Firedoglake liveblogs the Gonzales hearings

For more on the Senate hearings with Alberto Gonzales, Firedoglake is liveblogging them. Here are this morning's hearings, presented with the earliest at the bottom of the list and the last at the top:

• Alberto Gonzales testimony, Part VIII
• Alberto Gonzales testimony, Part VII
• Alberto Gonzales testimony, Part VI
  [Lunch break]
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part V
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part IV
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part III
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part II
• Alberto Gonzales Testimony, Part I
• Just warming up?

Today's Senate Hearings with Attorney General Gonzales

I have been listening closely to the Senate Hearings on NPR in which Attorney General Gonzales is being grilled on the firings of the US attorneys. The questions (with the exception of those by Sen. Cornyn the "box turtle [*]" pretending to be a Senator from Texas) have been sharp and direct.

Gonzales' responses have been imprecise, frequently going off on tangents that appear to have only the twin purposes of making the Attorney General look better and using up the time each Senator has to ask questions, and often contradictory. My impression is that Gonzales was not involved in the process of running the office. He made "decisions" primarily based on the recommendations of his subordinates - and though he dares not say so, probably at the direction of Bush and Rove from the White House. He repeatedly testified that he did not ask his subordinates the basis of their recommended decisions.

Yet he stated repeatedly that he takes responsibility for the decisions he made. Senator Lindsey Graham nailed it when he asked (paraphrased) "Is it fair to say that you depended on your subordinates to have good reasons for the decisions they recommended and never questioned the basis they used for those decisions?" When Gonzales replied "Yes." Sen. Graham went on "And you never considered that some of the US attorneys you were firing might be on the list because they somehow raised the ire of someone on your staff?"

At this point Gonzales stumbled and then agreed that the scenario Sen. Graham presented was possible.

Then towards the end of this mornings' session Attorney General Gonzales was asked if, considering his credibility problems with members of Congress, it might be best if he resigned, Gonzales energetically stated that he did not think he should resign. That he had a great deal more [unspecified] to offer the Department of Justice and he wanted to stay on to accomplish those things.

When the Senate Committee adjourned for lunch, one NPR reporter made a point of stating that while hearings like this often were contentious and highly emotional, this was the first time that many of the Senators involved appeared to pity Gonzales more than simply be angry with him. The pity, the reporter continued, was because of the feeling that had frequently been mentioned on the Hill that Gonzales was a "Dead man walking."

That is my impression so far. For more on the hearings, go to TPM Muckraker. See also Gonzales And The Profound Lie by Rick Perlstein.

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Addendum 2:17 PM CDT
I rarely ever agree with Byron York at the Corner of NRO, but this time he has it right.

The major problem with his testimony is that Gonzales maintains, in essence, that he doesn’t know why he fired at least some of the eight dismissed U.S. attorneys. When, under questioning by Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, Gonzales listed the reasons for each firing, it was clear that in a number of cases, he had reconstructed the reason for the dismissal after the fact. He didn’t know why he fired them at the time, other than the action was recommended by senior Justice Department staff.

I will say I don't think this is the major problem with his testimony, it certainly sits close to the top of Gonzales' many, many problems.

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[*]An old Texas joke.
What do you know if you are driving in the country and see a box turtle sitting on top of a fence post? Several things. You know:

• he has no purpose there,
  
• he didn't get there by himself, and
  
• he can't get down by himself.

"Box turtle" is one of the nicer things that Sen. John Cornyn has been called.

Bush-league incompetence in war since 9/11

Just read this from Joe Galloway today:

Masters of the art of war

By Joseph Galloway
An ever more combative President Bush last week denounced the Democratic majority in the House and Senate for attempting to substitute its tactical and strategic judgment for that of our military commanders on the ground in Iraq.

Heaven forbid.

How dare Washington politicians attempt to dictate benchmarks for measuring the effectiveness of the ineffective Iraqi government or lay down timelines for beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops from a war gone bad?

The president's indignation might resonate more loudly with the American people if it were not so heavily laden with hypocrisy.

Shall we call to mind that for six years Bush and his senior cohorts -- Vice President Dick Cheney and the unlamented former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- rode roughshod over the best advice of their military commanders?

Remember Afghanistan? Remember how we blew the best chance ever at destroying Osama bin Laden and the top leadership of al Qaeda because we didn't have enough American forces on the ground to seal off all the escape routes from Tora Bora?

