News n Notes from the Web

November 27, 2004 - New York Times
The Fear Born of a Much Too Personal Look at Jihad
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN - REMEN, Germany

THE first thing to know about the woman known widely here as Doris Glück is that Doris Glück is not her real name. She won't tell you her given name, or even her official new name - provided by the German police - beyond the first name and initial, Regina S. She won't say where she lives, either, and when she meets you at the railroad station in Bremen, she is clearly anxious to get away quickly lest she meet someone who knows her.

About a month ago, under the pseudonym Doris Glück, she published a book in Germany, "I Was Married to a Holy Warrior," in which she described how she fell in love with an Egyptian, married him and then watched, appalled, as he became progressively more militant and, finally, fully engaged in jihad.

The worst moment came in the mid-1990's in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where she and her now ex-husband had gone to help the Muslim side in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. (In the book she calls him by a pseudonym, Omar, to forestall any effort he might have made to block publication had she used his real name, Reda Seyam.) One day, she was taken to a place near a mountain, she says, where she became an involuntary witness to the revenge execution of three Serbian men, one of them by beheading.

After that, she came back to her native Germany where, eventually, the intelligence service gave her a new identity as Regina S., she said. She undergoes regular debriefings as the German police collect information on Muslim militants in Europe.

"I can't travel on a plane or in a train," she said. "I'm nervous when I'm near a train station because many people know me, and also because my ex-husband lives in Germany, and maybe he will be visiting someplace with his children. I don't fear that he will kill me, but if he went to friends of his and told them that he found me, and they tortured me or beheaded me ..." Her voice trailed off and she looked out the window of the out-of-the-way restaurant she had chosen for an interview.

And then she told her story from the beginning, a story of love, politics and war, and how a woman in her late 40's became an informant for the German criminal intelligence police. "I wouldn't say that I was a spy," she said of her years living close to the Muslim struggle, especially in Bosnia, "but I started to pay attention to what was going on. That's why I'm in a witness protection program, because I saw a lot."

Flashback to 1987: She was in a cafe in Bonn on a business trip (she lived in Mannheim and worked in cosmetics sales) and she noticed a man with brilliant eyes, like Omar Sharif's, she said. They met, and the man in question, an Egyptian tourist, asked her for help in placing a newspaper ad seeking a German wife. She helped with the ad, and there were some responses to it, but five weeks later, the two were married.

IN their first seven years of marriage, she said, "my husband drank liquor, he had no beard, he didn't go to the mosque." But in 1994, the same year he became a German citizen, he broke his arm in a bicycle accident. With time on his hands, he started going to a mosque in Heidelberg, the university town along the Rhine where they were living, and before his wife knew it, he had committed himself to the Islamic cause.

Along the way, at Omar's request, Regina S. converted to Islam, taking the name Aysha, after one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad and also the name of her mother-in-law.

"Islam is a wonderful thing," she said, "but they destroyed that in me, because my ex-husband hates unbelievers. He thinks it's O.K. to kill unbelievers."

Indeed, Mr. Seyam is suspected by the German police of being an Islamic militant, though there is no evidence that he broke any German law. According to German news reports, he spent a year in prison in Indonesia, accused of links to terrorist groups, but as a German citizen who had committed no crime in Germany, he was able to return in 2003. He has been living here ever since, under 24-hour surveillance and receiving child support payments from the state for the five children he has by a second wife.

Mr. Seyam, reached by phone at his home in Berlin, was dismissive about the book.
"What she has said about me does not disturb me very much, because I and the people who are near to me know what kind of a character I have," he said. "But what she has written about Islam, that's something that troubled me very much because it is untrue."
According to her, Mr. Seyam worked for a German aid agency, People Helping People, though his real purpose in Bosnia was to fight in the Muslim cause, mainly by making videotapes of anti-Muslim atrocities and anti-Serb resistance, she said.

"In Bosnia, he wanted me to wear a head scarf and long clothes," she said. After a while he brought her a burka, which covers the entire face and body, and she wore it even though she hated it, she said.

During their time in Bosnia, Mr. Seyam took his second wife, the widow of a man killed in the fighting, something, she said, that she protested furiously. In his interview, Mr. Seyam said his wife agreed to the second marriage because she was unable to have children.

But one day in 1996, she said, she went with her husband and others to the place near a mountain where three Serbs were executed, an incident that her husband filmed. One victim was shot to death by a group of women whose husbands or sons, he told her, had been killed by Serbs. "Then there was a second man, a Serb, on his knees," Ms. Glück said. "I saw a big knife and then I saw his head cut off. I sleep with this memory every night. Afterwards, the mujahedeen played football with the head. Then a third Serb was shot by the men. "I was so shocked that I couldn't tell where my husband was, if he was one of the men who shot, or if he only filmed."

MR. SEYAM said he had never taken his wife to see an execution, though, he said, she did watch videotapes of executions.
In any case, she returned to Germany for a few months, and though she went back to Bosnia for a time, she lived for most of the next several years in Germany, apart from him. Still, he visited her there from time to time, and after he moved to Saudi Arabia, where he opened a media production company, Ms. Glück rejoined him at the end of 2000.
But in January 2001, she decided to get a divorce and she returned to Germany, never to see him again.

