Goodness Gracious! The Truth!

Maureen Dowd on Gates and Rumsfeld:

First Junior took over the house with grandiose plans to remodel it and make it the envy of the neighborhood. But then he played with matches and set the house on fire. So now he's frantically trying to stop the flames from torching the whole block.

Mr. Gates asserted that if America left Iraq in chaos, Iran and Syria could encroach more, and Turkey and Saudi Arabia might jump in to stop the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis by Shiites. "We're already seeing Hezbollah involved in training fighters for Iraq," he said. "I think all of that could spread fairly dramatically."

It was the sort of realistic assessment that never came from Rummy, except when he privately admitted in a classified Nov. 6 memo that their Iraq strategy was "not working well enough or fast enough," offering a silly hodgepodge of wildly tardy or dubious options, like telling the Iraqis to "pull up their socks."

So with the Pentagon deciding whether to Go Big, Go Long or Go Home, Rummy urged the White House to Go Minimalist and simply streamline the spin.

Junior took the advice to manage perceptions by minimizing Rummy two days after he sent the memo. [...]

The old criticisms of whether Mr. Gates massaged intelligence were forgotten; the senators would have embraced an ax-murderer if he had seemed sensible about Iraq.

There was no blathering yesterday about "known unknowns" or "Henny Penny" pessimists. The soft-spoken, vanilla Mr. Gates offered a sharp contrast from the finger-wagging, flavorful Rummy. In a remarkable shift from the mindless bellicosity and jingoism of the last few years, Mr. Gates said he did not favor military action against Iran or Syria.

After lunch the nominee clarified his remarks, saying he had not meant to criticize the troops, that the reversals in Iraq were not their fault. They don't lose battles in Iraq because there are no battles. There's just a counterinsurgency that they can't see and that they weren't prepared or equipped to fight.

Gates hasn't even sat in his office chair yet, and already he's light-years ahead of Rumsfeld, in perception at least.

It remains to be seen, of course, what he can and/or will do, or more correctly, what he will be allowed to do.

A little good news...

As regular readers of the Brain will know, the Owens Valley in Eastern California is one of my favorite places. Thanks to the end of a long court process, the valley is going to get some long overdue environmental relief today. From the LATimes with photos and videos:

INDEPENDENCE, Calif -- Hundreds of spectators led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are expected to gather today to watch the 62-mile-long Lower Owens River ripple anew with its first surge of High Sierra water in nearly a century.

The largest river habitat restoration effort ever attempted in the West (my em) will launch with Villaraigosa's push of a button, opening a steel gate at a dam that has been diverting the Lower Owens' water into the Los Angeles Aqueduct since 1913.

If all goes according to plan, within five years nature will transform the revived river's lazy loops into a lush serpentine oasis of willows and cottonwood trees, wetlands for waterfowl and shorebirds and warm water fisheries for bass, catfish, frogs and crayfish.

Please read the rest and watch the videos.

Suggested reading :

Rivers in the Desert by Margaret Leslie Davis

Water and the California Dream by David Carle

As Mark Twain once said, and California has taken to heart, "Whisky's fer drinkin'. Water's fer fightin' over."

Update:

Passerby left us this comment:

Man, we caught so many trout out of the Owens River one day that we nearly got nauseous cleaning 'em all in the bathtub of our hotel...

Rainbows and browns till our arms were tired. Never seen anything like it.

Not sure those hotel maids ever saw anything like that, either.

Next time, PB, check for this feature, common amongst the better accommodations in the area:



Just look for a lotta cats hangin' around!

Been there ...

The one and only Paul Rieckhoff, citing a story on NPR, via Blondie:

Soldier Tyler Jennings says that when he came home from Iraq last year, he felt so depressed and desperate that he decided to kill himself. Late one night in the middle of May, his wife was out of town, and he felt more scared than he'd felt in gunfights in Iraq. Jennings says he opened the window, tied a noose around his neck and started drinking, "trying to get drunk enough to either slip or just make that decision."

...

In my case, I was sitting in my van with a pistol to my head.

...

Five months before, Jennings had gone to the medical center at Ft. Carson, where a staff member typed up his symptoms: "Crying spells... hopelessness... helplessness... worthlessness." Jennings says that when the sergeants who ran his platoon found out he was having a breakdown and taking drugs, they started to haze him. He decided to attempt suicide when they said that they would eject him from the Army. [my em]

...

Fortunately, when I began to deal with these symptoms (instead of snorting coke and drinking myself into oblivion daily), I was already out of the military and married to an understanding woman who helped me through it. This treatment is downright unconscionable and obscene.

...

It's time for the military to step up. Just last week, they finally released new guidelines for troops suffering from mental health problems in theatre. It's a good start, but just issuing another memo isn't going to make difference.

...

