Hi. I'd hoped to send something substantial, even spectacular
about the Mexican election, but the counting goes on.
Lopez-Obrador now holds a slim lead, with almost every box
recounted changing in his favor (NY Times, today.)
So, here's some of the rest of what's happened and happening.
Ed
Ha'aretz
Last update - 11:31 02/07/2006
A black flag
By Gideon Levy
A black flag hangs over the "rolling" operation in Gaza. The more the
operation "rolls," the darker the flag becomes. The "summer rains" we are
showering on Gaza are not only pointless, but are first and foremost
blatantly illegitimate. It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from
electricity. It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their
homes and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to
penetrate Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government
and a quarter of a parliament.
A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a
terror organization. The harsher the steps, the more monstrous and stupid
they become, the more the moral underpinnings for them are removed and the
stronger the impression that the Israeli government has lost its nerve. Now
one must hope that the weekend lull, whether initiated by Egypt or the prime
minister, and in any case to the dismay of Channel 2's Roni Daniel and the
IDF, will lead to a radical change.
Everything must be done to win Gilad Shalit's release. What we are
doing now in Gaza has nothing to do with freeing him. It is a widescale act
of vengeance, the kind that the IDF and Shin Bet have wanted to conduct for
some time, mostly motivated by the deep frustration that the army commanders
feel about their impotence against the Qassams and the daring Palestinian
guerilla raid. There's a huge gap between the army unleashing its
frustration and a clever and legitimate operation to free the kidnapped
soldier.
***
A Moment of Pause
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 30 June 2006
A rolling sense of awe has enveloped the mainstream news media since
yesterday's Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo. The specifics of the
decision are part of the discussion, to be sure, but the sense of amazement
has a more basic root. After all this time, after a seemingly endless series
of over-reaching power grabs by the Bush administration, someone with a big
enough stick finally got in the way and said, "No."
"In rejecting Bush's military tribunals for terrorism suspects," reads
the analysis in Friday's Washington Post, "the high court ruled that even a
wartime commander in chief must govern within constitutional confines
significantly tighter than this president has believed appropriate."
In short, the fellow in the Oval is beholden to the law, and to the
Constitution. Not so very many years ago, that simple statement was held as
axiomatic. A president's powers are broad and deep on the best of days, but
for a very long time the legal boundaries held. Presidents who tested those
boundaries - Lincoln and FDR leap to mind - had the new lines of demarcation
they established erased and redrawn by Congress or the courts before too
much time went by. In the case of Nixon, an attempt to broaden the powers of
the Executive in defiance of law led to the annihilation of the entire
administration.
It is a fascinating event - the prison at Guantanamo becoming the
this-far-no-farther moment for the Bush administration - considering what
else has transpired. A covert CIA agent was exposed, intelligence analysts
were intimidated into delivering politically acceptable data, hundreds of
laws were summarily ignored by way of "signing statements," the FISA courts
were bypassed during surveillance of American citizens, activist groups with
no terrorism ties were intimidated, and the invasion and occupation of a
foreign country was undertaken under brazenly false premises. A lot of
people have died, and a staggering amount of taxpayer money has been
redirected into the coffers of companies with deep ties to the White House.
When all of it is boiled down, the invasion of Iraq and the "War on
Terror" in general haven't really had much at all to do with defeating Osama
bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, and have had even less to do with protecting
the nation. It wasn't about certain people getting paid, or about defending
Israel, or even about establishing a permanent presence in the Mideast. Not
entirely, anyway.
So much of this, in the end, has been about Dick Cheney being annoyed by
Watergate.
Think about it. All this, and everything else besides, has been the deep
set of footprints left by an administration bent on gathering to itself as
much power as possible. Cheney is the true mind and muscle of this White
House. The catastrophe of Nixon, as far as Cheney is concerned, was all the
authority and autonomy surrendered by the Executive branch once the scandal
was over and done with. Cheney started with Nixon in 1969 before becoming a
senior member of the Ford administration, and later was Defense Secretary
under the first president Bush. He suffered for Nixon's debacle for a very
long time, under three different Republican presidents, before finally
getting a chance to set things to rights.
It has been shown time and again throughout American history that the
best moment for a president to seize unprecedented powers always comes
during a time of war or national emergency. September 11 opened the door,
and Cheney ran right through. His partner in this was Defense Secretary Don
Rumsfeld, who may go down in history as the most savage bureaucratic
infighter in the history of government. Rumsfeld, at the behest of Cheney,
made sure the "War on Terror" was run out of the Pentagon and not the CIA.
Rumsfeld, with Cheney's help, convinced George W. Bush that Iraq needed to
be the so-called "central front" of the whole thing after Afghanistan.
The debacle of Iraq belongs to both these men, but most fulsomely to Mr.
Cheney. An invasion and a war create the perfect premise for the
establishment of a Unitary Executive, after all. 9/11 wasn't enough; we
needed to be at war. Cheney would not have been able to stage-manage the
profligate expansion of presidential powers otherwise, and when you cut
right down to the bone, that is a lot of the reason we are over there today.