Or how American troops were killed and wounded in Operation Anaconda because they didn't have artillery support when they so desperately needed it?

And why was this?

It was because Rumsfeld, that paragon of military expertise who (like his bosses) had never heard a shot fired in anger, had dictated that no more than 7,000 American troops would be permitted to set foot in Afghanistan and had ordered the Army to leave its artillery pieces behind.

How did Rumsfeld arrive at that arbitrary manpower ceiling of 7,000 pairs of boots on the ground and not one pair more? God only knows. He was determined to prove that high-tech weaponry had rendered obsolete old-fashioned ideas about how you seize and control an enemy's territory.

The Army would have no need of its artillery fire support. The Air Force, with its satellite-guided smart bombs and its AC-130 gunships, would provide all the fire support that the old-fashioned ground-pounders would ever need.

So when we finally tracked Osama and his merry band of murderous thugs to the cave stronghold of Tora Bora, our military commanders had no choice but to depend on three Afghan warlords to seal the escape routes into Pakistan. Instead, the warlords set up what amounted to toll booths and happily sold get-out-of-jail-free cards to Osama and Company.

When reconnaissance photos showed the escaping terrorists' campfires in the mountains, the warlords said they belonged to shepherds, who presumably were feeding snow to their sheep.

And while Army artillery is on call 24/7 to provide a shield of hot steel to their infantry brothers in snow, sleet or heavy mountain clouds, the Air Force still is loath to fly expensive jet fighters through zero-zero weather full of 12,000-foot granite peaks. It already had decreed that the highly effective AC-130 gunships with their Gatling guns and 105mm artillery pieces were too vulnerable to fly during daylight hours.

That's just Afghanistan. Then came Iraq.

Here Rumsfeld, with the obvious approval of Cheney and Bush, tampered and tinkered with literally everything. He threw out a war plan, which had been drawn up based on everything the generals had learned about war in that part of the world, that called for an invasion force of 450,000 American and allied troops. Rumsfeld determined that a figure of something like 100,000 would be more than enough and threw out five years of planning and war games.

When Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki reluctantly offered an opinion to a senator that it would require "several hundred thousand troops" to secure and occupy Iraq, Rumsfeld's deputy Paul Wolfowitz hurried to Capitol Hill to dismiss that estimate as "outlandish." After all, Wolfowitz said, we all know that Iraq has none of the ethnic divisions of a place like Afghanistan and thus would be easier to subdue.

So we invaded Iraq with half the troops we needed to occupy and pacify the country. When Baghdad fell, there was no plan and no troops to keep the mobs from looting government offices and destroying everything from power and sewage plants to hospitals and army camps and schools. No troops available to occupy and pacify the heart of Saddam Hussein's power base among the Sunnis of the Anbar province. No troops to secure the vast ammunition dumps or secure the borders.

Rumsfeld and his bosses forbade the generals to plan for a long occupation or nation-building. Why plan for those things when we'd be leaving Iraq within six months, by the summer of 2003? Nation-building and the creation of a new government were not our job, they said. Instead, we'd just turn Iraq over to the Pentagon's good friend Ahmad Chalabi and his fellow Iraqi exiles.

We now know how well Bush has commanded the military; how accurate his and Cheney's and Rumsfeld's predictions were and what masters they were of the art of war. Mission Accomplished. Last throes. A few dead-enders. A little untidiness.

Now Bush would have us believe that he always listens to his military commanders, that he's outraged that a mere majority of both houses of Congress would presume to substitute their judgment for his ... er, his commanders.

After all, he's not merely the commander in chief; he's The Decider.

Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. He is also co-author of the book "We were soldiers once...and young." from which the excellent movie "We were Soldiers" was made.

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[I have copied this editorial under the exception to the copyright law for purposes of discussion - editor.]

Even the Republicans recognize it. Bush is not competent to run the government.

It's not that the government can't get anything done. It's that Bush, Cheney and Rove are so utterly incompetent that the government can't get anything done while they are in charge. That's not just my opinion. It is the opinion of arch-right-winger Robert "Prince of Darkness" Novak. Novak is speaking for the Republicans in Congress, too.

