Dear President Obama,

My assumptions about Washington have been more than borne out by the past year: The Republican leadership and nearly all Republican members of Congress only care about one thing: defeating and punishing Democrats. They don’t have an altruistic bone in their bodies and they have no interest in bipartisanship. Their game plan is like that of any other grueling sport where time is a factor. They want you to lose badly, for anything you accomplish to take as long as possible so that you will achieve as little as possible, and for controversies surrounding your unfinished agenda to get carried into the next federal elections.

I said a year ago that in your first months in the White House you should be very decisive and take advantage of your mandate to get a lot done. Any delay caused by bi-partisan efforts would simply be exploited by the Republicans to propagandize against your agenda, whip unsophisticated voters into a frenzy and scare them to death. This would slow down the process and prevent you from accomplishing much. Was I right?

The message the voters sent you in Massachusetts was not that they hate your health care plan, although Brown did exploit fears that the state was not getting a fair deal. The message was that they don’t want you and Congress to spend anymore time on this. They want you to fix the economy!

You should threaten to pour boiling oil on reluctant Democrats in the House, get them to pass the Senate health care bill, and sign it! If you don’t get substantial reform done, you will lose your base. Some tea partiers will get over their hysteria once they see that previously uninsurable people they care about can get insurance, but only if you get a bill signed in time for this take effect before elections in November.

You need to get health care off the table ASAP and move on so that 90% percent of your time and your messages to the voters are about fixing the economy. People want you to kick the banks hard. You have to stop the perception that you are in the pocket of Wall Street. Be swift and decisive with regulation to avoid dragging out stock market reactions. The sooner you get this done, the sooner the markets will recover. You don’t want to cause any major downturns less than six months before the mid-term elections.

Your message to the voters, passionately delivered several times a week, should be hope. Just like FDR. You know how to do that well. You should continually paint the Republicans as only interested in obstruction and protecting big business at the expense of the people. If you don’t do this you may lose Congress in the fall.

It’s not going to get any better for you with Congress. Your majorities in Congress will only get smaller. You may have just this year to get anything significant done in your time in the White House. Think of this as your last chance. Unlike the Republicans in Congress, I want you to succeed.

We're not in Kansas anymore, are we?

A report from the inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department, says The NY Times, found that a former senior official at the Justice Department, Bradley Schlozman, "selected conservative lawyers for prime assignments and transferred three lawyers out of the Civil Rights Division because they were seen as liberals who were opposed to his political agenda. All three later brought federal discrimination claims and returned to the division after Mr. Schlozman left. The transfers, the report found, violated federal civil service law and 'constituted misconduct.'

"The investigation found that among people hired by Mr. Schlozman, 63 of 65 were considered Republican or conservative, but that when he was not involved, 'the results were more balanced,' with conservatives and liberals split about evenly.

"In a 2003 voice-mail message to a colleague, Mr. Schlozman said experience in civil rights law was not needed to work for the division. 'I just want to make sure we don’t start confining ourselves to, you know, Politburo members because they happen to be a member of some, you know, psychopathic left-wing organization designed to overthrow the government,' he said." (It's amazing how conservatives embrace affirmative action if it applies only to conservatives - see my previous post.)

"The investigators for the inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that Mr. Schlozman’s repeated denials to the Senate in 2007 that he had used ideological considerations in his personnel decisions constituted a 'false statement,' and they referred the matter to prosecutors for criminal prosecution last year."

The United States Attorney’s Office, headed by a Bush appointee, declined to prosecute. Mr. Schlozman is happily practicing law in his native Kansas.

Save your confederate money, boys.

The South, I mean the Republican Party, shall rise again. The latest debate in the GOP is over whether the song, “Barack the Magic Negro” is an appropriate holiday gift to the party from a candidate for new party leader. Tough call. Decide for yourself.

Obama's two short years in the US Senate.

One of the things that Republican speakers are now saying (incorrectly) is that Obama has only been in the US Senate for two years. It's four! That's a big difference in a position in which it takes a year just to get your bearings. The attempt, of course, is to bring Obama down to Palin's level. People should call Republicans on this lie everytime they say it - as TV interviewers are failing to do, except on the Daily Show.