"I went with him to Saudi Arabia because he said he had changed his life, and then I saw that he hadn't changed," Ms. Glück said, explaining how it could be that even after the beheading, it took her five years to make a final break. She does not deny that she was deeply in love with her husband, and like many people in a marriage that is no longer tenable, she clung to it far longer than she should have. "For me," she said, "Islam is a wonderful religion, but I didn't want to live in a sack."

Souad Mekhennet contributed reporting from Bremen and Frankfurt for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Anatomy Of A Crushing Political Defeat
By Arianna Huffington - 3 November 2004

This election was not stolen. It was lost by the Kerry campaign.

The reason it's so important to make this crystal clear — even as Kerry's concession speech is still ringing in our ears — is that to the victors go not only the spoils but the explanations. And the Republicans are framing their victory as the triumph of conservative moral values and the wedge cultural issues they exploited throughout the campaign.

But it wasn't gay marriage that did the Democrats in; it was the fatal decision to make the pursuit of undecided voters the overarching strategy of the Kerry campaign.

This meant that at every turn the campaign chose caution over boldness so as not to offend the undecideds who, as a group, long to be soothed and reassured rather than challenged and inspired.

The fixation on undecided voters turned a campaign that should have been about big ideas, big decisions, and the very, very big differences between the worldviews of John Kerry and George Bush — both on national security and domestic priorities — into a narrow trench war fought over ludicrous non-issues like whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant a Purple Heart.

This timid, spineless, walking-on-eggshells strategy — with no central theme or moral vision — played right into the hands of the Bush-Cheney team's portrayal of Kerry as an unprincipled, equivocating flip-flopper who, in a time of war and national unease, stood for nothing other than his desire to become president.

The Republicans spent a hundred million dollars selling this image of Kerry to the public. But the public would not have bought it if the Kerry campaign had run a bold, visionary race that at every moment and every corner contradicted the caricature.

Kerry's advisors were so obsessed with not upsetting America's fence-sitting voters they ended up driving the Kerry bandwagon straight over the edge of the Grand Canyon, where the candidate proclaimed that even if he knew then what we all know now — that there were no WMD in Iraq — he still would have voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

This equivocation was not an accidental slip. It was the result of a strategic decision — once again geared to undecided voters — not to take a decisive, contrary position on Iraq. In doing so, the Kerry camp failed to recognize that this election was a referendum on the president's leadership on the war on terror. (Jamie Rubin, who had been hired by the campaign as a foreign-policy advisor, went so far as to tell the Washington Post that Kerry, too, would likely have invaded Iraq.)

It was only after the polls started going south for Kerry, with the president opening a double-digit lead according to some surveys, that his campaign began to rethink this disastrous approach. The conventional wisdom had it that it was the Swift Boat attacks that were responsible for Kerry's late-summer drop in the polls but, in fact, it was the vacuum left by the lack of a powerful opposing narrative to the president's message on the war on terror — and whether Iraq was central to it — that allowed the attacks on Kerry's leadership and war record to take root.

We got a hint of what might have been when Kerry temporarily put aside the obsession with undecideds and gave a bold, unequivocal speech at New York University on Sept. 20 eviscerating the president's position on Iraq. This speech set the scene for Kerry's triumph in the first debate.

Once Kerry belatedly began taking on the president on the war on terror and the war on Iraq — "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" — he started to prevail on what the president considered his unassailable turf.

You would have thought that keeping up this line of attack day in and day out would have clearly emerged as the winning strategy — especially since the morning papers and the nightly news were filled with stories on the tragic events in Iraq, the CIA's no al-Qaida/Saddam link report, and the Duelfer no-WMD report.

Instead, those in charge of the Kerry campaign ignored this giant, blood-red elephant standing in the middle of the room and allowed themselves to be mesmerized by polling and focus group data that convinced them that domestic issues like jobs and health care were the way to win.

The Clintonistas who were having a greater and greater sway over the campaign — including Joe Lockhart, James Carville and the former president himself — were convinced it was "the economy, stupid" all over again, which dovetailed perfectly with the beliefs of chief strategist Bob Shrum and campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill.

But what worked for Clinton in the '90s completely failed Kerry in 2004, at a time of war, fear and anxiety about more terrorist attacks. And even when it came to domestic issues, the message was tailored to the undecideds.

Bolder, more passionate language that Kerry had used during the primary — like calling companies hiding their profits in tax shelters "the Benedict Arnolds of corporate America" — was dropped for fear of scaring off undecideds and Wall Street. Or was it Wall Street undecideds? ("This was very unfortunate language," Roger Altman, Clinton's Deputy Treasury Secretary told me during the campaign. "We've buried it." And indeed, the phrase was quickly and quietly deleted from the Kerry Web site.)

Sure, Kerry spoke about Iraq until the end (how could he not?), but the majority of the speeches, press releases and ads coming out of the campaign, including Kerry's radio address to the nation 10 days before the election, were on domestic issues.

The fact that Kerry lost in Ohio, which had seen 232,000 jobs evaporate and 114,000 people lose their health insurance during the Bush years, shows how wrong was the polling data the campaign based its decisions on.

With Iraq burning, WMD missing, jobs at Herbert Hoover-levels, flu shots nowhere to be found, gas prices through the roof, and Osama bin Laden back on the scene looking tanned, rested, and ready to rumble, this should have been a can't-lose election for the Democrats. Especially since they were more unified than ever before, had raised as much money as the Republicans, and were appealing to a country where 55 percent of voters believed we were headed in the wrong direction.