I am, as you probably know, no fan of Novakula. He provided aid and comfort to the enemies of America when he published the fact that Valerie Plame Wilson was an agent of the CIA. But his sources inside the top levels of the Republcan Party can't be matched. When he says that all the Republicans in Congress agree that the Bush administration is characterized by the "I" word, incompetence, you can take that to the bank.

From the Washington Post editorial by Novakula himself we get this statement:

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?"

America will take decades to dig out from under the debris resulting from the recent reign of "Prince George the Incompetent", who should have been a court jester but didn't even have the talent for that.

[h/t to Kevin Drum.]

Why did the Iraq occupation go so very bad?

First, the invasion of Iraq was itself a total mistake. It was a right-wing fantasy enacted by close-minded individuals who were proud of their party's ability to win an election and failed to apply any other skills.

That said, the actual military invasion of Iraq, planned and operated by our well-trained and well-equipped military was a case of applying a very large hammer to a relatively small nail. For the most part, the military aspects of the actual invasion worked rather well. But everything after the fall of the statue of Saddam in Baghdad has been a disaster. This is the famous "Phase IV." While there is little doubt now that this was the case, there is still the question of how it could possibly have gone SO VERY bad.

Now the Special Inspector General for Iraq has provided a report that answers these questions. By Dana Hedgpeth, Staff writer for the Washington Post:

The U.S. government was unprepared for the extensive nation-building required after it invaded Iraq, and at each juncture where it could have adjusted its efforts, it failed even to understand the problems it faced, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

In a stinging, wide-ranging assessment of U.S. reconstruction efforts, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. said that in the days after the invasion, the Defense Department had no strategy for restoring either government institutions or infrastructure. And in the years since, other agencies joined the effort without an overall plan and without a structure in place to organize and execute a task of such magnitude.

Lines of authority remained unclear in the reconstruction effort. With a demand for speed and a shortage of government personnel, much of the oversight was turned over to the contractors doing the work. There was little coordination among the various agencies. The result was a series of missed opportunities to address the unraveling situation, Bowen said.

"Many layers of management . . . made it difficult to determine who had ultimate authority over money, people and projects," he said. [Snip]

For the first time, the report lays out a timeline documenting the paucity of planning from the beginning of the war in Iraq, noting what was needed when and describing how the scale of reconstruction grew once the United States was in Iraq. It details how Congress provided vast amounts of money with little idea of how it was being spent. The push to get things done quickly meant turning much of the reconstruction over to contractors with little oversight from the government, as security worsened. And the lack of coordination magnified every shortcoming. [Snip]

Bowen said changes like those that took place in Iraq are not "short-term affairs."

"They are complicated, with social, political and security dimensions, and if you can't think of all the pieces of them together, then you're not ever going to end up with a response that works," he said.

In other words, the White House and the civilians at the Pentagon, applying Republican free market theory, failed to recognize that there was a need for government to conduct nation-building. So they walked into Iraq without any plan for doing anything at all except securing the oil supplies and removing the "dead hand of government from the backs of the entrepreneurs in Iraq." The result of this was that the Americans who were supposedly running things at the CPA and then from the Embassy were winging it. Each individual was trying to make decisions on their own with no coordination of the overall operation.

They removed the government, dismantling it with debaathification and the disbanding of the military and police forces, while not having enough troops in country to replace those they were getting rid of. (Yay, Rumsfeld!) Jerry Bremer, Head of the CPA, knew what the political bosses in Washington said they wanted, and he thought that by disbanding the Iraqi government and military he was giving it to them. But the absence of an overall integrated plan made such decisions made "from the hip" very unreliable. Bremer clearly did not realize what the results of disbanding the Iraqi government would be.

Of course, the free market theory was correct. Remove the government and military, leave a vacuum, and the free market did take over. But not to create an economy and a peaceful society.

The Sunnis wanted their jobs running the country back, and to get those jobs back, they had to evict the occupying American armies. Fortunately for the Sunnis, those American armies were too small to provide stability in Iraq by themselves. Al Qaeda wanted to disrupt American operations, and the lack of political and social stability was exactly what they needed. Kurds wanted their effective Kurdistan to remain in place, but they had had a decade to establish effective government structures and build a defense around the Peshmerga (Kurdish militias.) The Shiites wanted to protect themselves from the Sunni oppressors, but were (and are) highly disorganized and have no tradition of running a government. The result was that, under the very noses of the Americans, the Sunni resistance developed, aided by al Qaeda-in-Iraq. The Sunni resistance attacked the Americans, and al Qaeda-in-Iraq attacked the Shiites to provoke a civil war. The fractured Shiites, having to learn to govern a nation which has always before been governed by military force had no room to make mistakes as they learned on the job. Of course they have made numerous mistakes, as would be expected.