Memos won't do it. Prosecution and jail for officers and NCOs who harass their people when they need serious help will.

Hebeas Corpus

In the truest sense of the term. My pal Lambert reminds me that he and the guys and girls at CorrenteWire have been chasing the 'Bush Gulag' story for over a year. Yesterday I directed you to a post over there about the camp at Stare Kiejkuty, Poland. Today, Lambert follows up with one on the wherabouts of the 7,000 - 35,000 'detainees from the War on Terra' that were presumably interned at the '21st Century Gulag Archipelago':

Let's do some arithmetic on how many prisoners Bush is holding in his gulags.

  1. We know that there are thousands of prisoners (estimates range from 7,000 to 35,000).

  2. Gitmo holds only 500

  3. So, where are the missing thousands? The only alternatives I can think of:

    a. They've been released

    b. They're still in jail

    c. They've been disappeared.

Barring divine intervention, the bodies of the missing thousands occupy time and space in this world. Where are they?

...

Hitler, Stalin, Bush, birds of a feather.

The Army you have ...

ANNISTON, Ala. -- Field upon field of more than 1,000 battered M1 tanks, howitzers and other armored vehicles sit amid weeds here at the 15,000-acre Anniston Army Depot -- the idle, hulking formations symbolic of an Army that is wearing out faster than it is being rebuilt.

...

Equipment shipped back from Iraq is stacking up at all the Army depots: More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.

Despite the work piling up, the Army's depots have been operating at about half their capacity because of a lack of funding for repairs. In the spring, a funding gap caused Anniston and other depots to lose about a month's worth of work, said Brig. Gen. Robert Radin, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir. [my ems]

...

They're gonna be hitchhiking from the airport to the Green Zone soon. Didn't the idiots in the White House think this shit would break? Good God.

Big tip o' the Brain to Montag for the link.

And you people thought I was crazy ...

When I said we should give Saddam the keys back and say, 'never mind' ...

Gates Says U.S. Is Not Winning Iraq War

Think Progress

Incoming Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin's (D-MI) first question to Defense Secretary nominee Robert Gates: "Mr. Gates, do you believe that we're currently winning in Iraq?"

Gates' answer: "No, sir." Watch it:

I can't believe Faux News showed that!

Whatever is in Gates' past, or his present motivation, at least he gave the right answer.

Mutiny at the White House

Steve Young at HuffPo:

I don't want to go Woodward and Bernstein all over you, but last week, just after Air Force 1 lifted off towards a meeting with Iraq's Prime Minister al-Maliki, someone in the administration who had had enough of the President's insistence that he knows what he's doing, sent a message that everyone seems to have missed: an administration mutiny is in the offing.

The coup d'état warning came in the form of a leaked memorandum that national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, had sent Bush three weeks ago describing, as the New York Times editorial put it, "how Iraq was being pulled apart by sectarian hatreds and warning that Mr. Maliki was either 'ignorant of what is going on' or unwilling or unable to stop it."

Some say the President may actually heed the memo and his public pronouncements of Rumsfeldian praise ("Maliki is the right man for the job") prior to dismissal is just the Bush M.O. at work. That Maliki's Medal of Freedom is already in the smelter.

Which gives further indication the warning shot was not aimed towards Maliki, but just above the President himself; a notice to POTUS that if he continues to ignore the reality of his failed strategy in Iraq that the whistleblower(s) just might keep leaking to the American public that what Bush maintains as a victory or nothing policy, is far worse than nothing, That it is, in fact, so disastrous, an administration intimate is willing to jeopardize his position to out the boss.

That White House 'insider' must have realized that the future of the nation, not to mention his own soul, demands the collapse of this administration, and he's helping by outing its seedy machinations by any means possible.

It doesn't matter much if Bush gets the message or not, just that someone does who can take him down. Or get him committed.

Update:

Drips in the White House

The famous discipline of the Bush administration has completely broken down. This level of leaking suggests administration aides no longer feel the sense of cohesion and teamwork - or the fear of retribution - that kept them from leaking in the past. A leaker may go to the papers to make himself or his agency look good, or because the president, or those close to him, aren't listening. But in any case, the public venting of private information suggests factionalism and infighting that can't be peacefully controlled or contained. Even if these were authorized leaks - meant to influence the debate without official fingerprints - it suggests that the Bush administration has so little credibility left that the press and public won't listen unless we think we're eavesdropping.

Even before last week, administration leaking had grown to a steady drip. Senior officials at the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA had already learned to fight their battles by leaking inside stuff and offering anonymous opinions to the papers. (It was an interagency spat of this kind that produced Valerie Plame's outing.) Other leaks have appeared in the many books to be found in the "Finger-Pointing and Recriminations" section at Barnes & Noble.

