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.

McCain will win the election by saying Obama will lose the war.

Obama may lose the election because McCain has changed the conversation about the war. Obama’s huge strength as a candidate is that he had the courage to oppose the worst U.S. foreign policy mistake of the past fifty years, and possibly of all time. Yet, McCain paints Obama as naïve and inexperienced in foreign policy and military affairs. McCain keeps saying that Obama wants to let the U.S. lose the war in Iraq, but Obama is not really answering this charge, except to defend his patriotism and repeat that he will impose a timetable.

What Obama needs to repeat with all is oratory skill is that the war was never really designed to protect American interests. It was a blind spasm by a misguided President, a Wag-the-Dog diversion erected by his neo-con Vice-President who was determined to simultaneously subvert the constitution and destroy many of the noble values for which this country has stood. It has given a blank check to military contractors to whom the Republican Party is beholden, and to an unstable and dependent government in Iraq that will never step up and unless we are serious about stepping out. We financed the entire multi-trillion dollar war on credit and we can't fix our economy until we stop pouring money into this sinkhole. The only way to preserve American dignity, our stature in the world and our national treasury is to get on a timetable. Unlike Bush and McCain, Obama can show that as a leader, he has the discipline to get us out of the mess.

The public tolerated the war for a long time, even as facts mounted that the evidence for it was rigged, because people assumed the war was really about ensuring reliable and affordable fixes for our addiction to oil. Stratospheric gas prices exploded that myth.

Obama has already said these things, but in his quest to be seen as a uniter, he now seems afraid to offend any potential supporter. But unless he steps up, he risks losing the enthusiastic support of those who were passionate about his courage to lead, and worse, being unable to shake McCain’s tagging him as a weak leader. Today, he seems to have moved far away from his bold criticisms in 2002:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

Tortured logic.

A number of journalists, as well as witnesses at recent U.S. Senate hearings, have described how the U.S. came to adopt torture as a so called "weapon" in the war on terror. After 9/11, the military reverse engineered techniques that had been intended to harden U.S. military personnel against interrogation methods North Korea used in the early 1950's to elicit false confessions.

The problem is that most professional intelligence officers don't believe that torture is the best way to get reliable information from a suspect. Persons being tortured often will say whatever they think their torturers want to hear. This is the reason U.S. courts do not allow the admission of confessions obtained by torture in criminal trials. It's not about compassion for the tortured - it's about ensuring that the criminal justice system is based on truth. If there is one place where we need facts rather than fiction, it's in fighting terrorism.

A determined criminal facing life in prison or death from a military tribunal knows he only worsens his situation by confessing while being tortured. He gets nothing in return other than a certain conviction. He is more likely to cooperate if he gets something of long term value in return, such as better food, reading material, a cell with a view, a shorter sentence, life rather than execution, etc. Indeed, that is exactly how the CIA "broke" the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

What about the "24" scenario? Some believe the Hollywood scripted nightmare that the U.S. might capture a terrorist who knew the location of a nuclear bomb set to explode in a few hours inspired the adoption of torture after 9/11. With no time for tried and true psychological interrogation methods, desperate officers might attempt the Jack Bauer approach. Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said that no one would convict a torturer of a crime in such a scenario. We don't need a national policy permitting and encouraging torture in order to deal with this extremely unlikely situation.

As is clear from Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side, a few powerful people in the Bush Administration made the decision to use torture without a careful analysis of its potential effectiveness for eliciting true information. The sudden adoption of torture might have been because Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wanted false confessions from alleged terrorists in order to justify the invasion of Iraq and the civil rights of U.S. citizens. Indeed, a false confession about an imaginary link between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein was a key element in the case the administration made for the invasion of Iraq.

Now come calls for a general amnesty or pardons for those who illegally justified the use of torture and did the torturing. One of the arguments made for amnesty is that it is the only way to learn whether torture in obtained accurate information about terror plots. Finding out whether torture provided any useful information is pointless because there are more effective methods to obtain the truth that rely on psychology alone.

No other single proposal could be more damaging to the health of our democracy and our credibility in the world. We need to ensure that this cancer is rooted out of our institutions, and that we send an unmistakable message that systematic torture and abuse of prisoners will never be tolerated again. Otherwise, we risk again being dragged into a war abroad or at home on false pretenses, and being forever compromised in our ability to end human rights abuses by our post 9/11 image as hypocritical fascist nation. Oh yes, and we would have no standing to demand that our soldiers not be tortured if captured by an enemy. We and the rest of the world deserve much better from our democracy.

Conservatives favor affirmative action for conservatives.

Yes, the proof is in. The report of the Justice Department Inspector General and the Office of Professional Responsibility concludes that for at least five years, two Bush appointed Attorneys General illegally applied ideological and political litmus tests to civil service hiring for intern and career attorney positions. Applications to the Justice Department's Honors Program, which seeks the best talent from top law schools, were scrutinized for telltale signs of liberal affiliation, such as "buzzwords" like "social justice," or volunteer work for organizations perceived to have liberal goals.