By the end of the first year after the invasion, the insurgent groups had organized, trained and were becoming effective. Here is your free market at work. The needed institutions to kick the invading Americans out of Iraq were developed quite quickly.

The Americans, being led by a President who does not listen to underlings or outsiders and who makes a (political) fetish of non rational intuitive decisions which must never be changed, actively prevented American adaptation to the changing conditions in Iraq. The American Enterprise Institute approved members of the Kiddy Brigade who staffed the CPA were too inexperienced to be anything better than simply useless. The Sec. of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was so busy trying to prove that the military could operate "lean and mean" that he, too, refused to listen to his subordinates and failed to adapt. Rumsfeld also made it crystal clear to the Generals under his command that their careers depended on carrying out orders, not questioning them. In this vein, a number of Generals were retired and replaced by compliant Generals like Richard Meirs who was appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The American institutions were made to be about as unadaptive to changing situations as possible, just as it was facing an enemy that was willing to try anything and to promote the survivors who were able to make something entrepreneurial work. The result was to create two competing institutions, the U.S. military which was too small to be effective and which was made as unresponsive to conditions on the ground as an institution filled with well-trained and well-motivated people can be, and the competing insurgents who became the lean, mean fighting machines that Don Rumsfeld wanted his military to be. Probably by the end of the first year and certainly by the end of the second after the invasion, the U.S. had lost all hope of bringing stability to Iraq. This was a total failure by America's political leaders, the Republican Party led by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the NeoCons.

In the meantime, the very fractured Shiite community tried to create an Iraqi government that was acceptable to the occupying Americans, while every local community set up its own militia to protect themselves and their families because the government and the Americans were not doing that very basic function of government. Peace could only come with an effective government that had a monopoly on the use of deadly force. In the absence of such a government, everyone had to join some local militia or become fodder for the insurgents and the militias.

The American civilian leaders in Iraq tried to solve the economic problems by throwing money at them. Money by the pallet-load of cash - the most stealable form of money they could get. This, of course, attracted every individual and company in the world with get-rich-quick schemes. Halliburton, Parsons, and Blackwater have all lined up at the money trough with shovels. But the economic problems cannot be solved until there is a government in place which, with its monopoly on deadly force, can enforce stability on Iraq. Since the various militias are sending their members to the Iraqi Army and Police to be trained and equipped before they go back to rejoin their militias, such stability is not to be expected in any near term.

So why did the Iraq occupation go so very bad? The short answer is George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld refused to plan, and the absence of an integrated plan for the occupation has unleashed a deadly anarchy.

So the next question is how will they be made accountable for their failures?

The answer to that question is yet to be written.

Gonzales is doing exactly what Bush wants/expects - he's lying for Bush.

Once again, Josh Marshall clarifies what the repeated lies out of the Deparment of Justice proves without any doubt. Gonzales lied, when caught crafted a new lie to cover it, and was caugut again and lied again. so why does George W. Bush keep him on?

It's not friendship. It's the fact that Alberto is doing exactly what George w. Bush expected him to do and wants him to do. Bush's entire administration is a set of lie stacked on lie stacked on lie. That's who is holding the White House.

Bush.is.the.worst.President.ever.

Where did the Bushie US attorney firings go really wrong?

OK. If you haven't figured it out yet, I am a big picture and a process thinker. I like to see how things relate together before digging into the details, and when I dig into the details my first questions are always "How and why did it get this way?" Caused me some real problems studying accounting, let me tell you. Accounting teachers (and mathematics teachers) tend to teach the details first, and only after that link them to the big picture and the processes.

Yeah, Right. So what?

So here is an interesting process type discussion. What have the Bushies done with the US attorney firing scandal that closely resembles the process used by the Delta Zeta sorority when they kicked all the girls who were overweight, minority, or otherwise not considered attractive in stereotypical female terms? Eli at Firedoglake answers that question.

The two events have a very similar process, especially in how they treat those who are kicked out. The reactions of those who were kicked out are very similar, also, and highly predictable.

