Don't be afraid to tell people bad news

What the report out the past day or so about the BP Oil spill makes it clear is how much the administration has been caught up in the whole Washington trap of trying to candy coat everything.

Start with the economy. Even today, most people don't blame Obama for it.

But the reports of 'greenshoots' last year and continuously trying to talk it up have had an effect-- not on the economy, but on the administration's credibility.

Then there is Afghanistan. Remember that the Bush administration's repeated assertions that things were going well in Iraq when they were not destroyed their credibility over time. But it seems as if the Obama administration is repeating the same mistakes. We still have no clear mission, no definition of what a 'victory' even is, and we are losing American soldiers and dumping money into it, for WHAT? Who knows anymore? But whatever it is, is still getting sugar coated by the administration.

So now the oil spill report comes out. The oil spill was another situation that Obama did not create-- it was BP's fault. But now we learn that the administration was continually trying to minimize the apparent scope of the disaster, sticking to numbers that were only 1/60th the actual size of the spill.

My question is, WHY!!?? Why carry BP's water on this and get slicked yourself as a result? I don't understand that. Is it a reflexive reaction in Washington that when you are in control all news must be spun to the positive side?

Americans are adults and would like to be treated accordingly. If the news is bad, then tell us the bad news.

In 1940, Winston Churchill took over from Neville Chamberlin during the most discouraging days of World War II. He made a speech in which he promised the British people, "I have nothing to offer you but blood, tears, sweat and toil." Then a couple of weeks later as German forces closed in on Paris he began a speech with, "The news from France is very, very bad" before going into details. Whatever one might think of Churchill, he set a mold with those two speeches that it would do well for our politicians to follow.

When you only spin all news as good, you close the trap upon yourself. You now own it, any failure to live up to what you've said (i.e. reality) becomes a disappointment, and after enough times of crying "no wolf!" people start to not believe you and all you can do is scream "Happy, happy news, all is well!" all the louder to compensate. Eventually you blow out the amplifier.

This is something it would behoove President Obama to learn as soon as possible.

It's Sept. 11 and in good conscience I have to say it: OUT NOW!

Today is September 11, and a story out today compels me to speak out.

I'M SORRY, MR. PRESIDENT BUT YOUR POLICY IN AFGHANISTAN HAS NO DIRECTION, AND WE SHOULD GET OUT!

I fully support this administration on nearly every issue, most especially health care reform. I supported President Obama last year and continue to support his domestic agenda. And even in foreign policy, his early moves to get out of Iraq (though still far too slow for me) and his changing the tone from one of U.S. hegemony in the world towards more international cooperation are welcome changes.

But he's making a huge mistake by pouring American forces into Afghanistan.

Back when we went to war there in October 2001, I fully supported President Bush in his pursuit of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban government that gave him shelter.

But that was eight years ago, and President Bush bungled the job by de-emphasizing the Afghan war in the spring and early summer of 2002, when the Taliban had been driven into a small sliver of land, and one more concerted offensive could have finished them off (and probably netted all or most of the senior al-Qaeda leadership at the same time.) President Bush turned down the heat then and focused on Iraq, a country a thousand miles away that had nothing to do with the 9/11 terror attacks.

So bin Laden got away, the Taliban regrouped while we were otherwise preoccupied with Iraq and even spread across the border into Pakistan, and today we see that the leading U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Billy McChrystal says that he sees no major signs of al-Qaeda in the country. Apparently they've moved on to Pakistan and elsewhere. This is a very important story, because remember we originally went into Afghanistan to get rid of al-Qaeda. Well, if al-Qaeda is gone, then who are we fighting, and why?

So if we are not there hunting al-Qaeda what are we doing? Propping up 'democracy?' That's a joke. We've been seeing the notoriously corrupt Karzai government steal an election right in front of us. Karzai will win the recount and be selected President again. But he will have no more legitimacy than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has in Iran. To suggest that we in any way accept a fraudulently elected leader as legitimate is to make a mockery of our own belief in democratic values. Mr. Karzai has no more legitimacy if the results of this election stand than the Taliban do. Neither was chosen by the people. So don't say we are in Afghanistan to support 'democracy' because we haven't seen any real democracy there. Ultimately for the Afghans to ever live in a true democracy they have to want it enough to fight for it themselves.

