The Duke factor

Did the remants of David Duke's white-supremacist voting contingent help elect a white Democrat to the Louisiana Governor's mansion?

It appears they did indeed:

New study suggests bias, ex-Duke voters key to Blanco's 2003 win

Unexpected support from the so-called "David Duke vote" was decisive in Democratic Gov. Kathleen Blanco's victory, the detailed statistical analysis by two government professors at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., suggests.

White voters who had backed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1991, and who normally vote Republican, instead turned away from Jindal in the 2003 race, according to the analysis by Richard Skinner and Philip A. Klinkner. "Duke voters," particularly in north Louisiana, were enough to provide the new governor her margin, Skinner and Klinkner suggest.

However, before conservative partisans go pointing fingers about this case, it's perhaps worth noting that far more often, the racist vote in the South, and Louisiana specifically, usually favors Republicans:

In two other recent governor's races, for example, pitting a conservative white Republican -- Mike Foster -- against liberal black Democrats Cleo Fields and William Jefferson, the white's big win could arguably have been attributed to the political conservatism of the Louisiana voter.

Also worth noting:

The new study appears to confirm the fears of the Republicans who turned away from Jindal. "This analysis provides a solid case that Jindal's ethnicity was the reason a substantial number of voters who normally vote Republican, voted against Jindal," said LSU political scientist Wayne Parent. He called it the "last word" on the role Jindal's ethnic origins played in the 2003 vote.

"They applied sound political science methods to the election results and uncovered some voting patterns that should give us pause," said Lance Hill, executive director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. "Jindal's Indian ethnicity played a greater role in the outcome of the election than pundits accorded it."

So, how long do you think it will be before we see another minority candidate for higher office in the South being nominated by the GOP?

Mel's movie

You may remember that I previously discussed the nature of the anti-Semitism that is likely to emanate from such films as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, namely, a more "attitudinal" change that would eventually condone various kinds of violence, including those against liberals generally as well as Jews.

There have been, as noted then, at least a couple of incidents in the Denver area that suggest this violence is taking concrete form -- though it must be noted that since then, things have remained fairly quiet. However, a report in today's Washington Post makes clear that the film has in fact affected attitudes about Jews in America:

The percentage of Americans who say Jews were responsible for Christ's death is rising, particularly among blacks and young people, according to a nationwide poll taken since the release of Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion of the Christ."

The poll released yesterday by the Pew Research Center in Washington is the first statistical evidence that the movie's box-office success may be associated with an increase in anti-Jewish feeling, although social scientists cautioned that cause and effect are not clear.

... The increase was especially pronounced among two groups. The portion of people younger than 30 who say Jews were responsible for killing Jesus has approximately tripled, from 10 percent in 1997 to 34 percent today. The portion of African Americans who hold that view has doubled, from 21 percent to 42 percent.

The original report from Pew makes for fascinating reading:

The increasing sense among some groups that Jews were responsible for Christ's death comes amid controversy over the Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ." A relatively large proportion of people who have seen the movie (36%) feel Jews were responsible for Christ's death. However, this is also the case among people who plan to see the movie (29%), suggesting people who are drawn to this movie may be predisposed to this opinion more than others. By comparison, just 17% of those who have no plans to see the movie believe that Jews were responsible for Christ's death.

Also noteworthy: Evangelical Protestants are easily the film's biggest audience, constituting 25 percent of those who've seen the film (compared to 20 percent for Catholics and only 11 percent for mainline Protestants).

In the meantime, the final word on The Passion may belong to South Park, which satirized the film as cultural event hilariously in last week's episode:

Kyle finally sees "The Passion" and is forced to admit Cartman has been right all along. Meanwhile many of the film's hardcore fans band together under Cartman's leadership to carry out its message.

Cartman, for those interested, dons Nazi regalia and persuades the South Park townsfolk to march down Main Street chanting for the elimination of Jews in German.

In the meantime, Stan and Kenny go to the movie and reach the same conclusion I did: "That movie sucked." They travel to Malibu to get their $18 back from Mel Gibson himself, only to discover that, as the episode's final line puts it, "Mel Gibson is a wacko loser asshole."

In a career full of amazingly offensive (yet still hilarious) satires, it's one of the most vicious -- and funniest -- South Park episodes yet.

Crumbling supremacy

Some of you may recall the World Church of the Creator, the far-right "religion" of white supremacists based in East Peoria, Illinois, who made headlines back in 1999 when one of their members, Benjamin Smith [PDF file], went on a shooting rampage in the Midwest against various minorities, includiing Jews, blacks and Asians, leaving one man dead and four wounded.

A few years ago, the WCOTC -- which had a foothold in Montana dating back to the mid-1980s -- attempted to move its operations out West, with one faction attempting to set up shop in Wyoming, while others tried to make a go of it in Montana. The Wyoming move evaporated, and now -- with Matt Hale, the group's Peoria leader, in prison for allegedly ordering a hit on a federal judge -- the Montana faction is on its last legs.

This was detailed in a recent two-part series by Allison Farrell of the Lee Newspapers' Montana bureau, the first of which, "Down to Two," describes how the WCOTC is now literally on the brink of extinction because its main source of funds -- the library of texts by its founder, Ben Klassen -- is now in the hands of civil-rights groups:

But before he left, Carl used his key to the group's storage shed in Superior and took all of their remaining publications, some $41,000 worth of books written by the group's founder, and sold them to the Montana Human Rights Network for $300. The network monitors the radical right and other hate groups.

Carl said he wanted to hamstring the group's fund-raising ability. The books, which sell for $10 apiece, were the group's major source of income.

Carl also turned over boxes and boxes of the church's internal documents and e-mails that were stored in the shed. Page after page details the group's strained alliances, infighting and petty bickering.

The documents record Deardorff's brief contact with both the National Alliance and the Ku Klux Klan, and they highlight Hale's ego. The vast majority of the documents, however, paint a picture of paranoia and organizational chaos.

The extent of the group's decline -- already long apparent, as this backgrounder makes clear -- has finally reached the point where a movement that many thought was nearly extinguished back in 1992, when Klassen committed suicide, may finally disappear into the black hole from which it emerged. As the second part of Farrell's series explains, the lingering remnants are truly pathetic:

"I think they were really overrated in terms of their size and danger,'' Balch said, adding that the rendezvous he attended was 'tiny.' ''

"Mostly, it was people hanging out and talking and eating really bad food, like Kentucky Fried Chicken and doughnuts,'' Balch said. "Nothing much went on.''

Still, this is a group that was well on its way to oblivion once before. Klassen -- who founded WCOTC in the 1970s, based in no small part on the fortune he made by inventing a kitchen applicance -- had been in declining health since the mid-1980s, and his designated successor in the early '90s was a Montana extremist named Rudy Stanko, who happened to be in prison at the time for selling rotten meat for consumption by schoolchildren (Stanko blamed his conviction on the ever-popular massive Jewish conspiracy to enslave the world). Stanko obtained much of Klassen's library, but then declined the WCOTC leadership when released from prison in 1991. Hale then stepped up to the seize the reins of the WCOTC after Klassen's 1993 suicide. Hale was largely responsible for its apparent revival in the late '90s.

As the story observes:

"The World Church of the Creator very nearly collapsed once before in 1992 after its founder, Ben Klassen, committed suicide,'' said Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report, a quarterly investigative magazine the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes on the American radical right. "Really what allowed the group to come back to life was the store of old Klassen books.''

The remnants of that library, as the recent stories explain, is now in the process of being transformed into a piece of art. As Farrell explains in a followup report, two Montana artists intend to make a kind of educational piece of artwork out of the material and put it on display for the public, sort of like encasing fossils in amber.

This, in turn, has those last surviving remnants of the species to voice their displeasure in the only way they know how: By issuing not-so-oblique threats:

Another e-mail posted to the group's Web forum at www.creativityohio.com lists Holmes' home address and phone number, while another declares that Holmes' project "is one of many declarations of war against our religion.''

