Bush to Israel: 'Masada will not fall again'

Speaking today to Israel's parliament, the Knesset, President Bush said the bond between the United States and Israel was unbreakable and promised that "Masada will not fall again."

"Some people suggest that if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away," Bush said in his prepared address.

"This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of our enemies, and America rejects it utterly. Israel's population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because America stands with you."

Masada is the desert fortress near the Dead Sea where, after the destruction of the Second Temple, 960 Jewish zealots committed suicide rather than surrender to the Romans.

Bush's beginning as an evangelical favorite

You've probably noticed that blogging has been fairly weak the past week. There is a reason for that, and it's that I've been in and out of town and, it seems, too frenetically reporting or writing to thoughtfully blather.

Not that I am going to pick that up again quite yet, but here is an interesting excerpt from Slate of editor Jacob Weisberg's new book "The Bush Tragedy" that focuses on the religious politics of our 43rd president:

If Bush's theology is free of content, his application of it to politics is sophisticated and artful. Evangelical politics is a subject on which he has exercised his intellect, and perhaps the only one on which he qualifies as an expert. Bush began his study in 1985 on behalf of his father's effort to become president. George H.W. Bush regarded televangelists like Pat Robertson as snake handlers and swindlers. Reflecting his parents' attitude, Neil Bush referred to evangelical Christians in a speech for his father in Iowa as "cockroaches" issuing "from the baseboards of the Bible-belt." For their part, the evangelicals felt no affinity for Bush Sr. They found his patrician background off-putting and suspected the sincerity of his conversion to the pro-life cause.

To help him with this problem, Bush Sr. brought in Doug Wead as his evangelical adviser and liaison. Wead had been involved in a group called Mercy Corps International, doing missionary relief work in Ethiopia and Cambodia, and gave inspirational speeches at Amway meetings. He was also a prolific memo writer. The most important of his memos is a 161-page document he wrote in the summer of 1985 and a long follow-up to it known as "The Red Memo." Wead argued for "an effective, discreet evangelical strategy" to counter Jack Kemp, who had been courting the evangelicals for a decade, and Pat Robertson, whom he accurately predicted would run in the 1988 primaries. Wead compiled a long dossier on the evangelical "targets" he saw as most important for Bush. ("If Falwell is privately reassured from time to time of the Vice President's personal friendship, he will be less likely to demand the limelight," he wrote.) Wead made a chart rating nearly 200 leaders for various factors, including their influence within the movement, their influence outside of it, and their potential impact within early caucus and primary states. Billy Graham received the highest total score, 315, followed by Robert Schuller, 237; Jerry Falwell, 236; and Jim Bakker, 232.

Unbeknownst to Wead, Vice President Bush gave the Red memo to his oldest son. After George Jr. pronounced it sound, George Sr. closely followed much of its advice. For instance, Wead recommended that the vice president read the first chapter of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, a book that had become a popular evangelical device for winning converts. "Evangelicals believe that this book is so effective that they will automatically assume that if the Vice President has read it, he will agree with it," Wead wrote. Vice President Bush made sure that religious figures saw a well-worn copy on top of a stack of books in his office when they visited the White House and cited Lewis' condemnation of the sin of pride as one of the reasons "we haven't been inclined to go around proclaiming that we are Christians." He also took Wead's advice on how to answer the born-again question; in courting the National Religious Broadcasters with three speeches in three years; in inviting Falwell, James Dobson, and others to the White House; in cooperating with a cover story in the Christian Herald, the largest-circulation evangelical magazine at the time; and in producing a volume for the Christian book market.

George W. Bush became the campaign's semiofficial liaison to the evangelical community in March 1987. "Wead, I'm taking you over," he said at their first meeting, over Mexican food in Corpus Christi, telling him to ignore Lee Atwater, whom Wead had been reporting to. Wead recalls how anxious George W. was in political conversations with his dad. "He was a nervous wreck," Wead told me. "He wanted his father to be proud of him." Wead also recalled the son's expressions of his own political interest. The campaign had prepared state-by-state analysis of the primary electorate in advance of Super Tuesday in 1988. "When he got the one on Texas, his eyes just bugged out," Wead remembered. "This is just great! I can become governor of Texas just with the evangelical vote."

