Sunday Mishmash

Bravo to Nate 'The Great" Silver,baseball's leading statistician, for taking a break from politics to do an analysis of Derek Jeter's salary compared to performance and the compartive prices of other shortstops. I tend to believe this column printed in the New York Times led to the Yankees' upping the offer and snagging Derek for the next 3 years. Jeter now stands to become the first Yankee to pass the 3,000 hit level,to surpass Mickey Mantle's record for most games played as a Yankee, and to top Ricky Henderson's stolen base record for the franchise.

Dick Cheney in a moment of lucidity told Tim Russert that the tax cuts for the wealthy did not create any jobs and that they only account for 25% of the national debt. I have an ingenious solution to Cheney's Interpol problem. Since Cheney literally doesn't have a pulse anymore, his lawyers should claim he's dead, thereby sparring the Obama Administration from having to finesse the arrest warrant. The bonus to this is that he can take advantage of the Estate Tax, which is due to re-appear in 2011.

Since it looks like the tax cuts for the wealthy will be extended, Glenn Beck will get $2,500,000 in tax breaks and Mitch McConnell, whose net worth is $34 million, will get enough of a tax break that he will earn more than the President of the United States. Not bad for saying "no"

James Fallows writes in the Atlantic about how John McCain became a shell of his former self. Fallows likens McCain's fate to that of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, who became right-wing crackpots in their old age. Regenary, the right-wing publisher, has printed a new book extolling Lindbergh's politics when he was challenging FDR. It must have been underwritten by the Koch Brothers, who are trying to rehabilitate their families' reputation during that period.

For his part, McCain is trying to run out the congressional clock on DADT as GOP spokespeople claimed in the Sunday news shows,saying DADT is dead for this Congress. Don't bet on this.

Remember to revisit Prop 8 trial tracker tomorrow as the oral arguments begin at the 9th Circuit Court on same-sex marriage in California. So far, no names have been announced about the defenders. Boies and Olson are back up for the same-sex marriage advocates.

Meanwhile in Illinois, the Governor signed the bill allowing same-sex marriage and partnerships. What's interesting about this bill is that it allows for "marriage-lite" for both gays and straights. Straight couples can opt for domestic partnerships instead of marriage. A little shot across the bow was said by government authorities when they told the press, "No church can define marriage." Ouch!

Nate Silver in today's New York Times does a post-mortem about the House races. In short, he concludes that the Republican 60 seat pickup was a result of the polarization in those districts and that over 48 of them were districts where McCain had won in 2008. he also notes that the Democrats picked up all seats in Massachusetts, suggesting that the Coakley candidacy was incredibly weak when she lost to Scott Brown.

Newton Leroy Gingrich sort of thinks he may run for President so far. Stay tuned. He came up with an ingenious suggestion that the "rich" should determine when their tax cuts end. After all aren't they the ones who built America?

Robert Kaplan is an author I have enjoyed over the years but he leaves me today with a sophomoric article in the Washington Post, which will pass in this town as wise, saying that the problems in the world today are the result of the weakening of empires, including our own. He extols the fact that both the United States and the Soviets were "missionizing empires" and deplores China's reluctance to play the same role, exporting their values. He tut-tuts that China is not stepping up to the plate to accept their leadership role in this age. A strange argument but one that was heard on the Senate floor this week uttered by the "Liberator of South Ossetia" himself, John McCain.

Kaplan tells readers--wrongly--that we do not face the same fate as the Soviet union because of our wealth and personal freedom. This stuff just fries me. We have a war against the Middle Class--the Poor lost out two decades ago--,the world's largest debt, and the greatest shrinking of personal freedom in a generation but, no, Robert thinks we can go on with building up our military power. I guess the royalties for his books have been so good that he doesn't have to live in everyday world. I suggest Kaplan may be hanging out too much with Niall Ferguson, who has been on a global speaking campaign saying the American empire is threatened by the country's social benefits.

