Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Just 20 minutes before the debate began, a federal judge said Reform Party candidate Max Linn could join in. Organizers dragged a third lectern into the Tampa television studio, and the major candidates braced for the unknown.

Linn lashed Crist at every opportunity, keeping him on the defensive and reinforcing Davis' more measured attacks against the longtime front-runner.

The punchy pace was not what Crist had in mind. He had objected to the original proposed format, an informal setting with the candidates and host Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball sitting around a table. Crist got his lectern -- but didn't bargain for the double-barreled attack from Davis and Linn.

Crist adviser Stuart Stevens grumbled that the campaign had not been notified that Linn had filed a lawsuit. Candidates will be unwilling to participate in future Florida NBC debates as a result, he said.

Davis was more charitable about Linn's presence: "He brought a little democracy. Democracy is a little sloppy, a little unpredictable. But the voters tonight won. They got to see the difference between the candidates."

Linn, though, wasn't Crist's only new antagonist. A candidate who relies on a steady drumbeat of sound bites, from "I'm a happy warrior" to "I'll be the people's governor," Crist was rarely able to utter those words during the debate. Matthews, of MSNBC's Hardball, seemed determined to live up to his reputation for rapid-fire interrogations.

In a key exchange, he badgered Crist about the state's murder rate and why Crist was claiming that crime was going down when murder was going up.

Matthews: Mr. Crist did you say that crime has gone down? And led us to believe that violent crime has gone down, when violent crime has gone up?

Crist: Crime has gone down in our state.

Matthews: But violent crime?

Crist: Violent crime has gone down in our state as well. The only violent crime that’s up is murder.

Matthews: Well that’s what Marion Berry used to say in DC when I was there. He’d say crime is down but sorry murder is up, the only exception. For most people, murder is the big one.

Crist: It is the biggest one.

Matthews: Well why didn’t you say that. Why did you say crime has gone down when you knew that murder had gone up?

Crist: Because crime has gone down, Chris.

Matthews: That’s a technical point.

Crist: It’s not a technical point. Crime in our state has gone down. It’s a 35-year low right now. I’m telling you the truth.

Mathews: I’m sorry the only reason I’m saying that is because it’s exactly what Marion Berry said after his years in DC.

Crist: Well my name’s Charlie Crist.

Linn saved the worst of his vitriol for Crist. Matthews had to stop Linn twice from taunting Crist, saying the rules forbade candidates from talking to each other, as Linn said, "Answer the question, Charlie, for a change," and "I'm over here, Charlie. Can you see me or are you still ignoring me?"

With Linn acting in effect as a spoiler for Davis, the debate turned into what some considered the best moment so far in Davis' underdog campaign.

Overall, I don't think anybody on stage looked spectacular tonight. Between Chris Matthews' intense questioning and Reform Party candidate Max Linn wailing away at everything and everyone in the room, it was kind of a melee. And both Jim Davis and Charlie Crist fumbled. But i think Crist fumbled more -- on everything from pretending not to know how much money he'd taken from the insurance industry to the Terri Schiavo and Mark Foley cases. I don't think Crist collapsed. So maybe, as the frontrunner, he still cleared the requisite low bar. We shall see in one week.

Near the end of the debate, Matthews directed the conversation toward the topic that has overwhelmed the campaign up until now -- homeowner insurance costs.

Davis used the topic to flay Crist for wanting to "stay the course" with Republican policies and for failing to stand up to powerful insurance lobbyists. Crist wants to eliminate Florida-only subsidiaries of national insurance companies. He also wants to force companies who sell auto and life insurance in Florida to also sell property insurance if they want to do business in the state.

Davis blasted Crist for reportedly accepting at least $2 million campaign donations from insurers and criticized Crist's proposal to stabilize the market, even suggesting that Jeb Bush, who attended the debate, has expressed doubts about the workability of his solutions.

"What Charlie Crist has been offering is what Gov. Bush has recently said is something that sounds good but wouldn't work," Davis said. "I will stand up to this very powerful insurance lobby, something Charlie Crist has failed to do for four years as attorney general."

After the debate, Bush told reporters that Davis mischaracterized Crist's remarks, and he blasted Matthews for directing the debate to issues like the war in Iraq that, he said, have little to do with the Florida governor's job.

• Crist the rock
• The campaign-o-matic
• Crist v. Davis, round one
• Even Steven?
• Political ticker: Monday
• Oh no he didn't!
• Dear Jeb ... it's me ... Mark
• The secret candidate
• Wait, wait, there's more...
• When Mark touches Charlie

Tags: Florida politics, Florida, Republicans, GOP, Charlie Crist, Jim Davis,

This final overview of the political landscape finds the Nov. 7 elections shaping up as a collision between the Republican Party's fundraising and voter turnout proficiency with an ever-expanding field of competitive seats and a consistent decline in the GOPs support among voters on issues across the board. The result is a Congress up for grabs, and an energized Democratic Party trying hard not to seem overconfident. ...

