Author: Dean Pajevic

New episode tonight: “White House counsel Oliver Babish (Best Bet favorite Oliver Platt) questions Toby (Richard Schiff) about the White House leak — until Toby realizes he might need to retain his own lawyer after all. What’s happening over there? Josh (Bradley Whitford) and Leo (John Spencer) left and all heck broke loose!”

P.S. The Seymour Hersh / Scott Ritter talk and Q&A is on C-SPAN2 again at 7pm PT. I plan to watch again and tape it this time. There’s too much important said for me to trust my memory alone. OPEN THREAD:

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Oy. It was discouraging to read “The Lies Peddled On Sunday Shows And How Democrats & Liberals Play Into Them” at Pre$$titutes, via the Daou Report:

Chuck Schumer on Meet The Press: “Bush, say whatever you want about him, does not back away from a fight.” Thanks Chuck, keep inflating your own opponent.

Howard Dean, bless his heart, appeared on This Week and continued to fumble and stumble on the Iraq question, playing into the narrative that Democrats are incoherent on Iraq. Can’t he just flat out say it was illegal and immoral and the sooner we end this catastrophic misadventure the better? Why legitimize the so-called “political process,” a process by which Iran is gradually tightening its grip on Iraq? Dean rambled on about how our position should be contingent on the success (or lack thereof) of the Iraqi electoral process. Isn’t that Bush’s line?

My favorite line from today’s Meet the Press: “The politics of the war were taken more seriously by this administration than the war itself.” (George Packer) … OPEN THREAD:

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National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley asked the Italians to help with regime change in Syria:

I have it on good authority that Steven Hadley, the director of the US National Security Council, called the President of the Italian senate to asked if he had a candidate to replace Bashar al-Asad as President of Syria. The Italians were horrified. Italy is one of Syria’s biggest trading partners so it seemed a reasonable place to ask! This is what Washington has been up to. — Joshua Landis

Let’s take this in. Hadley is calling the Italians, asking for a name as a replacement figurehead? Stunning.

This Stephen Hadley? Whose ass is about to be indicted? Who was a member of the infamous WHIG group that sold the Iaq war?
Who has his smudgy mitts all over the Niger forgery story and connived with Karl Rove to smear Joseph Wilson and his wife?

Yup, that Stephen Hadley. In BooMan’s “Holy Crap: My Pre-Indictment Stress Syndrome is Acting Up” he quotes Larry Johnson: “My friend told me that Hadley fully expects he will be indicted.”

We need to listen to Joshua Landis — a Fulbright Scholar currently living in Damascus and Beirut — who is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the History Department and the School of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Landis has become an essential source for newspapers, including The New York Times.

Landis’s SyriaComment.com has become one of my must-reads. He writes well. He travels to Beirut regularly. He talks to international reporters daily. And Landis talks to Syrians on the streets of Damascus.

We’re not playing “DOOM” here, for chrissakes. You have to know the territory. As Patrick Lang — a former DIA Chief of the Middle East and Terrorism as well as first professor of Arabic Languages at West Point — pointed out last night here in “Syria and the Stone Wall“:

The Syrian government has a long established and time tested methodology for dealing with external demands placed upon it. It ignores them.

Further, as Joshua Landis logically notes, what can Syria possibly do to placate the Bush administration? “Bashar cannot possibly do what Washington is demanding of it — give family members to an international court. My guess is that the regime will stick together on this.”

But, really, none of that matters!

Cheney and Hadley are hellbent on going after Syria:

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Or, if you prefer:

Harriet’s Hairballs Raise Eyebrows

MSNBC was mentioning the “w” word this morning (that’d be withdraw). And, Harriet Miers’ tenure as the first female president of the Texas state bar association “could provide new fodder for conservatives opposed to her nomination,” reports the WaPo (photo source). The article, “Miers Backed Race, Sex Set-Asides,” mentions that “the types of policies pursued by the Texas bar association amount to reverse discrimination.” Not popular with conservatives!

The Los Angeles Times finds that the few questions that Miers did answer have “left many constitutional experts shaking their heads.”

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, “the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.”

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population.

“That’s a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause,” said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. “If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable.” (Emphasis mine.)

You know, I’m enjoying this FAR too much to step in and add my opinion about Ms. Miers. The conservatives and legal scholars are doing quite well on their own!

And now increasingly desperate conservatives — dizzyingly picking daisy petals (“I love the president, I love him not, I love him despite his jaw-jerking, I love the numbskull not”) — are left telling PlanetOut that they don’t mind that, in 1987, Miers’ helped out the Dallas chapter of Girls, Inc., “a youth organization that supports abortion rights and acceptance of lesbians.”

Miers chaired the advisory committee of Girls Inc., a non-profit organization dating to 1864 that serves about 800,000 girls a year, many from low-income families, according to the questionnaire she submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Miers received an award for her work with the local chapter and the Dallas Bar Association. […]

Questioned about Miers’ past involvement with the group, Tim Wildmon, president of the AFA, said it was not an issue.

“That’s been so long ago,” Wildmon said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think that factors in with her current situation. It was 18 years ago, people change, organizations change.”

What kind of moral compass does Tim Wildmon have that he buckles in to Miers’ record if it suits his purposes, but is sending his association after Girls Inc.? You bastard:

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Karen’s been to Indonesia where she got an “earful” from Indonesian women, writes Common Dreams.

“Hughes Misreports Iraqi History.” blares the WaPo headline. The subtitle: “Envoy Vastly Overstates Fact in Justifying War to Indonesian Students.”

JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 21 — Bush administration envoy Karen Hughes visited Indonesia on Friday as part of her campaign to repair U.S. standing with the world’s Muslims and defended the invasion of Iraq by telling skeptical students that deposed president Saddam Hussein had gassed hundreds of thousands of his own people. […]

State Department officials later acknowledged that Hughes, tapped by President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to set the record straight on U.S. policies in the Muslim world, had misreported history. […]

The students Friday repeatedly challenged her on all three fronts. But Iraq — and, in particular, unproven U.S. claims about Iraq stockpiling weapons of mass destruction — drew the most ire.

The NYT chimes in with “Bush’s Designated Hitter Strikes Out With Indonesian Students.”

The headline that may raise the most debate: “Hughes to replace Rove?” — from U.S. News & World Report.

You decide! Is America safer with Hughes inside, or outside, the White House bubble?

Meanwhile, her next stops are Aceh and then the predominantly Muslim nation, Malaysia. … more below:

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