But lose it they did.

So the question inevitably becomes: What now?

Already there are those in the party convinced that, in the interest of expediency, Democrats need to put forth more "centrist" candidates — i.e. Republican-lite candidates — who can make inroads in the all-red middle of the country.

I'm sorry to pour salt on raw wounds, but isn't that what Tom Daschle did? He even ran ads showing himself hugging the president! But South Dakotans refused to embrace this lily-livered tactic. Because, ultimately, copycat candidates fail in the way "me-too" brands do.

Unless the Democratic Party wants to become a permanent minority party, there is no alternative but to return to the idealism, boldness and generosity of spirit that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK and the short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy.

Otherwise, the Republicans will continue their winning ways, convincing tens of millions of hard working Americans to vote for them even as they cut their services and send their children off to die in an unjust war.
Democrats have a winning message. They just have to trust it enough to deliver it. This time they clearly didn't.
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The Bush Revolution
November 17, 2004 - New York Times
By Nicholas D. Kristoff - OpEd Columnist

Having crushed the resistance in Falluja, President Bush is now trying to do the same at the State Department and the C.I.A. Colin Powell may have "resigned," but don't kid yourself - the White House didn't want him. Mr. Powell's own statement said that he and Mr. Bush "came to the mutual agreement that it would be appropriate for me to leave at this time." The real winner in this foreign policy wrestling match is Dick Cheney. One of his former aides, Stephen Hadley, will now be the national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice was run over so many times by Mr. Cheney in the first term that she'll be docile at State.

In a conversation with the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, Mr. Powell once referred in frustration to Mr. Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz as "[expletive] crazies," according to a recent British biography of Tony Blair. Mr. Powell had a point, but they're getting the last laugh. The central question of President Bush's second term is this: Will he shaft his Christian-right supporters, since he doesn't need them any more, and try to secure his legacy with moderate policies that might unite the country? Or, with no re-election to worry about, will he pursue revolutionary changes on the right? To me, it looks increasingly like the latter.

Many liberals are still enraged at Mr. Powell for misleading the world about Iraqi W.M.D. in his U.N. speech. Fair enough. But wait six months, and they'll fervently wish they had him back. The reality is that Mr. Powell was a voice of reason in foreign policy discussions ranging from Pakistan to Venezuela. Without him, foreign relations would have been even more catastrophic. On North Korea, Iraq and Europe, Mr. Powell was like the man in the circus who follows the elephants, cleaning up their messes. Yet his even more useful role in the administration was not sensible diplomacy. It was his willingness to disagree, to offer another viewpoint. He pushed back. Condoleezza Rice is smart, diligent and honest, but she has zero record of pushing back. And that's what Mr. Bush needs - somebody besides Laura who will tell him when he's about to do something stupid. He needs lots of those somebodies in the intelligence community, whose crucial role is not so much to steal secrets abroad but to resist political pressures at home and offer unwelcome analyses. That will be much less likely now that heads are rolling down the corridors of the C.I.A.'s directorate of operations.

It's fair to replace Mr. Powell, a political appointee, but the spies being pushed out at Langley are career professionals. The intelligence community's best assets aren't those spying for us in foreign capitals, but the thousands of Americans at the C.I.A., the D.I.A., the N.S.A. and the rest of the alphabet soup of spookdom. Their morale - already bad - will suffer a further dive, along with their effectiveness. So what should we expect in a second term?

A squeeze on North Korea The hawks have been impatient with what they see as the coddling of North Korea, and unless there is progress soon, there will be a push to get tougher and apply sanctions.
A continued embrace of Ariel Sharon With Mr. Powell out, there will be no one in the administration pushing Mr. Bush toward a more balanced policy. Tony Blair will try, but he's too far away.
A collision with Iran When Iran's new agreement with Europe on curbing its nuclear programs falls apart, the U.S. will resume its push for regime change in Iran (ironically, pushing for regime change in Iran and Cuba is what keeps those regimes in power). Then the U.S. will discuss whether to look the other way as Israel launches airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
Dithering on Darfur Mr. Powell traveled to Darfur, proclaimed the slaughter there to be genocide and quietly pushed within the administration to get some action. I wish he had done much more, but, by contrast, the White House has been lackadaisical.

A litmus test of foreign policy prospects will be whether John Bolton, a genial raptor among the doves at State, is promoted to be its deputy secretary. For liberals who have been wavering on whether to move to New Zealand, that would be a sign to head for the airport.
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Iraq at the Tipping Point
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN OP-ED COLUMNIST
November 18, 2004 - New York Times

Camp Falluja, Iraq: Every time I visit Iraq, I leave asking myself the same question: If you total up all the positives and negatives, where does the balance come out? I'd say the score is still 4 to 4. We can still emerge with a decent outcome. And the whole thing could still end very badly. There's only one thing one can say for sure today: you won't need to wait much longer for the tipping point. Either the elections for a new governing body happen by the end of January, as scheduled, and the rout of Saddam loyalists in Falluja is consolidated and extended throughout the Sunni triangle, or not. If it's the former, there are still myriad challenges ahead, but you can be somewhat hopeful. If it's the latter, we've got a total fiasco on our hands.

