The Cherry Orchard

George W. Bush, today:

“I get criticized a lot from different corners, and that’s just part of what happens when you’re President.”

No, it’s really not. Our besieged administration is still trying to pretend that the United States of America still has any confidence in its leadership, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This wall of defense has become so thin that often the personal angle is the Bush administration’s only remaining talking point. For instance, the White House’s official reaction to Jimmy Carter’s blessedly honest statement that this administration’s foreign policy has been the worst in the nation’s history is to attack Carter for committing a social faux pas, as if their biggest concern is how this will affect dinner place seatings at future ex-Presidential gatherings.

I love it that Jimmy Carter is willing to speak the truth, and once again I sincerely appeal to the insiders of the Bush administration to consider the common sense behind an honorable resignation. We are at war, and our country cannot afford another year and a half of confused no-confidence leadership.

I try to keep it fresh here at the Orchard, but sometimes I have to dredge up a story of my own from a few weeks earlier, just because it is my self-appointed role to ask the more established members of our journalistic community to do a better job at reporting the news, and everybody — EVERYBODY — seems to be missing the obvious subtext of the weird showdown taking place in Washington DC right now between the executive and legislative branches over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

So, Take Two. As I said before. To repeat myself. THE ALBERTO GONZALES AFFAIR IS NOT JUST ANOTHER SCANDAL, and THIS IS NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL. Disgraced government officials come and go, and it’s not shattering news when a key member of any US president’s cabinet gets into trouble. But it is shattering news when:

1) that US president is facing intensive investigations of his conduct in office and is stonewalling key pieces of information relevant to these investigations.

2) the disgraced government official is the Attorney General, with vast power to influence (or impede) the progress of criminal and civil investigations involving the White House.

3) this disgraced government official refuses to resign against an absolute barrage of damning testimony and evidence against him, including (now) a highly unusual congressional vote of “no confidence” against him.

One plus one plus one equals three. And it is as clear as glass that the reason Alberto Gonzales is refusing (against all rational advice from both Republicans and Democrats) to resign is that the Bush administration is terrified of what a less sympathetic Attorney General could investigate.

I said it before, and I cannot be the only American doing the math here. Why do the major news outlets not explain this equation to the American people? I truly don’t understand.

Probably the most dramatic moment during last night’s Fox News Republican debate: Rudy Giuliani criticizing outlier candidate Ron Paul for suggesting that the 1991 invasion of Iraq was a primary cause for the September 11 attacks. Here’s Fox’s record of the moment:

“That’s really an extraordinary statement,” Giuliani said, interrupting FOX News panelist Wendell Goler. “That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.”

All the other candidates then clamored for a chance to echo Giuliani’s strong condemnation of Ron Paul. Here’s the only problem: what Paul said is a simple historical fact. It’s not even a contested fact. Every serious history of the events leading up to the September 11 attacks agrees that Saudi rich kid Osama Bin Laden formed Al Qaeda as a direct response to the arrival of USA troops in Saudi Arabia to reverse Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait in 1991. This isn’t something only lefties and Democrats say — it’s something every credible historian is in agreement on. It’s also one of the main points of Lawrence Wright’s bestselling book The Looming Tower, widely considered the most authoritative (and non-partisan) history of Al Qaeda.

So, if Giuliani is standing there with a straight face saying “I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11″ we must conclude that he has not read Lawrence Wright’s book or any other history of Al Qaeda. And yet he believes he has the ability to lead our country’s absolutely critical battle against this enemy — from a position of ignorance about the history of this enemy, one can only assume.

Fighting an enemy from a position of ignorance about that enemy: I thought that was George Bush and Dick Cheney’s unique style, and I thought our country had at least learned the lesson that we need to understand our enemies better before we engage them in battle.

I guess not. The fact that John McCain and other candidates praised Giuliani’s dramatic criticism of truth-teller Ron Paul is pretty disturbing. My respect for a few of these candidates has just dropped a couple of notches. America cannot afford any more military leadership by politicians too haughty or proud to know the basic facts of their enemy’s history.

I’ve now had two good televised looks at Mitt Romney, who many consider the frontrunner for the Republican nomination: a televised debate on MSNBC several days ago, and a Mike Wallace profile on 60 Minutes last night.