... As of Oct. 27, CQ’s individual assessments of all 435 House races showed Democrats seriously contesting Republican holds on 72 seats (31 percent of the party’s current total) with seven of those races already leaning toward a Democratic takeover and 18 more considered genuine tossups — the result of a combination of Republican political weaknesses and the Emanuel team’s success at growing the roster of competitive Democratic challengers, many in districts that the party had not contested in years. By contrast, only 21 Democratic seats were in play, and only a handful appeared seriously at risk. The bottom line is that the Republicans are now ahead at least marginally in only 207 races, meaning that even if they hold on to all of those (which won’t happen) they must win 11 of the 18 tossups to retain power. The Democrats are now ahead in 210 races — nine more than the number of seats they have now — so if they hold all those leads they will need to win just eight of the tossups to gain control.

As they have throughout the campaign, the Democrats face their more daunting task in the Senate: They must gain a net of six seats to take control — an all-the-more-unlikely prospect just two years after they lost four seats. But their quest has now put them within striking distance.

Republicans claim the immovable object: a barricade of structural political advantages that, party leaders argue, will keep their majorities intact even as the public mood toward GOP rule has soured.

The biggest such bulwark — and the one casting the most doubt over the prospect of a historic Democratic sweep — is the massive voter turnout organization that Democratic strategists lose sleep over. Spearheaded by Ken Mehlman, the Rove protégé who now chairs the Republican National Committee (RNC), the mobilization centers on a database containing the names and personal preferences, gleaned from publicly available data sources, of millions of Republican voters. Between now and Election Day they will be subjected to repeated entreaties to get out and vote. The effort will culminate with the latest iteration of the Rove-Mehlman brainchild, the 72-Hour Project, a turnout blitz over the final three days of the campaign.

Also building the barricade is the Republican Party’s mastery of fundraising: The RNC and the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House campaign arm, have both greatly outdone their partisan counterparts — the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — in overall receipts. Only the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, run by Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, has taken in more money than its GOP analog, the National Republican Senatorial Committee. ...

...Democrats, though, assert that the supposedly immovable object protecting Republican congressional majorities has been eroded and undermined by an overwhelming demand for change among the majority of Americans, who tell national pollsters they have lost faith with Washington’s ruling party.

This, Democrats say, is because of an almost-ceaseless series of failures, frustrations and foibles in the two years since Bush won re-election and declared that the victory he won with 51 percent of the popular vote was a mandate to pursue his agenda and execute his open-ended commitment of U.S. military forces to Iraq — and since the declaration of a permanent Republican majority by the man who was then House majority leader, Tom DeLay, whose own ethics morass drove him from Congress in June and continues to contribute to his party’s travails even now.

Setting the stage for all Republican problems is Iraq. With an unsubstantiated original justification for the war — deposed dictator Saddam Hussein’s supposed caches of weapons of mass destruction and ties to the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001 — U.S. troops find themselves grappling with a fierce domestic insurgency, the infiltration of international jihadists and the roiling possibility of an outright civil war between sectarian factions already inflicting mind-numbing atrocities on one another. ...

The US defence department has set up a new unit to better promote its message across 24-hour rolling news outlets, and particularly on the internet.
The Pentagon said the move would boost its ability to counter "inaccurate" news stories and exploit new media.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier this year the US was losing the propaganda war to its enemies.

On Monday, Vice-President Dick Cheney said insurgents had increased attacks in Iraq to sway the US mid-term polls.

The Bush administration does not believe the true picture of events in Iraq has been made public, the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington says.

The administration is particularly concerned that insurgents in areas such as Iraq have been able to use the web to disseminate their message and give the impression they are more powerful than the US, our correspondent says.

'Correcting messages'

The newly-established unit would use "new media" channels to push its message and "set the record straight", Pentagon press secretary Eric Ruff said.

Al-Qaeda figures like Ayman al-Zawahri issue video messages

"We're looking at being quicker to respond to breaking news," he said.

"Being quicker to respond, frankly, to inaccurate statements."

• A lighter shade of pale

A Google bomb or Googlewash is Internet slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking (called PageRank) of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. Google bomb is used both as a verb and a noun. The phrase "Google bombing" was introduced to the New Oxford American Dictionary in May 2005.[1]

Even within Rove's own party, expectations are widespread that the Nov. 7 elections will mark a repudiation for the base-rallying, contrast-drawing brand of politics with which he and Bush have been so closely aligned. But it is a mark of the particular place Rove holds in the Washington psyche that even the most exuberant Democrats are wondering why he seems so confident.