I came out to the Falluja front in a small press pool accompanying the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, who flew in to inspect the toughest problems in Iraq firsthand. Most of the fighting in Falluja was over by the time we arrived at this headquarters compound, although the tom-tom beat of 155-millimeter howitzers, still pumping rounds into the city, was constant. Here are the questions I came with and the answers I took away:

How important is taking Falluja? Huge. Falluja was to the Iraqi insurgency what Afghanistan was to Osama bin Laden. It was the safe haven where militants could, with total impunity, plan operations, stockpile weapons and connect the suicide bombers from abroad with their Iraqi handlers. That's gone. One arms cache alone found here had 49,000 pieces of ordnance, ranging from mortars to ammo rounds. Another arms cache blown up last week kept exploding for 45 minutes after it was hit, a senior U.S. officer said.

What happens next in Falluja? The plan is for Iraqi Army, police and National Guard units to move in, restore order and hold the place so the insurgents can't retake it and voting can be conducted in January. Whether the Iraqi Army can do that is unclear. Don't believe any of the big numbers that people in Washington throw around about how many Iraqi security people we have trained. Those numbers are meaningless.

The reality is this: Where you have individual Iraqi police, National Guard and Army commanders who have bravely stepped forward to serve the new Iraq and are willing to lead - despite intimidation efforts by insurgents - you have effective units. Where you don't have committed Iraqi leaders, all you have are Iraqi men collecting paychecks who will flee at the first sign of danger. The good news: there are pockets of Iraqi leaders emerging throughout the Army and police. The bad news: there are still way too few of them.

Then do we have enough U.S. troops? No way. U.S. commanders are constantly having to make hard choices between deploying troops to quell a firefight in one place or using them to prevent one from breaking out in another. With two months before elections and the campaign about to start, Iraq remains highly insecure. And with most aid workers having pulled out, U.S. forces have to do everything. Units of the First Cavalry in Baghdad might be fighting militants in Sadr City in the morning, dealing with sewage problems in the afternoon and teaching democracy in the evening. Some of these young soldiers already have three Purple Hearts from having survived that many grenade attacks in Baghdad.

What have we learned from the many insurgents captured in Falluja? A vast majority are Iraqi Sunnis, with only a few foreign fighters. This is an Iraqi Sunni rebellion, but a senior Iraqi official told me that they had discovered Saddam loyalists who were using Aleppo, Syria, to regroup and plan operations.

Bottom line? Iraq is a country still on life support, and U.S. troops are the artificial lungs and heart. At the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit in Babil Province, which I visited, 211 marines have been injured in fighting in the past few months. But 180 of them insisted on returning to duty after being injured. U.S. forces still have a strong will to win.

But another thing remains impressively strong: The insurgents will go to any lengths to intimidate Iraqis away from joining the new government. Too many people, from cleaning women to deputy ministers, are being shot. The insurgents' strategy is intimidation. The U.S. strategy is Iraqification. This is the struggle - and the intimidators are doing way too well. Without a secure environment in which its new leadership can be elected and comfortably operate, Iraq will never be able to breathe on its own, and U.S. troops will have to be here forever.
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A Plague of Toadies
by Maureen Dowd - New York Times Columnist
Washington

I went to see the magical "Pericles'' at the Shakespeare Theater the other night. In ancient Greece, the prince of Tyre tires of all the yes men around him. He chooses to trust the one courtier who intrepidly tells him: "They do abuse the king that flatter him. ... Whereas reproof, obedient and in order, fits kings, as they are men, for they may err.'' Not flatter the king? Listen to dissenting viewpoints? Rulers who admit they've erred? It's all so B.C. (Before Cheney).

Now, in the 21st-century reign of King George II, flattery is mandatory, dissent is forbidden, and erring without admitting error is the best way to get ahead. President Bush is purging the naysayers who tried to temper crusted-nut-bar Dick Cheney and the neocon crazies on Iraq. First, faith trumped facts. Now, loyalty trumps competence. W., who was the loyalty enforcer for his father's administration, is now the loyalty enforcer for his own. Those promoted to be in charge of our security, diplomacy and civil liberties were rewarded for being more loyal to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney than to the truth.

The president and vice president are dispatching their toadies to the agencies to quell dissent. The crackdown seems bizarre, since hardly anyone dared to disagree with them anyway and there were plenty willing to twist the truth for them. Consider George Tenet, who assured Mr. Bush that the weak case on Iraqi W.M.D. was "a slam-dunk.'' And Colin Powell, who caved and made the bogus U.N. case for war. Then, when he wanted to stay a bit longer to explore Mideast opportunities arising from Arafat's death, he got shoved out by a president irked by the diplomat's ambivalence and popularity.

Mr. Bush prefers more panting enablers, like Alberto Gonzales. You wanna fry criminals or torture prisoners? Sure thing, boss. W. and Vice want to extend their personal control over bureaucracies they thought had impeded their foreign policy. It's alarming to learn that they regard their first-term foreign policy - a trumped-up war and bungled occupation, an estrangement from our old allies and proliferating nuclear ambitions in North Korea, Iran and Russia - as impeded. What will an untrammeled one look like? The post-election hubris has infected Capitol Hill. Law-and-order House Republicans changed the rules so Tom DeLay can stay as majority leader even if he's indicted; Senate Republicans are threatening to rule Democratic filibusters out of order. In 2002, Cheney & Co. set up their own C.I.A. in the Pentagon to bypass the C.I.A. and conjure up evidence on Iraqi W.M.D. Now Mr. Cheney has sent his lackey, Porter Goss, who helped him try to suffocate the 9/11 commission, to bully the C.I.A. into falling into line. In an ominous echo of the old loyalty oaths, Mr. Goss has warned employees at the agency that their job is to "support the administration and its policies in our work.''