The crucible of the campaign forged a close relationship between the two men. Wead, whom George W. called "Weadie," says the candidate's son spent an inordinate amount of time talking about sex. But he was so anxious to avoid any whiff or rumor of infidelity that he asked Wead to stay in his hotel room one night when he thought a young woman working on the campaign might knock on his door. "I tried to read to him from the Bible, because by that time he was sending me these signals," Wead told me. "But he wasn't interested. He just rolled over and went to sleep."

Having Wead put him to bed was a way to advertise his marital fidelity, and to reinforce a distinction with his father, who was facing rumors about the Big A. Wead said Bush also liked having him around as an alternative to the company of drinking buddies from his pre-conversion period. But Bush resisted religious overtures as firmly as sexual ones. "He has absolutely zero interest in anything theological—nothing," Wead said. "We spent hours talking about sex … who on the campaign was doing what to whom—but nothing about God. And I tried many, many times."

'The Gaza Bombshell'

Americans are, by now, well aware of the foreign-policy failings of President George W. Bush. But now he's getting ready to leave office and finally he seems awake to Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He wants to leave a legacy, we've been told about his impetus for the Annapolis conference and his interest in seeing peace achieved in the next 10 months. (There hasn't been peace regarding Jerusalem in 2,000 years and he's going to fix it in a year?)

Well, Vanity Fair's David Rose reports that there is a more layered context to Bush's interest in the conflict and, believe it or not, his previous diddling only made the situation worse.

In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly stated that the last great ambition of his presidency is to broker a deal that would create a viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the Holy Land. “People say, ‘Do you think it’s possible, during your presidency?’ ” he told an audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very hopeful.”

The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.

It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.

According to [Fatah strongman Muhammad] Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”

A religious call to stop waterboarding

A former CIA man blogged Sunday about the awkward juxtaposition last week between the National Prayer Breakfast and the Bush administration's assertion's that waterboarding is a permissable form of interrogation that does not qualify as "torture."

I missed the National Prayer Breakfast—for the 45th time in a row. But, as I drove to work I listened with rapt attention as President George W. Bush gave his insights on prayer:

“When we lift our hearts to God, we’re all equal in his sight. We’re all equally precious...In prayer we grow in mercy and compassion.... When we answer God’s call to love a neighbor as ourselves, we enter into a deeper friendship with our fellow man — and a deeper relationship with our eternal Father.”

Vice President Dick Cheney skipped Thursday’s prayer breakfast in order to put the final touches on the speech he gave later that morning to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Perhaps he felt he needed some extra time to devise careful words to extol “the interrogation program run by the CIA...a tougher program for tougher customers, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11,” without conceding that the program has involved torture.

But there was a touch of defensiveness in Cheney’s remarks, as he saw fit repeatedly to reassure his audience yesterday that America is a “decent” country.

After all, CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed publicly on Tuesday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other “high-value” detainees had been waterboarded in 2002-2003, though Hayden added that the technique has since been discontinued.

An extreme form of interrogation going back at least as far as the Spanish Inquisition, waterboarding has been condemned as torture by just about everyone—except the hired legal hands of the Bush administration.

Ray McGovern, who works with the publishing arm of the Church of the Saviour, goes on to compel American religious leaders to speak about the moral failures of permitting torture.

Sometimes it takes a truth-telling outsider to throw light on our moral failures.

South African Methodist Bishop Peter Storey, erstwhile chaplain to Nelson Madela in prison and longtime outspoken opponent of apartheid, has this to say to those clergy who might be moved to preach more than platitudes:

“We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly or indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.

“All around the world there are those who long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet.”

Drinking to Bush speak

Looks like at least one of my former colleagues is ready for the president's annual address:

WASHINGTON - The state of our union is strong.

I'll drink to that. And, come tonight, so will an entire subculture of young political wonks who have turned the hallowed annual presidential State of the Union address into one big excuse for a drinking game.