"We will remain legal in the face of corruption, but once all legal means are denied, a war will be unavoidable,'' the e-mail warns, in seeming contradiction to the group's Web pledge to seek merely legal redress.

The e-mail sent to Holmes calls him a "Jewish boot licker,'' and informs the Helena artist that "more (creators) will be in contact with you.''

It should be noted, of course, that a number of Montanans are already all too familiar with these kinds of threats, particularly the publication of home addresses and Web-based harassment (but then, so are some left-wing bloggers). It may be a cold comfort that WCOTC's remnants for the most appear to be so incompetent and impotent as to be incapable of doing anything other than blowing a lot of smoke.

Unfortunately, there is also the lingering example of Benjamin Smith, even now. A dying scorpion can still pack a nasty sting.

Now there's an idea

Here's a fresh right-wing meme. Look for it in upcoming GOP platforms ... rescindable, of course, upon the (heaven forbid) election of any Democrat to the presidency ...

Unfounded Accusations Against Presidents Should Be A Felony

There needs to be a law passed where any person who disrespects the "Office of the Presidency" by making false accusations and spreading deliberate rumors about the president, should be charged with a felony or at the very least a high misdemeanor.

Damn, if this had been the law in 1998, every Freeper on the planet -- and about half of Congress -- would have been behind bars.

Short memories

Oh, and speaking of media whores ...

Mickey Kaus recently took exception to one of the more astute of Josh Marshall's already keen insights, in Marshall's recent post on Clarke and Condi:

Perhaps it goes without saying, but let's say it: It was as obvious four years ago as it is today that the most potent threats to America are asymmetric threats, particularly forms of attack that cannot easily be tied back to particular states which we can punish with our conventional military superiority. [Emphasis added.]

To which Kaus dimly responds:

Huh? Clearly the Bush administration failed, as WaPo's Robin Wright puts it, to "take seriously enough the danger from al Qaeda." (Duh!) They should just admit it. But to say this sort of threat was as obvious four years ago as it was after the World Trade Center was destroyed is idiotic, and reflects a counterproductive, bloggish anti-Bush intellectual overstretch.

Evidently, Kaus never heard tell of the Oklahoma City bombing.

You know -- the event that, before Sept. 11, was far and away the most significant terrorist attack on American soil. An event that, in fact, heralded to world the fact that the modern face of terrorism comprised "asymmetric threats, particularly forms of attack that cannot easily be tied back to particular states which we can punish with our conventional military superiority."

But then, we already knew that Bush and Co. don't take domestic terrorism seriously either.

The Horse, of course

I know a lot of people have been wondering what's going on with our old friend, Media Whores Online, the spunky Web site that for the past several years has been striking terror in the hearts of the sell-out Kewl Kids of the Beltway.

"Out to pasture"? Does that mean -- gulp -- that The Horse is no more?

People have to appreciate just what MWO accomplished in a few short years. Operated simply by a regular citizen, it became the first liberal activist Web site to attract a mass audience -- one, it must be noted, that responded to its pleas by sending out thousands of scathing (and, evidently, sometimes nasty) e-mails to various media miscreants.

MWO demonstrated the power of free speech in an open democracy, and in many ways paved the way for the development of the liberal blogosphere. I know that many of us now in the blogging biz were first able, by watching MWO, to see just how much could be accomplished by simply disseminating important information and working it out of the vast wormholes that the nation's corporate media have become.

Call it the democratization of the media, if you will; the Web has become an important way for important information to be kept alive when it might otherwise be buried. The traditional media did not like it, particularly those from the conservative realm. Tucker Carlson to this day makes rueful references to Media Whores Online.

And the big mystery, of course, was Who's really behind MWO? Because it couldn't just be an ordinary pissed-off citizen. That would cede waaaay too much power to ordinary people. The very concept blew Beltway minds like so many overinflated balloons. (Remember the limp but snide profile in Salon that attempted to answer the question, and just wound up embarrassing itself?)

In any event, MWO has been taking increasingly long vacations in the past year or so, culminating in the most recent hiatus announcement. A lot of people are wondering if we've lost the valued MWO voice for good.

I happen to have a long-running correspondence with the person primarily responsible for MWO's content, and so I wrote and inquired about what was up. The answer, to put it most simply, is that real life outside the Web intruded on MWO's online career, as it does for most of us.

Without revealing too much of what was explained to me in confidence, I think it's safe to say that MWO's editor became unable to post as often one might have liked to be effective. There is also a bandwidth issue, but putting out a tin cup is not on the agenda.

The editor explained to me that MWO hopes to return before the election, bigger and badder than ever, weighing in when it counts most. It may return as early as May ("at the rate the admin is going with their lies and corruption!").

Let's all hope so. That may be a horse of a different color, but it's the one many of us rode in on.

Credibility gap

More corroboration for Richard Clarke:

Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism: Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense

I guess now we'll be hearing that the Washington Post just wants to sell newspapers.

Maybe this will explain that seven-month gap -- you know, the time between Clarke's first request for a top-level meeting on al Qaeda and the actual meeting. Missile defense came first.

Josh Marshall has more.

The true shape of terrorism

One of the significant points made by Richard Clarke -- and largely obscured in the detritus of the ad-hominem attacks on his testimony -- is that the Bush administration, both before and after Sept. 11, has displayed an abysmal failure to grasp the real nature of terrorism.

It started off well enough, attacking the one state (Afghanistan) that was known to support al Qaeda and harbor their camps. But that military orientation in the "war on terror" obviously dominated the Bush strategy both before and after 9/11, and led ultimately to the adventure in Iraq that has proven not only to be an ever-deepening quagmire with a increasingly mounting toll in American lives, but has, as Clark asserts, actually weakened the real fight against terrorism.

A military orientation, as I discussed recently, almost perforce orients the "war on terror" to formulating attacks on those states -- the "axis of evil" -- that support terrorism. And the reality, as I've explained at length, is that terrorism as a phemonenon is not likely to be defeated under those terms.

The reason is what I've called the "corpuscular" nature of modern terrorism -- it does not need a state for support, and in fact can, as in Oklahoma City, manifest itself simply as a hostile entity within a given state. Home-grown right-wing extremists are every bit a manifestation of the same phenomenon as al Qaeda, and in fact not only share a great deal in common with them ideologically and strategically, but have in many cases (as in the anthrax attacks) clearly piggybacked off of al Qaeda terrorism to create an "echo" effect.

A fascinating piece by terrorism expert Jessica Stern, published in the respected journal Foreign Affairs in July/August 2003, was recently brought to my attention by a colleague because it provides some disturbing details about the rising likelihood of an actual coalescence of American right-wing extremists and Islamist right-wing extremists, including al Qaeda:

The Protean Enemy

Stern points out that there have been several indications that American terrorists are now commingling with Middle Eastern extremists in, of all places, the no-man's land of South America:

The triborder region of South America has become the world's new Libya, a place where terrorists with widely disparate ideologies -- Marxist Colombian rebels, American white supremacists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and others -- meet to swap tradecraft. Authorities now worry that the more sophisticated groups will invite the American radicals to help them. Moneys raised for terrorist organizations in the United States are often funneled through Latin America, which has also become an important stopover point for operatives entering the United States. Reports that Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is allowing Colombian rebels and militant Islamist groups to operate in his country are meanwhile becoming more credible, as are claims that Venezuela's Margarita Island has become a terrorist haven.

As these developments suggest and Tenet confirms, "mixing and matching of capabilities, swapping of training, and the use of common facilities" have become the hallmark of professional terrorists today. This fact has been borne out by the leader of a Pakistani jihadi group affiliated with al Qaeda, who recently told me that informal contacts between his group and Hezbollah, Hamas, and others have become common. Operatives with particular skills loan themselves out to different groups, with expenses being covered by the charities that formed to fund the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Not only that, but al Qaeda is apparently modeling its own structure on the one adopted by American right-wing extremists in the 1990s -- namely, "leaderless resistance," the splitting up of organizations into a remote network of terrorist cells, so that if one cell is apprehended or stymied, the others remain intact.