My immediate reaction: slick, slick, slick. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Romney sure does look presidential, and his background as a successful venture capitalist and turnaround-artist for troubled companies is impressive. The 60 Minutes shots of his large family — five sons, ten grandchildren — was heartening. But the fact that he has now thrown away the old liberal-friendly views on abortion rights that got him elected as governor of Massachusetts in order to appeal to a pro-life national Republican voter base shows a lack of conviction on social issues. I also haven’t heard him say anything that’s not a safe, generic cliche about the Iraq war or the war against Al Queda or about foreign policy in general, so it seems pretty clear that he is a fix-the-economy, all-business type of politician. There could be worse, but we are at war and I am concerned that his convictions about foreign policy go no deeper than his convictions about abortion.

Why is Mitt Romney the frontrunner? John McCain’s strong convictions on the importance of victory in Iraq show strong principled consistency, but America is perceiving a fervid believer in need of a reality check. As for Rudy Giuliani — well, as a New Yorker I find his candidacy strange and surprising. For years, Rudy was our familiar “bad cop” mayor here in Fun City. He was undoubtedly an honest man and a hard worker, and he was also a familiar face. I’ve seen him on the streets or at events several times in New York City, and never for a minute (before September 11) did anybody think of this straight shooter as presidential material. When he was mayor, many of my friends just thought of him as the enforcer who put Gotti in jail and kept robberies down but also turned Times Square into DisneyWorld New York, and made it a lot scarier to smoke weed on the streets. That was his image, the sum total of it, and today six years after the September 11 attacks I still can’t imagine this rough player winning a national Republican nomination for anything.

So it looks like Mitt Romney is the frontrunner, and he seems smart enough to take whatever heat he gets in this difficult role. I’ll be watching closely and calling the shots right here.

First impressions of the Democratic party’s presidential candidates on parade: they’re all fine, and there is absolutely no reason to consider this a two-person or three-person race at this point.

John Edwards got the most votes in a well-attended Daily Kos poll, and I agree with this result. The blow-dried southerner appears serious, unflappable and appropriately angry about the current state of things. Another candidate who made a good impression on me is New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, more for his earnest body language and focused message than anything else.

Hillary Clinton did just fine, and I have no doubt that she’d be a hardworking, intensely practical President. I admire her very much for her courage and positive attitude. However, she has yet to prove that she can raise voters’ passions as well as she can raise funds, that she can appeal to outsiders as well as knowledgeable insiders, and it’s starting to seem clear that her stiff public persona remains a barrier to her electability.

As for Barack Obama, I’m sorry but I’m still not on this bandwagon at all. His performance last night was mechanical and safe, and I really, really, really don’t care that he has a Kennedy-esque mystique. In fact, I am more and more offended by the idea that anybody should consider this candidate a front-runner just based on his good looks and charisma. He did not particularly distinguish himself in last night’s debate, which adds to my impression that the buzz-to-substance ratio is too high here. Obama cerrtainly has a right to press his candidacy along with the rest of this pack, and there’s still plenty of time for him to win me over. But he’s not going to do it by standing there looking handsome, and I’m sorry to say that seemed to be his core strategy during the debate.

Of course I like Dennis Kucinich, and I’m glad to see him on this stage, just as I’m glad to see him working hard on various fronts in Congress. Kucinich would have been the evening’s designated oddball candidate if Alaska’s Mike Gravel were not there to play the angry clown. Gravel’s just fine, but he’s not going to be our next President.

Chris Dodd is running? I missed that press release. I don’t see him playing much of a role in this election, nor Joe Biden, but maybe I’ll turn out to be wrong.

One final thought: regardless of which of these politicians wins the nomination, they are all doing good work on behalf of significant causes. I’m glad they’re all around, from the staid Dodd to the blustering Gravel, and the only thing that would disappoint me now is if the party were to begin to converge on a front-runner too early. We’ve got a lot more debating to do.

Oh, finally: this stuff is pretty good.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is all over the news this week, following his unconvincing Senate testimony last week (here’s one of the stories going around, and there was a lot of hilarity after President Bush claimed that Gonzales’s testimony helped his case). Still, I have a strange sense that most news outlets aren’t communicating exactly why this is such a high-stakes situation for the Bush administration and for the House/Senate leadership, and why the Bush administration is clinging so stubbornly to the hope that Gonzales will not be eventually forced to resign. There’s a hidden story here, and most Washington DC journalists know it and hint about it, but for some reason few journalists are coming right out and explaining what’s going on in this case.