There are two questions. Is Rove just acting cocky as a way of lifting GOP morale, or does he really believe it? And, if the latter, is he deluding himself, or does he once again know something that Democrats do not?

The answers have implications well beyond Rove's reputation. Midterm congressional losses for the GOP, some analysts and Republican veterans believe, could effectively end the Bush presidency two years ahead of schedule.

If the Republicans were to lose control of at least one chamber, those in the party who have long seen Rove's approach as polarizing would feel emboldened. At the same time, a new panel co-chaired by the man who exemplifies the GOP establishment, former secretary of state James A. Baker III, is preparing to chart a new course on the Iraq war -- which polls suggest is the single largest reason for the Republicans' current travails.

"The architect may find his engineering plans were faulty," said one former senior official of past GOP administrations, who has watched the current one with increasing dismay. "Turning out the base this year may not be a winning or a governing strategy. America seems to be looking forward to making things work together, rather than dividing people across the board."

• Dick Cheney: Fighting the real enemy, and the enemy ... you (and your filthy germs)
• Seven reasons why Karl Rove is optimistic

Tags: Republicans, African-Americans, News, News and politics, current affairs, 2006, Politics, Government, Congress

Vice President Cheney said yesterday that he was not referring to an interrogation technique known as "waterboarding" when he told an interviewer this week that dunking terrorism suspects in water was a "no-brainer."

Cheney told reporters aboard Air Force Two last night that he did not talk about any specific interrogation technique during his interview Tuesday with a conservative radio host.

"I didn't say anything about waterboarding. . . . He didn't even use that phrase," Cheney said on a flight to Washington from South Carolina.

Earlier in the day, White House press secretary Tony Snow told reporters that the vice president was talking literally about "a dunk in the water," though neither Snow nor Cheney explained what that meant or whether such a tactic had been used against U.S. detainees.

"A dunk in the water is a dunk in the water," Snow said.

The comments were aimed at calming a growing furor over Cheney's comments, which were taken by many human rights advocates and legal experts as an endorsement of waterboarding as a method of questioning.

Coming shortly before the midterm elections, the remarks prompted a wide range of political figures -- from Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) to Cheney's wife, Lynne -- to weigh in on the issue, providing another unexpected controversy for Republicans as they fight to keep control of Congress. Reporters peppered Snow with questions about the interview during Snow's two daily news briefings.

Waterboarding, in which a prisoner is secured with his feet above his head and has water poured on a cloth over his face, is one of several methods of simulating drowning that date at least to the Spanish Inquisition. It has been specifically prohibited by the U.S. Army and widely condemned as torture by human rights groups and international courts.

"Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" Scott Hennen of WDAY in Fargo, N.D., asked Cheney on Tuesday. "Well, it's a no-brainer for me," Cheney responded.

Hennen said in an interview yesterday that he did not know precisely which technique Cheney was referring to and was only passing along a question he had heard from a listener.

"It's impossible for me to say 'Did the listener mean waterboarding?' and 'Is waterboarding torture?' and that sort of thing," Hennen said. "I can't get in the vice president's head, and I can't get in the listener's head."

Human rights and legal experts said yesterday that even if Snow's version of Cheney's remarks is correct, Cheney's comments are troubling because dunking a terrorism suspect in water as part of an interrogation would actually be more physically dangerous than waterboarding. The tactic also would be illegal under U.S. and international laws, they said.

Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, noted that in the 1980s, Chadian forces led by military ruler Hissene Habre allegedly hung people upside down and dunked them in water during questioning. Habre was indicted by a Belgian court for torture and crimes against humanity and faces prosecution in Senegal.

Former CIA general counsel Jeffrey H. Smith said Cheney's comments were "irresponsible" and send a signal to U.S. interrogators that "the people at the top want you to get rough."

"It's clear that the vice president didn't mean a friendly swim at the country club," Smith said. "It would be designed to somehow frighten a prisoner and elicit information from them. Whatever it means, a dunk in the water is not harmless or innocent."

Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, issued a statement saying the comments provided another reason that voters should "change course" by voting for Democrats. "This administration's determination to assert the right to torture has undermined our moral authority, put our troops at greater risk and made our country less safe," Kerry said.

Snow and other Republicans pushed back strongly, arguing that Cheney's remarks had been misinterpreted and that the vice president had been talking about the value of interrogations in preventing terrorist attacks.

"That is a mighty house you are building on top of that molehill," Lynne Cheney said during an appearance on CNN's "The Situation Room." "A mighty mountain. This is complete distortion. He didn't say anything of the kind."