Al Qaeda seems to have learned that in order to evade detection in the West, it must adopt some of the qualities of a "virtual network": a style of organization used by American right-wing extremists for operating in environments (such as the United States) that have effective law enforcement agencies. American antigovernment groups refer to this style as "leaderless resistance." The idea was popularized by Louis Beam, the self-described ambassador-at-large, staff propagandist, and "computer terrorist to the Chosen" for Aryan Nations, an American neo-Nazi group. Beam writes that hierarchical organization is extremely dangerous for insurgents, especially in "technologically advanced societies where electronic surveillance can often penetrate the structure, revealing its chain of command." In leaderless organizations, however, "individuals and groups operate independently of each other, and never report to a central headquarters or single leader for direction or instruction, as would those who belong to a typical pyramid organization." Leaders do not issue orders or pay operatives; instead, they inspire small cells or individuals to take action on their own initiative.

This form of resistance often devolves from the larger five- to seven-person cell to smaller, intensely active spin-offs, ultimately manifesting itself in the form of "lone wolf" terrorists like Buford Furrow, Benjamin Smith or Richard Reid.

Lone-wolf terrorists typically act out of a mixture of ideology and personal grievances. For example, Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani national who shot several CIA employees in 1993, described his actions as "between jihad and tribal revenge" -- jihad against America for its support of Israel and revenge against the CIA, which he apparently felt had mistreated his father during Afghanistan's war against the Soviets. Meanwhile, John Allen Muhammad, one of the alleged "Washington snipers," reportedly told a friend that he endorsed the September 11 attacks and disapproved of U.S. policy toward Muslim states, but he appears to have been principally motivated by anger at his ex-wife for keeping him from seeing their children, and some of his victims seem to have been personal enemies. As increasingly powerful weapons become more and more available, lone wolves, who face few political constraints, will become more of a threat, whatever their primary motivation.

The Internet has also greatly facilitated the spread of "virtual" subcultures and has substantially increased the capacity of loosely networked terrorist organizations. For example, Beam's essay on the virtues of "leaderless resistance" has long been available on the Web and, according to researcher Michael Reynolds, has been highlighted by radical Muslim sites. Islamist Web sites also offer on-line training courses in the production of explosives and urge visitors to take action on their own. The "encyclopedia of jihad," parts of which are available on-line, provides instructions for creating "clandestine activity cells," with units for intelligence, supply, planning and preparation, and implementation.

The obstacles these Web sites pose for Western law enforcement are obvious. In one article on the "culture of jihad" available on-line, a Saudi Islamist urges bin Laden's sympathizers to take action without waiting for instructions. "I do not need to meet the Sheikh and ask his permission to carry out some operation," he writes, "the same as I do not need permission to pray, or to think about killing the Jews and the Crusaders that gather on our lands." Nor does it make any difference whether bin Laden is alive or dead: "There are a thousand bin Ladens in this nation. We should not abandon our way, which the Sheikh has paved for you, regardless of the existence of the Sheikh or his absence." And according to U.S. government officials, al Qaeda now uses chat rooms to recruit Latino Muslims with U.S. passports, in the belief that they will arouse less suspicion as operatives than would Arab-Americans. Finally, as the late neo-Nazi William Pierce once told me, using the Web to recruit "leaderless resisters" offers still another advantage: it attracts better-educated young people than do more traditional methods, such as radio programs.

And, as Stern observes, there have been other documented examples of an increasing overlap between right-wing extremists and Islamist radicals:

Focusing on economic and social alienation may help explain why such a surprising array of groups has proved willing to join forces with al Qaeda. Some white supremacists and extremist Christians applaud al Qaeda's rejectionist goals and may eventually contribute to al Qaeda missions. Already a Swiss neo-Nazi named Albert Huber has called for his followers to join forces with Islamists. Indeed, Huber sat on the board of directors of the Bank al Taqwa, which the U.S. government accuses of being a major donor to al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Matt Hale, leader of the white-supremacist World Church of the Creator, has published a book indicting Jews and Israelis as the real culprits behind the attacks of September 11. These groups, along with Horst Mahler (a founder of the radical leftist German group the Red Army Faction), view the September 11 attacks as the first shot in a war against globalization, a phenomenon that they fear will exterminate national cultures. Leaderless resisters drawn from the ranks of white supremacists or other groups are not currently capable of carrying out massive attacks on their own, but they may be if they join forces with al Qaeda.

The important upshot of this is that terrorism is best attacked as the highly amorphous, incredibly volatile thing that it is -- and that a strategy that aims for the root causes both abroad and at home is fundamental to winning the "war." A military-driven operation will seek to attack states where it is believed to be nurtured, with the likely effect being to only drive more and more individuals into the radicalized camps:

In countries where extremist religious schools promote terrorism, Washington should help develop alternative schools rather than attempt to persuade the local government to shut down radical madrasahs. In Pakistan, many children end up at extremist schools because their parents cannot afford the alternatives; better funding for secular education could therefore make a positive difference.

The appeal of radical Islam to alienated youth living in the West is perhaps an even more difficult problem to address. Uneasiness with liberal values, discomfort with uncertain identities, and resentment of the privileged are perennial problems in modern societies. What is new today is that radical leaders are using the tools of globalization to construct new, transnational identities based on death cults, turning grievances and alienation into powerful weapons. To fight these tactics will require getting the input not just of moderate Muslims, but of radical Islamist revivalists who oppose violence.

Besides countering the milieu in which terrorism arises, winning also means adopting flexible strategies that rely primarily on intelligence and the rule of international law, with an emphasis on eliminating their ability to obtain effective weapons of mass destruction. This means breaking up networks and infiltrating their ranks, the approach that appeared to work for law enforcement in its dealings with the American extremist right after 1995:

Especially important is the need to continue upgrading security at vulnerable nuclear sites, many of which, in Russia and other former Soviet states, are still vulnerable to theft. The global system of disease monitoring -- a system sorely tested during the sars epidemic -- should also be upgraded, since biological attacks may be difficult to distinguish from natural outbreaks. Only by matching the radical innovation shown by professional terrorists such as al Qaeda -- and by showing a similar willingness to adapt and adopt new methods and new ways of thinking -- can the United States and its allies make themselves safe from the ongoing threat of terrorist attack.

The Bush strategy, in fact, has failed in nearly all these regards. Richard Clarke's point, ultimately, underscores the extent to which the Bush administration has failed to adequately confronted the reality of terrorism: "When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside. I think the way he has responded to al Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe."

Condi Rice and the Great Bush Power Grab

It's hard to tell whether the White House is simply playing a kind of shell game, but it's clear that a larger agenda beyond even covering up its failures to protect the nation from terrorist attacks is at play in the refusal to let National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice testify under oath before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Closer examination, in fact, reveals that the agenda at work is an unprecedented expansion of presidential powers, so that it becomes in effect unanswerable to any power other than the voters every four years.

Rice herself was rolling in the obfuscation this weekend on CBS' 60 Minutes when she explained why she just couldn't testify before the 9/11 commission:

"Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify. I would really like to do that. But there is an important principle involved here: It is a long-standing principle that sitting national security advisers do not testify before the Congress."

As Atrios points out, there are multiple problems with this explanation, not the least of which is that the 9/11 commission is not specifically a creature of the Congress -- it was created as an independent body with key members named by the president himself. The traditional understanding of executive privilege is that it extends only to congressional inquiries.

Executive privilege, in fact, deals only in situations in which presidential advisers are compelled to testify before Congress. Of course, national security advisers have in fact testified before Congress on multiple occasions -- but they rarely are compelled to do so.

In other words, Rice is not only arguing against being compelled to testify. She is arguing that any kind of appearance, compelled or otherwise, before the commission might endanger the executive privileges of the president. She's making the preposterous claim that the White House must refuse an invitation to appear -- even though, in her words, they would like to testify [yeh, right] -- because doing so would undermine its power to resist subpoenas at a later date.