Looking at the decisions eliminate the unpresentable attorneys or girls and the process of insulting them on the way out, what did they expect those rejected individuals to do?

Go read Eli at Firedoglake.

Do you think the people doing the rejecting had a scintilla [*] of empathy for the rejectees?

Conservatives operate from fear, and do not normally have empathy for those who oppose them.

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[*] First time I ever got to use that word. Interesting word, isn't it? It means a spark or a trace.

Is the US attorney scandal the one that ties all the others together and to the White House?

I suspect that the US attorney scandal represents a severe overstep by the White House, Karl Rove in particular, and may become similar to the Nixon "Saturday Night Massacre." Phoenix Woman over at Firedoglake proposes that it is the key link in a Grand Unified Scandal Theory.

Her idea is more fully developed (and already written) than mine is, so just go over there and see what you think. Oh, and remember what it was like to read and write stuff like this before hyperlinks? I sure do. God! I love hyperlinks!

Here's what's wrong with the Republican Party today.

The US attorney scandal is symptomatic of the Republican Party for the last forty years. Look at the history.

First, from Josh Marshall

The president fired US Attorneys to stymie investigations of Republicans and punish US Attorneys who didn't harass Democrats with bogus voter fraud prosecutions. In the former instance, the evidence remains circumstantial. But in the latter the evidence is clear, overwhelming and undeniable.

Indeed, it is so undeniable the president hismelf does not deny it.

The president himself says that in some cases US Attorneys were dismissed because they were too lax in prosecuting election fraud. What he does not say -- but what we know directly from the accounts of the players involved -- is that these were cases in which Republican operatives and activists complained to the White House and Republican members of Congress that certain US Attorneys weren't convening grand juries or issuing indictments against Democrats, even though these were cases where all the available evidence suggests there was no wrongdoing prosecuted. (It's all reminiscent of the bogus voter fraud allegations Republicans got caught peddling in the South Dakota senate race in 2002. Only in this case getting these charges into the press wasn't enough; they wanted to use US Attorneys to actual harrass people or put them in jail.)

We know that Republican members of Congress sought to pressure the prosecutors in question to push these indictments. And we know at least in the case of David Iglesias in New Mexico that Sen. Domenici's (R-NM) complaints after not being able to get Iglesias to knuckle under were directly tied to his dismissal.

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

Also from Josh Marshall regarding Tony Snow's anti Constitutional statements today:

Quite a few people have speculated over whether Tony Snow really meant to say that Congress had no right or ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch. The claim is belied by the US constitution and all US history down to the present day. But I strongly suspect that it was no accident, slip of the tongue or loosely general statement the White House won't stand behind.

The simple truth, I think, is that there's too much criminality waiting to be uncovered.

Now over to Digby, who gives us a brief summary of the history of the Republican Party and Constitutionality:

The Republican Party has become authoritarian and unethical to an extreme. The lessons they have taken from the constitutional usurpation they attempt every time they gain the presidency are clear: they believe they have nothing to lose, at least long term, by abusing the power of their offices. They know that the Democrats will rail ineffectually until they win the presidency, at which point the Republicans will use the tools of scandal against them, even if they have to blow up watermelons in the back yard to do it. There are always some unsavory elements in government, but in the modern era this kind of institutional corruption started in the Nixon administration and then escalated through Reagan and Bush II. (Bush I only played really rough when it looked like he was going to lose his election.) Each of those presidencies had serious scandals concerning abuse of presidential power. I don't think it's paranoid to see a pattern.

No, it's not paranoid to see a pattern. All you have to do is work to see what is behind the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) that the Republicans and the media work so well together to build to conceal the anti-Americanism of the modern Republican Party. The Republican corruption is a really big thing in itself, but it is small compared to the effort they are putting into creating an authoritarian state of America.

How long until they declare that the US Constitution is a classified document, and anyone who reads it or quotes from it is a criminal who is to be placed in Prison or simply to be disappeared?

Bush's ten worst mistakes in Iraq

Juan Cole seems to have been watching the David Letterman Show. He has listed the ten worst mistakes Bush has made in Iraq.

I'm surprised he could narrow it down to only ten. Go read them.