The ambiguities in the waterboarding debate were most evident during two contentious news briefings yesterday as Snow was repeatedly questioned by reporters who did not accept his explanations of Cheney's remarks. Snow repeatedly insisted that Cheney was not referring to waterboarding or any other technique, although he was at a loss to explain how being dunked in water would not also qualify as a method of interrogation.

Snow joked at several points about needing to avoid water-related metaphors in his comments, as when he accused reporters of "fishing" for answers. He declined to say what Cheney meant by dunking terrorism suspects in water but said he would get back to reporters with a fuller explanation, which did not materialize yesterday.

At one point during the first briefing, a frustrated reporter asked: "So the detainees go swimming?"

"I don't know," Snow responded. "We'll have to find out."

• Yeah, we did it, and what are you gonna do about it?

Tags: War On Terror, News, Politics, Bush, habeas corpus, Military Commissions Act

PAGLIA: ... I'm not a Bush hater. I've always viewed him as a decent fellow who was pushed into the presidency because he was his father's son. But he's been out of his depth in foreign affairs from the start. He certainly lacks the basic verbal skills for the presidency -- reading speeches authored by others is no substitute. But I've become concerned about Bush's mental state in the past few months. Sometimes in his press conferences or prepared statements (which I listened to on the radio), I heard a sort of Nixonian tension and hysteria. His vocal patterns were over-intense and his inflections impatient, lurching and sarcastic. There was this seething quality to his speech that worried me and that seemed to signal that something major is being planned -- perhaps another military incursion.

SALON: Iran?

PAGLIA: What else? Yet another folly -- creating more generations of hatred against America. The feckless behavior of the Bush administration has been a lurid illustration of Noam Chomsky's books -- which I've always considered half lunatic. Chomsky's hatred of the United States is pathological -- stemming from some bilious problem with father figures that is too fetid to explore. But Chomsky's toxic view of American imperialism and interventionism is like the playbook of the rigid foreign policy of the Bush administration. So, thanks very much, George Bush, you've managed to rocket Noam Chomsky to the top of the bestseller list!

I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking. How are we ever going to get wise leadership or sophisticated diplomacy from people who have such a distorted, clichéd view about everything that's wrong with the United States? Neither the intellectuals nor the Democrats have any answers to the problems we face. It's not as if the Democrats are offering a coherent and persuasive foreign policy -- they have no foreign policy! They just come across as small-minded politicos jockeying for power.

And we do face an international crisis of mammoth proportions. What should we do in the face of this ruthless and barbaric Islamic fundamentalism? Is there an answer to the problem of Israel? There was a time when the left's call for a transnational Israel made sense to me, but at this point does anyone really think that, if Israel stops calling itself a Jewish state and opens its borders to all Palestinians who wish to return, there would be instant peace? Because of the shocking upsurge in anti-Semitism in the last few years -- exacerbated by the American incursion into Iraq -- surely such a development would mean suicide for Jews who reside in Israel. Passions have become too inflamed among young Muslims all over the world. I think it will be a century before any of this is resolved.

...The country is being asked to take a gamble with the disordered Democrats or to choose nascent fascism on the Republican side -- the intrusion into personal files and phone records, the shadowy sweeps that may have imprisoned innocent people along with genuine terrorists. The electorate could be ready to accept abrogation of basic constitutional rights in a time of war. ...

In Clean Politics, Flesh Is Pressed, Then Sanitized

By MARK LEIBOVICH
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 — Campaigns are filthy. Not only in terms of last-minute smears and dirty tricks. But also as in germs, parasites and all the bacterial unpleasantness that is spread around through so much glad-handing and flesh-pressing.

“You can’t always get to a sink to wash your hands,” said Anne Ryun, wife of Representative Jim Ryun, Republican of Kansas.

Hands would be the untidy appendages that transmit infectious disease.

Like so many other people involved in politics these days, Mrs. Ryun has become obsessive about using hand sanitizer and ensuring that others do, too. She squirted Purell, the antiseptic goop of choice on the stump and self-proclaimed killer of “99.99 percent of most common germs that may cause illness,” on people lined up to meet Vice President Dick Cheney this month at a fund-raiser in Topeka.

When Mr. Cheney was done meeting and greeting, he, too, rubbed his hands vigorously with the stuff, dispensed in dollops by an aide when the vice president was out of public view.

That has become routine in this peak season of handshaking, practiced by everyone from the most powerful leaders to the lowliest hopefuls. Politics is personal at all levels, and germs do not discriminate. Like chicken dinners and lobbyists, they afflict Democrats and Republicans alike. It would be difficult to find an entourage that does not have at least one aide packing Purell.

Some people find that unseemly in itself.

“It’s condescending to the voters,” said Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat.

A fervent nonuser of hand sanitizer, Mr. Richardson holds the Guinness Book of World Records mark for shaking the most hands over an eight-hour period (13,392, at the New Mexico State Fair in 2002).