What is clearly happening in the Rice case is that Bush administration is seeking to expand the principles of executive privilege to the point where it simply has no accountability to anyone other than the voters. It marks, in other words, a radical rearrangement of the constitutional separation of powers. This is not a new agenda -- and in fact, it has been one of the consistent operating principles of this administration since the day it took power.

In a way, it marks the revenge of the Nixonites -- because at its core, it is a campaign to overturn the Watergate-era precedents and subsequent reforms that placed certain executive-branch functions under the potential purview of the Congress.

The core of these is the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Nixon, which first established the limits of executive privilege:

However, neither the doctrine of separation of powers, nor the need for confidentiality of high level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances. The President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the court. However, when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises. Absent a claim of need to protect military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets, we find it difficult to accept the argument that even the very important interest in confidentiality of Presidential communications is significantly diminished by production of such material for in camera inspection with all the protection that a district court will be obliged to provide.

As it happens, none other than Bush's Solicitor General, Ted Olson, played a central role in the subsequent struggles in the early 1980s between Congress and the Reagan administration over the ramifications of this ruling. As I mentioned recently (and detailed in a 2001 Salon piece), Olson was so eager to test the issue of executive privilege that he forced EPA administrator Anne Burford to assert it over documents which, it later emerged, were not covered by the law.

Olson also filed a civil lawsuit that was promptly dismissed by a federal judge, as recounted in this 1998 article about executive privilege (in the context of Bill Clinton's attempts to assert it):

In a case known as United States v. The House of Representatives of the United States, the Reagan administration sought in 1982 to clarify and bolster the doctrine of executive privilege in light of a congressional subpoena of environmental policy documents.

U.S. District Court Judge John Lewis Smith Jr. would have none of it. The case, he concluded, demanded a political accommodation rather than a new body of case law: "Courts have a duty to avoid unnecessarily deciding constitutional issues."

Olson, in the course of congressional testimony that attempted to nail down the nature of his fatally flawed advice to President Reagan, was so egregiously evasive that he shortly thereafter became the subject of an independent counsel's investigation of him for possible perjury. The counsel later exercised real prosecutorial restraint when she decided that, though Olson's testimony was "misleading and disingenuous," it did not rise to the level of criminally prosecutable perjury. (Olson's cohort Kenneth Starr, of course, was never accused of such restraint later in his dealings with Bill Clinton.) It also helped that the IC's investigation had been sharply limited by the narrow referral from Olson's superior (and Federalist Society colleague) Edwin Meese.

What was most noteworthy about the investigation, however, was that Olson sued to stop it, arguing that the independent-counsel statute itself was unconstitutional. The case -- known as Morrison v. Olson -- made it all the way to the Supreme Court (with some help from Olson's Federalist Society comrade, Laurence Silberman,), where it was handed an ignominious 8-1 defeat.

However, the lone dissenter was Antonin Scalia -- and his dissent clearly reflects the core thinking of the current administration's views regarding executive privilege, resurrecting even Olson's old arguments in the 1982 civil lawsuit. Scalia essentially argues from an absolutist view of the separation-of-powers doctrine, giving the executive branch unimpeded purview over its realm.

Is it unthinkable that the President should have such exclusive power, even when alleged crimes by him or his close associates are at issue? No more so than that Congress should have the exclusive power of legislation, even when what is at issue is its own exemption from the burdens of certain laws. … No more so than that this Court should have the exclusive power to pronounce the final decision on justiciable cases and controversies, even those pertaining to the constitutionality of a statute reducing the salaries of the Justices.

This was a clear attack on the currently standing principle of the separation of powers, established in 1952 in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, allowing noncompartmentalization of powers, and a certain amount of overlap. Justice Jackson in his concurrence voiced the underlying principle: "While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government. It enjoins upon its branches separateness but interdependence, autonomy but reciprocity."

Scalia, however, contends that his absolutist approach is what the Framers had in mind, while announcing his disdain for the evolved body of law in the interim:

The ad hoc approach to constitutional adjudication has real attraction, even apart from its work-saving potential. It is guaranteed to produce a result, in every case, that will make a majority of the Court happy with the law. The law is, by definition, precisely what the majority thinks, taking all things into account, it ought to be. I prefer to rely upon the judgment of the wise men who constructed our system, and of the people who approved it, and of two centuries of history that have shown it to be sound. Like it or not, that judgment says, quite plainly, that "[t]he executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States."

The Bush administration -- particularly under Olson's guidance as Solicitor General -- has hewn closely to this reasoning throughout its tenure, particularly when claiming that the records of Vice President Dick Cheney, in his meetings with energy-company officials while plotting out the nation's energy policy, are off-limits.

The Bush legal and PR team, in defending Cheney, cites the well-established principle behind executive privilege, namely, that (as Warren Burger put it in U.S. v Nixon) "the President's need for complete candor and objectivity from advisers calls for great deference from the court." However, Cheney's claim of privilege runs head-on into the same ruling in its insistence that "when the privilege depends solely on the broad, undifferentiated claim of public interest in the confidentiality of such conversations, a confrontation with other values arises."

As John Dean observes in this recent piece in FindLaw about the Cheney case -- which now looms before the Supreme Court -- the Bush legal team is in fact seeking an unprecedented expansion of presidential powers, to the point of being nearly unaccountable:

What are the implications if Cheney does win this case, and Scalia's bright-line rule prevails? For a sense of them, it's useful to look to Judge Sullivan's well-reasoned opinion (and remember, Judge Sullivan has been nominated to judgeships by two Republicans -- as well as one Democrat).

Judge Sullivan wrote that "The implications ... are stunning," for Cheney's position is "untenable." He gave a few key examples of what accepting the bright line rule would mean:

Any action by Congress or the Judiciary that intrudes on the president's ability to recommend legislation to Congress or get advice from Cabinet members in any way would necessarily violate the Constitution. The Freedom of Information Act and other open government laws would therefore constitute an unconstitutional interference with Executive authority. Any action by a court or Congress that infringes on any other Article II power of the President, for example, the President's role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces and the national security concerns that derive from that role, would violate the Constitution. Any congressional or judicial ruling that infringes on the President's role in foreign affairs, would violate the Constitution.

The result, Judge Sullivan argued persuasively, would be to "eviscerate the understanding of checks and balances between the three branches of government on which our constitutional order depends." In other words, it would be to forever change the government, and the system our Founders envisioned.

What is noteworthy about the Bush power grab is that the administration has leveraged the "war on terror" specifically as a tool for expanding its powers. As I've explored previously, its assertion of military powers for arresting and controlling civilians suspected of abetting the "war on terror" under the guise of its "enemy combatant" status and military tribunals is based on a similar worldview -- namely, that the executive branch's powers under wartime are virtually illimitable, and not accountable to any civilian court.

Recall, if you will, Olson's logic in defending the secret court system underpinning the Bush 'war on terror', as recounted by the Washington Post, in which he described the criteria that would be applied in determining who's an "enemy combatant":

"There won't be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this," Olson said in the interview. "There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances."

And what's to restrain the president? Only the prospect of losing re-election:

Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president’s performance in wartime is political -- that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.

“At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision,” Olson said. “Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?”

The obdurate handling of Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission is part and parcel of this power grab: Bush, Cheney, Olson and Co. all see any concession of testimony before any other body, congressional or otherwise, a concession of its constitutional powers.

It's all about the Imperial Presidency. The principle -- just as it was for Nixon -- is the power of the president and his advisers to lie, fumble, and even break the law without consequence. Just because he's president.

The concern that Americans might have about getting to the truth of how 9/11 happened, especially in the way of preventing its recurrence, must take a back seat to such principles, evidently.

And who knows? They may even have a leg to stand on, legally speaking, in denying Rice's sworn testimony to the committee. Politically speaking, it's more difficult, given that Rice has been out there on every network imaginable running down Richard Clarke and spreading, well, intriguing explanations about just why she can't testify.

You'd think that a team as politically savvy as the Rove Squad would recognize that drawing a highly visible distinction between what Rice is saying publicly and what she might be forced to say on a witness stand is not exactly a good idea.

