Gay marriage, gay rights, and the hate-crime nexus

John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and a major civil-rights figure, wrote an eloquent and important essay that appeared in the Boston Globe the other day titled, "At a crossroads on gay unions":

We are now at such a crossroads over same-sex couples' freedom to marry. It is time to say forthrightly that the government's exclusion of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters from civil marriage officially degrades them and their families. It denies them the basic human right to marry the person they love. It denies them numerous legal protections for their families.

This discrimination is wrong. We cannot keep turning our backs on gay and lesbian Americans. I have fought too hard and too long against discrimination based on race and color not to stand up against discrimination based on sexual orientation. I've heard the reasons for opposing civil marriage for same-sex couples. Cut through the distractions, and they stink of the same fear, hatred, and intolerance I have known in racism and in bigotry.

Atrios followed up with a provocative post that said in part:

Now, I'm all for practical politics -- if you can't win elections all the principles in the world don't matter much. But, it isn't Democrats who are making this an issue, frankly, it's Republicans. They're making immoral homos the centerpiece of their '04 election strategy. Democrats can either be on the right side of this issue, or the wrong side. If they're on the wrong side, it won't win them any votes. Just as MSNBC can't out-Fox Fox, the Democrats can't out-gaybait the Republicans.

There are limits to this thesis, it should be noted; I'm certain that a few political pollster types will argue that while coming out for gay marriage will not gain you any votes, it will lose them for you.

I think they are wrong and Atrios is right -- though of course, it all depends on how the Democrats handle their response.

I think if they mealy-mouth the issue of gay marriage (a la Bill Clinton's absurd "don't ask don't tell" compromise on gays in the military) they will in fact lose votes on the issue.

But if they frame the issue in a way that casts into high relief the fetid, steaming bigotry that lies at the core of the GOP demagoguery, then I believe they will gain votes.

The first step, of course, is to be unrepentant and aggressive in support of at least civil unions for gays, following Howard Dean's example (rest assured the presence of Dean in the forefront of the Democratic candidates is a large part of the GOP's decision to attack on the gay-rights front). It will be important to frame it largely as a fairness issue. The campaign really has to zero in on the basic injustice of the ban on gay unions. That highlight alone should be enough to cast into fairly sharp relief the GOP's basic bigotry on the matter.

More to the point, there is another gay-rights-related issue latent out there that would cast a national spotlight on Republican bigotry toward gays -- namely, hate crimes.

There currently sits before Congress a bill that enjoys majority support in both the House and the Senate which would create, for the first time, a bona fide federal hate-crimes law. The bill, which enjoys bipartisan support (its current leading sponsor is Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon), actually would contribute substantially to addressing the problem of hate crimes in a material way.

There's only one problem: The Republican leadership will never allow it to pass.

And there is only one reason for this: Naked bigotry against gays.

Recent history

The legislation in question, titled the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act, originally was drafted in 2000. It has twice passed out of the Senate but has died in the House. It was offered again this summer and currently sits in the Judiciary Committee, under the care of Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a longtime opponent of the bill.

The bill's previous history is very telling.

The legislation originally was titled the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, and it was sponsored in 1998 in the Senate by Ted Kennedy, D-Mass, partly in response to the James Byrd in Texas killing that spring, and it picked up impetus that fall with the murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

It is important to understand that the reasons for the legislation go well beyond two headline-making crimes. Foremost is the general weakness of both state and federal hate-crimes statutes, the latter particularly. Though the 1994 Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act was the first attempt to provide for federal prosecution of the crimes, it is an extremely limited law, kicking in only if a hate crime is committed on federal property or during the commission of a federal activity, such as voting in a national election. It has hardly ever been used in actual prosecution because of its weakness.

An equally important aspect of the problem with hate crimes is that they represent an unfunded mandate. Because they are special crimes and they present special challenges, training law-enforcement officers in recognizing and handling them is an essential component of making them effective. And yet such training hardly occurs at all in most police departments in America, mainly because the states and the federal government do such a poor job of making it available, even though the politicians at those levels have been busily passing these laws.

The HCPA proposed to address both those issues, the former especially, by rewriting the federal law to expand the ability of federal agents to investigate the cases when necessary, and moreover to bolster the ability of the feds to give local agencies financial and investigatory assistance. Those local jurisdictions, after all, are where the vast majority of hate-crimes cases arise.

However, the bill also included "sexual orientation" among the categories of possible bias motivations. In other words, it expanded the law to make violent gay-bashing a hate crime, potentially a federal one. The religious right, ever alert to the "homosexual agenda" and its evil designs, promptly went to work.

The Family Research Council issued an "Action Alert" warning that the HCPA was a threat to the First Amendment: "Hate crimes legislation could severely restrict Americans' freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion. This legislation would give the government the power to interpret and classify certain speech, thought, theology, and moral belief as unlawful or contributing to crime. Will pastors, priests, rabbis, and other religious leaders who preach and teach against homosexual conduct be prosecuted for inciting a hate crime?"

Nonetheless, the Christian conservatives' campaign against the bill was relatively quiet, indicating their intention to resort instead to conservatives' control of Congress to win. A parade of testimony from both sides -- supporters included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Psychological Association, the Anti-Defamation League, and various gay-rights organizations -- was heard over the course of the summer. By that fall, however, it was becoming clear that the bill was fated to linger in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was then controlled by Hatch.

The Shepard murder appeared to change all that. Suddenly, in mid-October, both senators and representatives found their offices deluged with letters and phone calls urging that the bill be allowed to move to the floor for a vote. For awhile it appeared that public demand might force a vote. But, reportedly under pressure from the Christian Coalition, GOP Majority Leader Trent Lott announced on October 20 that the Senate would not have time to consider the bill before its annual November-December recess. The Republican leadership in the House, curiously, seemed to claim credit for the bill's demise; a memo from the House Republican Conference attacking hate-crimes laws as part of President Clinton's "big-government agenda" called the death of the legislation "a win for conservative priorities."

Despite the setback, however, the legislation was anything but dead. The following March of 1999, identical versions of the Hate Crimes Protection Act were reintroduced in both the House and Senate to great fanfare. The House version had 118 co-sponsors, while in the Senate thirty-one co-sponsors signed on. Vice President Al Gore and Assistant Attorney General Eric Holder both issued statements of support, along with the usual phalanx of civil-rights and gay-rights group. The support for the legislation was even broader than before, including a coalition of law-enforcement officers and prosecutors who argued that the law provided them with vital tools for adequately coping with these kinds of crimes.

Among the early witnesses offering supporting testimony for the bill were the family of James Byrd, and Judy Shepard, Matthew's mother, who observed: "There is no guarantee that these laws will stop hate crimes from happening. But they can reduce them. They can help change the climate in this country, where some people feel as though it is OK to target specific groups of people and get away with it."

The battle thus joined, the religious right pulled out its big guns and began firing away. The Family Research Council opined that "it is unconstitutional to elevate a category of sexual behavior to a legally privileged status," and argued that the law "punishes a criminal who commits a violent crime against a homosexual more severely than if he committed a crime against a non-homosexual."

"We call it the Thought Crimes Act," said Robert Regier, a policy analyst at the FRC. "All people are equal under the law, and no one deserves more protection than another because of their sexual behavior. … Passage of this bill is nothing short of telling us what to think. In effect, it supercedes the jurisdiction of the church. They should leave the judgment of our minds and hearts to God, and let the government judge our actions and behavior."

This time around, the legislation did not stall in the Senate -- rather, it proceeded out of the Judiciary Committee, and proceeded over the summer to move toward a floor vote. In July, it was folded into the Commerce, State, and Justice appropriations bill, approved by a wide margin, and forwarded to the House.

This set off alarms among its opponents, who began working feverishly to block passage in the House, where preliminary estimates suggested it would pass handily. On September 11, 2000, the Christian Coalition released an action alert urging its members to defeat the HCPA, since it would infringe on the "free speech of Americans who view homosexuality as immoral." The Traditional Values Coalition chimed in that "the elevation of such a lifestyle into a protected group is a government endorsement of that lifestyle."

As it turned out, they had little to fear. Lying in wait for the bill were the Republican leaders of the House, particularly Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, both Texans with an oft-articulated animus toward the so-called "homosexual agenda." Despite broad and bipartisan support for the measure even among their own ranks, they managed to maneuver it to death--removing it from the Senate appropriations bill and sending it to the House-Senate conference committee, where it was dropped altogether on a straight party-line vote. Later that month, President Clinton vetoed the appropriations bill in part because it omitted the hate-crimes legislation, but he eventually capitulated and signed a budget bill that did not include the HCPA provisions.

Round Two

However, while this ignominious end for the HCPA left its supporters stunned and shellshocked, the impetus they had gained, combined with how close to succeeding they actually were, kept their long-term hopes alive. They did not, perhaps, quite expect history to keep repeating itself. But it did.

Sporting many of the same, bipartisan sponsors as the HCPA, Kennedy in the spring of 2000 introduced the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act. It featured the same amendments to federal laws as the HCPA, expanding hate-crimes categories to include sexual orientation and broadening the laws' investigatory scope. True to its name, it also contained language emphasizing the primary role of local and state agencies in handling hate crimes -- and perhaps just as important, it included funding for federal grants to help local hate-crimes prosecutions, as well as for training law officers and prosecutors to identify and investigate the crimes.

In June, it passed the Senate by a wide margin, 57-42, and proceeded to the House, attached once again to another appropriations bill, this time the Department of Defense Authorization Act. Again, it enjoyed broad, bipartisan support; House members in September passed a resolution by a forty-vote margin (232-192) instructing joint-body conferees to include the bias-crimes language in the DOD bill.

But once again, the bill ran into the tandem team of Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, who succeeded on October 5 in stripping the legislation from the authorization bill.