One reason for Bush Admin secrecy

Arizona U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton was fired at least in part because he wanted to establish a policy requiring the FBI to record confessions to use in Court. Charlot complained that because the FBI had a policy of not recording confessions that he had lost convictions or had been forced to plea bargain an otherwise strong case down. So why doesn't the FBI want to record confessions?

Glenn Greenwald points out that the only reason for not recording confessions has to be that the FBI does not want the jury to know what the normal procedures they use for interrogating suspect looks like.

He makes a good case. Go read his excellent post.

Bush White House - all politics, no policy

Why have the supposedly smart people in the Bush Administration been dogged by a level of total failure not previously seen in any modern American Administration? The explanation goes back to an observation made by John DiIulio and published by Ron Suskind.

This is actually an old observation from 2002, but it remains true. From Ron Suskind who wrote the book The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (currently $3.98 at Barnes & Noble):

President George W. Bush called John DiIulio "one of the most influential social entrepreneurs in America" when he appointed the University of Pennsylvania professor, author, historian, and domestic-affairs expert to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He was the Bush administration’s big brain, controversial but deeply respected by Republicans and Democrats, academicians and policy players. The appointment was rightfully hailed: DiIulio provided gravity to national policy debates and launched the most innovative of President Bush’s campaign ideas—the faith-based initiative, which he managed until this past February, the last four months from Philadelphia.

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

In a seven-page letter sent a few weeks after our first conversation, DiIulio, who still considers himself a passionate supporter of the president, offers a detailed account and critique of the time he spent in the Bush White House.

"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions," he writes. "There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff. Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue."

Like David Stockman, the whip-smart budget director to Ronald Reagan who twenty years ago revealed that Reagan’s budget numbers didn’t add up, DiIulio is this administration’s first credible, independent witness—a sovereign who supports his president but must, nonetheless, speak his mind.

Sources in the West Wing, echoing DiIulio’s comments, say that even cursory discussion of domestic policy became much less frequent after September 11, 2001, with the exception of Homeland Security. Meanwhile, the department of "Strategery," or the "Strategery Group," depending on the source, has steadily grown. The term, coined in 2000 by Saturday Night Live’s Will Ferrell, started as a joke at the White House, too, but has actually become a term of art meaning the oversight of any activity—from substantive policy to ideological stance to public event—by the president’s political thinkers.

"It’s a revealing shorthand," says one White House staff member. "Yes, the president sometimes trips, rhetorically, but it doesn’t matter as long as we keep our eye on the ball politically."

This approach to policy-making is a fairly radical departure from the customary relationship between White House political directors and policy professionals. Each has always influenced the other, of course, but the political office has rarely been so central to guiding policy in virtually every area, deciding what is promoted and what is tabled.

"Besides the tax cut, which was cut-and-dried during the campaign," DiIulio writes, "and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison with previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism. There is still two years, maybe six, for them to do more and better on domestic policy and, specifically, on the compassion agenda. And, needless to say, 9/11, and now the global war on terror and the new homeland- and national-security plans, must be weighed in the balance. But, as I think Andy Card himself told you in so many words, even allowing for those huge contextual realities, they could stand to find ways of inserting more serious policy fiber into the West Wing diet and engage much less in on-the-fly policy-making by speechmaking." [Emphasis is mine - PPS Editor]

This pretty much explains the failures of the Bush Administration. They decide what they want to do, then determine how it will play out politically to the domestic audience. Having done that, any objections that the policy people bring up regarding how the project is to be done or what the likely results, especially downside results, are ignored.

This is a perfect explanation for why all the White House initiatives seem to be based entirely on political stereotypes and do not seem to have connection to real facts.

A quotation I found fascinating when studying Public Relations is "PERCEPTIONS are the REALITY we work with." Political operators and Public Relations operators differ only in who they are working for. So consider what it means to make Perceptions equal to Reality.

If getting power depends on the Republican base, and the Republican base holds the perception that the Earth was created in 4004 BCE, that evolution is a crock, and that the signs warn that Christ is about to return and all believers will be elevated into Heaven to sit at the right hand of God, then that becomes the Reality that the White House must operate in.

This is the glue that holds to politically active secular Republicans and the politically active Libertarians together with the Social Conservatives. Since the Social Conservatives outnumber both other major Republican sub-groups, the White House will act to please the perceptions of the Social Conservatives. Since the most politically active Social Conservative leaders consider the restrictions of policy-makers to be anathema, the White House must go along to retain power. That is the Reality the White House functions in.