Dick Lugar risks being renditioned by teabaggers to Arizona to placed in Governor Brewer's death panels. Lugar praised the President for his outreach to Republicans, claimed the Republican leadership appreciated it and said that Repubicans have to come up with some constructive programs and can't be the party of no. The Teabaggers are issuing a Fatwa against Senator Lugar for faintly praising the Muslim President.

Actually the founder of the Tea Party Express said this week we should return to the days when only those who owned property could vote. Does a car count?

The new Teabagger Governor of Maine,LePage, discovered something interesting. He is urging his Attorney-General to sign on to the case against the Healthcare Bill because when Maine becomes the 35th state,the law becomes null and void. Isn't that Great? It's also wrong. A great state now run by a total moron.

But in Virginia, we have the great Cooch, our fanatic Attorney-General, who now wants to streamline his appeal on the healthcare bill straight to the Roberts Court,Inc. You see the first federal court suit here in Virginia upheld the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Now Cooch doesn't just want an appeal he wants the final decision while Gumba Tony Scalia is still on the court.

I recommend reading Andy Rowell and Eveline Lubbers' "Ken Saro-Wiwa was framed, secret evidence shows" in today's The Independent (U.K.). This article details the multi-year investigation by Nigerian authorities into the military's killing of four Ogoni elders whose murders led to the execution of the playwright and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. The article should be read not only for this infamous case but also for the tawdry atmosphere around all abuses. Remember Saro-Wiwa was charged with murdering the elders for their moderate stance on issues in Ogoniland. The article details the activities of the military leading to killing the Ogoni elders and later to the whole frame-up and execution of Saro-Wiwa. And one of the details--those gratuitous details that show up in human rights cases--is the delivery of Ghana Must Go Bags filled with money to Lt.Col Okuntimo and how they spill open with guards present. The bags were the Shell Oil Company's payoff to the Colonel. Will anything be done?

The whole Wikileaks controversy has certainly opened the door to politicians' inner fascism around the globe. Both Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin call Julien Assange a traitor--even though he's Australia. Mike wants all leakers executed. I object--I don'tthink Scooty Libby should be executed. Mitch McConnell calls Julian Assange a "high-tech terrorist". Australian journalists are calling for Donald Assange, Julien's 20year old son to be kidnapped and used as ransom for his father's return. I guess this is Colombia-style democracy. Senator Lieberman,I-Knesset, said he got Amazon's cloud network to drop Wikileaks. And the woman who has accused Assange of sex with a broken condom turns out to have worked with the CIA and on other issues with anti-Castro groups organized by Carlos Alberto Montaner. (Full discloser--Carlos is a friend of mine.) Meanwhile,the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom are doing an all-global press to shut down any Wikileaks websites and their new tweeter accounts.

Now,let's focus on what our Government thinks of us. The Middle Eastern governments have basically enforced media censorship on the Wikileaks stories and shut down all internet sites commenting on it. We expect that. And we expect Russia and China to do the same as human rights activists have protested for years about authoritarian governments waging cyberwarfare against dissidents. Aside from the amateur hacker in the first days of the story, it has been the United States' government ,which has unleashed the electronic war to swamp every and all Wikileaks websites. It makes me sick to see our country is the best in the world at this. I had always felt it was Iran and China, working with a software called "Rain" that were the champs in suppressing information.

Now graduates students in Ivy League Schools have been warned not to read Wikileaks if they want a job in the State Department. Government employees have been warned not to read any of the Wikileaks' cables--even in the press? We have heard that lives at danger. American diplomats have been fanning out across the globe to offer their sources the opportunity to relocate for protection. How much of this concern is based on realistic threats I don't know. But the attitude of American politicians to the American public certainly is eye-opening.

Is there anything you have read that suurprises you? Are you shocked to find that Hamid Karzai is not a Jeffersonian Democrat? Are you surprised to find that an American defense contractor procured young boys and drugs for the Afghanis they are training as policemen? Were you stunned to find that the Saudis want to fight Iran to "the last American"? I'm not sure that the American public is shocked by anything in these cables.