Kennedy refused to give up, however, and reintroduced the LLEA the following March of 2001, replete with fifty-one original sponsors, even though its prospects in the narrowly GOP-controlled Senate appeared dim. But then, on May 24, Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords announced he was leaving the GOP and registering as an independent, which suddenly gave Democrats a one-vote majority in the Senate and control of both the committees and the legislative agenda.

For a time, it appeared that a bona fide federal bias-crime law was finally about to become reality. Since it was no longer forced to pass out of the Senate attached to an appropriations bill, it stood a far better chance of passage in the House as well. Kennedy pressed forward with the bill, gradually shepherding it through the Judiciary Committee to the Senate floor.

Faced with the prospects of the bill's passage, the religious right stepped up its rhetoric, denouncing the legislation again as "anti-Christian" and unconstitutional. Some of the fresh arguments raised against the legislation bordered on the bizarre, including intimations of an evil gay conspiracy to destroy America's moral fiber.

In the Senate, the opposition -- which knew it lacked the numbers to prevent passage -- shifted tactics, choosing instead to amend the bill to death. Republican senators began filing numerous modifications ranging from Senator Bob Smith's attempt to add pregnant women to the class of potential victims to amendments regarding defense issues and human cloning. By June 11, some nineteen different amendments had been filed, nearly all of them frivolous in nature.

Democrats decided to hold a vote cutting off debate -- which turned out to be a fatal move. Two of the Republican cosponsors of the bill, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and John Ensign of Nevada, reneged on their commitment and voted to allow the amendments to pile up, while another five Republicans who had voted for the bill in 2000 did likewise. In the end, the cutoff failed, and the bill returned to the Judiciary Committee, where it continued to languish.

That November, Republicans retook control of the Senate, and the LLEA returned to the tender mercies of Orrin Hatch. The LLEA was revived in 2003 in the Senate, this time under bipartisan cosponsorship headed up by Gordon Smith. But it remains bound inside the Judiciary Committee, and no prospect is in sight of its ever escaping -- nor, for that matter, of its ever surviving the House in any event.

Frank remarks

Indeed, as Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who would handle the bill in the House should it ever emerge from the Senate, told me in an interview that DeLay would certainly kill it again: "The problem in the House is that the Republican leadership is determined not to do anything or allow anything that’s supportive. And the way the rules of the House work, unlike the rules of the Senate, they’re in total control. As long as the Republicans are in control of the House, you’re not going to see, I’m afraid -- or at least, not for the foreseeable future -- but they won’t allow either the hate-crimes bill or ENDA or virtually anything else that’s supportive of the position of non-discrimination to go forward, and they have total control."

Frank made an important point in that interview:

The Republican leadership -- look, they’re worried about their base, and a large part of their base is very homophobic. Things have evolved. They don’t want to do much gay-bashing anymore, because they know that face has cost them something. But they are firmly against and will never allow anything supportive.

Are they trying to attract the gay vote?

No, but they do know -- well, some of them are, I mean, the Log Cabin people try to basically say, look, they’re not calling us names -- but what they’re trying to do is attract the votes, I think, of people who are gay and very conservative economically. But even more, I think, it’s not so much the gay votes, they know by now that since so many of us are out, what’s at play here are not just gay and lesbian people but millions of our relatives and friends. They understand it’s not a good idea to call somebody’s kid an asshole -- even if the person isn’t happy that the kid’s gay. So they’re really trying to answer to the general public.

Gay rights used to be a wedge issue used by the Republicans against the Democrats -- that is, they would force Democrats to vote on these issues because then they would feel that the general public being anti-gay and the Democratic primary electorate being pro-gay, we would be caught in the middle. Now that’s reversed.

Indeed, the polling data on including gays and lesbians in any kind of federal hate-crimes law is strong across the board. It's one of those issues where the average American, given the right framework and an understanding of the basic issues of fairness involved, knows the right thing to do. And as Frank suggests, there has been a gradual sea change in attitudes about gays -- an especially about bigotry against them.

Were Democrats to play it smart, they would make passage of the LLEEA a major issue for the summer of 2000 -- the perfect countermove to the GOP's desire to play up the gay-marriage issue.

If progressives can make an issue out of the GOP's anti-gay bigotry within the hate-crimes frame, then that same characterization of Republicans should transfer clearly and simply to their behavior on the gay-unions front.

There is a strategic reason, in the end, as well as a moral one, for doing the right thing.

As Atrios suggests, Democrats need to quit toying with the issue and simply get behind it. And a two-barreled front, it should be obvious, is going to be needed to knock down the Republicans' well-laid propaganda plans.

True colors

The anti-abortion "Christian" right lets down the curtain briefly with this headline in a recent edition of the "Pro Life News" From Covenant News [scroll down]:

D&X Ban Brings Out the Baby Murdering Jews

Maybe they've been reading up on Anne Emmerich ...

Evading reality

Those with long memories may recall that one of the chief flaws of the Charles Murray-Richard Herrnstein opus The Bell Curve was that it relied in key parts heavily on white-supremacist and eugenicist material from extremely dubious sources, notably the Pioneer Fund.

Now we learn that his latest work -- which ostensibly demonstrates the innate superiority of white Western civilization, mostly by defining "accomplishment" in terms based on white Western values -- is even more egregiously derived. Indeed, its entire thesis is based on a scientific "method" first used by eugenicists more than a century ago, and whose real scientific usefulness is rather limited. Murray, somewhat unsurprisingly, employs it in ways no serous scientist would.

Murray's text, titled Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950, uses a method called "historiometry" to obtain its desired results. From the New York Times review:

Historiometry was introduced in the early 19th century by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian mathematician who analyzed the relationship between age and achievement by studying the careers of prominent French and English playwrights. But it was Francis Galton, an English scientist and pioneering eugenicist, who brought the method into scholarly fashion.

For his 1869 study, "Hereditary Genius," Galton hit upon the idea of using obituaries and entries in a biographical dictionary to show a correlation between reputation, intelligence and heredity. Other studies of eminence followed, but by the late 1930's the approach had fallen from vogue as the social sciences came under the sway of behaviorism.

Galton, in fact, is the father of eugenics, having invented the term. Here's a characteristic excerpt from an 1864 magazine article penned by Galton:

If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties.

The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind; and even the best of these, so far as we know them, seem unequal to their work. The average culture of mankind is become so much higher than it was, and the branches of knowledge and history so various and extended, that few are capable even of comprehending the exigencies of our modern civilization; much less of fulfilling them. We are living in a sort of intellectual anarchy, for the want of master minds. The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised, and also to be differentiated. We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists. The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old. The foremost minds of the present day seem to stagger and halt under an intellectual load too heavy for their powers.

What is especially instructive about Galton was the way he devised "scientific" methods that were inimical to the nature of science itself -- that is, they often were constructed in a fashion likely to produce results that supported his original thesis, rather than working (as science must) from data first. Galton's application of historiometry, for example, relied on certain assumptions that later proved untrue. More recent social scientists have adopted historiometry for specialized fields of study, but most of them recognize the limitations of the method.

Not so Murray, who applies it to an absurdly long historical period and applies to cross-culturally, where the comparisons become based on predispositions and biases rather than anything approaching a scientific standard. Note how Murray went about collecting his data:

Borrowing the techniques of Mr. Simonton and other social scientists, Mr. Murray developed inventories of 4,002 significant figures in the arts and sciences by calculating the amount of space allotted to them in standard reference works and assigning them scores on a 100-point scale.

The built-in bias toward Western "accomplishment" should be obvious, since the vast majority of most "standard reference works" are either Western in origin or are derived in form from Western references.

This is not dissimilar from The Bell Curve in its argument that because poor blacks consistently test lower in IQ, a hereditary component must be at work -- while neglecting to take into account the effects of poverty, to wit, the fact that the poor nutrition common among small children from the lower classes directly affects their brain development and thus their IQs.

In other words, if you shut out reality and apply "scientific" methods to limited data, you can prove any point you want to make. Murray, it should be clear by now, is a master of this.

Heavy thinker

I know this is just temporary, but ...

Does it strike anyone else as extremely fitting that, if you go to the site reserved for Ann Coulter's blog, readers are informed that this is where "Ann Coulter speaks her mind" ...

And it is nothing but a blank page?

Bush and the 'First Amendment zones'

Following up on the recent post about so-called "First Amendment zones" …

I asserted in that post that these kinds of "First Amendment zones," in which protesters are segregated from supporters, are "purely a Republican enterprise." The picture is a good deal more complicated than that -- though, as you'll see, the point is not inaccurate. A number of readers have written in to point out -- quite accurately -- that "free speech zones" were used at both the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1996 and 2000.

Their use in Los Angeles, in fact, resulted in an ACLU lawsuit won by the plaintiffs, with a judge ruling not that the zones themselves were unconstitutional, but that placing them too far distant was; as a result, the protest zone was moved closer to the convention site. (Details on the fights in L.A. and Philadelphia over the zones can be found here.) There was also extraordinary police activity associated with the L.A. protests.

Indeed, the more I've delved the subject, the more it is clear that there is something of a history of the use of these "free-speech zones" that goes back some 30 years or more. For those old enough to recognize the distinctively Nixonian flavor to the zones, well, that's an accurate perception: they appear to have originated in fact with The Tricky One himself.

However, it's important to understand that what is distinctive about the Bush administration's use of the zones is their specifically anti-First Amendment purpose. The Bush "free speech zones" -- unlike most of their predecessors -- explicitly differentiate between kinds of demonstrations. It is a classic case of what free-speech experts refer to as "viewpoint discrimination," a term that is at the heart of most court rulings on the 1st Amendment.

