AWOL
J. Although the issue of our Maximum Leader’s less-than-stellar military career came and went in the 2000 campaign, it would seem like it is undergoing a second life. Perhaps one of the few things the Democratic Party did right in the last few years. Instead of just continually beating the President about it until it became a non-issue, the party has kept this one in its pocket.
But care needs to be taken, because as tailor made this thing is for sound bites and late night comedy monologues, we have some instructive examples of how it can be taken too far.
Let’s sum up: As a recent Yale grad, the Prez joined his local Texas Air Guard, learned to fly, carefully avoided Vietnam and then went to join the Alabama Air Guard so he could work on some right wing crank’s Senate camapaign.
But then there is this interesting 12 month period in 1972-1973. During that time, there is apparently no record of his service, and no one seems to remember him actually showing up for duty. Moreover, he then next surfaces officially requesting an early out from the service so he can go to Harvard B-School.
So... from the party that beat Bill Clinton mercilessly as a “draft dodger” for getting a deferrment and standing up for what he believed in, the current President will get a pass for hiding out in the Air National Guard, and then apparently not even doing his duty there...allegedly...
There are a couple of interesting aspects to this. First, of course, is the aforementioned Democratic strageizing, then there is the Republican’s anemic and panicked response.
For many of us, the dropping of this issue was simultaneously a disappointment and a hope. We were sorry to see the issue disappear as quickly as it did, and yet, over the last four years, we have said in private.... “boy, Karl Rove had better sacrifice white roosters to whatever skulking godhead idol he prays to that the Democrats have forgetton that...”
Well, looks like Karl’s sacrifices have not appeased the gods, because this issue is coming back with a vengeance. In the past three weeks, this has become even more of a deal because the Democratic front runner John Kerry is a bonafide war hero from the same era, as well as his fellow Yalie Bonesman.
So now we are forced to confront the spektor that the President is, in fact, a draft dodging liberal, as our good friend and covert operations editor The Drieux might say.
But moreover, from the tactical standpoint, what does this mean for the Democrats. Well, two things; one, it is nice to see the opposition party sounding off like they have a pair and two, they need to be careful that they don’t get utterly sidetracked and keep their message on point.
For the longest time, we here at the Mojowire have fielded countless emails, phone calls, smoke signals, coded pulsars, stating that the Democrats need to attempt to grow a spine and call the GOP and their orcs out on to the plain in front of the black gate for a little tete-a-tete ... yeah, let’s go, punks, what you got?
That’s all good, that’s what drew a lot of people to candidates like Howard Dean in the first place, the notion that Democrats were ready for a brawl and had discovered that maybe their ideas and their nation were worth fighting for after all, regardless of how distasteful we found fighting.
S. Yeah...okay, you got us... “how distasteful” *they* found fighting...it is well known that the Mojowire recruits its writers and editors from Asian pit-fighting circuits and Bloodsport Kumite combat arenas...
So it’s good to see that the Democrats have finally grown something of a spine regarding this issue. This is the sort of thing that Progressives like us and so many others were waiting for. It’s like the great line from the series “The West Wing” where Ron Silver, a campaign consultant tells Brad Whitford’s Josh Lyman that he’s tired of just taking whatever the Republicans dish out and cowering in the corner “saying please don’t hurt me.”
But there’s another part of this. The Republicans have understood this idea for a very long time, and yet, they have continued to get themselves bitten in the posterior by it time and time again when they take it to an extreme to defend an idea that utterly defies what the electorate is concerned about.
A good example is shaping up in the gay marriage debate. The Republicans are looking for red meat for their base, and when that is the case, they never fail to go to their social conservatives, who want to drive the rest of the party with a radical agenda of sexual or social control over their lives.
It’s all about picking their fights, and if they try to ride gay marriage back to the White House, they will lose and lose bad.
But the Dems are in danger of being in a similar situation. Fine, you have the base energized, but what do you do with it? For the Democrats, that is the same problem. They are in danger of going beyond making a simple and good point, and turning it into an issue that makes it possible for the other team to portray it as a Democrats avoiding the real issues.
The Democratic candidates can not get sidetracked by this. Instead, this is illustrative of what is wrong with the Republicans in general, but at the same time this all needs to be steered back to the fact that the GOP has no plan to create jobs, fix health care, make sure education is affordable and accessible.
No, all they can do is trot out a draft dodger with no ideas and a serious debt to the nation’s wealthiest interests and industrial contributors. That’s the real issue. Who is trying to actually address the nation’s mounting and serious problems and who is out there commanding us to “look at the monkey, look at the silly monkey.”
Because that is where the “culture war” issues really fit in. They have very little to do with actual national well being and both sides both use them as convenient touchstones for their bases and have them used against them as cudgels when the other side comes up with good points.
Right now the conservatives are on the ropes with that because they have nothing else to offer other than an obviously failed domestic agenda, mainly created by right wing speech writers in the West Wing and a discredited and disastrous foreign policy that has embroiled us in war, costing American lives and cost us credibility in the eyes of the rest of the world.