So while the pundits listen to President Bush's speech to Congress with pen and pad in hand, others will clutch shot glasses and pound whiskey every time the commander in chief utters familiar words and lines.

Phrases like "economic stimulus," "freedom is on the march," and "nuclear" will be accompanied with clinking shot glasses in common rooms and apartments across the country.

"It's an event that feels like it deserves attention. But you definitely don't want to be watching it alone," said Justin Krebs, who has hosted State of the Union drinking games for the past five years in New York City.

"It's definitely something that goes down better with a few drinks."

'Our Worst Ex-President'

Among the top 10 quotes of 2007, according to the Yale Book of Quotations, via Mother Jones, former President Jimmy Carter's comment to my friend the Bible Belt Blogger came in at No. 10.

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history."

I can't say I disagree about President Bush, and neither would these people. But, to many Jews, especially these ones, ain't nobody been a worse former president than James Earl Carter.

This story from February continues to dominate the top of Commentary's online archive. It talks about Carter's unexpected political ascendancy, his continued geopolitical meddling and his problem with Israel.

Carter’s frequent pronouncements on issues of the day and his free-lance diplomacy—have had a much sharper edge. He has injected himself into several foreign crises, sometimes with the grudging acquiescence of existing U.S. administrations but sometimes in open defiance of them.

One remarkable instance grew out of Carter’s strong opposition to the use of force to reverse the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Not satisfied with issuing a torrent of statements and articles, he dispatched a letter to the heads of state of members of the United Nations Security Council and several other governments urging them to oppose the American request for UN authorization of military action. In this letter, writes Carter’s admiring biographer Douglas Brinkley, he urged these influential world leaders to abandon U.S. leadership and instead give “unequivocal support to an Arab League effort, without any restraints on their agenda.” If this were allowed to occur, Carter believed, an Arab solution would not only force Iraq to leave Kuwait but at long last also force Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.

The U.S. government under President George H.W. Bush learned of Carter’s missive only from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada. Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s National Security Adviser, called it “unbelievable” that Carter would “ask . . . the other members of the Council to vote against his own country. . . . [I]f there was ever a violation of the Logan Act prohibiting diplomacy by private citizens, this was it.” Later, Carter justified his action by noting that he had sent the letter to President Bush, too—as if this disposed of Scowcroft’s point. And even that was only a half-truth. As Brinkley reports, the copy to Bush was dated a day after the letter was sent to the others.

Despite Carter’s appeal, the Security Council voted 12-2 to authorize military action, with only Cuba and Yemen taking Carter’s side. But this was not the end of the ex-President’s efforts. Just days before the announced deadline for Iraq to withdrawal from Kuwait, Carter wrote to the rulers of America’s three most important Arab allies in the crisis—Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia—imploring them to break with Washington: “I urge you to call publicly for a delay in the use of force while Arab leaders seek a peaceful solution to the crisis. You may have to forgo approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive.” This time, he did not share a copy of his appeal with his own government even after the fact.

Why, one may ask, was Carter so adamant on the point of “an Arab solution”? After all, the so-called “Carter doctrine,” which he had laid down in his 1980 State of the Union address in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, explicitly threatened war in circumstances similar to those created by Saddam’s naked aggression in the Persian Gulf. What, then, led him to take a different tack in this instance? Brinkley’s gloss supplies a possible answer. It appears that Carter saw the fruits of Saddam’s aggression as providing valuable leverage against Israel that he did not want to see squandered. Why he might have been thinking in such terms is a subject to which we shall return.

When the article does return to Israel, it offers point-by-point grievances with Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."' Here's one:

It is not only Arafat whose pacifism Carter credits. Now that the PLO has been upstaged by Hamas, he finds peaceful intentions in that quarter, too—even in the face of Hamas denials that it adheres to any such view. Reporting credulously that “Hamas would modify its rejection of Israel if there is a negotiated agreement that Palestinians can approve,” he has urged Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to forge a coalition government with this terrorist organization that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Hamas, Carter writes, has “meticulously observed a cease-fire commitment,” and “since August of 2004 [it] has not committed a single act of terrorism that cost an Israeli life.”