In other words, pro-Bush demonstrators are given close access to the president. Anti-Bush protesters are shunted off to sites, some of them literally miles away where they never even see the man, let alone get a chance to voice their protest to anyone other than their fellow protesters.

This is qualitatively different from most of the "free speech zones" or "protest zones" that have been deployed since the mid-1990s at certain political events, which simply shunted all demonstrators, regardless of viewpoint, into the same restricted areas. Moreover, most of the time, those zones were within reasonable proximity of the main event.

I contacted Vic Walczak, legal director of the ACLU Pittsburgh chapter that has taken the lead in the national organization's lawsuit against the Secret Service in this matter. I wanted to get the history of these zones and what the ACLU saw occurring.

Here's what he told me:

"These zones have been used -- my first experience was around Klan rallies, where they set these up. In some ways it's the same -- to protect the speaker because you know, you have 12 goose-stepping, hooded folks on stage spewing their hatred and, you know, five thousand people trying to tear them apart. And so you set up these protest zones.

"There is a parallel there. What we found different in this case is that, whereas in the Klan cases, everybody had to go behind some kind of barrier, so they can't get to the speaker, what we found here is that you got what's known as viewpoint discrimination.

"So, if you're holding a sign saying, 'I love George,' you can go to five feet. If you're not holding any sign, you can go to twenty-five feet. If you're holding a sign that's critical, sorry, you've got to go a mile away. That's the part that is really insidious under the First Amendment. It really is suppressing dissent.

"In terms of presidents using this, there's a fair amount of case law during Nixon's time where they engaged in this and other anti-First Amendment practices. One was the use of these protest zones. The other is simply to have the cops go through the crowd, whether it's at an event, or along a motorcade route, and tear up people's signs and threaten people. It was pretty brazen during the late '60s and early '70s. There are a fair number of recorded cases there.

"There's also some evidence of excluding protesters from designated public forums during President Reagan's tenure -- the cases we've actually seen involved Vice President Bush. And then we've got one reported case involving President Bush out of Ohio, and then one documented instance during Clinton's administration involving an attempt at excluding anti-abortion protesters from the Inaugural parade route in January of 1997. And that was smashed by the court.

"Clearly the number of uses of this kind of protest zone by a presidential administration has increased dramatically under the current White House. It didn't start with them -- I think since Nixon, there were isolated examples of this. This is the first time where we've really had a sufficient number of complaints to say that there really appears to be a pattern here."

The ACLU, for those interested, has so far officially cataloged 12 definable cases where viewpoint discrimination occurred at Bush or Cheney appearances. But, as Walczak told me: "We really think we've just scratched the tip of the iceberg in terms of finding out about these protest zones. And we're interested in hearing from people who think they've been victimized by this."

To that end, Walczak forwarded a memo and a questionnaire I'm more than happy to include here, seeking information from anyone who witnessed similar discrimination when they attempted to protest at a Bush or Cheney appearance. It includes contact numbers and addresses.

If you have any information to forward to Walczak, be sure to do so. The importance of this matter in terms of preserving free-speech rights should be plain.
_______

MEMORANDUM

TO: ORGANIZATIONS INVOLVED IN PROTEST ACTIVITIES AT APPEARANCES BY PRESIDENT BUSH OR VICE-PRESIDENT CHENEY
FROM: AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION (ACLU)
RE: SECRET SERVICE PRACTICE OF DISCRIMINATING AGAINST PROTESTERS AND USING "PROTEST ZONES" AT PRESIDENTIAL AND VICE-PRESIDENTIAL APPEARANCES
DATE: SEPTEMBER 30, 2003

On September 23, 2003, The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit on behalf of four organizations -- ACORN, United For Peace and Justice, USAction and NOW -- against the U.S. Secret Service alleging a practice of discrimination against protesters at presidential and vice-presidential events. More information about the lawsuit can be found [here].

In sum, the problem is that the Secret Service and local police erect a "protest" or "demonstration zone" at events attended by President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and other federal officials protected by the Secret Service (e.g., Secretaries Ridge and Rumsfeld, Attorney General Ashcroft). Anyone displaying a message that criticizes the Administration or its policies is required to go inside the zone, and then to remain there. Meanwhile, people gathered to see the visiting federal government official (spectators), passers-by and people showing support for the Administration, are permitted to congregate closer to where the official will be and the event. In some instances the protest zones are created either so far away or in such a location that the official, guests and the press attending the event cannot see or hear the protesters and vice versa.

The ACLU believes that treating people differently and less favorably simply because they express dissent or criticize the Administration is unconstitutional. It does not promote security because anyone intent on harming the officials would simply carry a sign with a supportive message or no sign at all.

If your group has been subjected to a protest zone at a rally against the President, Vice-President or another federal government official, we would very much like to speak with you. We may not be able to represent you, but we may be able to advise you and we may be able to use your story as part of the evidence in our case. Please complete and return the attached questionnaire. You may also contact any one of the following four lawyers to discuss the situation:

Vic Walczak, Pittsburgh ACLU Legal Director, vwalczak@aclupgh.org.
Stefan Presser, PA ACLU Legal Director, spresser@aclupa.org
Art Spitzer, National Capital Area ACLU Legal Director, artspitzer@aol.com
Chris Hansen, ACLU senior staff counsel, chansen@aclu.org

If you will be attending a protest involving the President, Vice-President or another federal governmental official, please read the attached "Protest Questionnaire" for information about what to look for. Then contact one of the above-listed lawyers after the event to discuss your experience or simply return the form to the person listed at the bottom of the questionnaire. Thank you.

_______

PROTEST QUESTIONNAIRE

TO: ORGANIZATIONS INVOLVED IN PROTEST ACTIVITIES AT APPEARANCES BY PRESIDENT BUSH OR VICE-PRESIDENT CHENEY
FROM: ACLU
RE: INSTRUCTIONS ABOUT ASSESSING RESTRICTIONS USED AGAINST PROTESTERS
DATE: SEPTEMBER 30, 2003

If you are planning to protest against President Bush, Vice-President Cheney or another high-ranking federal government official (like Secretaries Ridge or Rumsfeld, or Attorney General Ashcroft) during a local appearance by one of them, here are some things we would like you to watch for.

1. Are protesters required to enter a designated "protest" or "demonstration zone"?





2. If so, where is the protest zone in relation to where spectators and others are allowed to gather? For instance, is it farther away from where the event is being held? Is it out of sight? Is it somehow a "worse" location than is given to other members of the public? If so, why is it worse?




3. How many people without any signs or pickets can you see outside the event? Where are they allowed to stand in relation to the protesters and to where the event is taking place?





4. Can you see any people with signs or buttons supporting the Administration?



4a. If the answer above is yes, are the pro-Administration people also required to stay in the protest zone? Or are they allowed to go outside the zone, closer to the event and the location of the visiting dignitary? Please describe.






5. What happens if protesters attempt to leave the zone and mingle with other spectators? Are they told they must stay in the zone or they will be arrested?






6. Was anyone arrested because he or she refused to go into the zone or because he or she left the zone or attempted to leave the zone? If so, please identify that person if you can. Even if you can't identify the person, please tell us as best you can when and where that person was arrested and which law enforcement agency made the arrest.






6a. Was anyone threatened with arrest if he or she refused to go into the zone or left the zone? If so, please identify that person if you can.




7. Finally, if you have observed any of the above restrictions, ask a police officer or any other law enforcement official who appears to be in charge of security about why you have to stay in the protest zone and who decided the protest zone location? Ask if the Secret Service is involved and if so, how. At all times, be polite and don't get yourself arrested. If you receive any information that the Secret Service is involved, be sure to get the name of the person giving you this information and what law enforcement agency he or she works for. Sometimes it’s the local police, other times it may the state or county police, or sheriffs.





Please return this completed form to the ACLU in one of the following ways:

Susan Tofte
ACLU
125 Broad Street
New York, NY 10004

Or fax to: Susan Tofte, ACLU, 212-549-2651

Or e-mail to: STofte@aclu.org.

The Bush-Nazi connection redux

It’s certainly noteworthy that the connections of the Bush family fortune to the Nazi war machine and the Holocaust are back in the news, as Atrios and Hesiod are duly reporting. (Democrats.com has a good set of links to the various pieces.)

Regular readers will remember that I discussed this story in depth in "Bush, the Nazis and America," but I reached somewhat different conclusions.

The genesis of the story's resurgence appears to be the John Buchanan piece in the New Hampshire Gazette, which actually appeared a week and a half ago. However, the AP's Jonathan Salant picked up on it and confirmed the new documents further establishing the Bush-Union Bank connection, and offered new details about UBC's dealings with Fritz Thyssen, the Nazis' main underwriter from 1928-31 and a significant participant in Nazi activities until 1938.

Of course, as I observed in my earlier essay, that connection was already rather well-established fact. What isn't so clear, as I argued then, is what that connection means.

Salant's piece is short on broader context, but quite accurate, though it does little to advance the underlying issues. Buchanan's is more problematic; it relies heavily on the charges contained in the Larouchite Tarpley/Chaitkin text, and does little to assess the quality of it -- which is, frankly, not very good. And it fails to put Bush's Nazi dealings in their larger historical context, particularly the fact that Union Bank was one of only many American corporations with significant ties to the Nazi regime and the buildup of its war machinery, as well as that of the Holocaust.

A similar problem lies in the way it has been discussed so far in the press -- which is to say, superficially at best. Much of the ensuing discussion has revolved around the suggestion that Bush family has secret Nazi sympathies. But this is mostly nonsense; as I explained in Part 3 of the earlier essay, there is simply no evidence of an ideological connection to the Nazis (though the same cannot be said of, say, a eugenicist like Averell Harriman or an anti-Semite like Henry Ford, not to mention the leadership of the America First Committee, notably Charles Lindbergh).