After all, don't you wonder why she can explain it all on national TV -- but not under oath?

[Cross-posted at The American Street.]

A political hate crime

[I have decided to delete this post for now. The story cannot be confirmed, and I have no desire to be disseminating false information. I'm leaving its position here so the discussion about it can continue.

I spoke today to Sgt. Connie Locke, the Atlanta Police Department's liaison to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. She says she monitors cases like this closely and would -- or should -- have been immediately notified in an assault case like this, and was not. Moreover, she says she personally walked the case down to APD's database center and searched for an assault case like this one and came up empty.

There is still the possibility that the case simply hasn't been directed her way yet, or that it is actually being investigated by another authority, such as Fulton County.

In the meantime, the alleged victim's friends are hoping to provide some kind of substantiation, but it has not been forthcoming.

I'm giving this case another week or so to settle out, since it is still possible that tangled wires have kept it from surfacing. I'm being restrained for now because of this possibility. But I'll post some more thoughts on this later, when the matter is definitively settled.

For now, I'll simply apologize to my readers for abrogating my own standards for ascertaining the veracity of material sent to me in the process of getting this story up on the Web.]

Rice and the Ted Olson Effect

Speaking of Condoleeza Rice's reluctance to testify under oath, it's worth noting the last paragraph of this AP account:

But White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales said that in order for presidents to receive the most candid advice from their staffs, "it is important that these advisers not be compelled to testify publicly before congressional bodies such as the commission."

As the story earlier notes -- and this quote makes quite clear -- the White House is depending on arguments about executive privilege to insulate Rice from having to testify. This is questionable at best, of course, since National Security Advisers have a long history of testifying before congressional bodies. It's just that for this administration, any such appearances are considered a capitulation.

It will be interesting, then, to see whether the 9/11 commission decides to insist on making her testimony both public and under oath. If it does, count on the White House to fight tooth and nail.

That's because Bush's solicitor general (and clearly the chief driver of the administration's legal policy) is none other than Ted Olson, whose history includes an independent counsel investigation into his behavior over asserting executive privilege during the Reagan administration.

What was especially noteworthy about that previous episode was the fact that Olson's advice about the privilege assertion was fundamentally unsound, from start to finish.

Olson, you may recall, essentially forced EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford to assert executive privilege over a set of documents that Congress was requesting in its investigation of alleged wrongdoing (later proven) within the EPA:

The Dingell panel issued a subpoena on Oct. 22, and within three days, Olson was putting the finishing touches on a memorandum to President Reagan recommending he assert executive privilege over the documents. During meetings to discuss the memo, Burford's position was again voiced: "Be sure these documents are worth it before we go through this."

Olson ignored that advice. His final memo to Reagan on the matter, dated Oct. 25, 1982, stated without qualification that the documents contained no evidence of wrongdoing by administration officials, which is one of the legal conditions for asserting executive privilege. It also informed Reagan: "The Administrator [Burford] concurs in this recommendation."

But in fact, Olson and his staff had failed to ascertain whether either assertion was true. In reality, Burford was far from concurring. She later testified that she failed to see how Olson could have been unaware of her reluctance -- that her hesitancy had been obvious, and that she had suggested that Olson explore alternatives to asserting privilege. There's no evidence, however, that Olson and Burford had ever discussed the issue directly; they had never met face to face.

The biggest flaw in Olson's Oct. 25 memo, however, was the statement that the documents he was seeking to keep from investigators contained no evidence of wrongdoing. In fact, Olson's staff had not even conducted a thorough review of the documents Dingell wanted -- some 51 pieces in all -- and would not do so until Dec. 9, well after executive privilege was asserted. There had been a preliminary review in early October, and even then red flags had been raised; the OLC lawyers forwarded them at that point to Dinkins' attorneys for more detailed review. There is no indication that review was ever completed; Dinkins conducted a cursory check and then apparently let the matter lapse.

Over the next few months, it became immediately clear that the assertion was fatally flawed, especially after the documents had been finally reviewed and in fact evidence of criminal wrongdoing was found among them. In spite of this, Olson pressed ahead with a bizarre and unprecedented lawsuit against Congress:

When the full House cited Burford on Dec. 16, he and his team responded with an extraordinary civil suit in federal court contesting the constitutionality of Congress' contempt powers, charging that the invocation of privilege was proper and that the contempt citations should not stand. The suit, however, had a short shelf life; it was dismissed by the court on Feb. 1.

The Olson team's effort was "without a doubt the sloppiest piece of legal work I had seen in 20 years of being a lawyer," Burford later wrote in her memoirs. It only cited in its support nonbinding opinions from a single case -- former President Richard Nixon's suit against the House Judiciary Committee -- and Burford notes that no factual defenses were raised.

Olson was later investigated for likely perjuring himself in later testimony before Congress on this matter. But in spite of that, he was never forced to reckon the fact that he had given President Reagan profoundly bad advice and sent him on a quixotic attempt to overreach the powers of the executive branch.

As I put it back in 2001:

Olson's ... single-minded effort to assert executive privilege actually overlooked what the law permitted, and it wound up costing President Reagan dearly. One is only left to wonder what dubious legal tangles he has in store for President Bush's agenda.

Now that he is advising Bush in an even more powerful capacity, Olson's fetish for expanding executive-branch powers -- especially through executive-privilege assertions -- has been apparent through most of this administration's tenure; the most worrisome of these have been the powers obtained through its assertion of the right to declare citizens "enemy combatants" and to incarcerate them under military tribunals.

But if the White House tries to assert executive privilege for Rice -- who has, of course, been all over the networks and talking to reporters left and right -- before the 9/11 commission, it may find itself in the same strange no-man's land that Olson concocted for Ronald Reagan back in 1983.

Cornered Condi

[From the Associated Press]

Jeez, no wonder Bill Cosby didn't want to sit next to her. And all along I thought it was just that he had the good sense to resist providing the Bushites with yet another of those handy photo props.

Possible caption: "I'll never testify under oath! What do these bastards want, the truth?"

[Of course, please post your own caption.]

Incoming

Looks like the Good Ship Lolli-Bush is about sustain another gaping hole in the hull of its credibility, thanks to Eric Boehlert at Salon:

"We should have had orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001"

A former FBI translator told the 9/11 commission that the bureau had detailed information well before Sept. 11, 2001, that terrorists were likely to attack the U.S. with airplanes.

The money quote:

Edmonds is offended by the Bush White House claim that it lacked foreknowledge of the kind of attacks made by al-Qaida on 9/11. "Especially after reading National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice [Washington Post Op-Ed on March 22] where she said, we had no specific information whatsoever of domestic threat or that they might use airplanes. That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie."

And this was a witness called by Charles Grassley, of all people.

Off the talking points

Boy, these guys are asking for trouble:

Retired brass urge delay in U.S. antimissile shield

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A group of 49 retired U.S. generals and admirals is urging President George W. Bush to postpone the scheduled deployment this year of a multibillion dollar missile shield and spend the money instead on securing potential terror targets.

In a letter to be released at a news conference Friday, the officers, including retired Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1985 to 1989, described the complex technology as untested and a poor use of scarce defense dollars.

"As you have said, Mr. President, our highest priority is to prevent terrorists from acquiring and employing weapons of mass destruction," said the letter made available to Reuters.

They should talk to Richard Clarke about what happens when you run afoul of the preordained agenda of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al.

Pretty soon we'll be hearing that Admiral Crowe is just bitter because he's not the chair of Joint Chiefs anymore.

Beyond bad taste

George W. Bush's capacity for tasteless exploitation seems quite bottomless now:

Bush pokes fun at himself at dinner

... There was Bush looking under furniture in a fruitless, frustrating search. "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere," he said.

John Kerry has the appropriate response:

That's supposed to be funny?

If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately for the President, this is not a joke.

585 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq in the last year, 3,354 have been wounded, and there's no end in sight. Bush Turned White House Credibility into a Joke George Bush sold us on going to war with Iraq based on the threat of weapons of mass destruction. But we still haven't found them, and now he thinks that's funny?