This was, of course, before Hamas militants rebooted their daily rocket attacks on the town of Sderot and the surrounding Kibbutzim.

Ever since his presidency, there has been a wide gap between Carter’s estimation of himself and the esteem in which other Americans hold him. This has manifestly embittered him. For all his talk of “love,” the driving motives behind his post-presidential ventures seem, in fact, to be bitterness together with narcissism (as it happens, two prime ingredients of a martyr complex). But he has worked hard to earn the reputation he enjoys. In contravention of the elementary responsibilities of loyalty for one in his position, he has denigrated American policies and leaders in his public and private discussions in foreign lands. He has undertaken personal diplomacy to thwart the policies of the men elected to succeed him. And in doing so he has, at least in the case of North Korea, actively damaged our security.

At home, Carter’s criticisms of the policies of his successors are offered up with reckless abandon. For example, when the Patriot Act and related measures curtailed the rights of defendants accused of terrorism, Carter editorialized that “in many nations, defenders of human rights were the first to feel the consequences.” The charge was simply a concoction, and not a single example was offered to substantiate it. In this manner, Carter has made himself a willing hook on which foreigners can hang their anti-American feelings. When he was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, the chairman of the committee allowed that the award “should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. It’s a kick in the leg to all who follow the same line as the United States.”

Carter’s special rancor toward Israel remains to some degree mysterious, as such sentiments often are, but it is likely we have not heard the last of it. As the protests and criticisms of him continue, he may well sink deeper into his sense of angry martyrdom, following the path recently trod by academics like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who fancy themselves victims of the very Jewish conspiracies they set out to expose. It is sad that a President whose cardinal accomplishment was a peace accord between Israel and one of its neighbors should have devolved into such a seething enemy of Israel. It will be sadder still if this same man, whose other achievement was to elevate the cause of human rights, ends his career by helping to make anti-Semitism acceptable once again in American discourse.

Pope attacks 'climate change prophets of doom'

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

And I thought President Bush was a Methodist.

However, when the reporter for the Daily Mail got to the meat of the pope's statement, which will be part of his message for World Peace Day in January, I had to agree.

"Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow," he said in the message entitled "The Human Family, A Community of Peace".

"It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

"If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations.

"Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken."

In other papal news, the Vatican will issue Friday a doctrinal document on "some aspects of evangelisation."

(Hat tip: Luke Ford)

An outsider's view on our unpopular president

George W. Bush was ranked 21st on the Daily Telegraph's list of influential conservatives, way behind leading men Rudy Giuliani, Gen. David Patraeus, Matt Drudge and most every Republican candidate for the 2008 presidency. Here's why:

In just over three months, Republicans will choose a presidential nominee who will become the de facto leader of the party and, by extension, of US conservatism. In a bid to attract centrist voters, he — whether it be Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain or Fred Thompson — will rush to distance himself from Bush.

By this time next year, many American conservatives may be asking: "George W. who?"

I can't say I'd be sorry to have Bush lost in our nation's history, even if we are dealing with his messes for the next few years. But Kevin Drum says we shouldn't let former Bushies off the hook.

They all loved him when he was riding high, and they'd love him still if he weren't polling in Richard Nixon territory.

Leading the liberals was Bill Clinton, Al Gore, strategist Mark Penn and Hillary Clinton.

Evangelical political split gets big play in NYT

I've been talking for a while now about evangelicals who fall into the camp of reluctant Republicans, but, holy political soldiers, The New York Times Magazine dedicated some 7,500 words to the subject. I don't have much time today to offer my insights, but here is the nut:

The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.

Bush: All world 'prays to the same God'

This just might be the dumbest thing Bush has ever said:

I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God.

The statement was made in an interview with Al Arabiya, and the transcript comes from the U.S. State Department, courtesy of the Bible Belt Blog. The problem with Bush's effort to connect with parts of the world that see the United States as the great Satan is that it doesn't make any sense.

He could have said that Christians, Jews and Muslims pray to the same God of Abraham, though each religion understands Him differently; Bush even could have argued that Christians should call God "Allah." But it's impossible that all the world "prays to the same God" if simply for that fact that about a quarter of the world practices polytheism.

