Fake Democracy

Obama, You Have it Wrong

2009-03-06T23:26:00.003-06:00

President Obama is doing a few things right. But when it comes to economics, he is doing a whole lot wrong. Very wrong. The coming articles intend to explain why his errors are so dangerous for the country.

March 6, 2009

Misconception Number 1 - The World Works From the Top Down

I suppose when people become part of an elite group that holds the power, they can eventually fool themselves in thinking that the world actually revolves around them. After all, their misconceptions about their own success are exactly why we have the mess today. The excessive accumulation of power by too few has erased many critical elements of a healthy capitalistic society.

Leave it to people of this warped ilk to think that the world cannot survive without them. But therein lies the problem. The beautiful thing about economics is you can't lie. Well, you can lie, but you can't lie forever. In a transparent system, lies are short lived, and quickly corrected. The pain is small when they get revealed. But in an opaque system, lies live a lot longer, with time to build up excess in the wrong places. Economics does not allow a lie remain hidden forever. The reason we have a huge pop in our economy right now is because a huge lie is being unwound. This unwinding is inevitable. The pain is necessary. It is moral. It is justified. It is essential - both the unwinding and the pain.

I have to believe that the Obama administration believes that the world operates from the top down, because they insist that the world needs their swift action (from the top) to save it. Now if they were talking about global warming or nuclear proliferation, I might take them seriously. But when they tell me that 'the economy would fail, and never recover, if they don't take strong, fast action.' . . . Really? The economy? Forever? You're kidding, right? I can only assume they must not understand what an economy is.

Jim Rogers said it best when he said 'there is no such thing as too big to fail.' He makes a point about the morality of free markets that needs to be repeated here. "In a free market, the incompetent are supposed to fail, so the competent can move in a take their assets. When the government tries to take money away from the competent (the tax payer) and give it to the incompetent, that is damaging to the overall market, not to mention immoral. It hurts the competetent, because it prevents them from moving in when they should." The code word here is bankruptcy. Nobody wants to utter those words, but it is not as bad as it sounds. We should be celebrating the concept of bankruptcy. It is one of the healthiest, and most vital concepts of our capitalist system. If the Obama Administration wants to deny the value and function of bankruptcy, they are robbing this nation of a critical ability to cleanse itself of incompetence. They are also failing to see how helpful this is in rewarding competence. That's the truly sad part, is they are not optmistic enough to see the tremendous well beneath them -- a well that can fill any vaccuum if they would simply allow it to happen.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration is so buried in the details, they can't move back far enough to see the macroeconomic concepts. This concept being preached by Jim Rogers is not nonsense. It's a concept about morality, and the efficient movement of power. It is precisely how the cream rises to the top in a competitive system. Since the cream has not been rising to the top the past several decades, we have been stuck with an entire population of incompetent CEO's running corporate America. They have grown used to not having any competition. This is why they are so blatantly overpaid, even when they do poorly. Now that they are truly failing, the flies are at the door, ready to move in and lay their eggs. You know, without flies, that shit just hangs around. The powerful incompetents are desperately trying to save themselves from annihilation. And who is helping to save them? The US Government.

Birds of a feather do hang together. Just remember this. If you help the incompetent, then that says something about your own competence. You cannot prevent their fall. You can only delay it. And if you delay their fall, you will stick to them like glue and fall with them. I would strongly suggest, Mr Obama, that you look for winners to support, instead of losers. That is the ONLY path to helping your country. It is your job to level the playing field, and let the dues be paid by those who create failure. Let in the flies, or be eaten by them. They may look nasty, but they serve an oh so critical function when there's stink in the air. And when they are done, I think you will see that the economy will not 'fail forever.' Whoever told you that was probably playing for the losing team. There is life after the flies do their thing. I promise the grass they leave behind will be surprisingly green, if you just let them do what they were put on earth to do.

