Off topic, but I was thinking about our discussion about the flat tax and I realized that I was making a pretty broad assumption that a flat tax would be unfair to “average joe”. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon introduced “The Fair Flat Tax Act of 2005,” aimed at simplifying the tax code while keeping it progressive. It appears to be a pretty good proposal, but I wanted your view on this as well.

“And anyone else who wants to wring their hands and bash the Democratic party now is going to get my foot up their ass. When they are back in power I will join you in the bashing, if and when it is warranted. If you do it now, I will eviscerate you.
Comment by HellTo Pay — October 29, 2005 @ 3:40 am”

I’ll bet my NRA membership I’m a better shot than you are a punter.

The information about Plame wasn’t “out there:” it was about as far “in there” as one can get without resorting to a proctologist to get it out. It was in the vice president’s office, the state department’s intelligence branch and the CIA. Libby wasn’t “pushing back” against rumors: he was “screwing” an administration critic for so publicly “discrediting” an already rickety core administration “claim” about Iraq that the White House felt compelled to “renounce” it. And if every senior White House official — calling Cheney’s chief of staff and national security advisor a “political aide” is pretty cute — who learned the identity of a covert CIA agent from the vice president of the United States and promptly leaked it to the press was prosecuted, I suspect our jails could handle the traffic with room to spare for Davis if he did anything even remotely as sinister as that. With a bit of luck, we’ll find out.

For going on 40 years now, Democrats have gotten their asses kicked when it comes to hardball politics. Lanny Davis and Libby/Rove are emblematic of why. If Davis wants to wish a pox on both parties’ houses, he should probably wait until Democrats get a house.

We got the government Lanny Davis deserves

If you’re looking for an argument in favor of overthrowing the Democratic party old guard, you won’t do better than the one Clinton White House counsel Lanny Davis advances in his bizarre New York Times op-ed piece today.

Assuming it’s not a parody, the stomach-churning essence of the argument is that crime is now indistinguishable from politics. While Davis admonishes Republicans for their “criminalizing politics” mantra, he likewise chastises Democrats for finding an indifference to national security in the Plame leak.

Similarly, the Democrats are playing up the idea that White House officials may have endangered national security in playing hardball politics. Well, I can remember all the times I picked up the phone and talked “on background” to reporters, “pushing back” against rumors damaging to President Clinton and citing information that I thought was “out there.” I don’t remember ever worrying about whether the facts that I felt were public knowledge might have been classified. But even if I had, I would probably have rationalized that anything I had heard on the grapevine couldn’t possibly be a state secret. If every political aide was prosecuted for those kinds of conversations with the press corps, I’m afraid there wouldn’t be enough jails to hold us.

Maybe Davis didn’t have time to read the Libby indictment before he submitted his article; given what he says about his own carelessness as White House counsel, that’s not out of the question. Whether he did or not, the cynicism and dishonesty he packs into that single paragraph is breathtaking (and the rest of the piece is worse).

The information about Plame wasn’t “out there:” it was about as far “in there” as one can get without resorting to a proctologist to get it out. It was in the vice president’s office, the state department’s intelligence branch and the CIA. Libby wasn’t “pushing back” against rumors: he was “screwing” an administration critic for so publicly “discrediting” an already rickety core administration “claim” about Iraq that the White House felt compelled to “renounce” it. And if every senior White House official — calling Cheney’s chief of staff and national security advisor a “political aide” is pretty cute — who learned the identity of a covert CIA agent from the vice president of the United States and promptly leaked it to the press was prosecuted, I suspect our jails could handle the traffic with room to spare for Davis if he did anything even remotely as sinister as that. With a bit of luck, we’ll find out.

Davis plays the equivalency game: for every Republican sin, he has to offer up a counterweight Democratic one. But Republicans have owned the government for five years now; there is no equivalency. There are no powerhouse Democratic lobbyists under indictment, if only because Tom DeLay has been so successful in purging Democratic lobbyists from K Street. There are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders under indictment, if only because there are no powerful Democratic Congressional leaders. Democrats didn’t out a covert CIA agent; Democrats didn’t drag the nation into an illegal war based on bogus intelligence (although more than a few are complicit in the effort); Democrats didn’t institutionalize torture or strip US citizens of basic constitutional protections.

There is a national security issue here. Republicans are demonstrably more corrupt than Democrats. Hell, this isn’t even the only occasion on which the administration have blown the cover of a secret intelligence asset from purely political motives: in August of last year, the administration infuriated British and Pakistani intelligence services by leaking the name of a highly placed al Qaeda informant in order to justify an increase in the terror alert level, and in the process ruining counterterrorism operations in Britain and Pakistan.

For going on 40 years now, Democrats have gotten their asses kicked when it comes to hardball politics. Lanny Davis and Libby/Rove are emblematic of why. If Davis wants to wish a pox on both parties’ houses, he should probably wait until Democrats get a house.

You could have just skipped the whole futile exercise and phoned this in:

Corruption is institutionalized and systemic.

I recommend: Chambliss, William J., On the Take: From Petty Crooks to Presidents, 1978, Bloomington, University of Indiana Press (Seattle-King County corruption cases).

Nace, Ted, Gangs of America which you can download for free here, you cheap bastard:

http://gangsofamerica.com/

N.B. It’s not about the “hood”.

And my favorite:

The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice (6th Edition) (Paperback)
by Jeffrey H. Reiman

Or Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor
edited by Tara Herivel, Paul Wright

You can also visit this site:

http://www.paulsjusticepage.com/reiman.htm

Who’s the idealist here?

Comment by tom unplugged — October 28, 2005 @ 9:31 pm

I think many journalists are reading blogs. I wonder how many of them actually have time to read many of the comments. You can google “Ambrose Bierce”, “Bitter Bierce” and “Devil’s Dictionary” and find out as much as most know. I’m hardly a Bierce scholar but I have been a rabid fan of his for almost twenty years.

Comment by mighty aphrodite — October 28, 2005 @ 8:53 pm

“H” is for Hell To Pay and you are running low on funds. That definition of “Homicide” is from Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary”. Even a home-schooled moron like you should have some familiarity with Bierce. Any American who is not familiar with him ain’t worth spit. It’s like knowing nothing of Twain or Mencken. I’m sure Sceptimus Smith has heard of Bierce. Why don’t you two get a home study group together? Speaking of Sceptic stank, check him out getting the bad ass smack down in a New York second over at Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake:

http://www.haloscan.com/comments/firedoglake/113054289464563288/#149509

That’s his first post, scroll down from there as he gets denuded and run out of town like the snake oil salesman he/she/it is.

Right.

Swampland in Florida?

The question is to those who insist that Valerie Wilson was not a covert agent. If this is so, why did the CIA request the investigation to begin with?

Comment by Blue State Red — October 28, 2005 @ 6:43 pm

Guess what? Wilson’s lawyers will be using the info gleaned from Libby’s (as well as “official A”’s) upcoming trials as preliminary discovery. Areas that Fitz chose not to pursue will be targeted with probing and leading questions in the civil trial(s). With Bush and Cheney under oath, it won’t be long (oh, about next October or so) before we get a much fuller picture of the depths to which these “leaders” descended, to push a phony reason for invasion. Remember Clinton, BSR? You guys buttered this bread with an investigation about blowjobs and ten-year-old land deals – and now you’re going to choke down the results – bon apetit’.