[...] Perhaps this is the message the struggling administration now wants to send out about Iraq. OK, the president's a liar. But he's not as clueless as he looks.

Clueless or not, he's still a liar.

In the spirit of mutiny, I volunteer to pull Bush's rope when we keelhaul him. I hope the bottom of the ship hasn't been de-barnacled recently, too.

Leahy: Bush Should be "Terrified"

In the Green Mountain Daily, Odum writes about Senator Leahy's address at the post-election party sponsored by the Vermont Democratic party.

And finally there was our Senior Senator, Patrick Leahy. For those who've heard Senator Leahy speak, you know that his delivery can vary quite a bit. It can be easy to tell when he's tired, physically or mentally - so Leahy on the stump doesn't necessarily mean the same thing twice. But Leahy of late has had a fire in his belly, the likes of which we haven't seen in a while. His sadness at the loss of comity and the discarding of basic Constitutional values under the Bush GOP has turned into outrage, and he has been consistently riveting in front of a crowd in recent months.

But since the election, that outrage has turned into inspiration, and it's an inspiration he passed on to the crowd tonight. Like the speakers before him, Leahy was funny, thankful, exuberant... but there was an edge that was very serious. He related a conversation where he was recently asked if President Bush should be "worried" that he was now to be Chair of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. The crowd started cheering.

"No, no" he said, calming the crowd, as if to be prepared for a softening of his rhetoric.

"No, he shouldn't be worried. He should be terrified."

And the room exploded.

Ba da bing!

Two of a kind ...

Will the name Stare Kiejkuty become synonymous with Auschwitz?

Iraq Study Group

Brother Jo Fish echoes my sentiments toward the Baker-Hamilton Report that will be released soon:

Know what? Not interested. I don't think it's going to offer anything more than cover for an idiot president, and the enablers in Congress and his administration who should have been monitoring and overseeing this mess from it's misbegotten inception to it's unseemly demise.

...

This was just a play for time and nothing will happen beyond that. The Chimp ain't gonna take their recommendations and Congress won't force him to unless they defund the mission in Iraq. That ain't gonna happen neither.

...

So all the spin and other hype aside, there will be no good outcome from the whole thing. Yet another 'plan' consigned to the trash heap of history by the Decider and his sycophantic minions. After all, accepting the premise of the report is admitting that the whole Excellent Adventure has been a colosally mis-managed fuck-up...

Stealing Krugman's quote from Gord's post yesterday:

How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bully's ego?

Insurance ... revisited

More on NOLA from our pal Scout Prime:

That's right, the Corps of Engineers is taking a "strategic pause" between essentially completing repair work to broken levees and "strengthening flood protection in New Orleans" according to the NYT

...

Seems the money's tight for the Corps of Engineers (no shit, it's all going to Iraq) and they estimate the city to be at risk until 2010. I posit that if they drag their feet so long, there won't be a NOLA by then. Scout gets to the crux of the biscuit:

... How many more will follow Travelers Ins. out of the area? ...

We'll know in the next few weeks. The big boys will follow Travelers first, once their legal departments determine they won't be answering lawsuits for the next 10 years. "Exposure" is the operative word in the insurance industry and the lowest exposure is what's best for the bottom line. Premiums collected vs. claims paid and all that. Expect the auto insurers to jump also, when they get finished tallying up their claims for all the vehicles destroyed and adjust their reserves. My gut feeling is the government will have to put a federal insurance system in place resembling the 'flood insurance' program they already have. That won't happen until next summer at the earliest.

An all around shitty situation down there. Great thanks to Scout for keeping this in the forefront.

Quote of the Day deux

Paul Krugman

Well, here's a question for those who might be tempted, yet again, to shy away from a confrontation with Mr. Bush over Iraq: How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a bully's ego?

Quote of the Day

The Chief:

... I guess they take us for fools, Honor means nothing to some of these feather merchant sons of bitches ...

If the people who made the mess ...

Are tasked with cleaning it up, odds are you'll have a bigger mess.

...

The people writing the lessons learned on the Iraq disaster are the very people who created it, and who have a vital stake in rewriting history before anybody figures out they're the ones responsible for one of history's most profound fiascos.

...

These are the geniouses who are now calling for more troops.

Hel-lo, McFly?

These are the same geniouses who called General Shinseki a traitor when he advised Congress of the need for 250,000 troops or more before the balloon went up. These are the same people who believed it would be over in six months. These are the same people who refused to learn the lessons of Gulf 1, when we needed a half-million boots to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, analogous to liberating Rhode Island. Iraq is 20 times the size of Kuwait with 10 times as many people, who don't like us, and serious sectarian divisions.

...

Insurgent forces, especially successful ones like the ones we face in Iraq, don't engage in decisive battles with superior, conventional military units. That's Asymmetric Warfare 101 stuff. It doesn't surprise me that Kristol doesn't know that, but why anybody still listens to Kristol or any of his cronies in the Big Brother Broadcast Network is a mystery mini-series to me.