Flatline & Brooks - March 16, 2007

2007-03-16T23:43:00.000-05:00

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy Founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Johnny, what did you think of Valerie Plame before Congress today, what she said?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I‘m in love.
JIM LEHRER: Did she persuade you?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: In ways that I can‘t reveal on public television. But if I were stuck on an island . . . with just one wish . . . . Joe Wilson, first of all, is a most impressive man. And his wife is every bit as impressive. What a couple. They can be my friends any time. And she was smart to keep her mouth shut while the Republican lie machine worked so hard to smear her. They only look more foolish, now that she is able to set the record straight about how she was destroyed for despicable reasons.
JIM LEHRER: That she was a victim.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: She was destroyed as a national security asset, no telling at what further cost to this country, to protect a lie to go to war. I just wonder how many other covert operatives were also put out of business or endangered from this that we don’t know about.
JIM LEHRER: What was your reaction to her story?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, just on that subject, there are laws about who is covert and who is not. And once you're covert, you're not always covert, as she claimed. You have to be in the field and such things. I'm not an expert on the law, but that is a matter of dispute.
And then as we saw, as the Republicans said, did the Republicans intentionally out her? I personally think this story is over and done with, to be honest with you.
I thought that the story was hot as long as people thought Rove and Cheney might be at the end of the line from the investigation. Once it became clear it was Richard Armitage, interest in the story died down. The prosecution went on. The only trial that is going to be has concluded, so I basically think the story is over.
JIM LEHRER: You don't think she's a victim?
DAVID BROOKS: No, no, she certainly was a victim. No, she certainly was a victim of a campaign to out her. And I thought -- you know, I've said on this program before, I thought the whole process was terrible.
I thought it started with the misleading things her husband said. I think it continued with the vicious campaign by the White House to destroy her and to overreact to the op-ed piece. And then it continued, I thought, with a prosecution that went off in the direction it was not supposed to go on.
It was supposed to be about outing a CIA officer, not about going after the vice president. And so I thought it was a travesty from beginning to end with no real influence on policy.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree, no real influence on policy?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: This makes me want to just bitch slap David Brooks until his nose bleeds. This is probably the single worst case of treason I have ever witnessed in my lifetime. This is like shooting one of your own soldiers in the back. A covert spy was destroyed for political gain. It's not so hard to see the truth here. And Plame was explicity that she was definitely covert. There was no gray line. You don't get to bounce in and out of being covert. That's nonsense that Brooks is babbling on like a rag doll as if there was something to it. This was treason. I don't need a lawyer to explain it.
DAVID BROOKS: I feel like I'm getting involved in a dispute about the Dead Sea scrolls. I mean, this is ancient history, but Wilson's report, as a bipartisan commission found, was not disputing what the president said in those 16 words. It was mildly supportive.
He was dishonest about what it said. I mean, there's a whole series, as I said, of dishonesties building upon dishonesties, which is not to exculpate, whatever that word is.
JIM LEHRER: That's a great word, whatever it is.
DAVID BROOKS: The vice president -- I will never say it on television again. The vice president and the way they reacted, but it was just one, long, tawdry series of events after another.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Ancient history my ass. For four years we had a Republican Congress with it‘s head in the sand while our constitution was being destroyed. We have a bit of catching up to do, just to fix what broke back then. That is not ancient history because we are still suffering the consequences. The list of crimes of this administration is longer than any President in the history of this country. And of all the crimes Bush has committed, this deal against Plame ranks near the top. The only thing that competes with it is our illegal war, and our torture of prisoners. It’s hard to decide which of these three crimes is worse. The fact that people like Brooks can brush this under the rug with a smirk is what worries me about the mental state of this country.
JIM LEHRER: New subject, speaking of the White House, David, the fired U.S. attorneys and Attorney General Gonzales, is he on his way out?
DAVID BROOKS: I think he might be. What strikes me, aside from the substance of this, what strikes me about this story is, first of all, how much Republicans around the country, and especially on Capitol Hill, are sick of the White House and sick of them, of the Republicans having to wake up in the morning and try to defend something which they think is incompetent.
And so there's just a wall of hostility coming from Republicans now. And there's also, apparently, disputes within the -- between the White House and the attorney general.
And there's also the knowledge that, if they want to pursue substantive matters, having to do with national security and other things that go through the attorney general's office, this guy is not going to be able to do that in an effective way.
So I think all that adds up to the likelihood, regardless of the merits of this case, that they're going to have a new attorney general.
JIM LEHRER: New attorney general, Johnny?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Come on, Gonzales is an embarrassment. If you know anything about this guy, you can‘t possibly take him seriously. He‘s an accident waiting to happen. The odds of him screwing up are 100%. He so dumb, he makes Ashcroft look smart. Now how bad can that be?
JIM LEHRER: But should he go?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I‘m not even going to dignify that question with an answer. Where have you been? Are you serious? Should he go? Do I really need to answer that for you? If you audience doesn’t already understand what a criminal Gonzales is, then there’s no hope in my trying to explain it now.
JIM LEHRER: Do you feel, David, that something really wrong was committed here by the White House, Gonzales, and all of the above?
DAVID BROOKS: I really don't know. I'm amazed everyone else around town seems to have an opinion on this subject.
It goes on to whether these attorneys were wrongfully fired, wrongfully dismissed for political reasons. And a lot of the cases which the administration was pushing these guys to push have to do with New Mexico, voter fraud in New Mexico and Washington State, capital defense cases, immigration law. I nothing know nothing about any of these cases.
But a lot of people in Washington assume that the White House must be wrong and the attorneys were right not to push these cases. I don't think we know that.
Nonetheless, I think what's clear and what's created this furor, especially on the Republican side, is just the incompetent way they first said they were not being fired for cause, then said cause, denied that there was any politics in it, when of course there's politics in it.
And so it's that whole atmosphere that has created this little skirmish. But the substance, unless you're a real expert in these cases, I don't think anybody knows.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree that this is more of a handling offense rather than a substance offense?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: This executive branch has destroyed our constitution. We have an illegal war going on, people are being tortured, scandal is everywhere, elections are being stolen, Americans are being illegally spied on, CIA spies are destroyed who don‘t play ball, and you find it a stretch that maybe some prosecutors are being fired for political reasons? Jim, what kind of show is this? Are you out of your f. . king mind? This is not news. It‘s been circulating for some time that Karl Rove was implementing a plan to keep GOP power running for eternity, and this was part of that plan. Wake up and smell the fascism. You‘re living in it. People are dying. We are there. It’s time for you to start being an American and asking some tough questions.
DAVID BROOKS: I thought Johnny knew all about number theory in Albania. But this is the thing -- this follows on Plame. This is the second attempt to get Rove. This is the great white whale of Washington politics. And he's sort of vaguely implicated in this, and so there's a desire to see if he's deeply involved.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Get Rove, get Cheney, get Rice, get Gonzales, get Bush. Please, get them all. This country is in big trouble, with the worst administration in the history of this country. I’m very worried about the next 22 months, because I’m in complete agreement with Zbigniew Brzezinski that the entire future of this country as a world power is at stake. That’s really the biggest story of the week is Brzezinski’s message, which has been well circulated in the intellectual media. Our democracy is on the line. Our future is on the line, and Brzezinski, who understands power better than most, has articulated the problem to perfection.
JIM LEHRER: That this could play out by then end of Bush‘s term.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: If Bush attacks Iran, we are basically finished. We will be stuck in a 20 year battle with 4 countries that we won’t be able to get out of. We will be done for. If we can escape the next 22 months without Bush creating this mess, then we have a chance of recovering our democracy and world respect. But we are truly on the line here. We are sitting on the edge of a cliff. That is Brzezinski’s position and I agree with it 100%.
My hat is off to Jon Stewart for airing the most reality on TV this past week. Leave it to Comedy Central to surpass news stations for the umpteenth time. He had Brzezinski on his show, and he probably has the most educated listeners of any show in all of TV. And Stewart is one of the few who works at characterizing Cheney as the horrible Hitleresque maniac that he truly is. And what Zbigniew has to say was so startling, that Stewart didn’t even bother to be funny, or end with a laugh. This is a serious charge against the Bush administration of the highest order.
Buy the book. Read it. 2nd Chance is the title. I think a few Americans are starting to listen. That’s the only part that give me some encouragement. But you, Jim Lehrer, could be doing more yourself. You should be living up to Jon Stewart’s example, and quit kissing ass to this kind of insidious power. Your country needs you. Step up to the plate. You can start by getting Brooks off of your show. Stop cow towing to his lies. Get some real people on this show. Help our democracy. Please.
JIM LEHRER: OK. We have to leave it there. Thank you both.