What we do see is in essence a civil war between the Taliban and the Karzai government. It is true that the Taliban have a reprehensible political and legal system in place in the areas which they control, and that life is especially horrible for the female half of the population. However, is that a reason to lose American lives over? I don't see it. The problems of Afghanistan belong to Afghanistan. The United States should be ready to lend a hand (both financially and with good advice) if asked, but there is really no good reason for maintaining U.S. troops there anymore.

Does that mean that we just give up searching for al-Qaeda terrorists? Not at all. Leaving with our army doesn't preclude continuing to collect intelligence, the use of special forces for quick, defined missions (such as if we have good intelligence about where bin Laden is), or of working behind the scenes with his local enemies (there are plenty, after all) to get to bin Laden that way. What successes we have had recently have been through the use of Predator and Reaper drones, unmanned aircraft that have gotten several al-Qaeda operatives (mostly on the Pakistani side of the border.) There is no reason why those sorts of operations couldn't continue.

I recently wrote a post entitled Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it about the uncanny similarity between our fruitless search for bin Laden to our similarly fruitless search despite sending an American army to march all over Mexico searching for Pancho Villa in 1916. One point I made was that as long as we were there, Villa essentially had nothing to worry about from his local enemies because he was giving the 'yanqui' the proverbial finger. But once we left so did his protection, and there were people in Mexico who knew how to find him much better than we did (and they eventually did catch up with him too.) It is certainly prudent to continue to keep an eye out for bin Laden but like a baseball that's gotten lost in the woods, there comes a time when the effort (and in this case that means American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars) expended outweighs the diminishing chance we have of finding what we are looking for. If you want to blame George Bush for that because the trail has grown cold while we were off fighting in Iraq for more than half a decade, go ahead. But it's time to get our army out and limit our looking to our intelligence service, satellites and other sources.

But the bottom line is that neither President Bush nor President Obama has articulated why we are still fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, what exactly we hope to accomplish there, what constitutes 'success,' and most importantly, what our exit strategy is.

In his speech the other night President Obama pointed out that the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are more than it would cost to reform health care (and that is true, based on CBO numbers.) But for that comparison to be any more meaningful than just a few numbers on paper, we have to quit bleeding our treasury just as so many Americans have bled their lives into the soil of those two nations all the way on the other side of the planet.

Imagine that: paying for health care reform by bringing all our soldiers home. Now THAT'S what I call a real world solution.

For more information: http://rethinkafghanistan.com

The 'slippery slope' is what we've been on for decades. Chrysler reorganization really IS 'chapter 11.' And not just in legal terms.

Earlier this week, President Obama oversaw a marathon negotiating session which failed to produce an agreement to avert bankruptcy filing by Chrysler because a small number of preferred stockholders (according to reports, mainly hedge fund managers) held out. Following the all-night the administration annouced that the automaker was indeed going to enter bankruptcy. After that, the administration announced that the United Auto Workers (UAW) would command a majority stake in the company as it emerges from bankruptcy and that the hedge fund managers would in effect go to the back of the line to be paid from any assets sold off through the bankruptcy process.

My first reaction was that this arrangement tickled every progressive bone in my body. It was the fault of a few hedge fund managers after all, that the bankrupcty occurred in the first place. And hedge fund managers won't get much support from the public (I've not seen a survey on their popularity but I suspect that if there was one, hedge fund managers would likely score someplace between Dick Cheney and Bernard Madoff.) And giving the company to the union that represents the people who actually make the product, I mean what could be more progressive than that? The only thing that made it better to contemplate was to think of all the conservatives reading it and just putting their head in their hands and shaking it slowly back and forth. Sweet revenge for all the times I did that when the Bush administration did something by assertion that seemed way over the top.