Bush loses favor with young evangelicals

God only knows how this could be, but between 2001 and 2005, President Bush's approval rating with evangelical Christians ages 18 and 29 -- people just like me -- ranged from 70 percent to 87 percent. The big news from the Pew Forum is that Bush's favoritism with young evangelicals has fallen to 45 percent.

Members of this group remain fiercely conservative in your politics -- supporting the war in Iraq and capital punishment and opposing socially liberal causes -- and aren't likely to ankle to Republican Party, the report says, even if evangelicals can't pick a presidential candidate to support in '08.

But what shocks me is that Bush still enjoys even that much favor with my co-religionists.

Hersh: 'Shifting targets' in Iran

When I called Seymour Hersh last month, he was rewriting his next piece for The New Yorker. That story is online now, and it happens to deal with the first question I asked in the interview: Does he still believe President Bush is gunning for Iran?

Yes and no, Hersh writes. The U.S. is no longer looking to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Instead, the attacks will be more tit for tat regarding Iranian meddling in Iraqi bloodshed and the killing of American soldiers.

Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Hersh was on Wolf Blitzer this morning, embedded below, talking about these "shifting targets." As for handling Iraq, Hersh told me: "There are only two issues: Option A is to get out by midnight tonight, and Option B is to get out by midnight tomorrow."

My interview with Sy Hersh goes global

So my interview with Seymour Hersh brought 3,000 visitors to JewishJournal.com yesterday. LAObserved, Romenesko, Huffington Post and War and Piece all linked to it. My Web editor just called to say he heard it quoted on Nick Madigan's "Minding the Media" program on KCRW this afternoon. Here's a link to the transcript:

What will the journalism of the future look like? Will it continue to obsess over absurd, half-in-the-bag teenybopper celebrities, and insist on making up silly headlines to describe criminal sports figures and tin-pot dictators?

With fewer and fewer jobs available in traditional journalism, will aspiring reporters and editors dedicate their energy to the fluid, often irresponsible blogosphere, where opinion is king?

(skip)

In an interview with the Jewish Journal, another veteran journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who is 70 and writes for the New Yorker, said he has embraced the new order.

"There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism, and it is online," said Hersh, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for uncovering the My Lai massacre.

"I hate to tell this to The New York Times or The Washington Post," he said. "We are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism."

"We have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America," Hersh said. "We haven't come to terms with it. I don't think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff."

When I was learning the difference between a nut graph and a set-up and why "lede" is spelled so oddly, Hersh was a journalistic hero of mine. (I think I always related because of the glasses he wore.) What I found most interesting from our conversation was this bit of honesty:

JJ: You turned 70 this year. Why keep working so hard?

SH: I don't work that hard. I write four or five pieces a year. Secondly, what do you want me to do? Play professional golf? I can't do that. You do what you can do. And I'm in a funny spot because I have an ability to communicate with people I have known for a number of years. They trust me, and I trust them, so I keep on doing these little marginal stories.

JJ: That's all they are? Marginal?

SH: With these stories, if they slow down or make people take a deep breath before they bomb Iran, that is a plus. But they are not going to stop anybody. This is a government that is unreachable by us, and that is very depressing. In terms of adding to the public debate, the stories are important. But not in terms of changing policy. I have no delusions about that.

All Saints cleared by IRS

Remember all that hub-bub in late 2005 when the Internal Revenue Service said it was investigating an anti-war sermon delivered at All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena? Well yesterday, congregants were told the liberal church is in the clear. Sort of.

The investigation is over, the church did not lose its tax-exempt status, but the IRS still said the speech -- seen by some as supporting Kerry over Bush, which non-profits can't do -- was illegal. The LA Times reports that the rector wants a clarification and an apology. Good luck.

"To be sure, we are pleased that the IRS exam is over," the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr. said in his 9 a.m. sermon, which was interrupted several times by applause. "However, the main issue of protecting the freedom of this church and other religious communities to worship according to the dictates of their conscience and core values is far from accomplished."

