling the President that a major departure from our current Iraq strategy is required. Telling because its hard to believe that they just though of it this week, but its the first time we've heard anything about current thinking among the Joint Chiefs in quite some time. For all Rumsfeld's talk about rebuilding and modernizing the military, in the end he'll be remembered for his autocratic and stubborn refusal to adept to the realities of the civil war raging in Iraq.

More pressing for the future is a somewhat ominous note at the end of this article:

A constant subtext in the meeting yesterday, and in the ongoing White House
review, is the Joint Chiefs' growing concern about the erosion of the U.S.
military's ability to deal with other crises around the world because of the
heavy commitment in Iraq and the stress on troops and equipment, said officials
familiar with the review. The chiefs planned to tell Bush of the significantly
increased risk to readiness in the event of a new emergency, rather than push
for a timeline to leave Iraq.

An undercurrent of the conflict over the last six months is the toll it is taking on our battle readiness, and the administration's unwillingness to acknowledge this. While this isn't new, to hear that the Chiefs have begun to press this issue would lead one to believe that the situation is more dire then we think.

He's the Snake to My Mongoose, or the Mongoose to My Snake.

E.J. Dionne argues in his column in the Washington Post that a Barak Obama candidacy is good for Hillary Clinton, as well as Sen Bayh. The concept is that instead of a Hillary/ anti-Hillary primary, Democrats would be treated to a primary where candidates would need to define themselves, and more importantly take chances.

The idea that caught my attention was his comparison of Obama to the Bill Clinton of 1991/92.

In 1991 Gov. Bill Clinton railed against politicians who "have divided us
against each other, pitting rich against poor, playing for the emotions of the
middle class, white against black, women against men, creating a country in
which we no longer recognize that we are all in this together."
In his New
Hampshire debut over the weekend, Obama said that we had "come to be consumed
by" the "24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative-ad, bickering, small-minded politics
that doesn't move us forward. . . . There's no sense that they are coming
together in a common-sense, practical, non-ideological way to solve the problems
that we face."

Cloak, Dagger and... Google?

Recently when the Bush Administration went to the CIA for names of Iranians who could be sanctioned for their involvement with Iran's nuclear program the CIA refused saying there sources were to valuable to expose. So what did they do when rebuffed? They googled it.

Frustrated, the State Department assigned a junior Foreign Service officer
to find the names another way -- by using Google. Those with the most hits under
search terms such as "Iran and nuclear," three officials said, became targets for
international rebuke Friday when a sanctions resolution circulated at the United
Nations.

The results? About what you'd expect when you try and replace a clandestine intelligence network with an internet search engine.

There is nothing that proves involvement in a clandestine weapons program,
and there is very little out there at all that even connects people to a
clandestine weapons program," said one official familiar with the intelligence
on Iran. Like others interviewed for this story, the official insisted on
anonymity when discussing the use of intelligence.

So what was the purpose, to try and look tough? To pointedly rebuke the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that they negotiate with Iran? To show the world how impotent the civil war in Iraq has made us?

12 Years Older and Deeper in Debt

With the House's adjournment at 5am Saturday the GOP's 12 year run in Congress ended. A "movement" that rode in on the back of the Contract with America seemed to be the start of a Republican stranglehold to match the decades of Democratic control reaching from Roosevelt to Clinton (with brief interruptions.) The threat of the Republican Revolution to undue the social programs that served as the primary safety net for millions of Americans never occurred, if anything the period will be remembered for wild spending that has occurred during the Bush administration.

But setting the chaos of Iraq aside for a moment, will the last 12 years be remembered? One historian says not so much:

Compared with the liberal ascendancy, which ran from Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and arguably Ronald
Reagan's election, the conservative era has been brief and relatively
inconsequential, said Julian Zelizer, a Boston University congressional
historian. Nothing in the past 12 years compares with the creation of Social
Security or Medicare, the voting rights and civil rights acts, the Marshall Plan
or Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate highway system. Nor were any of those
big-government achievements fundamentally altered.

A Story of Lobbyist Run Amok

There aren't really any winners or losers (other then the consumer) in this story, everybody seems to be plenty wealthy. And it isn't a story of Democrats vs. Republicans, neither side can point to this as shinning example. And while there is no hero there are plenty of villains; lobbyist.

In this article at the Washington Post front page we learn about the laws governing milk production in the US and how laws are written to allow dairies in one state (Nevada) to ignore federal regulations, while forcing one specific dairy to follow them. It servers as a microcosm of American politics today where legislation often goes to the highest bidder.

Excuses

I like this column because it combines my two favorite things this year, Butler winning the NIT and Democrats taking control of Congress. The uniting theme? That the media insists on making excuse for the losers.

How Not to be President

In today's Washington Post Doug Brinkley has an interesting preview of how history will judge President Bush. The answer is not well.

This last point is crucial. Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.

When an historian is comparing you to Hoover, you've got problems. Big problems. Even worse when this judgment isn't including the worsening situation in Afghanistan, the war he fore sake for Iraq.