We would like to think that most progressives and even those who are just feeling a little more akin to them this year, will not be fooled by the nonsense of culture war distraction-land and that the Democrats will keep their eyes on the prize instead of allowing themselves to be drawn into a mire.
cue JAMES music
And now the music is telling me that we have an incoming transmission from the redoubtable Dr. S9…
J. That’s right. It is time once again for our regular contributor Dr. Strychnine, reporting from his super-secret, ultra-dope, mega-cool, extra-jiggy, Mojohaus spy satellite of love high in geosynchronous orbit above Baghdad by the Bay…take it away S9…
SPOOK WARS
S9 Greetings fellow high-movers, breakabouts, blacklighters and assorted bubbleheads. Once again, our elite staff of tactical situation analysts here on S9 station are working overtime tracking the movements of objects through our solar political space, keeping a sharp eye on threatening profiles as they develop. Our forecasters are particularly alarmed by the recent developments at the White House in response to the ongoing deterioration of their case for making preëmptive war on
Iraq last year.
It seems that El Jefe Máximo has finally been briefed on the minor problems related to the yawning chasm between his rhetoric about Iraqi Weapons Of Mass Destruction in late 2002 and early 2003 and the actual reality of the David Kay report in January 2004.
At least, *we* knew the Weekly World News was joking when they broke the story about Iraqi archeologists digging up a crashed U.F.O. in the ruins of Babylon. Apparently, the White House may have taken it seriously— because the President announced yesterday his executive order to create a commission on the intelligence capabilities of the U.S. regarding weapons of mass destruction. At first glance, it looks like the President is going to get to the bottom of how the
intelligence agencies could have been so ridiculously *wrong* about the threat posed by Iraqi Flying Saucer Technology Program Related Activities.
But our crack team of investigative analysts looked at little deeper. We discovered that there is every reason to believe that this new commission has been deliberately constructed to execute a whitewash of epic proportions. This is going to make the Warren Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy look like an episode of Law And Order by comparison.
Let's start with the basics.
• The commission will not have any power of subpoena— it's merely vested with a worthless grant of moral authority in the vague language of its executive order.
• The commission is a wholly-owned and operated subsidiary of the White House. The President appoints all the members— after vetting by the Vice President— and they all serve at his pleasure.
• The commission has no brief to consider how any intelligence product was used in the formation of policy. It's all about how the intelligence agencies fouled up.
• The commission has no authority to investigate Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon, or the special shadow intelligence agency set up in the Office of the Vice President to stovepipe the irrational claims of Iraqi National Congress defectors directly into the White House inner circle— completely bypassing any analysis at CIA, NSA, DIA or any of the other 3- and 4-letter acronym soup agencies.
In other words, after heaping gynormous pressure on the CIA (and its cognates) to cook the National Intelligence Estimate to inflate the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the administration now plans to put the ritual scarification of blame onto the very spooks they pressured for giving them a cooked story in the first place.
But wait. If that's not enough, there is the President stacking the commission with a coterie of sycophants with no business deciding for themselves where to have lunch— much less how to sort out the malignant elements of the intelligence community from the patriotic public servants who harbor them among their ranks.
Who are we talking about? Consider just the co-chairmen.
•
Chuck Robb, a former Senator from Virginia most famous for partying with organized crime figures, sex with underage girls, and illegally tapping a political rival's cellphone. The only reason this clown wasn't indicted by a grand jury in 1992 was that the Bush Administration (the previous one) needed him to throw the deciding vote in the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
•
Laurence Silberman, a former federal judge most famous for overturning Oliver North's conviction on utterly bogus reasoning, and for accusing President Clinton of "declaring war on the United States" for simply trying to protect secret service agents from being used as political pawns. A more partisan and extreme whackjob, you may never find.
In other words, the co-chairs are: 1) a guy who literally owes his butt to the Bush family, and 2) a guy who would gladly cut off his own chalootie if G2 were to look at him sideways. And the rest of commission is loaded with similarly noteworthy names.
Oh yeah— and if that isn't enough to convince you of the complete lack of seriousness this commission deserves, consider this: the executive order says the commission has until the end of March 2005 to make its report.
Cue James music for exit
Speaking for all of us here on S9 station, we can't *wait* to see the magic bullet theory this commission comes up with... "the uranium yellowcake starts here in Niger, then travels through time and space, like the cheshire cat, until finally landing in this sub-basement in Damascus here..."
DICK FEELS THE BRANCH CREEK
J. That flock of vultures you are seeing over the naval obseravatory is not a mirage wireheads. The Vice President of the Untied States is in serous trouble, politically and legally, as his reign as chief vizier to the Sultan has started to unravel.
Yeah, this guy’s Jafar to the Bush family’s Sultan in Disney’s Alladin, except that the Sultan was actually well meaning, instead of a coked up dilletante loser with delusions of grandeur and a family with more money than God.
As you loyal and devoted wireheads know, the justice deparmtment has been investigating the illegal disclosure of the identiy of CIA operative Valerie Plame to punish her husband Joeseph Wilson for calling out the administation on it’s WMD falsehoods. In recent weeks, we told you that a Federal Grand Jury had been empaneled, and the DOJ was closing in on who the chattermouth was that leaked Plame’s identity to the Conservative News Network’s official administration monkey Bob Novak.
