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Carrots and Sticks
Karl Rove has threatened Republican Senators not to get into the way of Bush`s NSA spying program:
[T]he White House has offered to help loyalists with money and free publicity, such as appearances and photo-ops with the president.
That carrot has worked with some, especially with Senator Pat Roberts, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, said the White House had agreed in principle to negotiate on legislation that would give Congress authority to oversee the eavesdropping.
…
"The administration is now committed to legislation and has agreed to brief more Intelligence Committee members on the nature of the surveillance program," Mr. Roberts said, adding that "the administration has come a long way in the last month."
Roberts wants to legalize a program the White House all along maintains is legal and he wants to do so without investigating what the program is all about. In exchange he may get some of the oversight Congress is already entitled to have.
But while Roberts is engaged in a personal inspection of the inside of Rove’s abdomen, those carrots have not worked with everybody.
Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is still pressing for more investigations and for legislation to put the spying program back under control of the FISA court – until now.
But on Tuesday, suddenly and without any reference to sources, USA Today reported: "Senate aide’s spouse gets a windfall":
Sen. Arlen Specter helped direct almost $50 million in Pentagon spending during the past four years to clients of the husband of one of his top aides, records show.
Specter, R-Pa., used a process called "earmarking" 13 times to set aside $48.7 million for six clients represented by lobbyist Michael Herson and the firm he co-founded, American Defense International. The clients paid Herson’s firm nearly $1.5 million in fees since 2002, federal lobbying records show.
Specter, as well as the lobbyist, deny, with some plausibility, any connection. There is no relation to the Abramoff or other scandals and all the earmarks did benefit Specter’s constituency in Pennsylvania. Specter himself has asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate.
But why does this story pop up now? Who initiated it?
Doesn´t this look like a big stick is being used after Specter denied to take Rove’s carrot.
Some blogs on the left fail to ask these questions and to recognize the real plot. They are pursuing Rove’s plans.
The story now drowns out Specter’s initiative on the NSA case. The beat of these drums will increase. Either he will fold, or there will be more stories like this until he is out.
But whatever Specter will do, the spying scandal will not go away. I tend to agree with Glenn Greenwald’s hope:
[T]his scandal has many tentacles. And each of them is growing inexorably. The White House is running around with a broom desperately trying to sweep each branch under the rug (..), but once the mechanisms of the Washington scandal machine are activated with full-force, it is very difficult to simply shut them off or the prevent the disclosure of information which someone is trying to conceal.
Rove’s carrots and sticks will only prolong the scandal. Specter may fold under one leaked lobbying story or another, but the NSA spying outrage will not go away.
Watch for more leaks on more programs. So far only the surface has been scratched.
@RossK et al,
I’m as sick, sick of the designer pathologies of the seligmanized Republicans and their counterpart, zimbardo–esqe Democrats as anyone, in the real world of brutal injustice RIP Gary Webb, Jonathan Kwitny, Alfred McCoy…
If we are ever to escape the straight jacket of true/false aristotelian logic, i.e., The ratchet effect we are going to have to think our way past the binary lockbox (w/apologies to Gore). I applaude Bernhards, and excellent posts however, the “point about the left-side big boys being played for saps.” is bullshit. They are playing their assigned role.
Beyond Surreal? Sure, but stay w/me for a moment, in Antony Sutton’s explosive book Wall Street and FDR (1975) he exposes how certain Wall Street bankers who financed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia also financed the rise of the upcomming US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the new deal. The reality of the grim meathook future before us is the same as it’s always been, only we have pasted the entropy event horizon and it’s shit shit shit from here on out… they own both parties.
A few good Greeks knew hope was the elixir of fools and a jape of the gods. This didn’t keep them from employing it to keep themselves among the living, but it did frame the whole matter of optimism in a different light.
Bourdieu was right. It’s not [just]”follow the money” [anymore] but rather “follow the status of the job or social position”
Propaganda is now propagenda.
Okay. Say whatever you want, but for God’s sake, stop saying you’re “ashamed.” I understand shame to be a community-building emotion that ties people together in mutual identification, but the time for that is now officially over.