The only journalist to adequately tackle the topic so far has been Joe Conason, who hits nearly all the right notes in his latest Observer piece, "Bush 'Nazi' Smear Unworthy of Critics." Especially noteworthy is his conclusion:

There are many unflattering terms that can and should be used to describe George W. Bush. He is, among other things, a truly bad President. But neither his offenses, nor the Republican Party’s politics of personal destruction, can justify using such tactics against him. Imputing Nazi sympathies to the President or his family ought to be beneath his adversaries.

Besides noting that something as factually accurate as the Bush-Nazis tie is by definition not a "smear," I only differ with Conason significantly on one point:

Whatever the President’s grandfather did or may have done, how does that reflect on George W. Bush? In 1942, he hadn’t been born yet. If he is nevertheless accountable for Prescott Sr.'s actions, fairness requires that a similar standard be applied to other descendants of politicians and businessmen whose attitude toward Nazism was, at best, ambivalent. Should anyone named Kennedy, Harriman, Dupont or Fish be arraigned for the offenses of their dead ancestors? Should everyone boycott Ford Motors?

Actually, it's a good deal more complicated than that. All these names had different kinds of dealings with the Nazis, all of them with different levels of culpability. If it emerges, for instance, that Prescott Bush had a hands-on role in the use of slave labor from Auschwitz in the Silesian steel operations, for instance, then that makes his involvement of a different order of magnitude. Some Americans provided ideological support, others financial, and others both.

Moreover, both levels of that kind of involvement do have an effect that carries through today. Just how much of the Bush family fortune, for instance, is founded on the Nazis' bloody money? Does the profound ideological support for Nazism that came from the DuPont brothers still exist in the family today? I think these are questions worth asking, because they give us, if nothing else, a better sense of the real morality that is practiced by the wealthy elites who have throughout history assured us that they are our moral betters as well.

In other words, Republicans have made a great deal out of George W. Bush's superior moral character, ostensibly (or so it has been depicted) a product of his upper-crust upbringing. But what kind of character has the Bush family actually practiced through the course of history?

What the evidence irrefutably shows is that there was a substantial business connection between the Bush family fortune and the buildup of the Nazi war machinery (as described in Part 2), as well as a significant tie to the Auschwitz slave labor camps.

However, as I have argued (as does Conason), it is important again to keep this in context: Many Americans made money by investing in the Nazis, and many more made fortunes by taking an active role in arming the country in the 1930s: Ford's activities may have been the most noteworthy (his German engine-building plants, nationalized before the war, were key components of the Blitzkrieg machinery), but other major players included Kodak, Shell, General Motors, and DuPont, the latter pair having an especially noteworthy level of involvement (in which, it must also be noted, Joseph P. Kennedy, the family's patriarch, had no small role).

On the other hand, as I argued in Part 4, the issues raised by the Bush association run even deeper. It must be said first that the context does not by any means exonerate either Prescott Bush or his heirs -- nor, for that matter, any of the other businessmen whose similar contributions formed that context. The connection to Fritz Thyssen, especially, is no small thing, because he played such a significant role in the Nazis' rise to power. Hitler's party was on the ropes in 1927 and probably would have gone under entirely had not Thyssen bailed them out beginning in 1928, actively underwriting their activities for the next several years until they assumed power in 1933.

Thyssen was a classic case of the corporatist conservative who saw the thugs of fascism's far right as a useful bulwark against the left in general and communists in particular, believing all along they could control it. Of course, Hitler proved Thyssen wrong; by 1937, his propensity for devouring his allies (see especially the Night of the Long Knives) had become self-evident, and Thyssen tried fleeing to Switzerland, but eventually was caught and served out the war in prison.

More to the point, it was clear well before the outbreak of war in 1938 just what kind of person these gentlemen were dealing with. Hitler had already commanded the brutal thugs of the SA during his rise to power. He already, beginning in 1933, rounded up political dissidents and opposition leaders -- mostly socialists, Communists and leftists of different varieties -- and placed them in concentration camps (Dachau being the most notorious), where many of them were subsequently "liquidated." He had already, in 1934, imprisoned or summarily executed his former allies in the Night of the Long Knives. And of course, his ardent, screeching anti-Semitism had long been painfully apparent, and the anti-Jewish Nuremburg Laws, passed in 1935, were abundant evidence he meant business. The list is long, but the nature of the man with whom they were blithely doing business -- and thereby deepening his grip on power -- was more than plain.

Prescott Bush's activities in Germany were of a piece with this approach to dealing with the Nazis: If good money is to be made, even thugs and dictators are acceptable business partners. There are three significant moral dimensions to Bush's dealings here, all of which warrant deeper study:

-- To what extent did those dealings enable one of the most monstrous regimes in history in its subsequent mass genocide and warmaking? The evidence so far would suggest it played a significant role, since Thyssen's steelmaking operations were at the heart of so much of the Nazi machine.

-- To what extent did those dealings harm America even before the war? The flow of American capital into Germany played a key role in the so-called "German miracle" of the 1930s, when its economy was booming at a remarkable rate; by contrast, America's own economic recovery was slow to take root. It would be interesting to examine just how much capital was flowing out of the country at a time when it needed to stay home and invest in American jobs, and what its actual effect was.

-- To what extent is the Bush family fortune -- which itself played no small role in the ascension of the current occupant of the White House -- derived from these Nazi dealings? It is worth remembering, perhaps, that Prescott Bush himself later attested that in the early 1930s, the firm for which he worked would have gone under completely were it not for the personal intervention of Averell Harriman, who wrote checks out of his own accounts to keep the business running until it could become prosperous again. The dealings that clearly put the house back in order subsequently were its German investments. This suggests that the Bush family fortune -- like those of many once-wealthy families after Black Friday -- was at Ground Zero in the early '30s and was subsequently rebuilt largely through these dealings.

Indeed, it is clear that this issue has been allowed to fester for well over half a century precisely because there has never been any kind of adequate reckoning of the business dealings that helped make the Nazi nightmare a reality. This is true not only of the German industrialists who gave the Nazis both their political and their warmaking powers, but of the American industrialists and capitalists who contributed substantially to the same.

In this sense, it is worth comparing the German and American postwar response to this legacy, especially when it came time to reckon the moral and legal consequences for the roles of the various participants in the Nazi phenomenon -- especially since the Germans, for obvious reasons, were made to bear the brunt of the culpability. What's noteworthy is to what little extent Americans ever had to do the same.

Yet even in this regard, there is one constant: The financiers, the people who lined the Nazis' pockets with money, and who likewise lined their own pockets with the regime's profits, almost uniformly escaped facing any kind of serious consequences for having done so. As I discussed in Part 4, these men were never held culpable, legally or socially, in part because of the exigencies of the postwar period, when it was widely believed their resources were needed for rebuilding the international economy. However, as Christopher Simpson explored in his 1993 book The Splendid Blond Beast: Money Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (a somewhat narrower examination of the issue can be found in John Higham's 1983 text, Trading With the Enemy: The Nazi American Money Plot 1933-1949) a more important factor was the fact that international tribunals were stymied by the same machinations of privilege and power that had wrought the genocide in the first place. The elites whose fortunes were at stake found that the structure of international law was weak and easily manipulated so that they could simply "get on with business."

This fact came back to haunt Germany in the 1990s, when the connection of certain industrialists not only to the Nazi regime but to the Holocaust resurfaced in a controversy with similar features -- namely, the uproar that resulted from the city of Nuremburg's decision to honor Franz Diehl, whose wartime factories used Nazi slave labor.

The most recent edition of The Journal of Modern History contains a fascinating piece by Neil Gregor titled " 'The Illusion of Remembrance': The Karl Diehl Affair and the Memory of National Socialism in Nuremberg, 1945-1999," which deals with precisely this topic. (A piece on History News Network by Daniel Bogler of the Financial Times of London, "Germany comes clean: Companies are putting the past behind them by revealing the truth about their history", discusses with the issue on a broader scale.)

Gregor describes how the Nuremburg city council, which for the first time in years came under control of corporatist conservatives in 1996, decided to make Diehl, a major figure in the town's business life, an honorary citizen. This raised a considerable storm, since Diehl had been a Nazi party member and his plants not only had produced Nazi armaments, but had employed slave labor from various concentration camps. As the controversy progressed, further evidence arose that Diehl had financially supported far-right-wing/neo-fascist organizations in the years immediately following the war, before they had become outlawed in Germany.

The corporatists' response was a familiar one:

Most obviously, what was at stake in the dispute was the relative persuasiveness of competing images of the Nazi past put forward by the various protagonists. Diehl's ability to parry criticism depended not least on his ability to project a compelling narrative of Nazi Germany that cast businesses as the victims of the regime and brutalities as the sole responsibility of their immediate perpetrators. Diehl's mobilization of the imagery of totalitarianism to characterize life under the National Socialist regime drew not only on widely held beliefs within broad sectors of a postwar West German society but also, more specifically, on an exculpatory narrative that had been propagated by West German social elites since the 1950s in an attempt to reconstruct the legitimacy of elite conservative politics after this legitimacy had been called radically into question by this same group's complicity in the crimes of Nazism. [emphasis mine] In seeking to cast the suffering of forced workers as an issue pertaining only to individual managers' direct responsibility for isolated acts of inhumanity on the shop floor, rather than recognizing that organizational interests and institutional cultures for which he bore responsibility were to blame, Diehl was playing upon a problem that had represented a judicial conundrum for decades. While courts in the 1950s and 1960s had generally been able to convict individuals whose crimes and misdeeds in the concentration or extermination camps could be directly proved, it was much harder to legally demonstrate the involvement of those whose function within the system of exploitation and murder had been one or more stages removed from the actual site of brutality itself. The result was that, while socially marginal thugs who had ended up as SS camp guards could be convicted in postwar trials, respected middle-class members of the judiciary, civil service, and business community could return to professional life with their reputations untarnished.