Flatline & Brooks - December 15, 2006

2006-12-17T21:03:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Johnny, what are your thoughts about Donald Rumsfeld tonight?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: He was nothing more than a defense contractor lobbyist put in charge of the piggy bank. He was allowed to invent any justification imaginable, so long as the money kept flowing. I’d say as a lobbyist who was supposed to maximize the profits of the largest private contractors, and he perfected the task. A huge pile of money was spent very quickly. While hundreds of thousands of dead people will go unnoticed in his path, he was surely worshipped by those defense contractor executives, who all soothe each other’s egos with false justifications for their immoral lives. And as you may have noticed, the soldiers in general don’t benefit from this spending. They are constantly shorted. But that’s because of the inescapable fact that the money flow is being maximized to the private sector. It’s a huge waste resources and power. So Rumsfeld might hold the number one spot as the fastest waster of power in the history of the world. He, like Bush, was handed more power than nearly anybody in history, and he squandered as much of it as he could. He may not know it, because he is so well indoctri-ego-nated, he believes most of his own bullshit.
JIM LEHRER: Does he deserve all the blame he's getting, David?
DAVID BROOKS: I do. I think he does deserve quite a lot of blame. I don't think he's a scapegoat.
I mean, I understood going into Baghdad and the first rush up with whatever he had, 130,000. What I don't understand was why he didn't adapt the number of troop levels after that. When it became clear to people in the White House, when it became clear to John McCain, when it became clear in what has become clear in every single book and article that's been written about what went wrong, there wasn't enough troops, and there was no order in society. Why he didn't adapt in May of '03, in June, in July? And more than that, why did he suppress any sort of debate that could have happened about that within the military? And he didn't.
And one of the things he did not do was cultivate a climate of open debate. So a lot of people within the military who privately held one opinion didn't say it, and maybe they should have. But it would have taken a lot of courage, and part of that was his fault.
And then the final thing I'd say about him -- and I agree he was the most well-qualified public servant maybe of our lifetime and the most destructive at the same time -- but the final thing I'd say about him -- and this he shares with, I think, a lot of people in the White House and in the Pentagon, was that he saw the war as killing bad guys and controlling territory. And as many essayists and reporters over there made clear, the enemy saw the war as controlling the narrative and winning the war of ideas. And they were playing a different game than we were, and they were beating us at it.
JIM LEHRER: Everybody says -- and I'm sure the two of you would agree -- that whatever else Donald Rumsfeld is, he's a very smart man. So all the things that you all have just outlined are not the actions of a smart man. So what happened?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I can’t believe you dared to say that. This is the dumbest administration this country has ever experienced. This is the most incredible congregation of ignorance I have ever witnessed. Rumsfeld is obviously not a smart man. Read the book Emotional Intelligence. Rumsfeld‘s emotional intelligence is at the level of retardation. Many criminals in our history are smart people. But they share one thing in common - emotional ignorance. Don’t confuse a guy’s ability to solve a calculus equation with a guy like Jesus or Ghandi, who can lead a million poor people to safety.
JIM LEHRER: Do you think that he sought out the guys who wouldn't speak up and wouldn't...
DAVID BROOKS: Every book, whether it's the Ricks' book, the Gordon book, every book underlines that. That's one of the things.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: America is constantly sold on the idea that we are strong enough to police the world to our will. That‘s even harder when our will has no moral authority behind the objectives. The world cannot be dominated by force. Leadership is not about the meanest guy in the room. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld think the world is a cold, cruel, crazy place that only listens to death and torture. It‘s a huge miscalculation about leadership and humanity. They have no clue about these things. An empire should never ever, ever reveal the full extend of it‘s power. The minute you do that, you have shown the entire world your limits and greatly weakened your hand. A truly wise leader will rule without ever having to use significant force. War does not mean glory. War means you were too stupid to work things out. War signifies failure. The Bush administration has no desire to resolve anything peacefully, which puts them in the same pile of trash as any violent dictatorship.
DAVID BROOKS: I do have a theory, because I think there is a straight line that goes through his career. He comes out of college in the '50s and '60s. The country had a lot of big bureaucracies. A smart guy comes out and says, "You know, we're getting fat."
JIM LEHRER: He was a Navy pilot.
DAVID BROOKS: Right.
JIM LEHRER: Which was a risk-taking business.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. And he says, "I'm not going to be an organization man. I'm going to streamline bureaucracies." He did it in the Nixon administration. He streamlined a bureaucracy. He did it at G.D. Searle. He streamlined a bureaucracy. He came to the Pentagon...
JIM LEHRER: That was a chemical company that made artificial sweeteners.
DAVID BROOKS: He became the CEO.
JIM LEHRER: Yes, exactly.
DAVID BROOKS: And then he came here and he decided to streamline a bureaucracy, with emphasizing technology over manpower. And there are many challenges for which that probably would have been the perfect solution. But occupying Iraq was not that challenge, and so he was mismatched to the problem.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I still say he was perfect for the task. He maximized war profits to the profiteers. Well done. Oh yeah, and there some people dyeing. Oh well. It’s complicated.
JIM LEHRER: And everything leading up to that has been, "Oh, no, we've got plenty of troops. We can do everything. We're not anywhere near cracking," and all of a sudden they're cracking.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: The man is not capable of seeing his own failure.
DAVID BROOKS: The world changed, and what we've had when this decentralized sort of enemy is a different sort of enemy -- in some ways, to be fair to Rumsfeld, he was very cutting-edge on technological matters. He is not a stick in the mud, whatever you can accuse him of. He's not someone who believes in doing things the old-fashioned way.
But I don't think he quite -- and, to be fair, I'm not sure any of us quite guessed what is actually happening in the world and the kind of enemy we face. There are people in the Pentagon -- George Packer, in the New Yorker, current New Yorker, has an essay on this -- people within the Pentagon talking about the need for anthropologists to understand the culture of Iraq.
And that's something the Pentagon in general, and I think Rumsfeld in particular, had some trouble with.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I‘m not prepared to give an ounce of credit to any enemy. This is not anything new. We‘ve see it all before. We have talked about repeating Vietnam. Well, we did. We repeated Vietnam. It‘s the same damn thing, in every way.
DAVID BROOKS: Just one more thing to spread the blame a little, I mean, the relationship with Cheney is key. One little story that's I think in Bob Woodward's book, there's a woman named Meghan O'Sullivan, who was an Iraq expert. She was going to be involved in the postwar planning before the war.
Cheney and Rumsfeld got her removed from the planning, though she knows a lot about Iraq, because she was not on board, I think, with Chalabi, one of the people they wanted to install. She had a dissenting voice. She was kicked off, sidelined, and that sort of thing just sends a message.
And so, you know, Cheney was involved. And, to be fair, the president, for all this time, he's the boss, and he should have done something.
JIM LEHRER: Meanwhile, the Iraq Study Group, what's happened to it? And its recommendations, where are we with that, two weeks later?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: From what I‘ve heard, Bush is pissed off big time about what Baker did, and he‘s not about to give an inch to it. Bush is apparently a man on edge, hating just about everybody there is to hate.
JIM LEHRER: And having his own listening tour.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: He‘s a cornered dog as the great journalist Doug Thompson will tell you. I agree.
DAVID BROOKS: He did take a year and a half to go to war. In any case, on the Iraq Study Group, I would say it is fading. The White House has not embraced it.
Certainly, talking to Iran they don't believe in. The Republicans in general don't think that the road to peace in Baghdad leads through Jerusalem. They just think that's a flawed strategy.
The Iraqis are certainly contemptuous of it; they certainly don't like it. And the Democrats have not embraced it; they've been sort of lukewarm about it.
So I think, when you look back on the lasting effect of the Iraq Study Group, I think it will have prolonged our presence in Iraq, because I think, after the election, people could have said, "The voters sent a message. Let's get out of Iraq."
Then you had the likes of Republican Senator Gordon Smith saying, "I'm at the end of my rope." Without the Iraq Study Group, you could really kind of brought kind of momentum, "We're out of here." But the Iraq Study Group froze the debate for a month, and then said, you know, slow, gradual withdrawal. And so I think, perversely, the end effect was to keep us there longer.
JIM LEHRER: You buy that?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t know. It feels like there’s a civil war developing in the real base of power - which is literally within the Republican party. This Baker group thing was rather incredible, and their slap in Bush’s face in public was also very incredible. This outdoes Stephen Colbert big time. And now Bush is blowing it off as nonsense. That was a very unwise move, because he’s not just blowing off some commission. He’s blowing off some of the very center of world power. For people of this caliber to be at odds with the President, while our military is literally about to crack in two, and public support is rapidly deteriorating, this is something that is starting to smell like an electrical fire. Things could get really nasty.
JIM LEHRER: The whole point -- the Iraq Study Group people said their whole point was to try to arouse a consensus, in Congress and among the American people, to do about Iraq. Is that possible now?
DAVID BROOKS: You know, I thought more accurate display of the debate was a panel you had on a couple nights ago with six or eight different experts. I think Fred Kagan was there, Peter Galbraith and various other people. They disagreed. There is no consensus. A leader is going to have to pick one and not the other.
I just don't believe there is a consensus position. Those kind of panels work like, in Social Security, when there's basically already a consensus, you just need to build up political willpower. But on this there is no consensus. People are disagreeing.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Forget the fact that our entire occupation is illegal, and that most Iraqis don’t want us to stay. Leaving is not losing. Leaving is being moral. But try telling that to a warrior. They are so sad that the dead bodies they created didn’t add up to something. It didn’t. It can’t. It never will. I'm not so sure this who ordeal was about anything more than a powerstruggle between moderate right wingers and neocons. When the neocons start scaring their own, you know things are bad. But what I don't read on the front pages of any paper, is how all the left winger who have hated and feared Bush for many years, were all correct. The left was right. The right was wrong. Where is that admission? Come on David, you can be the first to say it.
JIM LEHRER: And I have to say good night to both of you.