Bacon predicted that the vague, mixed message from the IRS after its nearly two-year investigation of the All Saints case would have a continued "chilling effect" on the freedom of clerics from all faiths to preach about moral values and significant social issues such as war and poverty.

Although the church no longer faces the imminent loss of its tax-exempt status, All Saints has "no more guidance about the IRS rules now than when we started this process," the rector said. He said the church would continue its struggle with the IRS, which he said so far had cost the 3,500-member congregation about $200,000.

(A quick note: The next line of the article -- "One of Southern California's largest and most liberal congregations"-- is so far from accurate its comical. All Saints is both prominent and liberal, but certainly its not at the extreme end of the spectrum. But more hyperbolic is the "largest" claim. In the era of 7-Eleven mega-churches, a 3,500-member congregation seems quaint.)

What Seymour Hersh thinks of W and the world

I mentioned last week what Seymour Hersh told me about the academics behind "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Today, The Jewish Journal published my interview with the legendary muckraker. Here's a sampling:

JJ: You're not a fan of President George W. Bush. Do you look at things in terms of Jan. 20, 2009?

SH: Absolutely. Absolutely. No matter who will be there.


JJ: Do you have one of those countdown clocks on your desk?

SH: No. Somebody gave me one, but I thought it would be too cute. You know, he's got power. He's still president.


JJ: You mentioned that there are plenty of things you know that you can't write about.

SH: The bottom line is nobody in this government talks to me. I've been around for 40 years -- in Bush I, in the Reagan years, certainly in Democratic regimes, but even in Republican regimes where I am more of a pain -- I've always had tremendous relationships with people. This is the first government in which in order to get my stories checked out to make sure I'm not going to kill some American, I have to go to peoples' mailboxes at night, people I talk to and know, and put it in their mailbox before turning it into The New Yorker, to get them to read it and say, "Oh, Page 4, you better not say that, Hersh."

I can't do that with the government. I used to always go and sit down and talk with the heads of the CIA and heads of other agencies. These guys are just really quantitatively different. You are either with us or against us across the board. And this is why I count days.

(skip)

JJ: New York magazine has a profile this week of Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, and they call him "America's Most Influential Journalist." What have bloggers like Drudge done to journalism, and how do you think it compares to the muckrakers that you came of age with?

SH: There is an enormous change taking place in this country in journalism. And it is online. We are eventually -- and I hate to tell this to The New York Times or the Washington Post -- we are going to have online newspapers, and they are going to be spectacular. And they are really going to cut into daily journalism.

I've been working for The New Yorker recently since '93. In the beginning, not that long ago, when I had a big story you made a good effort to get the Associated Press and UPI and The New York Times to write little stories about what you are writing about. Couldn't care less now. It doesn't matter, because I'll write a story, and The New Yorker will get hundreds of thousands, if not many more, of hits in the next day. Once it's online, we just get flooded.

So, we have a vibrant, new way of communicating in America. We haven't come to terms with it. I don't think much of a lot of the stuff that is out there. But there are a lot of people doing very, very good stuff.

(skip)

JJ: Bush recently compared Iraq to Vietnam in a positive way. What do you think he learned from the Vietnam War?

SH: He seems to have learned from lessons that were not very valid. Nobody wants to be a loser. Bush is going to disengage to some degree, and he's going to claim the country is more stable. He's just going to say whatever he wants, and he's going to get away with it because who knows what is going on in Basra. Nobody I know in their right mind would go down there. You'd get whacked.

And the Democrats have fallen into the trap of saying, "We shouldn't get out." As far as I am concerned, there are only two issues: Option A is to get out by midnight tonight, and Option B is to get out by midnight tomorrow.

Redefining success in Iraq

This is a rather long "Daily Show" sketch, and only marginally worth the six and a half minutes I just spent watching it at work (from an employer's standpoint; not mine). But it offers yet another in the drumbeat of satirical pieces on the ever shifting target for "success" in Iraq.

Bush's message 'a pig wearing makeup'

Phillip Carter, who knows a thing or two about the English language and about the situation in Iraq, calls the substance of President Bush's national address last night "a pig wearing makeup."