At The Nation, David Corn gives us a little historical perspective on this:

Even if Bush does not believe he lied to or misled the public, how can he make fun of the rationale for a war that has killed and maimed thousands? Imagine if Lyndon Johnson had joked about the trumped-up Gulf of Tonkin incident that he deceitfully used as a rationale for U.S. military action in Vietnam: 'Who knew that fish had torpedoes?' Or if Ronald Reagan appeared at a correspondents event following the truck-bombing at the Marines barracks in Beirut--which killed over 200 American servicemen--and said, 'Guess we forgot to put in a stop light'. Or if Clinton had come out after the bombing of Serbia -- during which U.S. bombs errantly destroyed the Chinese embassy and killed several people there--and said, "The problem is, those embassies -- they all look alike."

Yet there was Bush--apparently having a laugh at his own expense, but actually doing so on the graves of thousands. This was a callous and arrogant display. For Bush, the misinformation--or disinformation -- he peddled before the war was no more than material for yucks. As the audience laughed along, he smiled. The false statements (or lies) that had launched a war had become merely another punchline.

Also worth reading: Bob Fertik's take at Democrats.com.

Of course, it's also worth remembering that this isn't the first time that Bush has made tasteless jokes that come at the expense of American dead and wounded:

"You know, when I was running for President, in Chicago, somebody said, would you ever have deficit spending? I said, only if we were at war, or only if we had a recession, or only if we had a national emergency. Never did I dream we'd get the trifecta."

Actually, it's not so much Bush's tastelessness that is revealed in these jokes. It is his utter lack of good judgment. It bespeaks a president who is unable to comprehend the consequences of his own decisions. All of which makes his unfitness for the office so starkly manifest.

Right-flanking the Sierra Club

My ballot for the Sierra Club Board of Directors -- the object of a takeover attempt by anti-immigration extremists -- arrived in the mail the other day.

It's an interesting ballot (you can read it in a PDF file here) more for the number of candidates who say they are running solely to raise voters' awareness of the takeover attempt. It certainly doesn't hurt that the issue has raised a few headlines in the national press, notably this report from the Washington Post:

Immigration Issue Sparks Battle at Sierra Club
Groups Vie to Reshape Nonprofit's Board

The most notable aspect of this campaign has been the way groups like the far-right VDare (run by Peter Brimelow) have helped recruit new "members" to the Sierra Club specifically for the purpose of voting for the slate being supported by the club faction calling itself "SUSPS," formerly Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization. As I've noted before, SUPS is little more than a front organization for anti-immigrant groups who have extensive ties to white nationalist and supremacist organizations and activities.

"The Sierra Club is the most prominent and influential group in America in terms of environmentalism," said Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, who said the center got involved because it discovered hate groups were urging followers to vote in the board election. "That's why it's seen as a prize. The aim is to hijack the credibility, the reputation, the membership and the finances of a very important political player."

There are three SUPS candidates on this ballot: Richard Lamm, the former Democratic governor of Colorado; David Pimentel, a renowned entomologist; and an African-American man about whom little is otherwise known named Frank Morris.

It is noteworthy that in the ballot, only Lamm is really forthcoming about his position vis a vis the immigration issue, and even then the reference is brief and somewhat oblique. Here's what he says:

My priorities are wilderness and biodiversity loss caused by habitat destruction and resource extraction -- overpopulation and overconsumption are critical root causes. Our country's population is exploding, 44 million added since 1990 alone, driven by rising fertility and record immigration. The Club's population programs -- global and domestic -- must be strengthened.

Pimentel, on the other hand, says almost nothing about the issue:

Concurrently, our agricultural land, natural areas, biodiversity, and water and energy resources are under increasing pressure. We must courageously address America's surging environmental problems and thereby equitably manage our resources for all generations.

And Morris is even more oblique:

Rapid population growth exacerbates all these problems and must be addressed.

However, in Q&As posted on the Sierra Club Web site, at least Lamm and Morris are more forthright, stating up-front that they oppose the Club's current "neutral" stance regarding immigration. Pimentel, however, claims that he holds "a neutral position on immigration."

There are currently two board members, Paul Watson and Doug LaFollette, elected under the SUPS banner. Three more could bring the faction actual control of the Club's agenda -- and decidedly for the worse. As a recent Oregonian profile of Paul Watson noted:

"We're only three directors away from controlling that (Sierra Club) board," Watson told an animal-rights gathering last September. "And once we get three more directors elected . . . we'll change the entire agenda of that organization."

What's worth observing about the SUPS coalition is that it seems to be itself constituted of two decidedly different factions: one of far-right white nationalists, the other of far-left animal-rights extremists who think the Club is far too mild in orientation, since it admits and even caters to hunters and fishermen like myself. The extremist orientation of this faction is self-evident in their seeming embrace of so-called "eco-terrorism," embodied in Watson himself:

Robert Cox, a former Sierra Club president who sits on the board with Watson, says club members grilled Watson about his takeover comments and past eco-militant statements at the last national meeting.

"He put a very good spin on his statements," Cox says. "I think Paul walks right up to the border of condoning violence but seems to duck when he's called on it."

Indeed, this propensity manifests itself in nearly every aspect of Watson's life, including his wife's:

In February, Watson's wife, Allison Lance Watson was indicted on four counts of lying to a grand jury investigating the May 2000 arson of an Olympia timber operation. Investigators allege a truck she rented was used by her friend in the crime. She is free pending an April 19 trial.

I've mentioned previously that I had some firsthand experience with Watson during the brouhaha over whaling on the Makah Indian Reservation. I've also mentioned that I was unimpressed with him -- because of his strangely egocentric, highly theatrical kind of environmental activism, which seemed more intent on putting on a show than in resolving the issue intelligently and in a way that respected the Makahs' treaty rights. But then, reading his views of himself in this interview, it's fairly clear why: Watson -- how can I put this nicely? -- is a frigging fruitcake.

"We live in a media culture, so that when Sean Penn becomes me, he'll be more me than I've ever been," he says. "And not only that, but what was not acceptable will become acceptable. Society might frown upon what you do, but when they make a motion picture about you then, hey, it's OK."

He smiles. "It even worked for Bonnie and Clyde."

These kinds of far left/far right coalescences are not terribly common, because the two are so constitutionally different in so many regards that they rarely can stand to share the same air.

But they do happen. The most noteworthy of recent vintage was the appearance of white nationalists under Pat Buchanan's banner at the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. (Another case that springs to mind regionally is that of Johnny Liberty -- real name: John Van Hove -- who still sells right-wing "constitutionalist" monetary theories to hippies at Northwest barter fairs.) When the personalities involved are the right kind, as they are here, then it's often possible.

The bigger picture of what's happening here, though, is the most important aspect of all this, because it fits in so neatly with the conservative movement's longtime campaign to "defund the left."

The most public aspect of this effort, as this piece by Bill Berkowitz explains, is to undermine the ability of unions and liberal advocacy groups to make use of federal funding to further their causes. This has been an important, if little-noticed, component of the right's strategy for some time now.

As this 1993 piece by my friend Daniel Junas explains:

Defunding the left, in fact, is the central principle of Norquist's long-term strategy. In Norquist's view, cutting taxes would reduce the size of government, which, in turn, would reduce the number of public employees whose union dues or personal efforts might help elect progressive candidates.

"Every time you nick the budget," Norquist has said, "somewhere a Democratic precinct worker loses his job."

Although controlling Congress is a paramount concern, Norquist and his Republican allies are also pursuing this strategy at the state level, placing a great deal of emphasis on gaining control of governorships and state legislatures. And Americans for Tax Reform has helped sponsor and fund numerous anti-tax ballot initiatives in the states.