Flatline & Brooks - October 6, 2006

2006-10-08T12:56:00.000-05:00

RAY SUAREZ: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And, Johnny, in the latest polls that I've seen, Harold Ford's ahead, within the margin of error. It's very, very close, but he's ahead.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yes, there are a lot of rich guys running for office, and some of the rich guys are better campaigners than others. Most hold rich guy views that don’t upset the rich establishment - whether Democrat of Republican.
RAY SUAREZ: Is Harold Ford's lead a credit to his side of the ledger, David, or is there also some sign that Tennessee is changing? They elected a Democratic governor last time.
DAVID BROOKS: They've often done that. They have Governor Bredesen there, though you get a lot of southern states who elect Democratic moderate governors, like Bredesen is, and will still -- it's been trending Republican. So I do think, a, the national climate -- there are a few things going on in the world which help Democrats -- and, b, Harold Ford.
And Ford, along with -- I think you see a couple of Senate candidates, in Virginia, here in Tennessee, in Missouri, who are pretty conservative, sort of hawkish on the war to some extent, mention the Dubai ports deal quite a lot, sort of suspicious of trade, surprisingly nationalist on immigration, and very much against gay marriage. So you see sort of a series of Democrats sort of in the upper south running this sort of campaign. And so far, it seems to be working.
And one other thing about this race is -- we've been hearing rumors that Barack Obama has been more seriously considering running for president. He told Jonathan Alter of Newsweek that it was almost 50-50. And I think one of the factors in his decision is this race. Can Harold Ford, can a black candidate win in the upper south?
RAY SUAREZ: Why is that? Explain that a little bit more.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, as you know, there's a lot -- Barack Obama is the dream candidate. He's the only guy in the country among Democrats who really generates genuine enthusiasm.
But there are a whole series of questions -- I think, probably in his own mind, but certainly in a lot of people's minds -- about his viability. One is the age issue. But second is, can a black candidate win and carry enough of these swing states that he would need to?
And the thinking is, if Harold Ford can carry Tennessee, then Barack Obama could probably carry a state like Tennessee. And that really does open up all sorts of possibilities for the party.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, with Tennessee in play, with Claire McCaskill in Missouri ahead within the margin of error, suddenly the conventional wisdom that the House was a cinch but the Senate no way doesn't look like such wisdom anymore.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, the Senate way. It's possible. I wouldn't say it's certain. I actually haven't seen a lot of movement in the Senate. You've seen some movement in New Jersey, which the Republicans looked like they were going to take it. Now, it seems a little safer. You've seen a lot of movement in Connecticut, where Joe Lieberman looks a lot stronger than he did a couple of weeks ago.
But, you know, all this Foley stuff has happened in the past week. And as I look race by race, I haven't seen actually Foley-related movement. I think a lot of people, including myself, feel somehow there will be an effect of the Foley thing. But if you look at the key Senate races and the key House races, it's been pretty stable, which means toss-up in a lot of these states.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, Johnny, the Foley story broke, and indeed the congressman's resignation was just a few hours old the last time we spoke, so I think it was still too new for us to really know much to say last week. But now that it's had a week to steep, to ripen, what does it look like to you?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yes. I still remember like it was yesterday the so called indignation of countless Republicans towards Bill Clinton‘s sexual escapades and his denials that later followed. So now we have a Republican pursuing sex of the most illegal kind, with others who kept a lid on the deal - the good Republican Bishops that they all are - and we have FOX News so desperate, they actually try to mislabel Foley as a Democrat. I would say it’s payback time for Democrats. But Foley is emblematic of the total nuts we put in every office in Washington. The list he sits on is not very lonely. Newt Gingrich has a sexual history that would make Bill Clinton turn red, and we didn’t hear much about that one. With the timing of this, the Democrats could not have asked for a better Christmas present.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, let me stop you right there.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Certainly.
RAY SUAREZ: Because I guess the real question is, for all those people who find it off-putting, reprehensible, does it change anybody's vote? Are there voters who were going to vote one way and, because they feel badly about this, they're going to vote another? Or does it just make already convinced people on either side even more convinced...
JOHNNY FLATLINE: The core of the Republican base are people who are simply too uneducated to know myth from reality. Religious right people live in La-La land to begin with. There is no reality for them. We could be losing hundreds of soldiers per day and billions of dollars per second, and Bush could convince these people to keep on smiling for Jesus. But the one shock collar the GOP puts on these people is the fear of their family morals being threatened by an uncertain world. So when one of their own gets caught not only pursuing the wrong age, but also the wrong sex, this is a problem, because GOP bases their whole illusion of power on their moral purity. These voters are not voting for issues. They don’t read books. So writing about the horrible policies of this administration, and the horrible complicity of this Congress is a waste of time. The word Conservative has been turned into a label like a football team to root for, and these people want to root for a team. They want to belong to the good guys so they can point to finger. They do not want to think. They do not want to question authority. They crave authority. For them, Bush doesn’t have to be right. He just has to look and feel right. I’ve always said that the only thing that could bring down Bush from these kinds of supporters, is if we could catch him on video tape, in bed, with a Muslim man. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but so far, no video. But in the end, a Congressman getting caught doing this, is worse than his help in killing 100,000 innocent civilians in some distant land. The conservative base doesn’t care about dead foreigners, but you can bet your bippy they care about a single American kid being targeted for molestation. That hits their shock collar, and hits it hard. If Foley were a Democrat, as Fox so desperately wishes, just imagine the feeding frenzy the GOP would be having right now. Just imagine the 24 hour coverage Fox would be giving the story.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, the efforts at getting a handle on this, the efforts at beginning the assessment, the damage control, how are the Republican leadership doing?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, like I say, so far, so far, there's no evidence of it, if you look at the key races. As I say, there's no movement.
Nonetheless, I do think, when you look at it and you just go around and talk to people, you do find this intense alarm. This country is filled with people -- including myself -- whose kids are on IM all hours of the night. You have no idea what's going on, what they're saying.
I often say to candidates, "You know, if you go out in the country and you say, 'I will outlaw IMing after 10 p.m., you will win. I don't care what else you stand for; you will get parents supporting you." Because people, they've built this shell for themselves, their home and their family, but things are coming in outside the shell -- IM, cable TV, all this other stuff -- that they're really worried about.
And so the party, in the long run, that can speak to this concern -- as Bill Clinton did quite well -- the party that can do that will have a long-term effect. So I'm not sure, you know, what Hastert did or didn't do. That's not the key issue. The key issue is Foley and the act, and what it says about the party.
Is it a party that's lost its moral bearings? Is this a party that's at the end of its reign? You know, I covered British politics at the end of the Conservative Party's reign after more than a decade. At the end, they had scandals coming out of everywhere. And it was a sense they've just run their course.
So to me this really feels like something that's going to shift opinion, but so far it hasn't shown up.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: David may be right. After all, our Constitution has been shredded to bits this past year, and there has been very little public reaction. So why should we expect anybody to get worked up over this? The worst damage is more likely to occur from within. This has Republicans on the defensive, and therefore, less unified. Totalitarian regimes don’t do well around dissent and disorder.
RAY SUAREZ: One interesting thing is that it chased the Woodward book and the various ancillary discussions of what was in that book out of the front pages for a while. It was taking up a lot of the breathable oxygen in national political debates.
Does that come back now? Does Foley recede in the coming weeks? Do some of these serious charges in that book, serious implications in that book, return?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't think they've ever gone away. I watched a lot of local debates on C-Span, because that's the kind of life I lead, and one of the things you notice is the Foley thing comes up, but Iraq is already in those debates. Immigration is always in those debates.
So those things have not exactly gone away. And it could be historians will look back at this week and see the North Korean busting out of their deal as the big event of the week, and we're all focused on Foley. And historians will say, "What were they thinking about?"
But nonetheless, I don't want to minimize the Foley thing, because the way kids are raised, that's a crucial voting issue.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: There have been a ton of books printed trying to save his country from our new dictator -- a ton of books with incredible material, and incredible effort, screaming for attention from the American people. Anybody who reads any of the recent material by Noam Chomsky should be scared out of their wits. So why is the Woodward book a big deal? Well, for one, he gets the most personal interviews of the people in power. So rather than discussing the horrible policies, actions, and results of these criminals, he can tell us what they think and say privately that might contradict what they say publicly. That has some sales appeal. I enjoyed Richard Clarke’s book immensely simply because he had a front row seat to power, and second, he appears to be an honest source of information - something very lacking in politics these days. So, it’s good to see the inside of the black box, if you feel you are getting an honest view. This White House is such a pit of snakes, just jamb packed with liars, that it’s hard to get a clear view of anything from the inside. But more than anything, Woodward’s book has some momentum because Bush’s policies have created damage that is getting to be undeniable. His ratings are dropping. More and more people are turning against him. So, it’s getting easier for dissent to get a voice in the media. Thus the title State of Denial rings truer than ever, making it easier to sell.
RAY SUAREZ: David, what do you make of -- I think it's a little too strong to call a defection -- but at least the misgivings now spoken of by none other than John Warner, one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq project?
DAVID BROOKS: Right. Well, I don't think anybody who supported the war now thinks that things are going well. I mean, most people think things are going horribly.
And the question becomes: What do we do about it? What do we do from here? And you see a whole series of schools opening up. There's John Warner and Christopher Shays from Connecticut saying, "We've got to get the Iraqis off -- just get off their duffs, because over the past year the Iraqi government has done very little."
There's Joe Biden and others saying we really have to think fundamentally about separating the country, separating the regions, to minimize the civil war. There are other people who are thinking one big more military push. A lot of the former generals think that.
So this is a question about, how do we move on from here? But as for the downward slide, I don't know anybody who disputes that. And I think one of the things we learned from the Woodward is that a lot of people had the idea there was no deliberation in the Bush White House, people were just drinking the Kool-Aid. But we've learned from the Woodward book, whether it was Condi Rice, or the NSC adviser, Steve Hadley, they knew. They had a realistic sense of what was happening, and the remedies never came because they either ran into Don Rumsfeld or they ran into President Bush.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Sometimes David can really pull one out of his ass. I guess realistic is a great adjective, because it means almost nothing in this context. As we learned some years back, Rice is the one who stood in the way of Dick Clarke on Al Queda. Woodward now confirms what Clarke suspected, that she stood in the way of the head of the CIA as well. She considers the deaths of countless civilians in Lebanon as “birth pains of democracy.” Can you think of a more idiotic comment than that for a Secretary of State? I don’t even think I can classify Ms. Rice as a human being. Perhaps she wants to match the status of Kissinger as a prominant war criminal who stands above the law. But I guess that's just the birth pangs of fascism.
RAY SUAREZ: Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great weekend.