Indeed, what message does it send when politicians, the putative leaders in a government by the people, for the people, feel compelled to wipe off the residues of said people immediately after meeting them?

“The great part about politics is that you’re touching humanity,” Mr. Richardson said. “You’re going to collect bacteria just by existing.”

Still, politics can be an especially dirty place to exist.

“Every time you’re with big groups of people, you’re going to be exposed to rhinoviruses, adenoviruses and the viruses that cause gastroenteritis,” said Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and physician.

Mr. Coburn said he washed his hands whenever possible but did not use any antigerm lotions. Being a doctor, he said, he has been exposed to more bugs and, thus, enjoys greater immunity than most other people.

For what it is worth, Howard Dean, also a doctor and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said he did not bother with the stuff, either.

“If you’ve had children, you’re immune to everything,” said Mr. Dean, a father of two.

As with most things, this places Mr. Dean at loggerheads with President Bush.

“Good stuff, keeps you from getting colds,” Mr. Bush raved about hand sanitizer to Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, at a White House encounter early last year.

Mr. Obama, who recounts the episode in his new book, says that after rubbing a blob of it on his own hands, the president offered him some, which he accepted (“not wanting to appear unhygienic.”)

Mr. Obama has since started carrying Purell in his traveling bag, a spokesman said.

It is not clear when politicians became so awash in the gel. In one semifamous cleanliness lapse in the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton, who had just shaken dozens of hands at a tavern in Boston, was handed a pie but no fork on his way to the car. The ravenous Mr. Clinton promptly devoured it using his unwashed hand. He eventually became a serious user of hand wipes and lotions at the urging of his doctor, an aide said.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said he learned about hand sanitizer from observing Senator Bob Dole’s abundant use of it in his 1996 presidential run. Mr. McCain remains vigilant today.

“I use it all the time,” he said through a representative. “I carry it with me in my briefcase.”

Purell, which is made by GOJO Industries of Akron, Ohio, came on the market as a consumer product in 1997 and became popular in campaign vans, holding rooms and traveling bags in the 2000 campaign. Donald Trump, the billionaire germophobe who contemplated running for president, even distributed little bottles of it to reporters.

“One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands,” Mr. Trump wrote in his book “Comeback.” “I happen to be a clean-hands freak.”

Al Gore is, too. He turned his running mate, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, onto sanitizer in 2000, and Mr. Lieberman became an evangelist.

“He said it was one thing he learned from Gore,” said an aide to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, Rebecca Kirszner, who became a popular dispenser of Purell on a senatorial trip to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Richardson said that if he ran for president, as he is considering, he had no intention of conforming to the norms of his antiseptic peers.

“I just won’t use the sanitizer,” he said. “I’ve been offered it, but I’ve turned it down.”

This positions Mr. Richardson as the early hygienic maverick of 2008.

“I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty,” he said.

There is something afoot, in a very Shakespearean way, in the White House. Preparing for a post-election massacre of the GOP and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, two factions are emerging within the White House. One is the neo-con faction surrounding potential scapegoat Vice President Dick Cheney. This faction includes Cheney's own staffers and his and Rumsfeld's sympathizers in the Pentagon, National Security Council, State Department, and media and think tanks. The other is the faction coalescing around the other potential scapegoat -- George W. Bush. This is the most interesting faction as it consists of George H. W. Bush and his closest friends -- James Baker III, Lee Hamilton, former CIA Director Robert Gates, Alan Simpson, Sandra Day O'Connor, and other past luminaries of the George H. W. Bush administration. George W. Bush has had to admit that his presidency has been a failure and now must have his father and his father's friends bail him out. The Iraq Study Group of Baker and Hamilton, which is negotiating with the Iraqi Resistance, Iran, and Syria against the wishes of Cheney's faction, was a step in the direction of bailing out Junior.

This editor was recently approached by someone close to George W. Bush and White House Press Secretary Tony Snow who made it clear that George W. Bush was fighting elements "further to his right." Flabbergasted, I responded that I didn't think many people were further to the right than Bush. But that was before the impending scapegoating issue became clear. "Further to the right" means Cheney, some members of the Christian fundamentalist Right, and their followers.

long knives soon to be out for scapegoats -- what will happen in the White House will be one of the the nastiest political purges in U.S. history. Cheney, whose ideological fervor knows no bounds, is not about to concede that Iraq was a failure. He and his neo-con advisers do not intend to be scapegoated. The Bush faction, eager to protect the Bush family name during a series of intensive congressional investigations but more likely to admit to mistakes, does not intend to bear the brunt of blame for the Cheney faction's misadventures.