Mr. Bush doesn't want any more leaks, like the one showing that he was told two months before invading Iraq that such a move could lead to violent internal conflict and more support for radical Islamists. Mr. Goss has managed to make the dysfunctional C.I.A. even more dysfunctional. Instead of going after Al Qaeda, he's busy purging top-level officials who had been going after Al Qaeda - replacing them with his coterie of hacks from Capitol Hill. Mr. Cheney is letting his old mentor, Rummy, stay on. What does it matter if the Rummy doctrine - dangerously thin allotments of forces, no exit strategy, snatching State Department occupation duties and then screwing them up - has botched the Iraq mission and left the military so strapped it's calling back old, out-of-shape reservists to active service?

Condi Rice and Stephen Hadley did not do their jobs before 9/11 in coordinating the fight against Al Qaeda, and they did not do their jobs after 9/11 in preventing the debacle in Iraq. They not only suppressed evidence Americans needed to know that would have debunked the neocons' hyped-up case for invading Iraq; they helped shovel hooey into the president's speeches. Dr. Rice pitched in to help Dr. No whip up that imaginary mushroom cloud. Condi's life story may be inspirational. But the way she got the State Department job is not. Not only are the Bush officials who failed to protect the country and misled us into war not losing their jobs. They're getting promoted.
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Reading Bush's Reshuffle

By Mike McNamee - Business Week - NEWS ANALYSIS - 16 Nov 2004

How he acts on three key questions will reveal whether he plans to add fresh smarts to the Cabinet or reward loyal servants
Turns out it's really shaping up to be a second-term shakeup. With Secretary of State Colin L. Powell leading three other Cabinet officers out the door on Nov. 15, the recasting of the Bush Administration is well underway. From the inner-circle Cabinet jobs of Powell and departing Attorney General John Ashcroft, to the netherland vacancies in the Education, Energy, and Agriculture Depts., President George W. Bush has plenty of opportunities now to spend all the "political capital" he talked about at his post-election press conference, with his 3.5 million voter margin of victory.

Only one of the six open slots has been filled so far, so it's too early to assess how Bush's Round Two Team will shape up. But here are some key indicators to watch as the transition -- Washington's favorite quadrennial sporting event -- unfolds. The answers to four questions will reveal much about whether the Bush Administration will tackle the second term with fresh blood and renewed vigor, or if it sees the next four years as just more of the same:

Will Bush finish the job? Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld got his first wish: He has outlasted Powell, his fierce opponent in a long series of intramural battles over foreign policy and the Iraq war. But if Bush is smart, he won't let Rummy savor that victory for long. Rumsfeld's stubborn refusal to plan for post-war conditions in Iraq fueled the mess in that beleaguered country. This week's military success in Fallujah doesn't make the U.S. endgame any clearer. Bush convinced voters not to change the country's Commander-in-Chief mid-war -- but that rule doesn't apply to the President's underlings. New realism on Iraq requires new leadership.

Does the same rule extend to the economic team? So far, only Commerce Secretary Don Evans -- a longtime Bush friend and sounding board whose main role was to help sell tax cuts on Capitol Hill -- has stepped down. Two behind-the-scenes White House officials -- National Economic Council Director Stephen Friedman and Council of Economic Advisers Chairman N. Gregory Mankiw -- are said to be planning voluntary exits.

Some disgruntled Republicans who'd like to see more creative thinking in economic policy hope that Treasury Secretary John W. Snow will follow them. But with overhauls for Social Security and the tax code on his agenda, Bush appears to want continuity in that key post.

Will Bush reward loyalty at the expense of competence? The reported promotion of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to Secretary of State is a bad sign. The former Stanford University provost taught Bush most of what he knows about foreign policy and is his prism for viewing the world. But she has struggled to master the operations of the National Security Council, let alone the added task of coordinating Iraqi reconstruction. By putting Condi in charge of the vast bureaucracy at Foggy Bottom, Bush sends a message: It's more important to be right beside him than to be right.

Will Bush burrow in or reach out? The President's first post-election appointment -- naming White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to succeed Ashcroft at the Justice Dept. -- hints that the new Cabinet will be even more insular than the first. Gonzales came to Washington with Bush from Austin and has spent the last four years defending his boss's dubious arguments about prisoner detention and torture.

At the Education Dept., a Texan-for-Texan switch appears to be in the works, as White House Domestic Policy Adviser Margaret Spellings is reportedly poised to replace Secretary Rod Paige. There's no further news on who will replace Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham or Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman.

Arguably, though, with four years of Washington experience under their belts, Bush's Austin retainers are now ready for the big jobs. But in an Administration already known for wearing blinders, fresh viewpoints would be especially welcome.
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Can we save country from its leaders?