The fact is, Gonzales is not just another high-ranking Bush appointee. He’s the Attorney General, which means he has the authority to investigate and prosecute anyone suspected of committing a federal crime, including top administration officials up to the level of the President’s top staff, thus encircling the President himself. As a longtime friend of George W. Bush and a key member of the Bush/Cheney team, Alberto Gonzales is not going to prosecute anybody close to the Bush administration for any number of wrongdoings. A different Attorney General, however, might.

Even though the Attorney General is a Presidential appointee, the appointee must be approved by the Senate, and our current Senate is not going to approve a candidate who does not demonstrate a basic willingness to investigate the Executive office independently of Presidential influence. So, if Gonzales were to resign, an extremely contentious nomination/approval process would begin for his replacement, and since this nation cannot survive long without leadership in the Department of Justice, some compromise candidate would have to eventually be approved. This new Attorney General could prove very hazardous for the Bush White House as our Congress and Senate continue to conduct aggressive investigations into the workings of the Executive office.

This is what’s at the core of the Alberto Gonzales showdown: our government is somewhere near a state of constituional crisis, similar to the constitutional crisis of 1973-74. Remember Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre? This was one of the most critical turning points of the Watergate scandal, and it all revolved around the Attorney General’s office.

I’m not sure why so many journalists aren’t stating this clearly to the American people, but the Alberto Gonzales case is all about the viability of the Bush/Cheney administration. And I don’t believe it for a minute when Gonzales says he’s made his own choice not to resign. He’s not resigning because George W. Bush is begging him not to, and I bet he’d zoom out of Washington DC like a rocket if Bush let go of his arm. Gonzales has nothing to gain and nothing to lose at this point, but George W. Bush needs him sitting in that chair.

I was away on a very refreshing vacation for a few days, which means I didn’t watch the evening news (or my regular favorite, Keith Olbermann, or my regular un-favorite, Bill O’Reilly) for about five days in a row. Here’s what I found on my return, when I checked in on the TV sound bites:

1) It’s impossible not to feel sorry for George W. Bush at this point, despite the incredible damage he has done to our country’s security, our country’s budget and our planet’s progress towards international understanding. It’s a telling fact that he has failed to follow the longstanding Presidential tradition of opening the baseball season by throwing out the first ball at a chosen stadium. The reason is obvious: there is no stadium of baseball fans in America, not even in Texas, that wouldn’t boo him off the pitcher’s mound.

But the President did address a captive audience of soldiers at California’s Fort Irwin yesterday, and the tapes show a tired, confused man straining to infuse his own words with conviction. Please watch his body language the next time you catch this politician on TV, and I think you will notice the same thing I’m seeing: Bush barely seems to believe his own words about Iraq anymore. My guess is that there are massive internal divisions plaguing the Bush/Cheney team at this point, and I wonder if the President might be smart enough to start realizing (a few years too late) how badly he has been duped by his closest advisers. The front man is starting to falter, and when I say “front man” I’m not talking about Tony Snow.

2) I’m pretty disgusted at all the talk about Democratic 2008 Presidential candidate fundraising. As I’ve said before, I really don’t give a fuck who’s raised $26 million and who’s raised $25 million. I’ve got one dollar and one vote to offer to any candidate who promises to manage our country’s future responsibly and intelligently, and all this talk of tying up the nomination with big-money bonanzas just makes me feel like we don’t live in a democracy at all

I’m also disgusted at the thought that three senators — Obama, Clinton and Edwards — are spending so much time campaigning for 2008 when there is so much important work the Senate needs to do now. My mind is not yet made up who I will support in this race, but my big one dollar and one vote just might go to the one politician of the three who convinces me that they are working hard NOW to help our country by their actions in the Capitol. Let’s live in the moment, candidates, okay? This type of electoral shenanigans is more palatable in peacetime — in time of war, it’s really very offensive.

3) I’m also sick of our nation’s romantic notions of a savior celebrity President. Most democracies on this planet are led not by their Presidents but by their Prime Ministers, who correspond most closely to our Speaker of the House. As far as I can tell, the most important elected official in the United States government right now is Nancy Pelosi, and I am very impressed by her focus, her cool unflappability and her resolve to forge her own path towards solving our problems. Why the hell shouldn’t I support Nancy Pelosi for President? She’s working hard to run our country, while the rest of these celebrities are working hard to look good on TV. Screw that nonsense — we’ve got problems to solve.