You didn’t torture anybody in Iraq. You didn’t pose for pictures. You didn’t defend it or slyly rationalize it away. You didn’t cheer for it. You didn’t vote for it (and you had your vote stolen.) And yet every day for four years you’ve been called traitors and scum on morning radio and CNN because the totalitarian impulse of the redneck hive mind cannot tolerate even the smallest degree of disagreement or emotional friction. And the fact is that when the right comes for you, at your house, the leering soldiers in those photos are the soldiers that will be knocking on the door. They’re America. MacLeod is right: you can feel the decadence now, the cultural deathwish.
They don’t acknowledge your right to participate in politics or national identification; they don’t acknowledge any citizen consubstantiality with you. They don’t acknowledge any rules of civility or fair play, and their less than secret attitude toward you is as eliminationist as it is toward “terrorists”– a category which you now explicitly occupy. They have the cultural majority (stop whistling in the dark), they have three branches of government, and a propagenda machine that has nearly 60% of the population believing that we found WMD in Iraq. So approximately that percentage will buy whatever rightwing fraternity-hazin’ spin on these or other photos of torture, rape, decapitation. Or anything else that crops up. “So what? It’s war.” So as much, with the democrats.
They’re not nationalists, they’re tribalists. And you don’t belong to the tribe any more than the detainees. They’ve made that quite clear.
On the eve of the bombing of Afghanistan, abcnews online ran a jarring excerpt from Jarhead, a Marine’s Gulf War memoir, describing the masturbatory bloodlust of solidiers looking forward to killing, any killing, for its own sake. With all the bloviating binaries about barbarian them and noble us, it stood out, and you had to wonder about the timing: what was the motive for publishing that?
No: it wasn’t some “critique” by the “liberal media.” Of all the moments in the century’s history, one can safely say that on that eve, the liberal media did not exist. On the contrary, it was sensationalist media showing its id, playing to what it knew people really wanted, playing to the imagination of unfettered vengeance and warlust without rules. Similarly, on the same eve, the “liberal warbloggers” were writing utterly inauthentic little tight-lipped moral meditations about the tragedy of war before they relaxed into left-baiting glee and den Bestian “rules of war are for the liberal pussy” cheers and jazzed passion about how exciting warblogging was, it was like in the early days of the internet, trading cool zingers with their friends! Human rights agencies were saying that if food shipments were unluckily delayed by war or weather, the death toll could rise as high as six million. Familiar number. Meanwhile the new coalition of neocons and Huntingtonian liberals were engaged in a contest: hey, what’s your favorite war movie? I just watched Lawrence of Arabia. Awesome! “I’m a strong liberal, but…” The mask slips, and what’s behind it is disgusting. I didn’t even disagree with the realpolitik argument about Afghanistan, but I haven’t forgotten that. I will not forget it. I spent the weekend after 9/11 in the hospital, not because I was afraid of being bombed, but because I held a baby in my arms and understood the tipping point that had been crossed, I knew the rot that was coming, and I knew there would be no way back from it because people wanted it, longed for it. The right could do anything, could fuck everything over, could wreck the culture, could even self-destruct before our eyes–as they have–and over half the country would continue to reward them for it, all the way down the black hole. Nothing has proven me wrong since then, not one thing. Everything I saw looking down the future has happened.
And the rot is just beginning. Imagine what it will be in ten, twenty years. When your kid is your age. Winning this or that election is irrelevant on the larger time scale. It’s only a question of pacing.
It’s not your country anymore, and those who own it are vile.
Yes. It’s hard to bear. Impossible to bear. Hide? Fight Alamo-style? Emigrate? I have no advice.
But at least this: enough already with being “ashamed.” What–on their behalf, like Jesus, because they’re incapable of the emotion? Even as they’re already blithely rewriting the history of their own position-taking, devoid of responsibility? Still playing Diogenes, looking for the honest conservative with your lantern? For Diogenes, it was a joke. You?
Enough with being “ashamed.” No. Don’t bear their fucking guilt for them.
Don’t forget the whisky.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Feb 18 2006 8:43 utc | 13
@ gylangirl-
Pwhew. You said it. It’s like inhabiting another reality. A Cassandra reality, where you can see what is happening and what is going to happen, while all around you people are blind and unbelieving, regarding you as mad. Even your therapist thinks you are mad, and chastises you with increasing frustration that you refuse to be like other people. “I can’t help you become well-adjusted if you persist in these destructive beliefs,” he sighs, as you fork over another 95 bucks.