Monday, November 8, 2004 - seattle Post-Intelligencer - Wendy E. Smith, Guest Columnist


John Edwards is right. There are two Americas, and they don't intersect. They don't even appear to understand each other.
When I woke up on Nov. 3 and switched on the radio, that realization hit me like a ton of bricks. Contrary to my predictions, we had had a relatively fair election and the American people (or something over half of them) had democratically voted for an extremist Christian regime.

I had the radio tuned to NPR, which was hosting a national call-in show. The first caller was a Bush supporter from Tucson. He expressed his frustration that he didn't have a real choice in presidential candidates and was forced to vote for a candidate whose policies he didn't completely support. As a progressive, this sounded very familiar to me but the man had said he was a conservative, so I paid attention. Did he want an even more right-wing candidate to vote for (if such can be imagined)? No. It turned out that he had wished he could vote for John Kerry but "couldn't possibly ever vote for a candidate who isn't 'pro-life.' " He said that until Democrats understood the overriding importance of such "moral values," they would never win in the red states. The next caller was a woman from Pennsylvania. She had been busting her butt for Kerry for weeks and was now in despair. She stated that she simply couldn't understand the people who had voted for Bush: "These people want to control what happens in my bedroom, in my body, but they are A-OK with us having killed 100,000 Iraqis, and mounting. I just don't get them."

That was when the bricks hit. I felt lost. I knew what I was planning to do in the case of a stolen election (civil disobedience in the service of saving our democracy). I knew what I was going to do if Kerry won (give him three days to rest and then start pounding on his door with complaints about his Middle East policies). But, I had no idea what to do now. For months, Kerry has been conspicuously going to church all over the country and shooting ducks and geese like crazy in between -- all in an effort to convince the people in the red states that he "gets them." It was all in vain. No amount of avian carcasses would have helped. Half the people in this country believe in a god who forbids stem cell research but seems to have forgotten his own First Commandment.

In the other America, we believe that killing all those Iraqis (not to mention Afghanis and, indirectly, Palestinians) is not only wrong but also terribly hazardous to our own security. We have different "moral values." And we don't give a rat's ass what other people do in their bedrooms. But we, my friends, are not in the majority.

We in that other America had better learn to speak our own morality, which is a humanistic one, in an emotionally convincing fashion. More important, though, we had better take a good hard look at what is happening in the Christian extremist America, dissect it and try to understand it from the inside out. I don't say this because I believe we should manufacture some anti-abortion, pro-Arab-and-Muslim-killing candidate who can make inroads in the red states in 2008. I say it because we had better get a grip on what we are facing, in order to figure out how to save our country (and the poor, suffering rest of the world) from the crusade on which America is embarked.

Wendy E. Smith is a writer and human rights activist in Seattle.
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Know Your Enemy - What the Red States Think (Perhaps)
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Liberals In Both Parties Just Don’t Get It
November 8, 2004 - by Doug Patton - www.mensnewsdaily (women need not apply)

A lot has been written since the election about how Democrats just don’t get it, but the truth is that it is not just Democrats but liberals, regardless of party affiliation, who are befuddled by the recent repudiation of their agenda. Two statements following the election results prove the point.

The first is Sen. Arlen Specter’s “warning” to President Bush not to send any “out of the mainstream” judges to the Senate Judiciary Committee for consideration. We’ll get back to that one.

The second statement came from washed-up New York pol (now an analyst for Fox News) Geraldine Ferraro. In the typical, dismissive fashion of a liberal analyzing why the “progressive” agenda lost — again — Ms. Ferraro look at that sea of red across America and said, “But look at those blue states! The country is nothing without them!”

Could there be a clearer expression of Northeastern liberal elitism than that? She went on to say that the blue states have all the great universities, cultural centers, business interests, etc., implying that we who populate the red states are backward, uneducated morons who reside in flyover country.

The visceral disdain of elites toward traditional conservative values informed by a Christian worldview is as blatant as we have seen it in our lifetime. Even after being soundly defeated at the polls, American liberals in both parties still believe that only those who share their “enlightened” point of view need apply — especially when it comes to the judiciary.

This brings me back to Arlen Specter and his liberal GOP allies in the United States Senate, people like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. These senators are not Republicans. Each of them is a “RINO” (Republican In Name Only), a liberal Democrat with an “R” behind his or her name.

Specter is particularly odious to conservatives who take the party’s stated social agenda every bit as seriously as its economic goals. The Pennsylvania Senator would have lost his seat in the primary to conservative Congressman Pat Toomey had President Bush and Pennsylvania’s other U.S. Senator, Rick Santorum, not come to his rescue by campaigning for him. Within hours of narrowly winning re-nomination, Specter again bit the hand that had fed him by assuring his friends on the left that he would never capitulate to a “far-right” agenda.

After winning a close general election last week, Specter again gave voice to his liberal arrogance by issuing his now-infamous “warning” to the White House not to send pro-life judges to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he intends to be chairing in January.

As Democrats strategize themselves into political oblivion trying to learn “the language of faith,” liberal Republicans like Specter present a two-fold problem. First, they can create real obstacles in the president’s efforts to defend traditional, pro-family values; and second, Democrats love to quote them. How many times have you heard Chuck Schumer say things like, “Even respected, moderate Republicans like Arlen Specter think the president’s agenda is too radical”?