Those who forget their inequality are doomed to repeat it.

On the day the first of Bush’s "economic stimulus" tax rebates hit some citizens’ bank accounts, it should be noted that this is the first federal tax rebate in history in a Presidential election year. No one in Washington previously has had the nerve to so openly pander for votes with money. Many economists believe that this will do little to jump start a recession economy, because any boost in consumer discretionary spending will be so short lived. In these tough times, much of this "free" money will simply go to pay off debt or be eaten up in higher prices for groceries and gasoline. (See update.) As a result of increasing the deficit, the government will then have to borrow the rebate money back from rich investors.

Rather than being motivated to use tax cuts and rebates to revive the economy, Bush and his party have a history of using them to pander. In spite of Republican mythology about the 2001 Bush tax cut, it was not about reviving the economy. It was conceived in 1999, when the economy was booming, as a way of getting votes in the 2000 election.

The main reason we have the 2008 rebates is that Republican are hoping lower income people – who have been economically the worst off during the Bush years – will mostly remember the rebate checks they got in July when they go to the polls in November. This sort of appeal worked for California Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger when he unseated the Democratic incumbent in the 2003 recall election. Schwarzenegger promised to roll back a vehicle licensing tax that had been raised due to the state's poor fiscal health. The tax of up to a few hundred dollars per vehicle hit low income people the hardest. Many minority voters chose a Republican for the first time in their lives.

So why did the Democratic Congress go along with this scam? Because, what could else could they do? Once the President proposed and promoted the rebate, opposing it would have resulted in Republicans campaigning against Democrats on the issue in the Fall. Too bad the Democrats did not have the fortitude to just say no.

A Princeton professor of politics recently described his study of the national economic priorities of the two parties over the past sixty years. Under Democratic Presidents, the actual incomes of the middle-class rose more than twice as fast as they did when Republicans owned the White House. The real incomes of the working-poor increased six times as fast during Democratic administrations! The affluent fared equally well with both parties. If Democrats had held the Presidency continuously since 1948, "incomes would be more equal now" than during even the most egalitarian era of the 1950's. The professor notes that "Every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower presided over increasing economic inequality, while only one Democrat — Jimmy Carter — did so."

Why do many middle class and working poor voters not reward Democrats for their superior economic stewardship? The professor believes that Republican Presidents’ use of their new mandates to cut inflation and social spending – hurting the least well off – wear off after three years, producing a perceived boost in the next election year for those that have suffered the most. Democrats’ policies helping the poor and middle-class also run their course after three years, creating a perceived decline that coincides with the next election cycle. As Republicans know so well, the public has a short memory.

Subprime meets nonprosecution.

Neatly tying together my previous posts about the Bush Justice Department's use of deferred prosecution agreements (nonprosecution) and the subprime mortgage crisis comes speculation that a Republican controlled Justice Department would not prosecute companies accused of wrongdoing in the subprime scandal. In fact, the existence of this corporate diversion program may have fueled the subprime crisis by encouraging bad corporate actors to believe they would not be held accountable for wrongdoing, says the NY Times.

The pollution problem.

Is the quote below The Economist Magazine talking about the Republican Party in the United States, or The New York Times talking about the Communist Party in China? Click here to find out.

Reining in economic growth to alleviate pollution may seem logical, but the country’s political system is addicted to fast growth. Delivering prosperity placates the public, provides spoils for well-connected officials and forestalls demands for political change. A major slowdown could incite social unrest, alienate business interests and threaten the party’s rule.

Slum lords and pimps.

The three elected Republican administrations of my politically conscious lifetime - Nixon, Reagan/Bush and Bush II stand out for their corruption. Nixon was impeached and forced to resign for masterminding the commission of crimes while spying on his political opponents, for obstruction of justice in trying to cover them up, and for lying about that. Reagan appointed scores of crooks to cabinet and administrative positions, who set about using their power to line the pockets of friends and party loyalists or to look the other way while others did so. The Reagan administration set a still unbroken record for the number of its officials indicted or officially investigated for criminal acts – 138. The Savings and Loan scandal alone cost taxpayers $150,000,000,000.