Flatline & Brooks - September 29, 2006

2006-10-01T12:35:00.000-05:00

RAY SUAREZ: Which brings us to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And, David, early in the week, we had the release, the declassification -- first the leak, then the declassification -- of the intelligence estimate, which at its core implied the war in Iraq has worsened the terrorist threat. Does that have any legs as a sort of pole to build a debate around? Is that going to carry us through the next month or so?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I'm not sure the NIE, the intelligence estimate, is going to do that. I think reality is going to do that.
I think most people understand that the war in Iraq has made us less safe. Frankly, I think most people in the administration now understand how badly it's going. I think we're learning that from the Bob Woodward book that's coming out, that even within the administration there's been a recognition of what's going on.
The NIE, the report did make two other points which I think were important. The first is that Iraq, while going badly and hyping up the amount of terror in the world, is also the central battleground. And I think the report made clear we're either going to give a lot of credence to the extremists or where they will be defeated.
And then the second thing the report makes very clear is that the only way fundamentally to defeat the extremists is through a process of democracy and pluralism. So, to me, which is the essential truth of all this, is that Bush was absolutely right in his understanding of the problem, the breadth and depth of it. He was right that democracy and the Middle Eastern culture and political climate is the only way to the solution, but that we've screwed up the implementation.
RAY SUAREZ: What do you take away from both the leak, the reaction to it, then the declassification, and the ensuing debate?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: It is true this report is nothing new. Our own government has known for years our activities in Iraq would increase terrorism in the world. Only, this time, maybe it‘s known to the general public more, because for some reason, the press seems more inclined to report it this time. And maybe Bush knows it more, because apparently he simply doens't listen to anybody in his own government who disagrees with him. But speaking of denial, my god, even Brooks, sitting right here, right now, can admit the report is right, and somehow turn around and say Bush was right. Bush was not right about anything. He was never right. We are not spreading freedom or democracy. We never were. There was never a good idea there. The reasons we are in Iraq have nothing to do with democracy. What this report and others like it show us, is that our government has good intelligence. It always did. But we have some crooks at the top, in charge of this country, who have the ability to ignore all the brains of this government, and take us down a pathetic lonely path of failure. My advice is to look at the beneficiaries of this stupidity, and there is your real answer. Look at the money. We are spending $2 billion a week, obviously to zero benefit to Iraqis. Who benefits from that $2 billion? It should be so obvious, I shouldn't have to spell it out for you.
RAY SUAREZ: But we don't get the luxury of having a polite debate in an abstract setting. We are some 40 days away from Election Day, and the president went on the road and said the Democrats are the party of cut and run. Pretty tough stuff.
DAVID BROOKS: And it was. That is the language they're going to be using from here on in.
I think we essentially have a debate in this country between one party that does understand the breadth of the problem but has messed up the implementation of the central front in the war on terror. The other party, the Democratic Party, which is very quick to criticize, but so far has not really offered a strategy for how you deal with the terror, not only in Iraq, but around the Arab world.
And so, to me, these are two unpleasant choices.
RAY SUAREZ: But do they have equal responsibility? And will the voters think they have equal responsibility, when one group controls all the apparatus to make this thing happen?
DAVID BROOKS: Right, politically there's no question. It was the Bush administration and, more specifically, Donald Rumsfeld who messed up the fundamental implementation of the war. And as we're learning from the Woodward book, the president had many opportunities, with many people all around him, including apparently his wife, telling him to get rid of Donald Rumsfeld, and he didn't do it. And therefore, the buck stops with him. And that will be to his eternal discredit.
But the Democrats -- it seems to me it's not just enough to say, "They messed up, they messed up, they messed up." To really gain the trust of the American people, the Democrats have to eventually say something positive of what they would do.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: It’s amazing how the Republicans can take over the entire government, screw it up, and say, well, if you vote for anybody else, it will be worse. I mean think about that for a second. Of course Bush thinks it’s always his way or the highway. He thinks his position is the only position of action, and all other positions are positions of inaction. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are plenty of brilliant ideas out there about how to disengage from Iraq. But Bush is the one who has been cutting and running. He cut and ran from smart people with good ideas. He cut and ran from the war on Bin Laden and Afganistan. He cut and ran from good intelligence. He cut and ran from generals who think Rumsfled is incompetent. Bush thinks that fighting the wrong country makes us stronger and safer. Nothing could be more macho, yet more stupid and wrong. The best kings, the best warriors, the best of the best, know the best way to make yourself safe, is to avoid a fight you can‘t quickly win, avoid exposing the maximum capacity of your defenses, avoid running your bank broke, avoid losing soldiers for the wrong reasons, and focus on reinforcing your weaknesses. And in Bush's case, we have to add another really stupid bit of advice: avoid fighting the wrong country. Bush has done none of the above. No President in history has ever made us weaker. No President has ever been this bad, this stubborn, or this dishonest. We need to cut and run from President Bush before he destroys us all.
RAY SUAREZ: Now, the Woodward book, as has been mentioned by both of you, more is coming over the weekend, and then "60 Minutes" interview with Bob Woodward himself. Is this the kind of thing that just causes a lot of waves here or does this have national impact?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I have no clue. But the book store is utterly packed is all sorts of literature trying to explain how bad this administration is. I don‘t know why we need Woodward to explain it through insider gossip. There is plenty of more objective evidence to see that we are in a bad situation. But Woodward and other more recent critics are starting to reveal how Republicans are beginning to fight amongst themselves. That’s a good thing, because their past unity has caused this country a great deal of harm. Unity is not a source of strength. If you want unity, go study Hitler. His regime can teach you all about unity. It was his way or the highway, too. And when he failed, what option did he have left? Suicide. That's the life of a stubborn fool lost far from any reality.