...

You could put a half-million troops on the ground now but all they will be are targets for both sides. Those of you old enough to remember Vietnam will recognize the strategy all too well. We had 500,000 under arms in that toilet and look what it got us. That's where we should have learned our lessons.

It's time to get out and let the Iraqis sort out what works for them. Diplomatically, we should enlist Iran and Syria's aid to prevent a failed state existing between them, as Chuck Hagel said yesterday.

Unfortunately, I don't think the Chimp is ready to make that act of contrition.

The last honest Republican

That would be Chuck Hagel:

...

No, that's not the point. Of course the Iranians and Syrians are not going to come to our assistance. Of course not. But they are going to respond in their own self-interest. All nations respond in their own self-interests. Tallyrand once said that nations don't have friends. They have interests. He was right. Ahh, it's not in the interest of Syria or Jordan or Iran to have a failed state that would be a complete mess for the middle east.

Why did the Iranians help us in Afghanistan? Why did they cooperate with us in Afghanistan on intelligence matters and other issues? Because they didn't want a failed state next to them which comes with all the problems. They didn't want heroin moving into their borders. What we're not getting here, is we're not getting a full and comprehensive wide-lens appreciation of interests. And the other fact is that there will be no peace in the middle east which we haven't talked about

...

And he calls Holy Joe on his stupid, Bush-sucking, warmongering, bullshit. Hagel's the only Rethug I have any respect for.

Insurance

My good pal Scout Prime was on my ass about this first thing this morning (as well as a whole bunch of other bloggers I see ... heh ... she's a pit bull).

St. Paul Travelers Cos. Inc., Louisiana's largest commercial insurance provider, plans to cancel all its commercial property policies in the New Orleans area next year, sparking fears that other insurers will follow and slow the region's economic recovery.

While the St. Paul, Minn., company refused to say how many commercial policies will be affected or specify where the cuts will be in South Louisiana, two insurance brokers who were briefed by the company this week say Travelers will not renew any property insurance for businesses in Orleans, Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard and eastern St. Tammany parishes. Cuts will also affect individual businesses in other parts of South Louisiana, including St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes.

...

I showed this to Mrs. F, an executive in Japan's largest insurance company, and she agrees that other insurers will most likely follow suit. Any excuse to limit exposure. The insurance companies will all jump on this statement by the insurance commissioner:

...

"They cited the state of the rebuilding of our levee system as the primary reason for their decision," [State Insurance Commissioner Jim] Donelon said.

...

The one to blame for this is your Commander-in-Chief and what he's done to FEMA and the entire emergency management infrastructure of the federal government. Don't expect anything to happen in NOLA until the Corps of Engineers rebuilds the levees to withstand Cat 4 and 5 storms. The insurers won't risk their bottom line to underwrite properties that can be washed away as easily as they were during Katrina. Let's hope something can be done before too much time passes and NOLA becomes nothing but a fond memory.

And just an observation. I give Mrs. F the willies when I can speak of combat, death, and destruction in a cool and detached manner. She does the same thing to me when she can talk about the value of a human life or property in purely clinical, actuarial, bottom line terms.

Heroes vs. Whores

A little from the lovely Eleanor Clift:

...Webb could have asked how the Bush girls are doing, partying their way across Argentina. He could have told Bush he was worried about his son; the vehicle next to him was blown up recently, killing three Marines. Given the contrast between their respective offspring, Webb showed restraint.

...

I still say Webb shoulda put the Coward-in-Chief on his ass. Goes to show, in both cases, the peanut doesn't fall far from the tree. Good article.

Update:

Jo Fish:

...

It would be nice if the one George was more careful and intellectually honest than the other, but apparently that's not to be. Interesting how we get two fools named George in one city and both are so full of themselves that they can never be wrong, isn't it?

...

Housekeeping

As you'll notice, thanks to FeedBurner, you can now get the Brain on any newsreader or even your cellphone or Blackberry (or via email, just fill out the form). Just see the 'Feeds' section in the left sidebar and click on the service you use.

Quote of the Day

Driftglass:

...

To be sure, on November 7th, the Right certainly got their collective noses bloodied and asses sawed off and served to them on the good china.

This happened when a majority of the voting public finally showed its contempt for a clique that had literally done nothing with its One Party Rule but endlessly hector everyone else on morality, while happily giving aid, shelter and comfort to a menagerie of Pious, Jebus-luvin' liars, traitors, briber takers, bribe makers, war profiteers, war criminals, looters, child sex predators and, just for goofs, gay-hooker-frequenting, meth smoking preachers ... so long as they puked up the correct slogans or voted the right way.


...