Given this agenda, organized labor in general and public employee unions in particular represent the chief obstacle to Norquist's strategy for consolidating Right Wing/Republican dominance of Congress and the statehouses. Besides the AFL-CIO, the National Education Association is one of Norquist's prime targets. Consequently, school "choice" -- i.e. vouchers or charter schools, which would weaken public education as well as the NEA -- is one of Norquist's prime issues. On this issue, Norquist has forged an alliance with the religious right, which favors vouchers as a means for aiding parochial schools. In California, the official sponsors of the anti-worker initiative were previously active in conservative school board politics in Orange County, as well as the 1993 vouchers initiative campaign. And in Washington state, the legal strategy against the Washington Education Association is being pursued by the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a local think-tank which has close ties to the religious right and which supported a charter schools ballot initiative in 1996.

One of the trademarks of this campaign is the way the right finances a number of initiatives -- ranging in content from anti-tax to land use to education to "right to work" -- aimed at forcing the traditional groups who provide so much of the infrastructure of establishment liberalism to devote their energies to fighting these brushfires instead of concentrating on enacting their agendas. It drains their coffers and their energies, and often acts as a real wedge that alienates the organizations from the public.

The Sierra Club campaign is somewhat unique in the way it attacks the organization -- but undermining it from within, instead of attacking it from without. In an election year, when environmental issues should be playing a major role, the Sierra Club is being forced to confront forces that have infiltrated its own ranks instead of playing a major role in the public debate over the Bush administration's multiple failures on the environment.

Just having to deal with this problem is a major distraction for the Sierra Club, regardless of the outcome. Moreover, if the SUPS candidates succeed in gaining election, there is certain to be a large-scale negative reaction from within the Club, and much of its funding may well dry up and blow away almost overnight.

Why, Grover Norquist couldn't have dreamed up a better scenario.

When the bullets fly

Via a World O' Crap post at Sadly, No comes this item from the periphery of the conservative movement, proferred by a real piece of work named Paula Devlin, who adopts an interesting view of property rights -- one, it must be noted, that is not significantly different than that promoted by the Montana Freemen, the militia movement and other right-wing extremists -- in a piece titled "Serfdom, American Style":

The globalists, via the UN, concocteed the scheme called Agenda 21 that purports to restore this nation to its pristine condition prior to the arrival of Columbus. Our politicians, since they have their nests feathered, think this is fine and go right along with it. Forget about the will of the people or Constitutionality. If that's what the globalists want, that's what will happen and the people will be conned into believing these schemes will provide them a benefit. They could not be more wrong.

If anyone thinks they own their own piece of real estate, think again. You are renting it from the local taxing authority who will repossess it if you miss a payment. You cannot do what you wish with it, especially if an imaginary endangered critter might have crossed it before the last ice age. You cannot defend yourself against intruders, rapists or robbers. (Invite them in, give them coffee and ask them nicely to wait until the sheriff arrives from the donut shop.) You get to pay through the nose for all the "services" of government, which boil down to them telling you what you can and cannot do with what you own.

It wasn't so long ago property owners could shoot trespassers. Now the trespassers have all the rights, especially illegal immigrants. They should not even have legal standing. Property owners who have illegals on their property should shoot them on sight and ask questions later.

As it just so happens, of course, this is precisely what the radicals at Ranch Rescue -- as well as other border "militias" -- have in mind as well.

Well, at least one rancher on the border seems to have taken the sentiments of Paula Devlin and her ilk to heart, at least to some extent. While he won't take pot-shots at illegal immigrants -- who he says are mostly harmless -- he has indeed taken to slinging a few rounds in the direction of the smugglers he says come rumbling through his property. And he's paid a price for it:

Echoes of the Wild West in one man's border war

... Kozak said he does not blame the illegal entrants who frequently walk through the gullies around his cabin, leaving him alone on their journey north.

His concern is the trucks racing across his land, their loads covered in tarps and the tail lights disconnected to avoid the attention of federal agents.

First he put up gates to try to stop the smugglers. After three $200 gates and spending hundreds more for fences and posts, Kozak gave up because they were simply knocked over by the trespassers.

Kozak moved on to other barricades, made of wood and barbed wire with danger signs.

That's when the shots started. The shooting then was random, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents told him they were happening because he was trying to stop drug loads.

Kozak responded with his own warning shots.

But Wednesday, when a maroon truck drove across his property, something in Kozak snapped.

He opened fire on the truck with his rifle, placing three rounds in the hood.

The truck raced away.

Meanwhile, Kozak parked his own truck sideways on the road to block their return path and went inside to fix himself a pot of coffee.

That's when the shooting started.

The first bullet hit the wall, destroyed the kettle on the stove. The next bullet went into the water heater, followed by three more shots that ripped into the house. One bullet hit a photo album, passing through 20 pictures before stopping.

Kozak took cover, grabbed his rifle and went out the front door. The shooters were gone.

His travel trailer, set up sideways on the smuggler's route, was on fire. It's now a melted ruin of ash.

"That's the first time they ever unloaded that many rounds," he says. "They gave me a message and said, 'Don't shoot at us any more.'"

It would be easier to feel sympathy for this rancher if he were to cooperate more fully with the Border Patrol, but he may have his own reasons for being leery.

But also worth noting: The same rancher wants nothing to do with Ranch Rescue, either.

This story is a classic case of how the extremist right finds a way to thrive: It injects itself into situations in which the government is actually failing its citizens, and not coming up with any realistic solutions either. In that sense, the situation for border communities in the current decade is not unlike that facing farmers in Middle America in the 1990s: the genuine grievances are going unaddressed, and when that happens in a democracy, then extremists find fertile ground for recruitment.

[Thanks to reader James Wilson for the tip.]

Clarke, Clinton and terrorism

It is almost astonishing -- but not really, when you think about it -- the extent to which the White House is attacking former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke for speaking out about the Bush administration's multiple failures in coming to grips with terrorism both before and after Sept. 11, 2001.

None of the attacks so far have attempted to counter even a single one of Clarke's facts. Indeed, on one key factual point -- Clarke's Sept. 12 encounter with Bush in the Situation Room, in which Bush pushed him to find Iraq culpable in the attacks -- the Bush people, astonishingly enough, are claiming that Bush "doesn't recall" that meeting. Of course, the fact that Clarke claims to have at least three other eyewitnesses to the meeting has perhaps prevented Bush from simply claiming that Clarke is lying.

No, all of the attacks so far have been about Clarke's character. They can't attack him on facts, so they impugn his motives -- a classic ad hominem response that reveals the depths of their desperation.

Among the most interesting of these arguments are those suggesting that both Clarke and, in the bigger picture, Bill Clinton are even more to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks than George Bush, because they had the previous eight years to do something about al Qaeda and didn't.

Nevermind, of course, the role of certain factions of the right in undermining the Clinton efforts to corral al Qaeda. But if we're going to look at the big picture, then Bush has to be part of that as well.

However, there's no doubt that there is blame to be shared by the Clinton administration, on at least a few important counts.

One of the very real proximate causes of 9/11 was the failure of American intelligence, particularly in its multiple handlings of al Qaeda in the years preceding 2001, and especially its ability to gather intel on the ground, from within al Qaeda. Nearly everyone inside the intelligence services recognizes that this had primarily occurred during the Reagan era, when the CIA was heavily bureaucratized and much of its intel-gathering capacity severely diminished. See, for example, this piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Reuel Marc Gerecht, published just before 9/11, about just this subject:

The CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which now has hundreds of employees from numerous government agencies, was the creation of Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, an extraordinarily energetic bureaucrat-spook. In less than a year in the mid-1980s Clarridge converted a three-man operation confined to one room with one TV set broadcasting CNN into a staff that rivaled the clandestine service's Near East Division for primacy in counterterrorist operations. Yet the Counterterrorism Center didn't alter the CIA's methods overseas at all. "We didn't really think about the details of operations -- how we would penetrate this or that group," a former senior counterterrorist official says. "Victory for us meant that we stopped [Thomas] Twetten [the chief of the clandestine service's Near East Division] from walking all over us." In my years inside the CIA, I never once heard case officers overseas or back at headquarters discuss the ABCs of a recruitment operation against any Middle Eastern target that took a case officer far off the diplomatic and business-conference circuits. Long-term seeding operations simply didn't occur.