But what I cam certain is that the over-reaction to Wikileaks will stir up more anti-Americanism than before. It seems very peculiar that we are hunting down Julian Assange with an insensity we lack against Bin Laden. Our plea to interpol was immediately after Assange said he was going to dump thousands of documents about an American bank. The Iraq and Afghanistan dumps--which were massive--elicited a very nonchalant response from Bob Gates at the Pentagon. Or maybe it has been Assange's call for both Hilary Clinton and Obama to resign for ordering spying on the United Nations that triggered the harsh reactions. I thought both statements showed how Assange was actually very naive about politics in general. We've been spying along with everyone else on the United Nations for decades.

But one question I do have is why the manic urge to shut down Wikileaks but no such effort has been made to close down the Jihadi websitesthat recruit new Al Qaeda members. We have Al Qaeda in Yemen recruiting American college kids from Virginia and relaying praise to the FT. Hood shooter. These websites actually kill people and yet we haven't made a move on them. I know it's so we can obtain intelligence on these groups so we allow them to operate. Meanwhile, troubled youths destroy their own lives and maybe others.

The simple lesson on Wikileaks is to keep your condom on, others the feds will come get you.

If you want to own a part of American history, the Unibomber's parcel of land in Montana is on sale. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the cabin. The last time I looked the cabin was at the Newseum here in Washington.

Wikileaks and America

Not all of Wikileaks is bad news. As Dana Milbank's column in today's Washington Post points out, many of our diplomats are veritable Graham Greenes able to pen poignant cables home. We also learn that Prince Andrews thinks the United States is back in the Great Game, which the American ambassador denied, having not received the talking points from the Bush-Cheney Administration. In my view, it was good news that our foreign service officers are conscious that all our erstwhile allies in the Middle East are corrupt, sleazy and double-dealing. We also learn that the Obama Administration has been adroit in isolating Iran in the world. Details of how the Obama Administration weened China away from Iran by getting the Saudis to guarantee its oil supply showed deft diplomacy.

There are the usual fun vignettes of world leaders like Qaddafhi with his buxom Romanian nurse, Sarkozy reveling in denying Tony Blair the Presidency of the EU, and Berlusconi's pride in setting a good table and his close relationship with Putin's less savory friends.

We can look forward to weeks more of Wikileaks. They promise more upcoming cables having to due with the Vatican, North Korea and Israel. Julian Assange told Forbes he will have a massive document dump on a major American bank, which will expose the international financial community.

But there exists the problem of "bad faith" by Wikileaks. For example, when they dumped over 250,000 cables into the internet, they also asked their supporters to download the "insurance files", which are heavily encoded. These files are supposed to guarantee the United States or other security services would not assassinate Assange or those who work for Wikileaks. But it seems to me that if you profess wanting transparency in "all global issues" then saving the crown jewels just to protect your person is not quite cricket.

The U.S. Government reacted with justified outrage over the latest Wikileaks, even more than the previous dump of Afghanistan and Iraq documents. The problem is that this administration has tried to recover America's fallen prestige in the world and this doesn't help matters. The Italian foreign minister characterized these actions by Wikileaks as the "9-11" of political diplomacy. Former CIA officer Bob Baer claims that the release of the cables will make it more problematic for the United States to launch drones inside Pakistan and to engage in some of its covert anti-terrorism work as in Yemen. Another practical problem is that the leak silences friends inside other countries from providing intelligence to American diplomats.

But one of the issues here is that over 2 million Americans had access to these cables. None of them were highly classified. And where was our vaunted counterintelligence officers? This seems to me to be the result of the Secret America the Washington Post revealed earlier this year. A myriad of new intelligence agencies have grown up since 9/11 and none of them have any adult supervision. If you really believe that the lone American military analyst is the source of these cables I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'll sell you. The Wikileaks phenomenon is just the start of a flood of classified materials washing across the internet. It doesn't have to be Wikileaks but competitors since our intelligence agencies are so porous.