This strategy was extremely successful; the Diehl controversy was muted even within the confines of the opposing mainstream liberal party. Only the local Green successfully brought up the significance of the victims' grievances, particularly in the larger sense of Diehl's moral obligations to the victims and their families, as well as to squarely facing the consequences of his behavior in an honest and forthright fashion (he wound up suppressing an objective historical account he had commissioned to supposedly "exonerate" his prewar behavior).

There were two versions of this postwar narrative: one which cast both German society and the individual citizens "as the victim of a 'normal' war in which the peculiarities of Nazi racial imperialism and barbarism were denied," and a second which "sought to co-opt the city's historical associations with the Nazi regime into a story that represented the city and its inhabitants as having been the terrorized victims of a peculiarly vicious totalitarian regime, against which they had been powerless to resist but in the face of which they had preserved peculiarly local values of decency and humanity," or what Gregor calls "the cozy myth of Nazism as having somehow come from outside of Nuremberg's political life to somehow take such powerful hold that it had been impossible to dislodge."

Gregor concludes that Nuremburg (and by extension, German society) will not adequately confront the peculiar challenges raised by the history of Nazism in their midst until it discards these myths and confronts the truth:

Instead of continuing to construct Nuremberg as a site upon which the events of high politics were played out, and instead of representing Nazism as an anonymous, external force visited on the city and its inhabitants from outside, Nuremberg needs to reframe its memorial politics using an approach that emphasizes the structures of consent, participation, and activism in everyday life and that acknowledges the extent to which local institutions, public and private, became agents of Nazi terror and murder. Rather than representing Nazis as outsiders and the local population as either victims or passive bystanders, local politicians and city agencies would do well to consider the oppositenamely, that local institutions, agencies, and individuals should be recognized as active perpetrators and that it was the multitude of actual outsiders who represented the overwhelming majority of victims. Moreover, those citizens of foreign countries murdered during the Third Reich, both in Germany and abroad, should be acknowledged as the victims of an unprecedented war of racial annihilation that had its roots in the society of which Nuremberg was part. For only when the official history of Nuremberg involves seeking answers to searching questions about the identities of local perpetrators will the city be able to claim that it is confronting the problem of its Nazi past honestly. And only when the city recognizes the extent to which the crimes of the Third Reich relied upon the cooperation, collusion, and collaboration of such local perpetrators will it be spared the embarrassment of being seen to endow an exploiter of concentration camp labor with its highest civic award.

I would like to argue that a similar problem confronts America, which has historically excused itself from complicity in the Nazi phenomenon largely on the basis of the fact that it was American and Allied forces that defeated the German army, a reasonable-seeming position that is directly undermined by such inconvenient histories as that raised by the Prescott Bush, Henry Ford and America First cases.

More to the point, the American postwar narrative resembles the Germans' in that it seems specifically tailored to protect the elites whose culpability in the Nazi regime remains profound from any consequences for that behavior. Like the German mythology, it casts Nazism as almost an alien infestation from outer space, or at least as something specifically confined to Nazi Germany. This elides, of course, the extent to which fascist ideology spread in America before the war and the extent to which it was encouraged and sponsored by American industrialists, as well as, most of all, the extent to which those same capitalists did the same in Germany and, moreover, specifically were involved in numerous business dealings that fueled the Nazi war machine which was to cost so many Americans their lives.

A reckoning is long overdue, and not merely for the sake of clearing our national conscience or coming to terms with some distant history now in our national rear-view mirror. Such legacies as the Prescott Bush case specifically, and the problem of prewar American dealings with Nazi Germany generally, need a thorough examination precisely because they reflect directly on the conduct and behavior of our national leaders today.

As Phil Leggiere put it in his remarkable piece (cited in Part 4, and worth repeating), "The Indiscreet Charm of the Bush Nazi Web Conspiranoids":

What … Aaron-Loftus and Simpson substantiate with more detail and in a far wider historical context, is that the relationships between Harriman Bank and other corporations and Nazi-era Germany need to be understood as part of a larger pattern. There is little evidence that the free-form meta-diplomatic modes of international financial deal making developed by Harriman, Bush and company in the 1920s and '30s signaled pro-Nazi or pro-fascist political ideology. However, it did help form a template for U.S. international finance and politics in which support for dictatorships, (financially in the '30s, financially and politically-militarily during the cold war) would become business as usual in U.S. foreign policy. One of the most interesting aspects of both the Simpson and the Aaron and Loftus books is their examination of how the private sector style of international affairs pioneered by Dulles, Harriman, Lovett and Bush in the '30s gradually metaphorphosed, during and after World War 2, into the official realpolitick of the U.S. government, often under the guidance of these same men. The ruling precepts of anti-communism and free trade that guided the international banking elite in the '30s in their dealings with Hitler would become the official policy through which the U.S. would support a wide variety of corporate-friendly dictators throughout the world, from the '50s to the present.

… This evidence is only partly about the Bushes. More significantly, it traces the origins of the cavalier, amoral relationship between American and global financial elites and genocidal dictatorships that has characterized U.S. policy for decades.

This legacy has two dimensions that that need reckoning: domestic and international.

-- The willingness of elite capitalists to sponsor the activities of the thuggish elements that are intrinsically a major component of fascism as a bulwark against "leftists" has never left us entirely. Indeed, it has been occurring with renewed vigor since the early 1990s, when the conservative-movement dogmatists decided that Bill Clinton was a major threat to their drive for power, and began forming alliances with proto-fascist elements, specifically transmitting their ideas and agendas into mainstream conservatism. (This is, of course, the primary subject of "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism.")

That propensity has been rising to the surface in increasing numbers with the George W. Bush regime, which deployed thuggish elements in the Florida debacle in 2000 and turned them loose against antiwar protesters in 2002-03. The levels of violence and thuggery have remained subdued so far, but a serious challenge to Bush's power in the 2004 elections may well raise it another notch. In any event, the willingness to form these alliances dates can be traced directly back to the behavior of such capitalists as Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker in the 1930s.

-- The willingness to do business with, and indeed sponsor and arm, brutish thugs, dictators and continues to affect us today. After all, Iraq's Saddam Hussein was precisely the kind of dictator that America has historically armed and backed as an "enemy of our enemies" over the years since World War II, only to have them turn on us as a genuine threat themselves. For that matter, the terrorists who now operate Al Qaeda were originally sponsored by Americans in Afghanistan as part of our effort to undermine the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Not that we have ever learned anything from this: Today, in the name of defeating Al Qaeda and Saddam in the "war on terror," we have allied ourselves with all kinds of reprehensible thugs and authoritarian regimes, including those in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, and Malaysia.

Confronting America's past regarding its dealings with the Nazis is not merely an intellectual exercise or picking old scabs, but is an important step to understanding our role in the world today and the behavior of our politicians today, as well as facing the ramifications of our failure confront it previously. Because by shoving this part of our history into the collective memory hole, we enable the people who perpetrated it to not only escape responsibility, but to keep on behaving the same way -- along with their heirs.

In this regard, there is one other point on which I differ with Joe Conason: It is not only the historians who should be sorting this out. It needs to be everyone. And for that to happen, it needs to happen in the media as well.

Howie and the Right-Wing Meme

Bush apologist Howard Kurtz -- who never met a GOP talking point he didn't mind repeating -- opines on "Bush hatred" in his latest WaPo column:

Mainstream journalism, with its traditional parameters, has somehow failed to connect with the notion that there are lots of Americans who walk around sputtering about Dubya -- despite fairly healthy approval ratings for a third-year incumbent. The press was filled with stories about Clinton-haters, but Bush-hating is either more restrained or more out of control, depending on who's keeping score.

As I've pointed out previously, there is simply no truth to the claim that "the press was filled with stories about Clinton-haters." The only serious appearance of the subject in major mainstream media was the 1994 Time story on 'Clintonophobia.' As Sadly No discovered in a Lexis/Nexis search (I posted about it here), there were a total of 18 stories in American newspapers between 1992 and 2000 that mentioned "Clinton hatred."

In contrast, a veritable cottage industry has sprung up around writing about "Bush hatred." A quick Google search reveals 1,980 hits -- the vast majority of them from conservative pundits and bloggers holding forth on the depredations of irrational liberals.

It's quite clear this is the Republicans' chief hope for blunting the wholly legitimate criticism of the Bush administration -- for its grotesque handling of the Iraq war, its failures in the war on terrorism, its miserable economic and environmental performance ... and yes, its theft of the 2000 election. Simply cast all this anger as the mirror image of the same kind of fevered lunacy that beset conservatives themselves during Clinton's tenure -- behavior that the GOP is well aware was unpopular with voters -- and voila! Serious debate easily dismissed!

In reality, this comparison, as I've pointed out, depends on an equivalency that does not exist -- namely, it contrasts Republicans' irrational and groundless attacks on Clinton (from Mena to Vince Foster to Whitewater to the 'black love child') with serious concerns on legitimate topics, all dealing with policy and ethical conduct, all based on established facts.

Kurtz's comparison also stands reality on its head. People who defended Clinton -- or rather, who questioned his critics -- were quickly labeled "Clinton apologists." People who irrationally attacked him were treated seriously or, at best, tut-tutted as "harsh."

One of the primary progenitors of that double standard? Howard Kurtz, of course.

Blowing Novak's cover

Excellent reading from Eric Alterman:

Abrams and Novak and Rove? Oh My!