DAVID BROOKS: The Woodward book -- when he had in his first book a couple years ago that George Tenet, the CIA director, said, "WMDs in Iraq are a slam-dunk," people in the White House think that won the election for them, because that inoculated them from the WMD. So a Woodward book can have an big impact.
And I think what we're learning from the book, which I had had glimmers of and all of us covered had glimmers, that a lot of the people in the administration understood the cataclysm that was in front of them. And they were complaining about it, maybe not as vociferously as they would, but they had a grip on reality.
And that grip on reality occasionally made it into the Oval Office, and yet nothing was done. And the question is: Why was nothing done? And I have two beliefs.
One, the president likes Rumsfeld because he's a tough guy, and he likes tough guys. And, second, politically, every single day, they asked a question day-by-day, "Would today be a good day to get rid of Donald Rumsfeld?" And no specific day was the good day, because it would have created a storm.
But they never stepped back and said, "Overall, what's the big problem here?" And they're going to live with that decision.
RAY SUAREZ: At the same time as approval ratings are dropping -- even on Afghanistan, which from the get-go has been a strength for the Bush administration, they're already pretty far down in Iraq, as well -- at the same time as that's happening, Congress voted to give the president more powers on the treatment of detainees from that war, those wars, and their trials. How was that handled this week?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: This is the worst legislation passed by Congress since the Patriot Act. Only people who stand in fear of democracy can stand behind this. Leahy gave an excellent reprimand to Congress for passing this - which should have been headline news. But nobody noticed. And shame on those 12 Democrats who voted for it. This makes Bush a dictator, who can jail anybody he deems dangerous. He can lock them up and throw away the key. And Congress just smiled and signed over the permission slip. I can only hope our courts will strike all this down in the few years. But our court system is getting so corrupt and fascist, I can’t even be sure we can count on them to protect our Constitution. The argument that this was a vote against terrorism is absurd. This is a vote against democracy. The argument that democracies cannot fight terror by democratic means is absurd. This is more in the style of Stalin or Hitler to buy into the arguments presented this past week. It’s a shameful day to be an American right now. Leahy compares it to the time Congress shamefully went along with the Gulf of Tomkin fiasco.
RAY SUAREZ: Does the sizable Democratic vote against the president on these new rules signal that, at least in the Senate, they're not afraid of the GOP advantage on national security anymore?
DAVID BROOKS: There's some of that. Nonetheless, I think it's a politically dangerous vote.
And everyone is struck by this whole debate, the passion. Chris Dodd gave an incredibly passionate speech against. John McCain and Lindsey Graham gave incredibly passionate speeches in favor. I think both sides are motivated by a sincere emotion.
Nonetheless, I think politically, as Mark implied, the smart vote for Democrats would have been to go with the president. And if you look at some of the Democrats in tough races -- Harold Ford is running in Tennessee, Sherrod Brown is running in Ohio -- quite liberal members, anti-war, but voted with the president on this.
And I think politically that's the smart thing, in part because it becomes much harder -- it will become very easy for Republicans to run ads against them.
RAY SUAREZ: Even in a situation like now, are people inclined to give the president more power over various component parts of the war, even if they don't approve of that president and his presidency?
DAVID BROOKS: I think absolutely. I think the NSA story, a lot of Republicans have run very effective ads on that story. They want the president in time of war to have power, even if they don't like Bush himself.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: The President is begging for powers he does not need. I think more than anything, he his trying to retroactively legalize his past illegal actions before Democrats take over and try to impeach him. Some of this law was designed to give immunity to crimes already committed. Plus, Bush is obsessed with being able to torture people. Someobody has been watching to many shows of 24 on Fox. This is outrageous and an insult to our Constitution. I’m just ashamed that so many in Congress are dim enough to fall for this stuff. This just shows me how utterly incompetent our government has become. This will reap dangers down the road. Anytime you violate democracy, you will get some bad news and abuse later. And we have opened the door for yet more abuse. Bush wanted secret prisons, and later we got Abu Graib. It’s as predictable as a math equation. It’s like all of the wisdom of our founding fathers has gone down the toilet. Our Congress is desperately trying to create a dictator. Nobody is afraid of power abuse. And yet, it’s abuse of power that has created 100% of the problems from which we now suffer. It’s abuse of power that got us in Iraq. It’s abuse of power that is increasing terror and weakening our military. And abuse of power is also causing the arrest and torture of innocent people. America is losing it’s self respect daily, and Congress is doing all it can to help us down the path. I really don’t understand how they can be so corrupt. It boggles my mind each time I see it.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, we're entering the lightning round. We've sprint through the last couple of weeks here. There's been more emphasis on the Senate and less on the House as a possible Democratic capture. What do you make of that?
DAVID BROOKS: Right, I think somewhat the Republicans are slightly better in the House, but there are a whole bunch of Senate races that are just toss-ups. And whether it's Ohio, whether it's Missouri, whether it's Tennessee, there are a lot of states where you just can't tell who's going to win.
And I don't think that's changed. And you can look at it both ways. Even despite the horrible political climate, Republicans are hanging in there. But the Democrats are hanging in there, too. And it's just hard to make generalizations, which gives a lot of us in the media a chance to divine trends that probably aren't really there. There's a lot just up for grabs.
RAY SUAREZ: Isn't the math still pretty daunting for the Democrats though? Don't they have to, in effect, run the table?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I have no clue who will win. I also have no clue if things will get better if the Democrats win, because so many of them so spinelessly vote for some of the horrible Republican programs. They spinelessly vote in horrible appointees. I can't understand why they do it. I also have no idea if our elections will be honest and fair. There was another documentary recently released, trying to reveal all of the corruption in the past two elections. And of course, the general media completely ignores this story which is not going away. Unfortunately, we do not have a political system designed for the best and brightest to compete for the job. So it should be little wonder there is such a lack of wisdom in our government. But at minimum, I can only hope Congress might change into something that can impeach Bush before he does some real serious permanent damage to our democracy. But it may already be too late to fix it.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, have a great weekend, guys.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Thank you.
DAVID BROOKS: Thank you.