George W. Bush started a war on false pretenses, and then set about awarding billions in no bid contracts to his friends. Now it appears that many of the Iraq infrastructure projects built by U.S. firms are crumbling and stand mostly as monuments to billions of wasted U.S. tax dollars. Iraq’s infrastructure resembles a scene from the recent dystopian satiric film Idiocracy.

The recent resignation of the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a typical example of the rampant corruption in George W. Bush’s administration here at home. She violated federal rules by giving internal agency documents to industry lobbyists that in some cases were used in lawsuits against the agency challenging its conservation policies. She changed the reports of agency scientists to make their findings more favorable to private and corporate interests, and in one case, her own ranch.

The conduct of the Deputy Secretary of State, director of U.S. Foreign Assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development illustrates the administration's hypocrisy. He pushed for funding to promote abstinence at the expense of funding for condom use in AIDS prevention, but resigned last month after it was alleged that he frequented prostitutes. He also was in charge of enforcing a U.S. requirement that aid recipients swear they oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

It is also worth mentioning that Paul Wolfowitz, an architect of the Iraq war, and subsequently appointed as head of the World Bank by Bush II, insisted that the greatest problem facing the World Bank is corruption. He now will likely have to resign because of his own corruption at the bank: using his office to obtain a promotion and a hefty raise for his girlfriend.

Perhaps the best illustration of the pervasive corruption under Bush II is the fact that for the first time in history, four Inspectors General simultaneously are under investigation for corruption. These "watchdogs" are appointed by a President to ferret out waste, fraud and abuse. This follows the resignation of three other Inspectors General appointed by Bush II after they were accused of abusing their offices.

Under Bush II, good government always takes a back seat to advancing the power of the G.O.P. Part of this strategy is a widespread effort to "purify" government agencies so that staff, even those in career civil service jobs, are party loyalists. This brings two analogies to mind. The first is the McCarthy era of the 1950's, when Senators McCarthy and Nixon went on a witch hunt for suspected Communists in government. (Watch Good Night, and Good Luck if you want to learn about it.) The second was the practice, during the Communist heydays in the Soviet Union and China, of appointing political officers in every government office and military unit, even in those with as few as a dozen people. The political officer often had more authority than the director or commander, and was responsible for ensuring that policies were in line with party doctrine and that persons suspected of being anything but absolutely loyal were fired or imprisoned. (See The Hunt for Red October for an example.)

As Frank Rich says in his May 13 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times, the focus on party loyalty is the result of Bush II giving his politic strategist Karl Rove free "reign" to remake government. According to Ron Suskind, White House staff have a name to describe their mission: "strategery." This was taken from a Saturday Night Live skit about George Bush in the 2000 election, and reflects the belief that public policy is a farce and politics is all that matters. In Suskind’s January 2003 article, he quotes John DiIulio, an academic who ran the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for Bush II. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything – and I mean everything – being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." DiIulio added that under Bush II, "policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver."

DiIulio's observation has been borne out in the Iraq "reconstruction" effort. In part to bolster the party’s unholy alliance with the religious right, many of the Americans hired by both government and private contractors to rebuild Iraq were hired primarily for being G.O.P. loyalists and staunch religious conservatives, and often were otherwise unqualified for their positions. Most knew nothing about Middle Eastern culture and had never traveled outside the U.S.

The most recent exposure of Bush/Rove strategery, and how it has been implemented by political officers, comes from the story of Monica Goodling, who took the fifth amendment rather than testify before Congress about her role in the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys. (See my previous post.) A 1999 graduate of a law school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson, she began as an opposition researcher (dirt finder) for the Republican National Committee in the 2000 presidential campaign. Meteorically, she rose to become deputy director of the executive office of the Justice Department, and then became liaison to the White House. She stands accused of using political criteria when interviewing applicants for civil service jobs and for the department's honors program for recent law school graduates. Posing as the anti-Clinton, she even asked some applicants if they had cheated on their spouses. At the age of 32, she received hiring and firing authority for all political appointments in Justice headquarters, including the heads of the various enforcement divisions. (Readers will be relieved to know that she is currently under investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, a political appointee.)

Republican control of Congress over the past twelve years brought a level of corruption unprecedented in past seventy-five years. Ethics and their enforcement were put on hold by Gingrich, Army, DeLay and their cronies. You have to go back to the time of Warren G. Harding to find anything comparable.