One of the most disturbing aspect of the cables is that they reveal the United States under President Obama has not abandoned the "Long War" concept created by the Bush-Cheney years. Almost every cable is tinged with a fixation on terrorism and war fever. The cable of Bob Gates briefing the Italian foreign minister about how the world will be radically different if Iran obtains a nuclear device is one of hundreds of examples of this mentality. Luckily, our policy makers have refrained from taking the Sunni dictators' advice in bombing Tehran but the theme runs throughout the Middle Eastern cables. It's not clear who is the client state the United States or the small Sunni kleptocracies. The Saudi King waxes hot and cold over whether Iran should be bombed. When Mossad tries to blackmail the U.S. in 2005 to bomb Iran while there is still time, the Saudis weigh in to stop this. This year the Saudi King now wants Iran bombed. Every Middle Eastern state, including Israel, wants a war with Iran and naturally the United States must wage it and pay for it.

Reading these cables you have to conclude that America must rapidly adopt a national energy policy as soon as possible to withdraw from the region and realign our country with the hopes and aspirations with the region's peoples and not their corrupt rulers. While the Sunni potentates urge the United States to bomb Iran, Middle Eastern people in recent polls believe the greatest threat to their security is posed by Israel number one, then the United States second and Iran down in the mix. The cables make you believe we are being manipulated by local political forces rather than following our national interests.

If one recalls the days of anti-Americanism in Latin America, it was because we would install military dictators and did not encourage democracy and freedom after the years of the Alliance for Progress. In the atmosphere of the Cold war, center and center-left forces were considered suspect and our emphasis was on stability, which was temporarily purchased by widespread human rights abuses. Reading these cables, I fear we are descending into that mentality, which will create dangerous blowback. Our intelligence assets are in fact part of the political problem as witnessed by the honest cables from our ambassador to Pakistan.

Leftist critics of Iraq and Afghanistan wars claim we are in quagmires. But it actually becomes true when you consider our role in the whole Middle East. Just review the cables on Hamid Karzai and his brother. We are in bed with so many shady corrupt characters that it's hard to see how we can extract ourselves from them. And the problem is that the average person there will remember. Just as they remember when George H.W. Bush urged the Shi'ites to revolt against Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and the United States failed to come to their rescue.

The cables about Iran's nuclear program remind me of the E.U. ambassador, who said,"We're all negotiating over a nuclear weapon like an oriental rug. But the difference is that we don't know whether the rug exists or not." The most worrisome cables detail North Korea's shipment to Iran of ballistic missiles, something the Iranian ambassador to Moscow immediately denied the day after the cables appeared. It has been this missile capability, in my opinion, that is the actual security threat posed by Iran. As we have seen, the Iranian nuclear program has been sabotaged by cyber warfare and the assasination of nuclear scientists, which should push the program back years.

Emerging as the elephant in the room is North Korea. The cables are fascinating in that the United States and South Korea have gamed out a unified Korea and cables covering the Chinese indicate Beijing might not object to this. It's clear China is not happy with their clients as North Korea keeps going rogue. One only has to watch the recent events on the Korean peninsula to get some sense of their insanity. How much of this military action is to camouflage an on-going transfer of power?

The Right and the Left in the States have selectively picked cables to reinforce their own ideologies. The Left is making hay out of suggestions that somehow the United States encouraged the right-wing coup in Honduras, while there are counter cables indicating this might not be true. The Right is circulating cables printed in the Guardian that the Obama Administration was hoping that the moderates would triumph in the Iranian election. Not a bad hope. But the point of circulating these memos is to portray the Administration as naive, something the rest of the cables show they are not. In fact, the cables show that Obama's overture to Iran was done precisely to set up the situation for tougher sanctions, something the right didn't understand in the first place.

The American diplomatic corps comes across as professional, honest, educated and savvy to the local conditions. While these cables are not policy papers but just reports from the field, you have to give the men and women who serve our country credit for dealing with a hostile and threatening world. You also have to give them credit for ferreting out information from host countries. Unfortunately, something that might become more difficult with the release of these cables.

One item I found ironic was Harold Koh's statement condemning Wikileaks. Koh is the counselor for the State Department, whose appointment was challenged by conservatives who claimed--quite falsely--was an advocate of Sharia law.