In spite of the fact that the purpose of the civil service system is to keep politics out of the hiring process, a former spokesperson for Attorney General John Ashcroft. quoted on NPR, justified the illegal practice as a long overdue attempt to create ideological diversity in the Justice Department! Given that candidates with perceived liberal affiliations or leanings were rejected at three times the rate of those believed to be conservative, that means that standards were lowered in order to accommodate a particular subset of applicants- just as conservatives bitterly complained affirmative action programs did in the sixties and seventies. This seems to be a tacit admission by the Bush Justice Department that conservatives are not as bright and academically accomplished as liberals. A former justice department official said the policy meant that Justice was hiring from the B list instead of the A list.

Is it any surprise that during this time the Justice Department did not seek racial and ethnic diversity in its hiring? Not a single black lawyer was hired in the Civil Rights Division between 2003 and 2007.

Update: The Justice Department’s inspector general and its internal ethics office issued a report concluding that aides to Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales illegally used partisan and ideological criteria to select less-qualified applicants for nonpolitical senior career positions, including immigration judges, assistant United States attorneys and counterterrorism positions. This discrimination slowed the hiring process at critical times and damaged the department’s credibility. Applicants' views on "God, guns and gays" were a key part of the screening.

Bush's tax cuts are like a subprime mortgage.

More people are waking up to the fact that the Bush tax cuts cannot be sustained without slowing the growth of the economy, and the tax cuts eventually will have to be scaled back. On top of this, in order to pay the interest on the national debt created by the Bush tax cut, there will have to be a permanent tax increase of at least five percent (see my previous post). This forever tax probably will be even higher, depending on how long the current tax cuts last and whether there is consensus to pay down any of the enormous debt they've created. If you were a twenty year old who got a twenty percent tax decrease for ten years while your income was low, you may not be happy that as a thirty year old you'll face a five, six or seven percent tax increase for the rest of your life when your income is higher. In the end, you'll lose money on this "tax break." Come to think of it, this tax deal is structured like a subprime mortgage. You get a teaser payment upfront, and then get hit with high payments you can't afford later.

Are Republicans victims of battered person syndome?

Here and elsewhere, the long sad story of how the Bush Administration has abused the average U.S. citizen has been well documented and publicized.

• The disastrous war in Iraq is now understood to have been continuously marketed on false pretenses since Bush first proposed it. Opposition to continuing the lie and war is widespread - even among moderate Republicans (except those who are getting rich as private contractors in Iraq). Citizens will pay trillions of their tax dollars and sacrifice the blood of many of the nation's young people for this horrific mistake.
• Even teenagers understand that for the rest of their lives they likely will be paying off Bush's unprecedented, gigantic federal deficits - so far increasing the national debt by more than a four trillion dollars and nearly doubling it. The "free" money people get from Bush's tax cuts and rebates is not free (see my previous post). Today, nearly a tenth of taxes go just toward paying the interest on the national debt, with Bush's deficits responsible for half of that. (Many voters remember that Bill Clinton's fiscal discipline created four years of surpluses. Fewer realize that under Republican Presidents since 1948 we have been subjected to average annual increases in the national debt three times higher than under Democrats.) (Here's an even scarier analysis by a conservative economist.)
• Nearly everyone, except determined hermits, realizes that the Bush promise of getting government out of our lives was a lie regarding civil liberties. Sadly, it was true concerning protecting most of us from the consequences of natural disasters such as hurricanes and global climate change, and from greed and exploitation (a prime example being the subprime mortgage meltdown).

Yet many Republican voters support that party's nominee in 2008, John McCain, who promises very little change from present policies (see my previous post). Could they be suffering from battered person syndrome? A victim of this condition:

becomes depressed and unable to take any independent action that would allow him or her to escape the abuse. The condition explains why abused people often do not seek assistance from others, fight their abuser, or leave the abusive situation. Sufferers have low self-esteem, and often believe that the abuse is their fault. Such persons usually refuse to press criminal charges against their abuser, and refuse all offers of help, often becoming aggressive or abusive to others who attempt to offer assistance. Often sufferers will even seek out their very abuser for comfort shortly after an incident of abuse.

Protecting whistleblowers from the agency that's supposed to protect them.

Today marked the latest, sad episode demonstrating the Bush Administration's complete contempt for notion that the work of Federal agencies should be shielded from political interference. The FBI, one of the few agencies not completely overrun with political operatives (see my previous post), raided and temporarily shut-down the Office of Special Counsel. According to the N.Y. Times, the "counsel’s office, which answers to the White House, is charged with protecting federal employees from reprisals for whistle-blowing and with investigating accusations of political interference in their work." Critics charge that the office has instead focused on promoting conservative social causes and retaliated "against whistle-blowers in its own ranks." So, the good news is that FBI is finally doing something about the misuse of this office. The bad news is that they waited so long.

Update: Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is calling for Congress to abolish the Office of Special Counsel.
President Bush ignored a staff request that he fire the Special Counsel Scott Bloch.