You are like an addict enmeshed in his own addiction. You make tortured resolutions with yourself in the middle of the night: “I will not go to ‘Moon of Alabama’ and read any more of Uncle $cam’s links. I will listen to NPR like all other good members of the intellectual class, and calmly discuss events,and Jay Leno’s jokes about them, around the watercooler of a nice fortune 500 corporation; the type my mother told me I should marry.”
You go to the supermarket and bump into your neighbor. They have just bought a new SUV, and are talking about going to Europe this summer. You are about to respond, but the words form the thought, “I wonder if Europe will still exist this summer…” You catch the words before they come out, but can only respond with a tortured “Ughhhh huhhhh.” They look at you a little strange and make a beeline for the Chilean berries.
You try but you just can’t control yourself. Even when you listen to NPR with your friends, you both hear completely different newscasts. They feel reassured that there is a voice out there that they can trust in trying times. They enjoy the insider cultural shibboleths sprinkled liberally throughout the humorous adventures of reassuring college professors and other commentators. You hear something else entirely. The newscasters appear to be reading through the pages of 1984. You catch yourself subconsciously angling out of the line of sight of the radio.
Like any addict, you struggle with your addiction. You make more private bargains, which you know even as you make them that you will not keep.
You go to the online dating site which you are a member of and stare at pictures of happy attractive people of the opposite sex. They work for a pharmaceutical company, making $150K+ selling drugs to doctors and hospitals, and they write, “I enjoy helping people.” They work for a large defense contractor, and they write, “I feel good that I am doing my part to help keep America safe.” They work in ‘financial services,’ and they write, “I help people use their money to make more money,” and you know what that means. They all describe themselves as caring, honest. They all list 10-15 third world countries that they have visited, “The natives were so friendly”, and 10 more they want to visit. They feel important, validated by these experiences, which confirm them as part of the “Masters of the Universe.”
You and your family regard each other with mutual suspicion: Perhaps babies were accidentally exchanged at the hospital. You’ve been through the fights, and the discussions. “Dear, you will give your father a heart attack if you persist in this hate. Have you been taking your pills lately?”
Somedays, you wake in a cold sweat, surprised to see the sun shing through the trees. Other days you think, “Well, the only way they can do what they’re doing is to maintain this veneer of normalcy. People have power, but if they keep people ignorant and content, then they can continue with their crimes. Therefore, whenever I get scared, I know that there is always room for me to be ignorant and content. I can be happy. There is a way. There is a place for me in this world.” But you know you are rationalizing; fooling yourself so you can breathe without that familiar tightness in your chest.
You engage in your activism, but the fear continues to strengthen. You look behind yourself when coming home late at night. You wish you had the courage of Martin, of Malcolm, of Medgar, who knew what the future had in store for them, and carried on with their work. But they had supportive families, you recall.
You used to love your meditation, but somehow it doesn’t feel the same since finding out that the Dalai Lama was on the CIA payroll. Timothy Leary was on the payroll. How about Ram Dass, you think. Was Buddha on the payroll back then, you wonder. Was he paid off to sit under a tree and keep still? Was he paid to not reveal what he knew, and now we regard silence as holy.
How will it all end you wonder? You watch your hair slowly turn grey. All the things you used to lose yourself in; drugs, sex, travel, money, power, no longer satisfy the same way. Even food. Food which you used to love, is now Frankenfood; just one more statement of corporate control of your very existence.
So you stay away from things for a while, then you drift back. After all, you tell yourself, “One day soon they will close down the internet. Then I will regret all the time I stayed away, like an ostrich with its head covered to keep it safe.”
So it goes, day by day. Taking life day by day. Stepping gingerly in a new reality. Feeling out the appropriate response to an insane world. Perhaps there is no sane response, just the best you can do. You try not to blame yourself. Global warming has saved me money on my heating bill, you smirk. Anyway, the lobster didn’t waste his time blaming himself while the water in the pot grew warmer.
Posted by: Malooga | Feb 19 2006 0:33 utc | 26
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