Alterman especially takes a hard look at Robert Novak, whose non-official cover as a "journalist" is pretty well shot:

I interviewed Novak not long after this for a too-kind profile I was writing and asked how he felt about being a pawn in Abrams's deception. His answer: He "admired" Abrams for lying to him on national television because the lie was told in the service of fighting Communism. "He had a tough job and there were lots of people out to get him," Novak averred, expressing zero regrets about misinforming his viewers. "Truth" did not even appear to enter into his calculations. There was his side and there were the other guys, period. That the Post and CNN willingly lend space to the man, knowing what they do, is another of the ongoing scandals involving journalistic standards and conservative ideological domination of the elite media.

My own favorite little Bob Novak anecdote -- unrelated to the Plame matter, but certainly revealing of the man's character -- comes from Sept. 12, 1995, when he was filling in as the host of "Larry King Live," and his guest was Sen. Jesse Helms. According to a Cox news report by Arthur Brice filed at the time:

Helms (R-N.C.) seemed somewhat shocked when the caller from Alabama said, "Mr. Helms, I know this might not be politically correct to say these days, but I think you should get a Nobel Peace Prize for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers."

"Oh, dear," guest host Robert Novak said.

"Whoops," said Helms. "Well, thank you, I think."

"That was the bad word," Novak said. "That was politically incorrect. We really don’t condone that kind of language, do we?"

"No. No," said Helms, a vocal opponent of affirmative action.

Helms went to say the slur is not part of his lexicon.

"My father didn’t condone it when I was a little boy," the 73-year-old senator said. "One of the worst spankings I ever got was when I used that word, and I don't think I’ve ever used it since."

Of course, Helms was as believable as Elliott Abrams.

What was noteworthy about both Novak's and Helms' responses, of course, was that they were flustered over the use of "the n-word". Neither bothered to even address, let alone repudiate, the content of the man's remarks -- you know, the part about "keeping the niggers down." Indeed, Helms seemed to thank him for them.

Novak is not simply a conservative-movement operative in reporter's clothing. He represents, as Alterman suggests, a much deeper and more systemic problem in modern journalism.

A personal note

I've always had a fond spot in my heart for Jeff Cooper's blog Cooped Up, if for no other reason than that he happens to share the name of one of my oldest and dearest friends. Most of all, I've enjoyed Jeff's clear-headed thinking and common sense, and have often wished we had more like him in the blogosphere.

So it was with real sadness that I read about Jeff's decision to go into blogging hiatus -- not because we're losing his voice (that's bad enough) but for the very human reasons he explains in his post announcing the decision -- namely, his 2-year-old boy has been diagnosed with auditory neuropathy. You should just read the post and let him explain it.

As Jeff says, there are some things more important than blogging.

Jeff's farewell really hit me hard, because the conflict is one I'm dealing with all the time as well. As it happens, I'm also the father of a 2-year-old, a delightful little girl named Fiona.

I'm not sure if any of my readers have picked up on the hints I've dropped from time to time, but being her care provider is actually my full-time job. That's right; your humble correspondent is a stay-at-home daddy.

My wife and I decided long ago that when we had children, we didn't want to do the child-care routine -- we wanted one of us to remain at home and care for them. We reduced our expenses and paid off our debts so that we could live on minimal income, and finally got around to making it happen two years ago. I wound up being in the better position to stay at home, and I was eager to do it, having gotten some child-rearing experience as a teenager, following the birth of my youngest brother.

For about a year before Fiona's birth, I worked at finishing Strawberry Days and building up a freelance writing business. At the time she was born, I was starting to get some real traction, stringing for the Washington Post and writing for Salon. Within a few weeks of her arrival, though, it quickly became clear that reporting and article-writing was just about out of the picture for a couple of years -- that kind of writing requires you to be near a phone and able to conduct interviews at all times, and it simply became impossible. Since that realization, I've settled into work I can do on evenings, weekends and naptimes -- namely, writing books ... and blogging. Neither of which produce much in the way of revenue.

[So for those of you wondering ... when you hit that little donation button for the "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism" essay, you are genuinely contributing rather directly to independent journalism. This summer's extraordinarily generous donations, in fact, made it possible for me to hire a care provider while I finished up Death on the Fourth of July. And of course, continued to blog.]

I've briefly pondered blogging about my adventures as a stay-at-home daddy. But there are already several out there, including such excellent sites as Rebel Dad and Full Time Father. And I have no intention of inflicting upon either my readers or my daughter the exploitative use of my admittedly overprotective love for her to score political points ("Why are conservatives congential liars and miscreants, my little Miss Poopy-Pants? Gosh, I don't know. Let's think about it while I change your butt. I'm sure I can find some worthy analogies inside your diaper.") like certain bloggers who will here go unnamed. Besides, I've always had doubts about how interested people really are in our personal lives. So I try to stick to what I know best -- politics, journalism, right-wing wackos. You know.

And lately, I've been conflicted between getting more posts up on the blog and responding to more of my e-mail ... and spending more and better time with Fiona. It's a balancing act, but I'm gradually working through it. Like all writing, blogging goes in fits and starts, and I imagine it's frustrating for regular readers.

Jeff Cooper's post was a bit of a gut-punch. Every parent carries that dread -- that something significant, something hidden, might be wrong with their child. It's the same dread that they'll tumble down a staircase or walk in front of a moving car. Like every parent, I've run through my head what I would do if something awful were to happen to my little girl, and even now can't get a handle around the despair it would bring.

The misfortune facing Jeff Cooper's little son seems manageable, and the early diagnosis should help them get tools for dealing with it. It seems like such an uncertain future, and all the rest of us can do is stand back and offer our prayers and support and whatever help might be needed -- and take the time to count our own blessings.

As Jeff says, there are some things that are simply more important ...



These thoughts and many others occupied me the evening after I read Jeff's post. Fiona's mommy was out of town on a business trip and I bathed her and put her to bed that night. Then I sat down and watched, for the first time, Grave of the Fireflies, which I had just purchased earlier that day.

The film is one of those on my "always meant to see" list, especially because I'm something of an anime buff (see my Totoro link), and Fireflies is one of the genre's real classics.

It is also, I must say, one of the most heartbreaking films I've ever watched. It is about two young survivors of the firebombing of Kobe in 1945, and how, in the long run, they become its victims too. And one thought stood out as I watched it -- that Americans are doing the same thing all over again, creating hundreds if not thousands of similar stories and similar victims, but this time in Iraq.

I was so stricken watching Grave of the Fireflies that when I finally turned out the light that night, I went in and lay down with Fiona and went to sleep, holding her as close as I could. I finally went in to my own bed sometime after 3.

In the morning, I was still thinking -- not just about Fiona and little Noah, and how we all want to protect our children from awful things, but also about little Setsuko, and the hundreds of Iraqi Setsukos and Seitas now wandering the streets of Baghdad and Tikrit. I tried to put myself in the shoes of their parents -- and just as before with Jeff Cooper's case, found myself unable to get a handle on the depths of the unimaginable pain.

And I thought about the reasons -- or rather, the utter lack thereof -- for this happening.

That, I understood, is why I keep on blogging. I'm sorry Jeff Cooper has to drop out, but he should, because Noah will always be more important. The rest of us will carry on the fight and look forward to the day he rejoins us. And may the wondrous human spirit that lives in our children -- well and unwell, happy and suffering alike -- always be the spark that fires us.

A divider, not a uniter

From the Jackson Clarion-Ledger ...

GOP bigwig (and Mississippi gubernatorial candidate) Haley Barbour, refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to take down a picture from its Web site showing him gripping and grinning with leaders of the white-supremacist organization:

Barbour said in an interview Thursday that white supremacist and anti-Semitic views on the CCC site are "indefensible," but he does not want to tell any group it cannot use his picture or statements.

"Once you start down the slippery slope of saying 'That person can't be for me,' then where do you stop?" Barbour said. "Old segregationists? Former Ku Klux Klan like (Sen.) Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.? You know?

"Once you get into that, you spend your time doing nothing else," Barbour said. "I don't care who has my picture. My picture's in the public domain. It gets published in newspapers every day."

Barbour sounds more and more like one of those good ol' Southern sheriffs who trots out all kinds of reasons why there was only one guard at the jail when the lynch mob arrived. (And I love how Republicans wave the magical and transparent Robert Byrd wand whenever their own congenital racism comes bubbling to the surface.)

As anyone with a grain of decency knows, the real reason Barbour should ask to have his photo removed is to repudiate any association with the group. Of course Barbour can't choose his supporters -- but he does have a say in whether those supporters can use his image to promote their cause. If, say, the Council of Conservative Pedophiles endorsed him, would he be so blithe?

The problem, as Barbour well knows, is that by allowing his name and image to be associated with an apparent endorsement of this supposedly "indefensible" group, Barbour lends credence to furthering its agenda. His wink-and-nudge response only makes all too clear that none of this bothers him; he is too busy currying the votes of white supremacists -- and by doing so, giving them a level of mainstream credibility they would otherwise not enjoy.

None of this is terribly surprising. Barbour, after all, has been wearing a Confederate flag on his lapel and has otherwise generally been gleefully injecting the issue of the flag into the campaign. (Recall, if you will, the earlier revelations that the Barbour campaign was identifying potential supporters by asking poll respondents how they voted on the flag issue.)

As I've noted previously, the Confederate flag is quickly becoming a symbol of the deeply divisive national cultural war, one with clear elements of racial intimidation and white resentment attached to it.

Barbour is running like his commander-in-chief -- paying lip service to "inclusiveness," and doing everything he can to divide us. Of course, this should come as no surprise either, considering Barbour's well-established track record as a political scam artist.