President Bush should ignore the vacuous statements of Geraldine Ferraro and other Democrats, but he should take very seriously the warnings of Arlen Specter and other RINOS — and do something about them. Since the president did not have the good political sense to back a true conservative in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, he should now use some of that political capitol he was bragging about the other day and do some arm-twisting to get someone else appointed to this important committee chairmanship. The Senate Judiciary Committee has several true Republicans, without resorting to another RINO who will undermine qualified judicial nominations just because they don’t meet a liberal litmus test.

Liberals may not get it, but conservatives do, and we are watching.
Doug Patton
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and this from CNN:


Conservative Leader Targets Specter
Senator says opponents misconstrued his remarks on abortion

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The head of a leading conservative group said Sunday that Sen. Arlen Specter "is a big-time problem" and that his quest to serve as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee "must be derailed." The comments from James Dobson, founder of the nonprofit Christian organization Focus on the Family, came four days after the moderate Republican from Pennsylvania told reporters that any Supreme Court nominee intent on overturning Roe v. Wade probably would not win Senate approval.

"When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, who'd overturn Roe versus Wade, I think that is unlikely," Specter said Wednesday, in the wake of President Bush's re-election. "And I have said that bluntly during the course of the campaign, that Roe versus Wade was inviolate." That comment sparked an avalanche of criticism from Christian conservatives who supported Bush's campaign. But Specter said Sunday that his remark was misconstrued and argued the uproar was fueled by people opposed to his "independence." Specter is in line for the Judiciary Committee chairmanship. The chairman has broad powers to advance or hold up a president's judicial nominees. "Senator Specter is a big-time problem for us," Dobson said on ABC's "This Week." He said Specter had made "one of the most foolish and ill-considered comments that a politician has made in a long time." Dobson added, "There are many, many members of that committee that are more qualified and less of a problem than Senator Specter."

The issue is critical because it appears likely the high court will have at least one opening, and perhaps more, during the next four years. Bush has said he expects to see as many as four openings. Chief Justice William Rehnquist is ailing, and several other justices may leave the bench. Justice John Paul Stevens is 84. Abortion-rights supporters fear that Bush could appoint justices who would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which gave women the right to abortion.

Bush has said he would not apply a "litmus test" for nominees, but Democrats point out that the judicial nominees during his first term were staunch conservatives opposed to abortion rights. During Bush's first term, Democrats blocked 10 of his nominees to U.S. Appeals Courts, the nation's second-highest courts, The Associated Press reported. The Senate confirmed 203 of Bush's court appointments, according to the AP. Dobson said he was also soured on Specter by the senator's support for embryonic stem cell research and his opposition to the Supreme Court nomination of conservative Robert Bork in 1987. Dobson said of Specter, "He is a problem, and he must be derailed." But Specter said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that his problem with Dobson and others began when it was reported that he had "warned the president, which is not so."

Specter said he has supported all of Bush's nominees, as well as Rehnquist, who has opposed Roe v. Wade, and that he led the fight to confirm justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative. "So my record is pretty plain, that, although I am pro-choice, I have supported many pro-life nominees," Specter said. He added that his comments were simply an acknowledgment that 60 votes are needed to end debate in the Senate and confirm a nominee.

"But with 55 Republicans, you aren't at the magic number of 60, so you have to anticipate problems with the Democrats, as we had a lot of them in the past Congress." Specter, the only pro-abortion-rights Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said his opponents are the same people who tried to defeat him in the primary. "They do not like my independence," he said.

Asked about his stance on stem cell research, opposed by many Christians who believe that life begins at conception, Specter -- who is Jewish -- said, "I believe that stem-cell research has enormous hope for the future. But I would point out that I'm joined by Senator [Orrin] Hatch, a noted conservative. I'm joined by many conservative colleagues on the Republican side of the Senate; I'm joined by Mrs. Nancy Reagan and by the vast majority of the American people."

He added, "If these embryonic stem cells could be used to produce life, I would never want to have tests on them. And in my capacity as chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Health and Human Services, I took the lead in having an appropriation of $1 million for embryo adoption. "But you have 400,000 of them. They're either going to be used to save lives, or they're going to be thrown away. So that I think my position is pre-eminently reasonable." Bork, a former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge, said on "Fox News Sunday" that Specter's prediction about possible Democratic reaction to a Supreme Court nominee who opposes abortion rights may not hold up. "I don't know if [the Democrats] can pull a filibuster on a Supreme Court nominee," Bork said. "That would be very unpopular, I think, with the American people. I think they would be in trouble." Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, told Fox that the Senate must re-evaluate its role, given last week's election results.

"I think the Senate, in its new majority, really needs to look and evaluate what they want to do," he said. "And for any one person to stake out and say we're not going to do this or not going to do that, I think is just wrong." Bush campaign adviser Karl Rove, credited with orchestrating Bush's re-election partly by emphasizing his conservative stances on social issues, told Fox that Specter is "entitled to his opinions." Asked whether he was satisfied with Specter's explanation, Rove said, "Well, it was pretty straightforward and pretty plain. He told the president, 'I will make certain your nominees receive a hearing, I'll make certain that they receive a vote, and the appellate nominees will be brought to the floor.'"
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How Karl Rove won the election

By Andrew Gumbel - 5 November 2004 - The Independent, UK

Using fear, smear and an appeal to visceral instincts, Republican strategists won this election by reaching out like never before to conservative voters and a public fearful of a repeat of the attacks 9-11. Crucially, they were also able to undermine John Kerry, portraying him as a weak flip-flopper unable to stand up to the threat of terrorism.