Why this pattern? It’s really quite simple. When a basic tenant of your political philosophy is that government is evil and wasteful, it becomes easy to view government as nothing more than a means to power and an exploitable asset. (See Paul Krugman’s March 19 opinion piece in The N.Y. Times.) As Reagan defined it in his inaugural speech, "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem." The leaders of the Republican party have treated our government as a slum lord treats an apartment building, as a pimp treats a whore, or as a corporate raider treats an acquired subsidiary. The G.O.P. has no respect for government, except as a tool in the party’s crusades for permanent power and as a means to increase the personal wealth of its elites. This has been consistent across four decades of G.O.P. Presidencies.

Postscript: Those who argue that the Clinton administration was similarly corrupt have been getting their news from right wing talk radio. Republican Ken Starr, the special prosecutor who spent most of Clinton’s time as President investigating him, spent more than 50,000,000 tax dollars to prove nothing more damaging to the administration than that Clinton cheated on his wife and lied about it. Clinton did let some big political donors spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom, which was not illegal. Republicans castigated him for this, but in the hypocrisy that comes so easily to them, recently rewarded their big donors with seats at the official state dinner for the Queen of England.

Update: The book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, describes how conservatives have set about destroying government from within for the reasons described above.

Prosecutor-gate: "Idiocy on the part of the administration"

That’s how Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, member of the Judiciary Committee, described the Bush White House and Justice Department’s firing of eight U.S. Attorneys (see previous post). This affair is cratering around "The Architect" Karl Rove. For perhaps the first time in six years, a desire for the appearance of integrity is a stronger motivator for many Republican members of Congress than loyalty to the President. There have been some mavericks before on the war and civil liberties, but what I’m calling "Prosecutor-gate" is bringing out Republican critics in significant numbers.

Today’s news reveals how deep the elbows of the President and senior White House aides were into this putrid mess, despite their repeated earlier denials. But there is another intriguing detail. Apparently the internal rationale used to justify firing the U.S. Attorneys was that they were not pursuing voter fraud cases.

Allegations of cheating in the last two close Presidential elections break down along on party lines. Republicans claim that a significant numbers of voters actually are ineligible to vote because they are felons (in some states) or non-citizens, or because they vote more than once in an election. Although very little voter fraud has been documented, Republicans say that election officials and prosecutors just aren’t looking hard enough.

Democrats assert the bigger problem needing attention is institutional disenfranchisement of poor people more likely to vote Democratic. One tactic Republican elections officials have used is dropping voters from the rolls in heavily Democratic precincts using inaccurate lists of felons, who by law in some states lose their right to vote. Another is threatening to arrest people if they show up to vote and are improperly registered or have outstanding warrants. This scares off people who fear the police. A third method is not providing enough resources to handle demand at polling stations in poor precincts. In the past twenty years, there is far more documented evidence of institutional vote suppression (committed by both parties) that has affected far more elections than there is of fraud committed by voters. The intense scrutiny of the close elections in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 found many instances of vote suppression, with the Republican Party in charge in both states.

Republicans want more focus on voter fraud for three reasons. The first is because they believe that people desperate enough to take money to engage in voter fraud are usually felons, migrants and poor people more likely to vote for Democrats. The second reason, say Democrats, is that making voter fraud the villain draws attention away from the Republicans' use of institutional disenfranchisement. The third reason is that threats to prosecute voter fraud are themselves a form of vote suppression, and Republican election strategy relies on intimidating indigent and poorly educated voters to stay away from the polls.

What Republican leaders want are some voter fraud prosecutions, especially in states where Democrats are in power. This is where the fired U.S. Attorneys come in. (Never mind that the U.S. Attorneys are supposed to be protecting us from organized crime and terrorists and that local law enforcement is much better suited to going after individual fraudulent voters – if they exist.) Senator Pete Domenici and Congresswoman Heather Wilson, both Republicans from New Mexico – a state with a large number of poor immigrants – have admitted asking the now fired U.S. Attorney to begin a voter fraud prosecution before the last election. Wilson is the ranking Republican member of the House Ethics Committee and should have known better. (By the way, the fired U.S. Attorney in New Mexico was the Navy prosecutor portrayed by Tom Cruise in the film A Few Good Men.)