Generation gap

Georgie Anne Geyer has an interesting piece on the rift between Bush Sr. and his AWOL son, embodied by Bush Sr.'s decision to give the 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service to none other than Sen. Edward Kennedy, easily the current president's most voluble critic on the Iraq war:

Bush Sr.'s 'message' to Bush Jr.

Geyer points out the remarkable differences that have emerged between the two presidents' ruling styles:

W has given way to a radical right that abhors international coalitions and manners; he mocks the world and denies any need for its help. He has led the Middle East to the nadir of its hope and possibilities, and he has led the United States to a moment in history in which we face asymmetric warfare from one end of the globe to another.

And above all, he has replaced his father's courtesy and good graces with an almost proud rudeness and scorn for others.

Why? I'll leave the question of "killing the father" to the psychiatric thinkers. Meanwhile, the tension between these two men reveals itself daily.

One also has to wonder what Bush Sr. -- being a former CIA chief himself -- thinks about the current White House's outrageous handling of the outing of Valerie Plame.

[Thanks to Shaw Kenawe at Atrios' comments for the heads-up.]

The right kind of terrorist

Imagine the following scenario:

Federal agents arrest a Muslim man, a member of a radical sect, living in Michigan on gun and drug charges. When they search his home, they discover a bunker containing a cache of weapons and explosives worthy of an army: an anti-aircraft gun capable of firing 550 rounds per minute up to four miles away, machine guns, explosives, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and booby traps. Investigators also find pictures of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with scope cross-hairs drawn over them.

How do you suppose the media would handle that story?

My guess that if it didn't lead the evening news, it would be reported on it. It would at least be above the fold in many newspapers, and almost certainly would be a hot topic of conversation among the nation's radio talk-show hosts. Michael Savage would have a field day.

But what happens when, instead, the circumstances are identical, and the suspect is a white man associated with a militia unit?

It gets buried in the Grand Rapids Press. And that's about it.

Tribal scapegoats

Here's an editorial worth pondering, from Indian Country:

Beware the anti-Indian media message: A twisted story can become legend

The editorial details the way tribal rights -- and the gradual economic recovery of the tribes, largely through gambling operations -- are becoming the scapegoat for the states' budget troubles. Particularly notable was the way the Schwarzenegger campaign demagogued on the issue of Gray Davis' associations with tribal operations in the recent recall campaign:

California tribes are now "it;" suddenly it's open season on Indians, who are getting accused of getting more than their "fair share." Reality: state governments' budget deficits point to a national short-fall of $22 billion in this budget year and $54 billion in the next. Legislators are salivating over Indian money. Both nationally and state by state (California leads in this), voters and legislators have been excusing their own tax bases. Now, they want the Indian tribes, who are just beginning to grow and prosper under their inherent right of self-government, to pay the penalty for their state’s poor choices and often times, poor management.

Particularly noxious, as the editorial points out, was a recent Wall Street Journal piece by Alan Murray that traded in some of the most appalling stereotypes of Indians, not to mention factual misconceptions:

Murray dismisses all of Arnold’s ideas for reducing California’s deficit, "[b]ut one, [it] is step four: Get our fair share of Indian gaming revenue." (WSJ, October 14, "Schwarzenegger Has One Useful Idea: Tap Casino Money"). Every other Arnold idea turns out to be "vague," "fuzzy," "meaningless," except taxing the Indian revenues from tribal gaming. "The Villain," behind the tree," writes Murray, playing on the title of an early Arnold movie, "turns out to be an Indian."

Why must it be so?

Because, "American Indians don’t pay taxes. They live in autonomous regions."

Actually, of course, as the editorial points out, most Indians do pay taxes of some kind or other, and only a portion of the Native population lives on reservations anyway. It is true that a number of those who do live on reservations pay few taxes -- but that is because they continue to live below the poverty line.

I'm familiar with this argument from many years of reporting on tribal issues from various reservations around the inland Northwest (especially the Shoshone-Bannocks and the Flathead-Salish, as well as a more recent stint with the Makah). Whites with barely concealed racial and economic motives (the two are often intertwined, and have been for most of the past two centuries) make similar -- and similarly false -- claims in the various efforts that have been made over the years to eradicate tribal treaty rights. The courts, fortunately, have been the chief bulwark against these efforts.

In spite of the obviously oppressed state of American Indians, the scapegoating of tribes for all kinds of ills has continued apace -- in the Northwest, for instance, they are often blamed for depleted salmon runs, and white "property rights" activists who live on reservations are notorious for taking the tribes to court in hopes of eliminating the tribes' control of their lands.

It probably should not surprise anyone, then, that when Indians actually began climbing out of their economic hole, that their white neighbors would choose to attack them for their success. (It is somewhat reminiscent of the lynching-era phenomenon in which well-off blacks in particular were targeted as "uppity.")

Finally, the editorial raises an important point:

Murray rounds out the article with a continued attack on the tribes’ relationship with ousted Governor Davis, accusing the tribes of buying Davis with a $1 million campaign contribution. Again, the bogus assertion is of something dishonest being done by the tribes, who in contributing to politicians are in fact working within the system as well as they can, just like everyone else in the country. They get labeled as an interest group but in fact the "so-called" interest group syndrome is basically the country’s political system. What Murray calls a "sweet deal" compacts for the tribes were the result of pretty tough bargaining, from a governor who understood that the tribes come backed up with a federally-recognized jurisdiction and governmental sovereignty based on 200 years of agreements, litigation, legislation and continuous case law. Which is entirely proper, because this is the actual history and the only logical positions of Indian tribal nations in this country.

Indeed, this is a rhetorical trick that appears throughout Republican campaigns: Liberal or nonwhite advocacy is labeled a "special interest," while all those corporate contributions from the likes of Enron are just "politics at work."

This scapegoating of a minority group is part of a disturbing pattern that is starting emerge from the California Republican camp now in control of California -- and, as the Murray piece suggests, elsewhere as well. I'll have more on that in the coming week or two.

Republican Newspeak Zones

Dave Lindorff had a terrific piece in Salon the other day about the so-called "First Amendment zones" that are being deployed wherever President Bush and Vice President Cheney appear these days:

Keeping dissent invisible [Premium story]

What is remarkable about these "zones," however, is that -- in contravention of their name -- they are actually about suppressing citizens' free-speech rights. While most Americans believe the entire country is a "First Amendment zone", the Bush White House is herding its opponents into fenced-off areas well away from anywhere the president might see or hear them, which means there is no interaction between them and Bush for the media to record. Some of them are set up as far as two miles away.

The Newspeakish name given these zones is especially ironic, considering that one of the principal features of the zones is their content orientation. (For those interested, the Supreme Court has consistently ruled against hate-speech laws, for example, because of their "content orientation", which the courts have found violates the First Amendment.) In case after case, it is clear that pro-Bush supporters are given the traditional treatment of being allowed to voice their opinions anywhere they like, and as close to Bush as they choose. Anti-Bush demonstrators, however, are being herded into fenced-off areas.

As Lindorff reports:

At a hearing in county court, Det. John Ianachione, testifying under oath, said that the Secret Service had instructed local police to herd into the enclosed so-called free-speech area "people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views." Explaining further, he added: "If they were exhibiting themselves as a protester, they were to go in that area."

Mind you, this doesn't necessarily appear to be the Secret Service's idea. This is something coming from the White House (and frankly has Karl Rove's fingerprints all over it). Lindorff writes:

Wolf also raises the possibility that White House operatives may be behind the moves to isolate and remove protesters from presidential events. He says that while he cannot recall specifically whether they were present with the Secret Service advance team before last year's presidential Labor Day visit, "I think they are sometimes part of" the planning process. The Secret Service declined to comment on this assertion, saying it would not discuss "security arrangements." The White House declined to comment on what role the White House staff plays in deciding how protesters at presidential events should be handled, referring all calls to the Secret Service.

Asked specifically whether White House officials have been behind requests to have protesters segregated and removed from the vicinity of presidential events, White House spokesman Allen Abney said, "No comment." But he added, "The White House staff and the Secret Service work together on a lot of things." While the Secret Service won't confirm that it is behind the pattern of tight constraints placed on protesters at public appearances by Bush and Cheney, the ACLU claims that mounting evidence suggests that this is exactly what is going on.

It is clear, in fact, that suppression of dissent in this fashion is purely a Republican motif. The Secret Service did not conduct itself in this fashion during Bill Clinton's tenure.

When did "First Amendment zones" first appear? The earliest form of them, unsurprisingly, was at George W. Bush's inauguration.

Though they went largely ignored by media, there were thousands of protesters in Washington that day, making it (fittingly) the largest Inaugural protest since 1973. Indeed, of the 300,000 estimated to be present, well over two-thirds of them were there to protest Bush's illegitimate ascension to the presidency.

My friend Maia Cowan was present, and she recalls that "the protest groups were split among different venues; they weren't allowed to have one big protest in one big place. (My guess was that the president-to-be didn't want anybody seeing how many protesters were there.) There were attempts to keep the protestors away from the parade route, including penning people up so that they couldn't even go back the way they came when they were blocked from going forward toward the parade."

Maia has collected a bunch of links at her Web site, Failure is Impossible, related to the First Amendment zones.

It appears that their first actual use was in Billings, Mont. , at a March 26, 2001, Bush appearance in which Yellowstone County sheriff’s deputies "set aside an area for protesters about 100 feet from the box-office window in front of the building. The area was away from the path of most people entering Metra to hear the president."

The first time the name "First Amendment zone" appears to have been used was in Tampa, Florida, on June 4, 2001, when protesters were fenced in two miles away from Bush's appearance. Three people were arrested for violating police directives to remain behind the fence.

And since then, they have been deployed in nearly every public appearance which Bush has made, including during his fleet fundraising visit here in Seattle two months ago.