On second thought though, there may be a reason why I had the same reaction then as conservatives have now. And it's a reason that should transcend partisanship, though we are where we are precisely because people with an agenda have used partisanship as one of several vehicles to drive that agenda. And that agenda is to empower the federal government, and in particular the executive branch, at the expense of the rule of law, civil rights and fundamental Constitutional rights.

To understand the danger, realize that whatever one may think of hedge fund managers, it is a long standing principle in contract law that the creditors of a company that is in bankrupcty court receive payment in a certain order. The hedge fund managers are what is known as preferred shareholders, meaning that legally they should be paid (which payment can be in shares of the new, post-bankruptcy company) before other shareholders (and certainly before the UAW.) That's not a matter of opinion, and I may consider it to be a grossly unfair arrangement (which I do) but it is nonetheless the law and it is not up to the President to rewrite the law and make changes in it. There is a way to make changes in the law, of course, which is to go through Congress, but Congress was not asked to vote on this.

And the fact of the matter is that if it is possible for the President to change the law by executive fiat and give a company to the union then what exactly prevents him or some future President from using exactly the same logic to seize your home and give it to the bricklayer, the gardener or the baby-sitter? The answer is that if this case is the precedent then there is nothing to prevent it.

Before conservatives think I'm with them on this though, I'd like to point out that this only continues a trend which has been ongoing for decades. With the singular exception of Jimmy Carter (during whose four years most of the civil protections from governmental overreach that we do have now were enacted) every President since Calvin Coolidge first appointed J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director in 1924 has pushed things in pretty much the same direction. Just to cite one recent example, some of you may remember the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was accused of plotting to plant a 'dirty bomb' and held without being charged for years in a military prison in South Carolina. After losing several appeals over the whole issue of habeus corpus protection, the Bush administration finally found one judge who would rule in their favor. As soon as they did they immediately did file charges against Padilla (though they did not charge him with anything related to a 'dirty bomb') and eventually managed to get him convicted on a single count-- that he had been to Afghanistan for training--- even while failing to gain a conviction on more serious charges. They filed the charges when they did specifically to make sure that the case would not be appealed to the Supreme Court which might have sided with all the lower courts and overturned their 'precedent.'

Now, I'm sure some conservatives will argue that the Padilla case is somehow 'different' than the Chrysler case. But if fact it is not. Both involve the President asserting a new legal and Constitutional standard where there was not one before. And if you are a conservative that still thinks that Padilla precedent is a good thing, I'd ask you whether you still like the idea that the Obama administration now has the authority to detain, using secret evidence, any U.S. citizen they say is an 'enemy combatant' without charging them as a crime for as many years as they want to. Because they now do have that 'right' courtesy of the Bush administration.

And therein lies the rub. What has enabled a decades long assault on civil rights has been a mixture of always finding the right 'bogeyman' (nazis, communists, mobsters, left wing subversives, right wing militias, drug dealers, criminal gangs, foreign terrorists, child molesters, Wall street crooks-- all have had their turn to scare us into surrenduring some measure of civil liberty) and partisanship. Whether it was Democrats foolishly supporting Bill Clinton's post Oklahoma City domestic surveillance bill or Republicans supporting the Patriot Act and warrantless wiretaps during the Bush administration, no one has ever taken a moment to ask why the mountain of powers that have already been given to the Presidency isn't enough already.

And we have already forgotten that Clinton's raid on Waco was entirely legal-- because of Reagan's 'war on drugs' legislation that ensured that federal agents could just come in unannounced and start shooting if there were allegations that drugs were on the premises. Someone had made such an allegation (though it turned out be false) and that was all the legal justification that was needed to charge in with guns blazing away.

Instead of looking at this kind of stuff with a partisan hue, colored by the administration that is then in power (i.e. "Democrat good, Republican bad" or the reverse) maybe the right way to look at is is always to be skeptical.

The worst thing about any kind of expansion of Federal powers is that they will still be there for all future Presidents. And in this area, it seems that Democratic and Republican administrations have been literally pulling the rope together and all sending us sliding down the same slope, a slope that leads down to.... where? I don't know but I fear to contemplate it.