We are basically sowing the seeds of civil war with this strategy, and doing little to mitigate the risk.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where we stand today. When President Bush announced the surge in early 2007, it had a simple idea at its core: to secure the population in Baghdad and Anbar in order to facilitate political progress at the national level. Security was always a supporting task in this strategy; the main goal was political. Unfortunately, the political strategy has failed, due to the inability or unwillingness of the Iraqis to resolve fundamental questions at the heart of their society. That's not a ding on them; these are hard questions that any society would be taxed to solve. Now, we're stuck. The White House is trying to do damage control by taking credit for other successes which sprang from the surge, but the overall situation speaks for itself.

His Eminence, President-for-Life Bush

When I was a student at UCLA, I wrote a story about the former co-director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program who had just been convicted of running one of the largest LSD labs in American history. It turned out, he was hired by the university despite serious previous drug run-ins.
In that article, I quoted Mark Kleiman, then the director of the program and a public policy professor, declining to comment about his former colleague. Nowadays, though, Kleiman has plenty to say on the blog he contributes to, The Reality-Based Community. He's a bit liberal for my leanings, but always a good read. This one from last week is worth a look:

Boy oh boy, did I ever get this one wrong!

No hoax: Family Security Matters, a front group for Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, really did run a piece by a failed philosopher called Philip Atkinson calling for a genocidal campaign in Iraq followed by the use of the victorious army to establish George W. Bush as President-for-Life with dictatorial powers. (Full text at the jump; has to be read to be believed.)

When this first came out, I was pretty sure I smelled a parody, but it turns out the guy was completely serious.

The argument of the piece, to give it an unduly generous label, calls for a diagnosis rather than a refutation. No wonder FSM "disappeared" not only the article (which has even been wiped from the cache) but the author, who has gone from "Contributing Editor" to "unperson" in record time. Winston Smith of the Ministry of Truth would be proud.

Presumably the scrubbing means that some semi-grownup somewhere in Gaffney's operation noticed that Atkinson had finally parted company with even the neocon substitute for reality.

America's next invasion: Vietnam

I'm not one for opinion columnists, and this piece has little to do with religion (except maybe that our heavenly picked president could use some divine intervention), but Rosa Brooks goes sort of Jonathan Swift on President Bush's speech Wednesday.

Re-invade Vietnam!

Oh yes. You thought the Bush administration was fresh out of ideas? You thought that with Karl Rove leaving, the administration that brought us the war in Iraq and "Mission Accomplished" had no more tricks up its sleeve?

Think again.

On Wednesday, speaking before a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience, President Bush did something he had previously avoided: He compared the Iraq war with the Vietnam War, agreeing that Vietnam does hold lessons for U.S. policy in Iraq.

Can't argue with that. For most Americans, the lessons of Vietnam were reasonably clear before we invaded Iraq and have been painfully reinforced by the ongoing disaster there:

Don't fight needless wars; don't go blundering around in countries where you don't know the language, history or culture; don't underestimate the power of nationalism, ethnicity and religion to bind together -- or tear apart -- people whose interests otherwise seem to diverge or converge; and, most of all, don't imagine that military force can solve fundamentally political problems.

But the president, who has his own very special set of history books, drew the public's attention to some entirely different lessons from Vietnam. To Bush, the "unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens."

Right! To Bush, the tragedy of the Vietnam War is that we didn't let it drag on for another decade or so.

Cheney president for a day *

You may have noticed: I'm not a George Bush fan. I may be a Republican, but I don't agree with 68 percent of the Party that think he's doing swell or with Republican Jews who think his foreign policy is good for Israel.

But there is one thing I know that would be much worse than President Bush. And that is President Cheney.

Tomorrow, when Bush undergoes a colonoscopy, Cheney will assume the role of chief executive and commander in chief. Considering his assertions of executive power and his position on torture, I ask that we offer this prayer: "Our Father who art in heaven ... deliver us from evil."

* Updated: Recommendations on National Review Online for what Cheney should spend his presidency doing. No. 1 the list: Bomb Iran.