There’s my Spring Break catch-up. Go, Nancy, go!

This Hillary Clinton/Apple Computer ad mash-up that’s been making the rounds is a brilliant piece of filmmaking. However, it’s totally unfair to Hillary Clinton, who does not have a robotic personality (she’s actually just shy and not very telegenic, and in fact she’d be much more likable if she could be programmed), and who has never used her political influence as either a First Lady or a Senator to exert control over the citizens of America.

The fact is, the charge that Hillary Clinton advocates an Orwellian America comes from nowhere and is completely random. This short mock-ad is a very clever work of propaganda, but the cleverness of the underlying approach (make up a lie and put it on YouTube) is more disheartening than the cleverness of the cinematic work is pleasing.

I’m not even particularly a Hillary Clinton fan, by the way — but for all her faults, Hillary Clinton is no totalitarian Big Sister.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is almost definitely going to resign. Yay. One more liar down.

I don’t usually gaze into crystal balls, but here’s a rare Cherry Orchard political prediction just for the fun of it. Dick Cheney will resign the Vice-Presidency “for health reasons” by mid-summer. Condoleeza Rice will replace him, in an attempted “sacrifice fly” by the White House administration. Whether the sac succeeds or not, time will tell.

You read it here first.

So the Scooter Libby verdict is in. Like many Americans, I am happy to hear that Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff has been found guilty (and I’m happy to rub this in Fox News’ face by displaying their write-up of this news). But, of course, the wrong guy is going to jail.

Scooter Libby lied under oath about the justification for the Iraq War, and he’s now facing up to 25 years in jail. Libby’s boss also lied repeatedly to the American people about the justification for the Iraq War, but since he did not lie “under oath” he doesn’t face criminal charges for perjury.

It sure seems to me that anytime a United States Vice President speaks to the American people about a decision to go to war, his words are “under oath”. What oath? Gee, I don’t know … the oath of office, maybe? It’s sad to see a hapless bureaucrat like Scooter Libby face jail time for his boss’s crime, based on the technicality that he lied under oath whereas his boss simply lied.

Enough about that. I still hope — naively, perhaps — to see both Dick Cheney and George W. Bush eventually cooling their heels in minimum security prison for their dishonest and harmful leadership of our country’s foreign policy. But maybe I need to let go of my anger and think about where this country will head next. This is a subject I touched on in a brief piece I just wrote for the PBS blog, Remotely Connected.

The subject of this article is an engaging documentary about an earnest but underfinanced young politician named Jeff Smith trying to beat the odds and get nominated by his Missouri district’s Democratic party to run for U. S. Congress. Does money really count for everything in modern electoral politics? If not, why do we hear so much about certain candidates “locking up” their nominations by fund-raising? If not, why did Tom Vilsack give up? If not, why does the press coverage speak of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the only two viable Democratic Party presidential candidates?

I don’t want the race for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination to be “locked up” in fundraising bonanzas. I want at least ten candidates in this race. I want to hear debates — big, loud, angry, intellectually substantial debates. I want John Edwards to keep throwing curve balls. I want to get Al Gore back in the game (and if I could choose any favorite among them all at this point, Al’s my man). I even want to get Yellin’ Howard Dean and John “Investigate and Indict” Murtha into the mix.

It’s only March 2007, and our two front-runners for the Democratic nomination are already too bland, too careful, too poll-conscious for my tastes. Voters, let’s reject the idea of an early victor and demand a better race.

Of course, bringing this whole thing back to my earliest point of the article, I have to say that I don’t think the next American president will be a Democrat. I’m guessing the next President will be a Republican — John McCain, perhaps, or Tom Ridge, or Condoleeza Rice. That’s because I’m still guessing (and hoping) that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will be out of Washington D. C. and safely ensconced with Scooter Libby and a bunch of other felons in a minimum security prison sometime before the next Presidential election takes place. I’m still guessing Cheney will resign and go to jail first, and whoever Bush picks to replace Cheney will be our next President, because I think Bush will resign and go to jail soon after.

So our next President will be a Republican. But the winner of the 2008 Presidential election will be a Democrat. You heard it here first.