This explains the priorities of the White House culture. It is aided and abetted by the fact that George W. Bush has no real interest in how government actually operates, so that policy operators have no way to get his interest. Bush clearly loves the political process, however, so the Political operators always can get his attention. This sets the priorities for the culture of the White House organization. Bush's intuitive decision process, which excludes rational consideration of policies and ideas feeds into this Politics-over-Policy and ignore-Reality culture. Since Bush considers changing his mind to be a weakness, there is no way for a policy operator who functions in unavoidable facts to reach his interests and convince him to change a decision already published in speeches.

Consider New Orleans. A Budget is a political document, and can be measured for effectiveness by its political repercussions. Funds allocated and actually spent on levees are reality. The results, however, do not become clear until the Hurricane hits. If politics trump policy, and the immediate results of cutting the budget allocations for levee building are obvious, then it becomes easy to ignore the dangers that may or may not occur later during hurricane season.

Since the biggest foreseeable security threats to the U.S. were identified to be

• A major terrorist attack on a large American city,
• A major hurricane hitting New Orleans, and
  
• A major earthquake hitting California, particularly in San Francisco.

the policy wonks knew early on in the Bush administration what they needed to work on. But the priorities the Bush administration came in to office with were

• An anti-missile defense system,
  
• Tax Cuts and
  
• Avoid doing anything that the Clinton White House did.
  

it should be obvious why no preparations were made for the major policy needs listed above. Then the culture and the attitude of George W. Bush ensured that no contrary ideas could be acted on.

So what happened after 9/11? Since a terrorist attack on a major American city had been only a possibility before 9/11 and it had no major national political constituency demanding it, the Bush administration essentially ignored that possibility at the highest levels. It didn't help a bit that the Clinton administration were pushing the new Bush people to give terrorism the highest priority at the highest level. Politically the Bush people catered to their supporters by down-playing everything Clinton. For a clear description of how they did this, read Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror by Richard A. Clarke. (A used copy is $1.99 plus $3.98 postage.)

The well-publicized success of the 19 plane hijackers as they hit the WTC (on TV and the Pentagon changed the White House priorities towards "A major terrorist attack on a large American city" from a mere Policy possibility to Political threat.

The reaction was, of course, political, not policy. First the problem was to control the public information that was gained by investigations into what the administration had done to prevent terrorist actions.

The strong effort to secrecy is that major protection the administration has had. We don't know what they did wrong because we don't know what they actually did. Then the 9/11 Commission was resisted until the resistance became too much of a political liability. Then the 9/11 Commission was established, but effectively neutered. anyone who thinks the final 9/11 report reflects what their investigators actually learned does not understand this White House. They didn't have to be honest, since the Republicans controlled Congress as well as the White House by the time the 9/11 Commission got started.

After the self-protection efforts were started, the next thing was to determine (politically) how to punish the terrorists. The political pressure on the White House required that we attack Afghanistan, so grudgingly, the Bush administration attacked Afghanistan.

But the NeoCons had been pushing for an attack on Iraq to "finish the job left undone during the 1991 Persian Gulf War." Again, this was a political position, with reasonable political justifications if the audience was the American voters. Politically this could be justified if Iraq was connected to the massive political upset caused by 9/11. How that was done is covered in Anatomy of Deceit by Marcy Wheeler and has been somewhat documented in the Firedoglake liveblog of the Libby trial. [If you are interested, click "Liveblog" in the labels below for my posts that link to the full Firedoglake liveblog of the Libby trial.]The important point to be made here is that, again, it was politically motivated. Policy and expert experience in Iraq were specifically excluded from consideration in determining why and how to attack Iraq.

The point of this essay is that this administration has a strict culture in which politics determines what they do, and policy is actively repressed. As long as the Social Conservatives are their largest political block and Bush is in office, this is not going to change.

Notice that 9/11 was not a reason to change the way they make decisions. The result is that when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast, the reaction was the same. First avoid blame, second blame the Democrats in Louisiana, and third make promises. Action has not been any top priority in the White House. They literally don't know how to cause the government to act strongly and effectively.

So I am really glad that I don't live in San Francisco over the next two years or so. The Federal government is not ready for that expected earthquake, since the timing is still unknowable.