Flatline & Brooks - June 23, 2006

2006-06-24T21:20:00.000-05:00

JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy Founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
What do you make of that story? What do you think of this whole thing that's going on in Connecticut? And is it indicative of something larger that's going on in the country?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, it's indicative of one thing. They're both independent centrists in parties that are drifting to the extremes.
Shays is one of the few moderate Republicans left in the House; Lieberman is the most moderate Democrat in the Senate. And we saw a lot of the moderate Democrats get wiped away in the last 12 years, and I think in this election we're going to see a lot of moderate Republicans get wiped away, and the parties are going to be a little more polarized.
And I think, if you talk to those two men, as I'm sure Mark and I both have, they're not happy with the way the war is being waged. They supported it, but they've both been there. They've both offered suggestions on how to change it.
But as you go forward, they're thinking, "What do we do? Do we want to sign on with John Kerry's thing and get out very quickly?" And they both say no. And so they're really stuck with a war they didn't agree with the operation of, but they want to keep at it, and I think they're both principled, gutsy, gutsy guys.
JIM LEHRER: And speaking of Kerry and the Senate, there were two votes or votes on two amendments offered by the Democrats. A lot of people are making a lot out of those, what it says about the divisions within the Democratic Party this week. What do you say?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Divisions occur where there is real democracy. Only totalitarians unite perfectly. It‘s hard for democracy to exist inside the Democratic party these days, because they must compete with a highly fascist Republican party that isn‘t afraid to represent the interest of the powerful, and stand against the interest of the common middle class citizen. And while we can debate how popular or unpopular this war is with Americans, there is no question that virtually everybody in Iraq wants us to leave. What gives us the right to overrule the will of the Iraqi people?
As for Lieberman being a centrist, I would like to correct the record. Almost the entire Congress is conservative. Kucinich is one of the few who might qualify as a true liberal. There might be a few dozen who qualify as moderates. Maybe. But the vast majority of Congressmen range from far right wing to radical right wing. And the proof is in the pudding. Look how many are able to stand up against the needs of the average citizen. Yet, look how most are perfectly able to defend rich and powerful special interest.
DAVID BROOKS: Strictly on the politics, if the voters are confronted with two parties, one party is the Republicans who screwed up Iraq, and the other party is the Democrats who don't seem to -- who seem to want to cut and run, or seem to be defeatist, or who don't have a policy toward Iraq, well, then what are they going to choose?
That's actually a tough decision. And if you go back to Vietnam, liberals were right about Vietnam. But did it help liberals get a strong foreign policy credential for the next 30 years? No. It helped conservatives and Republicans, because people decided, "Well, they probably were wrong about Vietnam, but we're thinking about the next security threat, and we still trust conservatives to be the tough foreign policy types."
So the paradox of Vietnam -- and I think it could be, though I'm not certain about this -- is that you can be wrong about this war, but still gain long-term political benefit by seeming tough.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I would just like to sit here for a second and reflect on the total garbage Brooks just spewed out. The words “cut and run” I hear so often. It’s clearly an attempt to denigrate any antiwar position thru insult, thru sound byte imagery, not through reason. I guess I could say that Jesus was a cut and run kind of guy, and for the next 2000 years, only a handful of those years has been without war, so I guess his desires were a waste of time. I guess we are supposed to laugh at his idealism, or any politician who goes anywhere near that kind of thought.
It’s also funny to hear Books admit that the Republicans screwed up Iraq. But let’s put some numbers to this screw up. This war is going to outlast World War II. Defeating Hitler was easier and cheaper than this. And in this case, certain well positioned corporations are making a fortune on our misfortune. This is not a war about principal, nor about democracy or WMDS or the Iraqi people. This is a war about oil and profit. That’s it. That’s it. All of this flowery discussion beyond that is a pipe dream.
JIM LEHRER: What do you think about how remarkable it is that the Republicans are backing a policy that, you know, that two-thirds of the American people are not supporting?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think there are a couple of things. First, they believe in it. They believe you've got to...
JIM LEHRER: Can't cut?
DAVID BROOKS: If we cut and run, it just would be a disaster, which I think is right on the merits.
Second, the Republican Party is good at certain things. They're good at cutting taxes. They're good at accusing the Democrats of being soft on defense. So there is sort of a comfortable posture for them.
And then, finally, there is no escaping Iraq, so you might as well take that on.
JIM LEHRER: Might as well take that on?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: There is no disaster to leaving Iraq. There is no disaster to leaving Iraq. There is no disaster to leaving Iraq. Iraq is already a disaster. Leaving is easy. Just get on an airplane, and throttle it up to the sky. It’s not a big deal. Every day longer America stays, it becomes a greater disaster to us, our grandkids and to Iraqis. It is not up to Americans to decide what to do with Iraq. We are not their parents. We are not their guardians. We are not their government. We have no right to be there. If we leave, I know this sounds hard to believe, but they will find a way to get by without us. People all over the world manage to survive without America. We are far too arrogant about our role in this world, and it’s hurting us to believe in this myth of our paternity over the world. It’s not real, it’s not true, it doesn’t exist. And whatever leadership we did have over the world, Bush is doing his best to squander as quickly as possible. As long as we continue to buy this myth, certain military contractors are going to continue to rake in billions of dollars of our money. What do we get in return for this investment? A lot of blown up sand, and that‘s it. Somebody show me a balance sheet, with dollars on it, the proves out the profit we are going to get from this expensive maneuver. Iraq is going to not only be our Vietnam. It’s going to be our government’s Enron.