Rummy's Other Role
The Perfect Scapegoat

By Sally Quinn
Thursday, October 19, 2006; A29

Don Rumsfeld is the shrewdest person in Washington. He understands better than anyone that somebody has to be in line to take the blame when things go wrong. So far he has been willing to do so. But not much longer.

The drumbeat to get him out of the Pentagon has reached deafening proportions. Republicans and Democrats, the generals, the media, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Andy Card, the first President Bush, and even Laura Bush all want him gone. Until now George W. Bush has resisted all of the pressure to get rid of his defense secretary. But those in the know say that the president may have reached the point where he realizes that Rumsfeld has outlived his usefulness.

Still, the president must be aware on some level that once the pugnacious, outspoken and flak-attracting Rumsfeld leaves the stage, the focus will be on the president. Whether Bush realizes it or not, this is about a scapegoat.

In the Bible, the high priest would transfer the sins of the people onto a goat, and, as it was written, "the goat shall carry all the sins of the people into a land where no one lives, and the man shall let it loose in the wilderness."

(The word for scapegoat in Hebrew means, literally, "into hell.")

Rumsfeld has seen others take on the role of scapegoat. Look what happened to Nancy Reagan. When she was first lady, she rightly realized that Donald Regan, the chief of staff, was causing her husband enormous damage. What she hadn't realized was that Regan was filling the role of scapegoat for the president. When Don Regan was finally fired, Nancy herself was made the scapegoat. She then took the brunt of criticism for the errors of her husband's administration.

It is hard for the American people to turn completely against the president. It seems tantamount to patricide. We're much more comfortable being able to blame someone else for the president's mistakes. Laura Bush will never be the scapegoat. For now, it's Rumsfeld.

Vice President Cheney is not eager to replace him. And he would never fire Rumsfeld, who was his mentor and who hired him for three government jobs during the Ford administration, including as his deputy when Rumsfeld was chief of staff. (In fact, Cheney's Secret Service code name was "Back Seat.") In any event, Cheney is low-profile, secretive, nonconfrontational -- and presumably too experienced to allow himself to be easily made the scapegoat. But if Rumsfeld goes, the attention and criticism can be directed only to Cheney, or to Bush.

And it's improbable that Rumsfeld can last. He may not have an exit strategy for Iraq, but, old Washington hand that he is, he undoubtedly has one for himself.

I suspect that he has already told the president and Cheney that he will leave after the midterm elections, saying that the country needs new leadership to wind down the war. And he will resign to take a job in some sort of humanitarian venture, thereby creating the perception that he is a caring person who left of his own accord to devote the rest of his life to good works.

Bush and Cheney, who don't want him gone, will then have to contend with the reality of the new situation: One goat must be sent off into the wilderness. Who will it be?

"Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl."
-- Passage from Sisters ... the novela Lynne Cheney would just as soon forget

... Sisters (published only in a Signet Canadian paperback edition) is a gothic female historical novel, in the tradition of Jane Eyre, with a strong dash of Gone With the Wind. Set in Wyoming in 1886, it tells the story of the beautiful, headstrong widow Sophie Dymond, an actress and magazine editor, who returns from the East to Cheyenne to discover the reasons for the death of her sister, Helen. The blurb on the book gives a good sense of the lurid and exciting plot: "Sophie had left the west to find success and independence. Helen had remained to wed a handsome, powerful cattle baron. Now Helen was dead -- and Sophie returned to find the reasons why ... in the secret world of frontier wives that most men never entered ... in the revelations of the town's most notorious prostitute ... in the passionate letters written to Helen by another woman ... and finally in the arms of the man whom Sophie had every reason to desire and despise ... her late sister's husband and possibly her killer. ..."

Following in the literary tradition of feminist writing of the 1970's, Sisters begins with a dedication to female kin: to Cheney's "mother and my grandmothers, at rest in the past, and to my daughters, who are running toward the future."

In her acknowledgments, Cheney also thanks "the men and women working to bring to light details of the daily personal lives of nineteenth-century women." In particular, she thanks Linda Gordon for her book on the history of the birth-control movement, Woman's Body, Woman's Right; G. J. Barker-Benfield for his study of obstetrics, gynecology, and sexual surgery, Horrors of the Half-Known Life; and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, for her celebrated article in the first issue of Signs, "The Female World of Love and Ritual."

Those scholarly influences are clear in the novel. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's article was among the most influential pieces of research and interpretation that came out of the early years of women's studies. Looking at correspondence between American women friends in the 19th century, Smith-Rosenberg hypothesized a female culture "built around ... an unselfconscious pattern of single-sex or homosocial networks ... institutionalized in social convention or rituals that accompanied virtually every important event in a woman's life." Those rituals were reinforced by intense bonds between mothers and daughters and by restrictions on intimacy between young men and women, and "devotion to and love of other women became a plausible and socially accepted form of human interaction," Smith-Rosenberg wrote. She placed such erotic friendships between women along the spectrum of 19th-century sexual and social relationships.

