The Serpent's Wisdom

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs let loose on leftist critics of the administration the other day:

"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy. ... They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality. ... They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."

Frankly I think this should cost him his job, which is not something I say lightly. It won't, though, because he's only saying what everyone in the White House is thinking. But outbursts like this, and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's lovely 'f*cking retards' comment last year, and so on, are going to cost the Democrats dearly on election day this year and in 2012. They can't afford to keep insulting the folks who are most likely to contribute, to volunteer, and to vote on their behalf. They may think they can rely solely on the wealthy donors who flocked to them in 2008, but they can't.

These outbursts also show what they're thinking: we're leftists, they've billed themselves as "leftists," therefore we owe them our vote, our support, and our praise. But leftist bloggers don't work for the Democratic party, and this is what really annoys them. In 2009 they established "Common Purpose," an initiative to essentially get leftist bloggers to start spreading White House talking points for them. Well, hey, it works for the Right, right? ;)

But let's get to the real meat of the problem, which is: the Obama administration is doing a lot of the same things that annoyed leftist bloggers when the Bush administration did them. Leftists complained then, and complain now, not because they are anti-Republican partisan hacks, but because they are anti-injustice.

Foremost in my mind, and the one that I think 20, 30 years from now is going to really tarnish Obama's legacy: the establishment of a permanent authority whose purpose is to imprison people -- citizens and non-citizens -- indefinitely without trial. This is an indelible blemish on the American human rights record akin to the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But they "stopped torture" (they didn't, but they said they would), and they "tried" to close the prison at Guantanamo, so we should be happy, right?

Continuing the war in Afghanistan despite the apparent absence of any evidence that it's making the US safer from Islamist terrorism? There's that, too. People can oppose the war for rational reasons that don't involve the desire to replace the Pentagon with a hippie flower garden. Then there's: appointing bankster wolves to watch the economic henhouse... refusing to prosecute telecoms for their willingness to aid DHS in their program of mass invasion of privacy without search warrants... refusing to prosecute agents who committed torture or investigate detainee deaths or accounts of torture... refusing to investigate the Katrina disaster... and these are all things Democrats did of their own free will without being able to blame them on Republican obstructionism.

So this is not, as the White House wants to paint it, a matter of being upset because the public option was taken out of the health care bill or because other legislative compromises were made to pass bills. Yes, those things suck too, but they are forgivable and they can be fixed. But it turns out we're really bad at paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The Obama Administration's attempt to have it both ways on torture seems to be falling apart.

Last week, they released several previously secret memos outlining the twisted legal arguments the Bush Administration offered the CIA to allow agents to torture suspected terrorists. This was a bold and commendable move which revealed... well, a lot of what we already knew about the last administration's way of thinking, but a number of new details which had been previously hidden.

Rachel Maddow offered a particularly chilling illustration of what it was exactly that the Justice Department signed off on.

On Countdown last Friday, Matthew Alexander debunked pretty thoroughly the argument from Obama's critics that the release of these memos makes things worse for the United States. Notably, al Qaida uses torture by the CIA as a recruiting tool.

But while releasing these memos they have announced that they do not intend to prosecute their authors or any CIA agents who acted in accord with the bad legal advice they gave.

It's a fair bet that the real reason for this is not to avoid "dwelling on the past" (was Nuremberg "dwelling on the past?"), but rather, loud bleating behind the scenes from prominent Democrats who are afraid that they too will be caught up in the net of reprisals and accountability. The threads from this stretch not just to the White House but to Congress as well, where detailed briefings were held and various things were signed off on by top Democrats.

Obama, though, may not get to have his cake and eat it too, after all. This weekend the New York Times called for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, one of the authors of the memos in question who is now a federal judge. At least one senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee is now saying he'd like to do just that. Members of Congress are also pushing the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to do what he's already said he doesn't intend to do.

This week alone, the Obama Administration has:

Actively fought efforts to undo telecom immunity and hold the government accountable for past and present spying on private citizens. This is of course the opposite of what Obama promised when he campaigned: he vowed to make government more transparent, more accountable, and more respecting of civil liberties, and as time passes, this is turning out to have been an out-and-out lie.

Actively sought to forever immunize the government from ever being held accountable for wrongdoing, whether for torture or domestic surveillance. On these issues the Obama administration has so far been to the right of Dick Cheney.