It’s no surprise that of the eight U.S. Attorneys fired in Prosecutor-gate, seven are from states in the South or West with significant migrant farm worker populations. Seven are from states with administrations controlled by Democrats, or in the case of California, from a state where the Governor is a Republican in name only and the Attorney General is Democrat Jerry Brown. In other words, the fired prosecutors came from states where Republicans have a strong interest in bringing voter fraud prosecutions for partisan political ends.

That's how badly Karl Rove and the Republican party leadership want to win elections.

(See N.Y.Times Editorial published March 16, arguing that "the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people," and that the eight U.S. Attorneys were fired for not using "their offices to help Republicans win elections.")

Rove's latest dirty trick: The Patriot Act prosecutor switch

Just when you may have thought there might be nothing more to know about the extraordinary malfeasance by the Bush administration, come more sickening details. A little-known provision of the "Patriot" Act apparently was designed for no other purpose than to allow Karl Rove to create more Republican pseudo prosecutors to run for Congress. The plan, as described in a N.Y. Times Op-ed, kills two birds with one stone. It lets Bush axe some particularly effective prosecutors of corrupt Republicans and replace them with inexperienced novices who will then use their new title of U.S. Attorney as a tough-on-crime credential to win a seat in the 2008 election. Diabolical. The change in the Patriot Act allows the newbies to serve indefinitely as interim U.S. Attorneys without ever having to face the embarrassment of rejection by the Senate.

As with so many of these political dirty tricks and abuses of power, Democrats will not have enough guile to use them if they get the White House back, so there is very little downside for the Republicans. Public outcry (and maybe some sense of the integrity that is critical to public trust in the inherent power of the U.S. Attorney post) probably will motivate Democrats to close this wormhole if they get the chance to overhaul the Patriot Act. But who knows? The bar has been set so low it may never get raised back to where it was before Bush came to town. (See followup story.)

Democratic blunder on Iraq.

There's been lots of cheering, applause and praise for Senator Webb's speech for the Democrats last night, responding to Bush's State of the Union speech, but I was dumbfounded at the sheer stupidity of the ending. The final mental image that lingers in viewers' minds is key to the success of any important speech and Webb sent exactly the wrong message. I'll lay out the dots and then connect them as I saw it.

It's become politically fashionable of late to use the words and actions of the other side's heroes to make big points, a trend that seems to grow more prevalent as the national discourse has become further partisan and polarized. Republicans cite FDR and Democrats cite Reagan, which they imagine makes them sound more reasonable. So, some genius speechwriter decided that Webb should refer to Teddy Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower. He ended his speech by reminding us that Ike quickly ended the Korean War because it had become a "bloody stalemate."

The main justification Bush gave in 2002 and 2003 for the invasion of Iraq was that some crazy dictator in a country with a culture Americans don't understand was about to get nuclear weapons and use them against the U.S. As Condi Rice said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Of course, the nuclear weapons and WMD claims weren't true. Now, most people believe that the Bush administration cooked the intelligence information to get public support for the war, but the WMD fear is still there. We've heard a lot in the past two years about the nuclear ambitions of Iran, Iraq's neighbor and likely participant in the Iraq civil war meltdown that could follow if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq.

So what do people think of when they think of the legacy of the Korean War? Most likely, it is North Korea, a nation with a culture Americans don't understand, ruled by a crazy dictator who has nuclear weapons and missiles that he may use against the U.S. If Jim Webb and the Democrats want to convince the American public that we should get out of Iraq, I can't think of a worse example to use than the Korean War.

If any of the New York Times reading, latte drinking, sushi eating liberals that Webb surely consulted for his speech had bothered to see Team America: World Police, they would have realized what a blunder it would be to end a pullout-from-Iraq speech with a reference to Korea. If the Democrats want to lead us out of Iraq, they'll have to be a lot smarter in making their case.

The misunderestimation of Gerald Ford.

Who could have predicted, in 1977 or 1981, that in the waning days of some Republican administration in the future we'd be reminiscing about how Ford’s skills as a President were misunderestimated? (See word use in a speech.)