In Woman's Body, Woman's Right, Linda Gordon argued that, despite frequent childbirth, miscarriage, and maternal and infant death, women with feminist beliefs both advocated and resisted contraception: "The suppression of birth control ... was partly a means of enforcing male supremacy, but partly, too, a self-protection for women, a means of enforcing men's responsibility for their sexual behavior," Gordon wrote. ...

Cheney is ambivalent about Smith-Rosenberg's analysis of women's culture, and sympathetic to Gordon's argument. She acknowledges the emotional bond between women, and their fears of male sexuality; but she favors remedies that would allow women freedom to enjoy their own sexuality with male partners. Sophie discovers that Helen had suffered many painful miscarriages and had withdrawn from marital sex. She had also been converted to the values of the local Women's Christian Temperance Union, led by her beloved schoolteacher friend Amy Travers.

Through Sophie's eyes, we see a group of female fanatics convinced of female moral superiority to men, and conflating temperance with celibacy. They have become convinced of Woman's spiritual purity, expressed in tender friendships between women. Sophie first discovers the evidence of Helen's "affair" with Amy Travers in letters, journals, and underlined poems. "Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will only be the two of us, and ... in the evenings I shall read to you while you go work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl," Miss Travers had written to Helen.

Repelled by lesbian ardor veiled as spiritual fervor, Sophie nonetheless comes to sympathize with the women's grievances -- abuse, prostitution, rape, frequent unwanted pregnancies -- and to admire their intimacy, although she cannot identify with it. Listening to one W.C.T.U. member, Lydia Swerdlow, crippled by the rigors of childbearing, insist that only reproduction can transfigure and redeem the animality of sex, Sophie understands despite herself: "For a moment, just a moment, she had a sense of the pressures which molded Lydia's feelings, and she saw that the way the other woman felt was not perverse, but a right response to her life. It had to do with wanting control; it was a different path to a goal Sophie herself was always seeking."

Watching two women embracing in a wagon after a fire, she "felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. ... She saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave."

Such a world of female love and ritual is alien to Sophie, who is not even sure how she feels about her real sister, her mother, or her grandmother; who prefers men to women; and who defines control as the sponges, powders, and condoms she keeps in a lacquered box given to her by the actress Adah Menken.

• Oh no he didn't!

SALON: It's also been interesting how both sides -- but the Democrats early on -- characterized Foley as a pederast. He's a dirty old man in the classic Washington tradition, going after teenagers. But there's no proof that he's a child molester.

PAGLIA: I kept hearing on the radio the stentorian voices of Democratic women politicians saying that Foley was "preying on children." When will this stop? This blurring of the line between teenagers and children -- who should be vigilantly protected by any society.

SALON: And in Washington, the age of legal consent is 16.

PAGLIA: Exactly! Therefore if it wasn't absolutely clear at the start who exactly Foley was flirting with, the Democrats should have been far more cautious about what they said. All that's been accomplished by this scandal is to call into question one of the central erotic archetypes of gay male tradition -- the ephebic beauty of boys at their muscular peak between the ages of 16 and 18. It goes back through Western iconography from Michelangelo's nudes to Hadrian's Antinous and beyond that to Greek sculpture. It's a formula at the heart of Plato's dialogues, as in the Symposium, which shows Socrates in love with but also declining sex with the handsome young Alcibiades. In ancient Greek culture, an adult man could publicly profess his love for a young man without necessarily having sexual contact with him.

The Foley scandal exploded without any proof of a documented sex act -- unlike the case of the late congressman Gerry Studds, who had sex with a page and who was literally applauded by fellow Democrats when they refused to vote for his censure. In the Foley case, there was far more ambiguous evidence -- suggestive e-mails and instant messages. Matt Drudge, to his great credit, began hitting this issue right off the bat on his Web site and radio show. What does it mean for Democrats to be agitating over Web communications, which in my view fall under the province of free speech? It's a civil liberties issue. We can say that what Foley was doing was utterly inappropriate, professionally irresponsible, and in bad taste, but why were liberals fomenting a scandal day after day after day over words being used? And why didn't Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing -- that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It's very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way.

• A textbook case of 'grooming'
• The 'ick' factor
• Blind, deaf and dumb
• Foley to name names
• Oh no he didn't!
• Dear Jeb ... it's me ... Mark
• Chris Shays comes unglued
• Me and my boyfriend

Tags: Mark Foley, Republicans, GOP, scandal, pages

The Tennessee Republican Party has sent out a flier with the tag line “Vote early to preserve your way of life” across the top.