In this sense, Clinton inherited a serious problem -- and even when confronted with various terrorist attacks, did little to attack it. In some regards, he actually condoned and abetted it. Clinton certainly carries some of the weight of 9/11, and he would probably admit as much in a candid moment.

None of this, however, compares to Bush's pre-9/11 record, which -- as Clarke has revealed in brilliant detail -- was unremittingly a litany of failures to comprehend the real threat that terrorism posed to America, and to focus his energies and the public budget on frivolous diversion, most notably a missile-defense system. Bush's downgrading of the counterterrorism chief's role from a Cabinet-level spot to a subjuncture of the Justice Department is only the signal move of a wide range of missteps that Bush took to undermine the nation's counterterrorism efforts.

The point isn't so much that these efforts (or lack thereof) aided or abetted the 9/11 attackers. There's simply no guarantee that even if Bush had done everything right, he could have prevented the attacks (just as probably nothing Clinton could have done would have effectively prevented Oklahoma City).

The point is that Bush's actions beforehand indicated a very poor grasp of the nature of terrorism -- and his actions afterward have continued to demonstrate that serious lack of judgment.

What especially demonstrates this incapacity is Bush's insistence on an almost obsessively military orientation of the "war on terrorism," which has led us into the clearly diversionary Iraq war. This orientation, as I've discussed recently, has many side consequences, not the least of which is that while we can make real logistical inroads against groups like al Qaeda (and we have), at the same time we substantively contribute to the environment that breeds future terrorism.

Moreover, Bush has simultaneously de-emphasized efforts to confront domestic terrorism, which as OKC established is fully capable of inflicting serious harm as well, and which in a 9/11 environment is capable of even more egregious harm in the way that it piggybacks off of international terrorism (see, e.g., the anthrax attacks). That Bush has done so indicates the extent to which the "war on terrorism" waged by Bush is actually, as previously noted, a political public-relations campaign.

In this regard, perhaps the most amusing of the ad hominem attacks on Clarke are those that accuse him of publishing his book, and taking his criticism of Bush public, for "political" reasons: [Snivel snivel] "He's bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign!"

This reminds me of the way Bush supporters smeared the families of 9/11 victims by suggesting they were just playing "partisan politics."

You know, I think it's undeniable that all of these people are fairly up-front about their desire to see Bush lose re-election.

But then, it's also worth keeping in mind that Richard Clarke was a registered Republican in 2000, just as some of the 9/11 family members are former Republicans as well.

These people didn't reach the point that they have simply because of some kind of gamesmanship that treats politics as a football game with points scored and lost by competing sides. They came to their decisions to denounce the Bush administration because they had all seen, in very tangible ways, just how disastrous this presidency has been for the nation. They understand that replacing him is a fundamental step necessary for the country to win the war on terrorism.

It doesn't seem to cross the minds of the conservatives attacking Clarke and other Bush critics that yes, these people have been politicized -- but politicized for very good reasons. It is more than likely, incidentally, that there are a couple million jobless workers out there who have been politicized for similarly good reasons. They've all seen, in their lives and those of everyone around us, how the Bush administration has made life worse for all Americans.

If being united in the desire to see Bush defeated at the polls makes these people partisan politicos, then so be it.

But when it's someone like Richard Clarke, or the families of the terrorists' victims, who is saying so, then the rest of us are going to listen carefully to their reasons.

Driving the wedge

This weekend in Seattle, methodist Church elders dealt a major setback to the right-wing campaign to divide the churches over the issue of allowing gays and lesbians to serve in the ministry:

Gay pastor can continue ministry

A lesbian Methodist pastor will be allowed to continue her ministry after she was acquitted Saturday in a church trial over her sexual orientation.

After about 10 hours of deliberations, a jury of 13 pastors ruled in favor of the Rev. Karen Dammann, 47, who disclosed three years ago that she was in a homosexual relationship. Two pastors were undecided and the rest found her not guilty of practices "incompatible with Christian teaching."

It was an interesting ruling, because United Methodists (particularly those in the West), with a long history of progressivism, have been among the most tolerant in ministering to gays and lesbians. But the larger church -- particularly those congregations in the South -- have refused any changes in the church's national rules regarding allowing gays and lesbians into the ministry itself. It represented a real conflict between two competing impulses within the church:

Church law prohibits the ordination of self-avowed, practicing homosexuals. But the church's social principles support gay rights and liberties.

"We, the trial court, reached our decisions after many hours of painful and prayerful deliberations, and listening for and to the word of God," the jury said in a statement released after the verdict. "We depended upon the prayers of the whole church, which undergirded our process. We depended on the leading of the Holy Spirit."

Of course, this is only the early stages of this particular fight. See the P-I's story the following day:

United Methodists grapple with gay ban

... But the battle over homosexuality in the Methodist ministry is sure to be rejoined April 27 in Pittsburgh, when representatives of the 117 regional conferences around the world assemble in the General Conference, which meets every four years and determines church doctrine.

Homosexuality has been on the agenda every time since 1972, when the General Conference adopted a committee statement that "homosexuals not less than heterosexuals are persons of sacred worth. ..." -- but only after a floor vote added the phrase "... although we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider the practice incompatible with Christian teaching."

That started what a church panel on homosexuality recently called "a long and painful struggle ... which continues down to the present time."

It should be clear what Methodist progressives are up against. Indeed, the response from church officials in other parts of the country was fairly ominous:

From the other side of the struggle, the Rev. James Heidinger II of Lexington, Ky., said that decision amounted to "jury nullification" of church doctrine.

"It seemed to so many ... that this was an open-and-shut case," said Heidinger, who leads a conservative, traditionalist movement in the church. "There was never any question about what Karen Dammann was involved in. She admitted that.

"I am stunned by the decision of this trial jury. That is a group, clearly, in the annual conference out there in Washington state, where they're really not -- they don't personally, themselves, embrace the church's position on this issue."

And of course, the faction that has fomented this fight from the beginning -- notably, the Scaife-funded Institute for Religion and Democracy weighed in with its own harsh condemnation of the ruling:

"The church trial for the Rev. Karen Dammann in Washington state was farcical," noted IRD United Methodist spokesman Mark Tooley. "Every United Methodist General Conference since 1972 has declared homosexual practice to be incompatible with Christian teaching. Yet a jury of 13 clergy decided the church in fact has no position on this topic."

What was especially striking about the IRD release was the way it sought to marginalize the Western churches, making all too plain just how it intends to use the issue as a wedge to weaken the larger church:

The Western Jurisdiction of the 10 million member United Methodist Church (8.3 million in the U.S.) is the denomination's most liberal region and the most resistant to upholding church teachings about marriage and sex. It is also the fastest declining part of the church and now comprises only about four percent of the church's membership. The jurisdiction comprises the Pacific and Rocky Mountain states, which include some of the fastest growing areas of the U.S. population.

"Here is the irony," Tooley said. "Liberal church leaders, who emphasize tolerance and open doors, are largely unable to attract new converts to the faith. When they succumb to the surrounding secular culture, the secular culture does not embrace them, it merely responds with an indifferent shrug."

In this case, he may be right. The secular left needs to wake up and begin defending its Christian allies -- and too often, it is blind to their very existence.

An excerpt of sorts

For your reading pleasure, may I direct readers to my just-finished three-part series at The American Street, titled "Hate on Fat Tuesday". It's a firsthand account of my experience at the 2001 Seattle Mardi Gras Riots:

Part 1: Blood on the Streets

Part 2: A Twice-Shaken City

Part 3: The Hole in the Law

Most of this text is taken from a chapter of Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America -- due on the shelves in June -- that we wound up excising altogether. (I've included in the third part of the series a capsule description of most of the events of the book, to lend it some context in this version.) It was a bit of an experiment, sort of a twist near the end of the book, which spends most of the preceding 250 or so pages examining the problem of hate crime with an emphasis on rural America, and it didn't work, so we pulled it. It's still a worthwhile piece of storytelling, though, so I've republished it here. Hope you enjoy.