Because they are purely a Republican enterprise, the use of these zones should become an issue in the 2004 election, if Democrats are smart about it.

I'm presuming that Democrats will not ask the Secret Service to set up "First Amendment zones" for their appearances or in any way try to separate protesters from supporters. (If they do, they'll deserve to lose.) It is likewise nearly certain that Bush and Cheney will use them.

And every Democratic candidate should point that out at every opportunity they get.

The Confederate flag in the Northwest

From my neck of the woods, so to speak ...

One arrest over alleged racial slur at meeting

BELLINGHAM, Wash. – A 14-year-old girl was arrested Monday and accused of yelling a racial slur and threatening to hang a classmate during a meeting at Meridian High School near Bellingham, Wash., according to Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo.

The meeting was called by school administrators in response to reports that nooses were found hanging from a tree at the school and some students displayed Confederate flags.

The source of the dispute, it seems, is an in-school debate over the Confederate flag. It appears there is a contingent of neo-Confederates at the school who are promoting it as a symbol of white heritage. Some have been sporting it on their cars. But school rules prohibit the flag, a prohibition that has court sanction:

The courts took away students’ choice. Judges said the Confederate flag did not belong at school.

Some said flying the Confederate flag was offensive, but some students believed it was not racist.

Why would the Confederate flag be an issue in northwestern Washington? Because it is a symbol of white supremacism for people well outside the South as well. This is why phony arguments about its meaning are only cover for the stark reality that anyone -- particularly anyone of color -- who is confronted by the flag knows all too well: The Confederate flag is meant to intimidate -- to trumpet the values of white supremacy. The "heritage" which it harkens back to is mostly rife with the charred corpses of lynched innocents.

Whatcom County has a history of right-wing extremism: The Washington State Militia, whose trial In God's Country covered in detail (and which was the subject of Jane Kramer's excellent Lone Patriot: The Short Career of an American Militiaman) was based in rural Whatcom. In recent years there have been cross-burnings aimed at immigrants, and death threats aimed at peace protesters. The Patriots who filled the ranks of the WSM are still very much at large in the county, and their effect keeps bubbling to the surface.

Counterspinning Plame

Everyone, it seems, is starting to get the picture about the nature of the White House response to the outing of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative: namely, that it intends to try to spin its way out of any consequences for the matter by claiming that no criminal acts occurred -- flying in the face of the reality that someone on the Bush team leaked an undercover CIA operative's identity to Robert Novak and several other reporters, a crime (with extraordinarily damaging consequences) regardless how you cut it.

So far, Josh Marshall, Mark Kleiman, Atrios, Kevin Drum, Thomas Spencer, Tresy at Corrente and Christian Crumlish have all reached this conclusion.

Christian rather neatly sums up the White House's emerging spin points:

So there you have it, an innocent chance burning of an agent's cover (oopsie!), and then "fair game" to go after an administration critic's family (just politics as usual), capped by the leak to the Washington Post (betrayal!). I can see it now. How long before we hear that's their story and they're sticking to it.

Accompanying the White House spin, of course, is the predictable chorus from his media apologists: Pay no mind, move along, folks. The Plame matter is a mere "partisan" affair that will evaporate when the smoke clears.

If Republicans have proven incredibly incompetent at running the country, they at least have continued to display a knack for ruthless hardball politics and manipulation of the media. That the media more often than not seem all too happy to oblige is another matter.

Facts are to spin like garlic to vampires: effective, but only in well-coordinated bunches. Anyone interested in seeing justice done in the Plame matter -- which is to say, anyone interested in the integrity of national security and the rule of law -- will have to counter the spin of Bush apologists with some talking points of their own.

To that end, the following points strike me as the most significant:

A: The Plame affair matters.

It matters because a significant national security asset in the war on terrorism was badly compromised. Contrary to the conservative spin that Plame's outing didn't matter because "everyone" in the Beltway knew she was CIA (and, in some permutations, that she was only an analyst and not an operative), in fact Plame's status was a closely held secret, for overwhelmingly important reasons, as the New York Times explained:

[W]ithin the C.I.A., the exposure of Ms. Plame is now considered an even greater instance of treachery. Ms. Plame, a specialist in nonconventional weapons who worked overseas, had "nonofficial cover," and was what in C.I.A. parlance is called a Noc, the most difficult kind of false identity for the agency to create. While most undercover agency officers disguise their real profession by pretending to be American embassy diplomats or other United States government employees, Ms. Plame passed herself off as a private energy expert. Intelligence experts said that Nocs have especially dangerous jobs.

"Nocs are the holiest of holies," said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former agency officer who is now director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. "This is real James Bond stuff. You're going overseas posing as a businessman, and if the other government finds out about you, they're probably going to shoot you. The United States has basically no way to protect you."

Moreover, her exposure has widespread ramifications for the war on terror, as Warren Strobel reported Friday:

Training agents such as Plame, 40, costs millions of dollars and requires the time-consuming establishment of elaborate fictions, called "legends," including in this case the creation of a CIA front company that helped lend plausibility to her trips overseas.

Compounding the damage, the front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, whose name has been reported previously, apparently also was used by other CIA officers whose work now could be at risk, according to Vince Cannistraro, formerly the agency's chief of counterterrorism operations and analysis.

Now, Plame's career as a covert operations officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations is over. Those she dealt with -- whether on business or not -- may be in danger. The DO is conducting an extensive damage assessment.

And Plame's exposure may make it harder for American spies to convince foreigners to share important secrets with them, U.S. intelligence officials said.

... "This is not just another leak. This is an unprecedented exposing of an agent's identity," said former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, who's now a prosecutor in Royal Oak, Mich., and who also did CIA training with Plame.

As Josh Marshall has pointed out, the damage to America's intelligence on weapons of mass destruction may well be massive, and very well could result in the deaths of CIA assets abroad -- not to mention the extent to which it exposes the entire American populace to an increased likelihood of attack by terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.

It matters because the deliberate exposure of an undercover agent's identity in a way that grotesquely compromises national security and the potential deaths of agents abroad constitutes outright treason.

And no, we're not talking about Ann Coulter's nearly hallucinogenic version of treason, but the Aldrich Ames kind of treason. The real thing that earns people prison terms.

It matters because the culpability for the leak goes right to the heart of the Oval Office. The sources of the leak appear to be within the inner circle of the Bush White House, including chief of staff Karl Rove, who has been identified by Jospeh Wilson, Plame's husband, and reporters as one of the administration officials who contacted them after the Novak column's appearance and exacerbated the effects of Plame's original exposure by explicitly encouraging its further spread.

The fact that these matters reach the highest levels of government is underscored by the reports that the White House, according to the Boston Globe, is reserving the option of resorting to "executive privilege" claims to shield some of its documents from the Justice Department investigation:

If the White House asserts a claim of executive privilege, [law professor Thomas] Sargentich said it would be a strong sign that the investigation is heading to the highest levels of the Bush administration, given that the claim can only be used to shield the president's decision-making process.

If the White House indeed resorts to this audacious tactic, it will be a tacit admission of the president's possible involvement.

B: The timing of the phone calls to reporters is irrelevant.

Contrary to the White House's emerging spin point, the difference between calls placed to reporters about the Plame leak before and after the Novak columns is ultimately inconsequential. As Mark Kleiman says: "Information does not stop being classified because someone else improperly reveals it."

Rep. John Conyers, in calling for Rove's resignation last week, made this point clearly:

The law states that even if you lawfully knew of Mr. Wilson's wife's status, you were obliged to come forward and report the press leak to the proper authorities -- not inflame the situation by encouraging further dissemination. 18 U.S.C. § 793(f). Larger than whether any one statute can be read to find criminal responsibility is the issue of whether officials of your stature will be allowed to use their influence to intimidate whistle-blowers.

It must be also noted that the White House's spin point here is severely undermined by other facts -- namely, two separate reports in the Washington Post that show several other reporters besides Novak were actively contacted by the leakers: The first, on Sept. 29, which reported:

Another journalist yesterday confirmed receiving a call from an administration official providing the same information about Wilson's wife before the Novak column appeared on July 14 in The Post and other newspapers.

Sunday's Post story carries the point even further:

That same week, two top White House officials disclosed Plame's identity to least six Washington journalists, an administration official told The Post for an article published Sept. 28. The source elaborated on the conversations last week, saying that officials brought up Plame as part of their broader case against Wilson.

"It was unsolicited," the source said. "They were pushing back. They used everything they had.”

It should be clear that the spread of the leak both before and after the Novak column was substantial.

C: The White House's conduct in responding to the leak so far constitutes at least an abject failure to live up to the responsibilities of its office, and perhaps an actual coverup.

Once the leak occurred -- on July 16 -- President Bush had an obligation to investigate the matter immediately and to find the persons responsible and deal with them appropriately (at the very least, dismissing them, if not turning them over for prosecution). Instead, the White House continued to actively pursue the spread of the leak with even more reporters.

No investigation was ordered until the CIA, in late September, filed a criminal referral in the matter with the FBI. And even then, the White House dragged its feet -- waiting a full day before ordering staff to recover the relevant documents, and then filtering them through White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez. Subsequently, the president himself has made clear that finding the original source of the leak is a low priority, warning that the leakers may never be found.

What is clear instead is that the White House is focused on finding the identity of the "senior administration official" whose information given to the Post has directly undermined the Bush team's emerging claim that "no classified leaks occurred." This in essence is an attempt to intimidate any dissenters within the Oval Office -- and possibly to get them to change their testimony. And that, in turn, may constitute obstruction of justice.

The Bush White House's behavior is rapidly approaching the impeachment stage. But if its spin succeeds, it may in the end escape any accountability for damaging the nation's security and placing us all at greater risk. And that will be the most egregious scandal of all.