With the country so polarised and divided, Mr Rove's simple plan was to get out conservative voters and traditional Republican supporters in record numbers. This was not an election that was won by winning over doubtful Democrats or independent voters to the Republican cause. For all the indications before the Tuesday that the most important issue for voters was the economy and national security, a post election poll suggests that social issues may have been what swayed voters. Twenty two per cent of voters said social issues were the most important factor, compared to 20 who said the economy and 19 who named terrorism.

And of those 22 per cent of voters for whom issues such as gay marriage and abortion were what was making them vote, a full 80 per cent cast their support behind Mr Bush. Officials said that amendments to ban gay marriage - a measure that appeared on the ballot in 11 states and which was passed overwhelmingly in each - helped draw conservatives to the polls. In Ohio, the state whose outcome secured overall victory for Mr Bush, Republicans admitted that the amendment 'acted like a magnet' in the south and west of the state and in the Appalachian regions of the south-east. A huge turn-out in these areas helped over come a very strong Democratic turnout in the north.

"I'd be very naive if I didn't say it helped," Robert Bennett, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, told the New York Times. "And it helped most in what we refer to as the Bible Belt area of south-eastern and south-western Ohio." John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron said support for the gay marriage ban may have increased turnout by as much as three or four per cent. Mr Rove, who believed that Mr Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because four million white evangelical Christians failed to vote, had had long worked hard to build support among this group. Yesterday's poll, conducted by Edison Media Research, suggested that 78 per cent of this group voted for Mr Bush compared to just 21 for Mr Kerry. Mr Bush even won a majority among Catholic voters, despite Mr Kerry being to first Catholic candidate since John Kennedy.

Beyond appealing to conservatives, Republicans needed to ensure they voted. Party officials said they worked like never before to organise ground roots networks to 'get the vote out'. "We had an unprecedented effort to get out the Republican vote," Jeff Flint, an official with the Ohio Republican Party. "This was something we had been working on for two years." The Republicans were also able to label Mr Kerry as a weak, flip-flopper. Mark McKinnon, the Republican's chief media strategist, said they had been quick to seize on Mr Kerry's comment last August that he had voted for $87bn worth of additional spending for Iraq before he voted against it. "As soon as we saw it we knew it was exactly what we wanted to say, but he said it for us," he said. "That was something he couldn't do."

Republicans also played on people's fear of another attack by terrorists. In the closing days of the campaign they released their 'wolves' advertisement designed to suggest terrorists were waiting to pounce. Vice president Dick Cheney also said Mr Kerry would be incapable of leading if America was attacked by nuclear weapons.

Mr Kerry was also let down by younger voters who failed to come out in sizeable numbers, despite predictions there was a groundswell of new support for the Democrats among young people worried about the war in Iraq and the possibility of a return of the draft. This year first time voters made up 11 per cent of the vote, just a slight increase of the 11 per cent in 2000.
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The Day the Enlightenment Went Out
New York Times - 4 Nov 2004 - By GARRY WILLS - Evanston, Ill.

This election confirms the brilliance of Karl Rove as a political strategist. He calculated that the religious conservatives, if they could be turned out, would be the deciding factor. The success of the plan was registered not only in the presidential results but also in all 11 of the state votes to ban same-sex marriage. Mr. Rove understands what surveys have shown, that many more Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than in Darwin's theory of evolution.

This might be called Bryan's revenge for the Scopes trial of 1925, in which William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalist assault on the concept of evolution was discredited. Disillusionment with that decision led many evangelicals to withdraw from direct engagement in politics. But they came roaring back into the arena out of anger at other court decisions - on prayer in school, abortion, protection of the flag and, now, gay marriage. Mr. Rove felt that the appeal to this large bloc was worth getting President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage (though he had opposed it earlier).

The results bring to mind a visit the Dalai Lama made to Chicago not long ago. I was one of the people deputized to ask him questions on the stage at the Field Museum. He met with the interrogators beforehand and asked us to give him challenging questions, since he is too often greeted with deference or flattery.

The only one I could think of was: "If you could return to your country, what would you do to change it?" He said that he would disestablish his religion, since "America is the proper model." I later asked him if a pluralist society were possible without the Enlightenment. "Ah," he said. "That's the problem." He seemed to envy America its Enlightenment heritage.

Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed "a candid world," as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs - as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.

President Bush promised in 2000 that he would lead a humble country, be a uniter not a divider, that he would make conservatism compassionate. He did not need to make such false promises this time. He was re-elected precisely by being a divider, pitting the reddest aspects of the red states against the blue nearly half of the nation. In this, he is very far from Ronald Reagan, who was amiably and ecumenically pious. He could address more secular audiences, here and abroad, with real respect.

In his victory speech yesterday, President Bush indicated that he would "reach out to the whole nation," including those who voted for John Kerry. But even if he wanted to be more conciliatory now, the constituency to which he owes his victory is not a yielding one. He must give them what they want on things like judicial appointments. His helpers are also his keepers.

The moral zealots will, I predict, give some cause for dismay even to nonfundamentalist Republicans. Jihads are scary things. It is not too early to start yearning back toward the Enlightenment.

Garry Wills, an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University, is the author of "St. Augustine's Conversion."
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