So, lo and behold, this week, from the UPI:
“Federal law enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby were the two Cheney employees.”
Make no mistake Wiregeeks, John Hannah’s lawyer has already thrown back a few shots of fine Beltway Tequila with somone from the US Attorney’s office, discussing how John can avoid a paid vacation at Club Fed; particularly by running through a list of names of who in the West Wing food chain he can finger.
Scooter Libbey is one of the big players in this administration, and Cheney’s key staffer. If he get’s popped for the Plame scandal, Vice President Dick — may I call you “Dick,” Mr. Vice President — Cheney’s clout at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave has taken a boot to the head. And this Administration’s insistence that this was all just much ado about nothing is revealed for the cheap carny hypnosis trick it was. Bad day for Dick and the rest of the Capo’s in the Bush regime.
But wait..There’s more... It now looks like Halliburton is going to get called on to the carpet for attempting to extort money out of the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys in order to do business in the Western Hemisphere.
Great...so while Dick Cheney was at the helm of Halliburton, their senior marketing officials were out shaking down French entrepreneurs for their lunch money for doing their energy busiess west of the Greenich Mean line.
And now, they want to question him under oath.
Hey, I guess it’s a good thing that executive protection doesn’t extend to sitting members of the executive branch of government, like what happened to Clinton, or Cheney would be able to walk away.
But really, though, in the world of real politick, this is a nightmare of Kafkaesque proportions for the Administration. Why? Because this is primarily coming out of media that they have absolutely no control over, namely the French.
Now it might be easy enough for the average American to normally write off the French news media as the aforementioned cheese-eating surrender monkeys, but for the fact that the U.S. Justice Department has felt it necessary to conduct their own investigation into the matter.
This is the issue that most consumes us now regarding Halliburton. And again, if it were just this, we might, that is *might* be able to look past it, but alas, it is not.
S. Besides Hallliburton, there is the small matter of the intelligence leaks on Valerie Plame. Again a bit of a refresher is in order.
Plame is married to Joe Wilson who was asked to look into the dread Iraqi Fying Saucers and at the end of the day pronounced them to be nothing more than the fevered imagnings of racist thugs deep in the bowels of Rummy’s Office of Special Plans.
But that didn’t seem to matter to the consensus builders....if Wilson couldn’t play ball, then theyh could find ways to make him more pliable. His wife, a deep cover CIA operative, could always have her cover blown... granted, we have no way of knowing whether he was threatened first or whether he and his wife were just done without any hint.
And then once a Federal Grand Jury gets a hold of the situation, it would appear that the first rock
they turn over reveals a staffer from the Vice President’s office, and now they are looking to talk to the like’s of the Veep’s Chief of Staff Scooter Libby.
Look, as veterans of these kinds of scandals, the Mojohaus legal department has informed us that it breaks down like this: some understaffer, who probably made the call or set up the call, will be called in, sweated out under the lights and then cracked.
From there, he gets a good attorney who trots himself down to to the federal prosecutors’ office and says something to the effect of “I understand that you are investigating the Valerie Plame incident. Tell you what: C-class federal misdemeanor, no jail time and a $5,000 fine and we’ll finger the instigator for you.”
We can almost guarantee that is what’s happening. And it does not bode well for the future of Dick Cheney. At some point he might have to be jettisoned. Not that he will end up doing badly out of the deal, with the deferred compensation in violation of federal conflict of interest rules and all.
The real issue here is what does this say about the Bush administration in an election year. This is what we are looking at. The Buh Administration has found itself in a particularly vulnerable situation, with a Vice President who is nothing more than a giant iron Albatross around the neck of a sitting President.
There is a certain buzz going around in circles right now that Cheney might not be on the ballot next fall with Dubya. Well, that remains to be seen, but for the time being this gives a lot of ammo for the Democrats to paint this administrartion as a group of rogue venture capitalists gone utterly out of control and on a binge that would embarrass the combined wealth of George Soros, Bill Gates and the first four emperors of China...
Get ready...it’s election season...
J. So our patriotic thought for the day: A strong Democratic challenger means the Terrorists win, or as John Ashcroft says... “Are you tryin’ to vote? Let’s see some ID hippy!”
exit theme: RENEGADE MASTER
S. And that’s all for this week, tune in again soon for another exciting installment, until, of course, we are declared enemies of the state.
And remember, you can now email the Mojowire at Mojohaus@hotmail.com, that’s M-O-J-O-H-A-U-S@hotmail.com. Email, us hippies!
J. And now you can check out the Mojowire online at Mojowire.Blogspot.com; you can read the entire archive.
This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...
J. And now you can check out the Mojowire online at Mojowire.Blogspot.com; you can read the entire archive.
This has been the Mojowire, brought to you by Mojohaus...Mojohaus-fine journalism, afflicting the comfortable since 1988, and produced by our super funky fly producer Mike Payne and the Darkling Eclectica, here on KUCI, 88.9...