Extended Wall Street's plunder of the American people to the FDIC. The FDIC is a relatively small fund (capped by law at $30B) which is now tasked by the PPIP (the federal program buying up toxic assets from flailing banks) with insuring over $1T in toxic asset purchases. If they lose money, they plan to assess fees from the banks they're insuring... unless those banks are bankrupt, in which case they'll simply ask the Treasury Department to print them the money. Put another way, the Treasury is holding its door wide open for bankers to take as much money as they want, keeping whatever profits they make and not having to worry about any losses they incur. Said bankers will also never have to worry about sleeping under a bridge or living in a tent or applying for food stamps. Meanwhile, if the FDIC becomes defunct because of this latest bizarre development, who's going to cover our measly little bank accounts in the event of a sector-wide banking breakdown?

Glenn Greenwald on yesterday's court hearing, in which the Obama Administration upheld -- in apparent contradiction to a campaign promise -- the Bush Administration policy of demanding that cases be thrown out of court in order to protect "state secrets" from being revealed.

Nobody -- not the ACLU or anyone else -- argues that the State Secrets privilege is inherently invalid. Nobody contests that there is such a thing as a legitimate state secret. Nobody believes that Obama should declassify every last secret and never classify anything else ever again. Nor does anyone even assert that this particular lawsuit clearly involves no specific documents or portions of documents that might be legitimately subject to the privilege. Those are all transparent, moronic strawmen advanced by people who have no idea what they're talking about.

What was abusive and dangerous about the Bush administration's version of the States Secret privilege -- just as the Obama/Biden campaign pointed out -- was that it was used not (as originally intended) to argue that specific pieces of evidence or documents were secret and therefore shouldn't be allowed in a court case, but instead, to compel dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance based on the claim that any judicial adjudication of even the most illegal secret government programs would harm national security. That is the theory that caused the bulk of the controversy when used by the Bush DOJ -- because it shields entire government programs from any judicial scrutiny -- and it is that exact version of the privilege that the Obama DOJ yesterday expressly advocated (and, by implication, sought to preserve for all Presidents, including Obama).

ETA. I should probably include a little bit about the case itself. Five plaintiffs have filed suit against a subsidiary for Boeing, alleging that the aircraft company assisted the CIA in carrying out of extraordinary renditions (otherwise known as "kidnappings") whereby they were imprisoned in various countries such as Egypt and Morocco, where they were tortured.

And by tortured, i don't mean and waterboarding and other techniques we have been debating in America whether or not they are "really" torture, but bone-breaking and genital-slicing and so on.

The Ninth Circuit panel, stunned by what they were hearing, asked twice if the change in administration had produced a difference of opinion on the subject.

A senior Justice Department official, charged with reworking the administration's legal position on torture in 2004 became so concerned about the controversial interrogation technique of waterboarding that he decided to experience it firsthand, sources told ABC News.

Daniel Levin, then acting assistant attorney general, went to a military base near Washington and underwent the procedure to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques.

After the experience, Levin told White House officials that even though he knew he wouldn't die, he found the experience terrifying and thought that it clearly simulated drowning.

source: Bush Administration Blocked Waterboarding Critic

How did the White House reward this intrepid and enterprising individual? By forcing him out of the Justice Department before he could finish writing his memo.

As Keith Olbermann put it (thanks novapsyche for the link):

The presidency of George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop, all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of his apologists...

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping this mock president and this unstable vice president and this departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others, from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

Four retired generals weighed in on the matter [PDF]:

...We write because this issue above all demands clarity: Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.

...This is a critically important issue - but it is not, and never has been, a complex issue, and even to suggest otherwise does a terrible disservice to this nation. All U.S. Government agencies and personnel, and not just America's military forces, must abide by both the spirit and letter of the controlling provisions of international law. Cruelty and torture - no less than wanton killing - is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance. ... Abu Ghraib and other notorious examples of detainee abuse have been the product, at least in part, of a self-serving and destructive disregard for the well-established legal principles applicable to this issue. This must end.

But will it end? Here's the punchline: the nomination of Mukasey for attorney general, after he could not, in the course of his role in covering the ass of George Bush and Dick Cheney, even admit to having thought about this question, has just been rubber-stamped by the Democrats.