Among the recipients of the flier was Rabbi Louis Zivic of Knoxville’s Heska Amuna Synagogue, who described the phrase as racially charged.

"I think it’s a subtle message, but it’s well understood," Zivic told the Forward. “I think this is all pitched sub rosa to people who have a tendency to be discriminatory."

In earlier decades, some white leaders used similar language in opposing civil rights for blacks, though Zivic was reluctant to draw a direct connection to fights over desegregation.

"I’m not sure I’d put it in terms of Jim Crow, that seems a little bit strong, particularly here in East Tennessee," the rabbi said. But it "means that in Tennessee we live life in a particular way. We cherish values like heterosexual marriage, we cherish values like family, and I think the implication is we want to stop further change, and of course the racial situation is part of what changes."

• A lighter shade of pale
• God don't like ugly
• Blind, deaf and dumb

NBC and The CW Television Network have taken a stand against the Dixie’s Chicks new documentary “Shut Up & Sing” a behind-the-scenes look at the incredible political and media fallout that occurred in 2003 after the Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines said that she was "ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." “Shut Up & Sing” opens in theaters in NY and Los Angeles on Friday and in theaters nationwide on November 10th.

NBC responded to a clearance report submitted by the Weinstein Company’s media agency saying that the network “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.”

The CW Television Network responded that it does “not have appropriate programming in which to schedule this spot.”

Famed litigator David Boies stated, “It is disappointing and troubling that NBC and The CW would refuse to accept an otherwise appropriate ad merely because it is critical of President Bush."

Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of The Weinstein Company stated, “It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America. The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is sad and profoundly un-American.”

The Weinstein Company is exploring taking legal action.

• "Death" becomes them
• It's coming

Tags: Death of a President, movies

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

The U.S. Army, senior Republican lawmakers, human rights experts and many experts on the laws of war, however, consider water-boarding cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment that's banned by U.S. law and by international treaties that prohibit torture. Some intelligence professionals argue that it often provides false or misleading information because many subjects will tell their interrogators what they think they want to hear to make the water-boarding stop.

Republican Sens. John Warner of Virginia, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have said that a law Bush signed last month prohibits water-boarding. The three are the sponsors of the Military Commissions Act, which authorized the administration to continue its interrogations of enemy combatants.

The radio interview Tuesday was the first time that a senior Bush administration official has confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding against important al-Qaida suspects, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Mohammad was captured in Pakistan on March 1, 2003, and turned over to the CIA.

Water-boarding means holding a person's head under water or pouring water on cloth or cellophane placed over the nose and mouth to simulate drowning until the subject agrees to talk or confess.

Lee Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, denied that Cheney confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding or endorsed the technique.

"What the vice president was referring to was an interrogation program without torture," she said. "The vice president never goes into what may or may not be techniques or methods of questioning."

In the interview on Tuesday, Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo, N.D., told Cheney that listeners had asked him to "let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives."

"Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?" Hennen said.

"I do agree," Cheney replied, according to a transcript of the interview released Wednesday. "And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation."

Cheney added that Mohammed had provided "enormously valuable information about how many (al-Qaida members) there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth. We've learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that."

"Would you agree that a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?" asked Hennen.

"It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president `for torture.' We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in," Cheney replied. "We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that."

In a recent investigative report, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC News described the CIA’s use of an interrogation technique called "waterboarding."

The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

In an editorial dated November 12, 2005 the Wall Street Journal denied that waterboarding was "...anything close to torture." ...

... So, who’s right? Is waterboarding torture, or is it merely a stressful psychological technique?

Interestingly, the United States has long since answered that question. Following the end of the Second World War we prosecuted a number of Japanese military and civilian officials for war crimes. including the torture of captured Allied personnel. At one of those trials, United States v. Sawada, here’s how Captain Chase Nielsen, a crew member in the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Japan, described his treatment, when he was captured, (and later tried for alleged war crimes by a Japanese military commission):

Q: What other physical treatment was administered to you at that time?

A: Well, I was given what they call the water cure.

Q: Explain to the Commission what that was.

A: Well, I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water was poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let me up until I'd get my breath, then they'd start over again.

Q: When you regained consciousness would they keep asking you questions?

A: Yes sir they did.

Q: How long did this treatment continue?

A: About twenty minutes.

Q: What was your sensation when they were pouring water on the towel, what did you physically feel?

A: Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.

The prosecutor in that case was vehement in arguing that the captured Doolittle fliers had been wrongfully convicted by the Japanese tribunal, in part because they were convicted based on evidence obtained through torture. "The untrustworthiness of any admissions or confessions made under torture," he said, "would clearly vitiate a conviction based thereon."

At the end of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East of which the United States was a leading member (the Tri