It can be safely assumed that this Supreme Court decision will not
deflect the central intentions of Mr. Cheney and this administration; power
is, after all, its own reward, and this White House has never been much for
lingering over setbacks. In the end, though, it is the simplicity of the
moment that gives pause. Someone finally got around to telling the Bush
administration, out loud and in public, that they are bound by laws and
treaties. It will be interesting to see if this decision has any force or
effect over an administration that has shown no interest in being thwarted.
The fact that this White House made up its mind to believe and act
otherwise, and chose to fight a war as a means of establishing new
boundaries of Executive power, will be their lasting legacy when the final
pages are written. That no one in a position to curtail them chose to do so
until now will be the lasting legacy of a lot of people who should have
known better.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling
author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know
and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.
***
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/01/opinion/01dowd.html?th&emc=th
Velvet Elvis Diplomacy
By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Op-Ed: July 1, 2006
Memphis
Among the newspaper headlines preserved in Elvis's trophy room in Graceland,
hanging next to his size-12 white leather shoes and rhinestone-studded gold
lamé suit, is this gem from Aug. 12, 1957: "Rock 'n' Roll Banned, 'Hate
Elvis' Drive Launched By Iran To Save Its Youth."
Datelined Tehran, the story began: "Rock 'n' roll has been banned in Iran as
a threat to civilization. 'This new canker can very easily destroy the roots
of our 6,000 years' civilization,' police said, before launching a 'Hate
Elvis' campaign."
Half a century ago, Elvis was considered a wiggly threat to Muslim
civilization. But yesterday, the president brought the Japanese prime
minister to Elvis's gloriously campy time capsule to thank the fanatical
Elvis fan for helping push democracy in the Muslim world.
Junichiro Koizumi seemed to be in an ecstatic trance. Standing near the
indoor waterfall in the Jungle Room with Priscilla, Lisa Marie, Laura and
George looking on, basking in the avocado glow of a 70's shag rug that
covered floor and ceiling, the 64-year-old Japanese leader did Thin Elvis
air guitar and Fat Elvis karate chops.
He grabbed the King's outsized tinted gold-rimmed glasses and slipped them
on, as the curator who had handled them with white gloves watched in alarm.
And he gamely sang heavily accented bits of "Love Me Tender," "Can't Help
Falling in Love With You," "Fools Rush In," "I Want You, I Need You, I Love
You," and even let loose with "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah" until finally
Priscilla Presley called out, "We need a karaoke machine!" He even cast Lisa
Marie in the Ann-Margret role in his own fantasy "Viva Las Vegas," pulling
her close to croon, "Hold me close, hold me tight."
"It's like a dream," bubbled Mr. Koizumi.
It was hard to remember anyone looking this happy in the gloomy cave of the
Bush-Cheney administration, where more time is spent spanking allies than
treating them.
Mr. Bush seemed out of his element. It's doubtful that W. had ever seen a
round, mirrored, white fake-fur canopy bed before, much less an entire suit
made of black faux fur. At one point, the president tried to cut off his
overexcited guest from Tokyo, a city that loves its Elvis impersonator bars.
But Mr. Koizumi would not be stopped.
Surrounded by monkey ceramics and ersatz cow skulls, W. tried to make a
serious point about his road-trip summit, saying the visit was "a way of
reminding us about the close friendship between our peoples."
In addition to being a respite from other bad news - getting disciplined by
the Supreme Court on Gitmo and getting taunted again by Osama - the
Graceland getaway was a triumph in personal diplomacy. That was the
specialty of this president's father, who made a career of dragging
befuddled world leaders off to baseball games, the Air and Space Museum, and
sprints on his boat in Kennebunkport.
Poppy used such jaunts as a lubricant to diplomacy and an inducement to
closer, chattier relationships. His less curious, less social son tends to
think of personal diplomacy more in terms of rewards and punishments, just
another way to give or withhold favors, depending on who is going along with
his world view.
Yesterday's pilgrimage may have struck some as too kitschy, given that
several youngsters in Memphis have been tragically shot by stray bullets
recently. But at least goin' to Graceland was a rare display of expertise in
the psychology of diplomacy, an area where this administration has been
strangely tone-deaf. W. figured out what the Japanese leader was thinking,
what he wanted and what mattered in his culture, and exploited it -
unfortunately, waiting until Mr. Koizumi was almost out of office.
Bush officials went out of their way not to do this with Saddam when they
failed to consider that he might be hyping his W.M.D. arsenal or toying with
U.N. weapons inspectors as a chest-thumping exercise aimed at impressing
other Arab leaders. The Bush team also repeatedly squandered chances to talk
to the Iranians and the North Koreans, ignoring the ways in which the
oddball leaders of those countries might be acting out of insecurity, envy,
bluster, one-upsmanship and a desire to be respected - sort of how high
school girls might behave if they had nukes.
With his small circle of pals and Iraq war defenders - Mr. Koizumi, Tony
Blair and Silvio Berlusconi - drifting off the world stage, and with allies
pulling back troops in Iraq, President Bush may soon be as isolated as Elvis
was at the end. For the rest of his term and through history, W.'s
Heartbreak Hotel is likely to be located in Baghdad.
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