JIM LEHRER: OK. But what about the specifics -- what I want to get at is the specifics of what the Democratic proposals were. In other words, John Kerry had his proposal, and then there was the Reed -- what did that -- what signal does that send on behalf of the party, or if any?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t know yet. Kerry’s position on Iraq recently has been admirable, whereas Hillary’s position has been as bad as Bush’s. She actually things there is some mission to complete. We obviously have another Vietnam here. Republicans want to pretend they are good managers of war, but they are not being honest about their intentions. They have no intention of leaving Iraq anytime soon. And it doesn’t matter if Iraq is a mess to them because their masters - the oil executives - are getting very rich from this mess. Many Democrats are fearful of being antiwar, because all of Congress is virtually owned by the war industry. Anybody who dares to be as wise as, say, Kucinich, will suffer ridicule from the propaganda machine. I admire Kerry for taking a stand and revealing the names of wise senators brave enough to have some common sense. All of the others should hopefully lose their jobs, should the voters get wise to this. But I won’t hold my breath.
JIM LEHRER: It got 13 votes for Kerry‘s program.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: People forget that Democrats voted for this war, too. 13 is a big change from what it used to be. In fact, that kind of change is huge in a fascist autocracy like the US Congress, where very few need to ever fear actually losing their job, unless, of course, they criticize the military machine. Remember, fascist governments don’t lead. They don’t invent. They don’t innovate. When the government becomes a undemocratic, it shifts 100% of all initiative to the public. So expect Congress to be the last institution on the planet to learn that this war is a really bad idea. They will be the last to get reality. Not the first.
JIM LEHRER: Some would say that Kerry, by insisting on a vote on his amendment, highlighted the differences and hurt the Democrats?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh hogwash. Anybody who is afraid to step out of line is not a leader. Apparently, few of the politicians know their history well enough to remember Vietnam. I think the amnesia was strongly encouraged by certain well paid campaign donations. They are paid to forget. Remember what happened to Howard Dean when he became the very first to criticize Bush for going to Iraq? It propelled him to the top of the Democratic party. People who never give to campaigns got interested. He got so big, inside power started getting nervous, and they had to turn on the propaganda heat to do him in, take him out. But before they began to interfere with his image, his individualism had propelled him to the very top.
DAVID BROOKS: ... and I feel a little bad, but not too bad, because the Democrats -- as far as I can tell, the John Kerry position -- I've studied all the floor statements -- they said nothing about Iraq. There was a lot of talk about Karl Rove being bad. There was a lot of political posturing.
But, a, why would we want to commit now to some decision we're going to have to take in a year about withdrawing or not withdrawing?
Second, do we have any confidence that any Democrat or any Republican say anything about the capacity of the Iraqis to handle defense within a year? Do they talk about the capacity of the Iraqi army to transport people, to do intelligence, to actually keep the place safe? No, that was entirely missing.
Finally, if you're an Iraqi in Iraq and you're sitting there thinking, "Should I help the government or should I help the insurgents?" And you see a Senate vote saying, "Hey, the U.S. is going to be out of there in a year," you think, "Well, I'm not going to help the government. I'm not going to help the government that may fall in a year because the U.S. pulls out."
So to me, it was all -- when he got to the ground on Iraq, it was incredibly counterproductive, though it served some political purpose back home.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: We should leave Iraq because we do not have the money to pay for it. We can’t afford this war. We never could. America does not have the resources required to manage a spare country. We are too arrogant for our own good. I don’t want to borrow more money from the Chinese, to fight Iraqis, to be paid for later by my grandkids. We are wasting huge amounts of money. We are hurting the strength and stability of our country. This war is not making the world safer. This is not decreasing terror. This is not securing world energy supplies. And Bush is also using this war to destroy our constitution and our civil rights and democratic freedoms. He is truly the worst President this country has ever had. This other talk about saving Iraq from itself is absurd. Vietnam didn’t need our salvation. Iraq is no different.
JIM LEHRER: I got you.
New subject: immigration. What do you make of the Republicans' decision in the House, at least, all these hearings suddenly, rather than to proceed with the conference committee and get the thing resolved?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think with immigration, it's just hard with a country as divided as this one to come up with a big piece of legislation. There's no consensus in the country about this.
And as far as what the Republicans were trying to do with these hearings, the loudest voices are the most restrictionist voices. Any time you hold a hearing, you're going to get the most restrictionist, build-a-fence side.
And the politics -- I wish the politics were different, but the short-term politics are that it helps the Tom Tancredo, the people that just want to build a fence. The long-term politics helps the other side.
JIM LEHRER: Johnny?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: It‘s a meaningless issue. It‘s just a way to get Americans to stop thinking about Iraq, or the destruction of our constitution. It doesn‘t matter. There are far greater dangers facing our society. Our world xenophobia will never save us. What we need to do now, is save America from ourselves. We have become our own worst enemy. We have nothing to fear except fear itself. Republicans are really good at playing up fear, hatred, racism, and any other tactic that divides humans from one another.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I had someone tell me -- a Democrat tell me, if you ran, except for the Northeast, if you ran in the country by promising to cut off benefits to illegal immigrants, education, health care, you would win in almost every district in the country. That's short term.
Long term, this group is here to stay. And not only is the group here to stay, but the people who believe in a growing country revived by immigration are here to stay. And, you know, we've seen California.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Republicans apparently don‘t realize that states like Texas will become a majority Latino very soon. But thieves always think short term. They know they can modify their lies for each election. 100% of the Texas’ senators are lily white, despite the browning color of the state. Like Mexico, our government has ways of slowing down the browning of the government, despite the color of the population.
JIM LEHRER: Well, this is a time when we have to un-bond. Thank you both very much.

Johnny Flatline - Stephen Colbert

2006-05-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

You might have missed this story, because when a story is truly meaningful, truly smart, truly important for our country, your honorable media will see to it that you never find out about it if they can. Well, a truly big event happened this past weekend that nobody in the media wanted to talk about. After 4 days, the NY Times reluctantly admitted this even happened. But only after tons of pressure from an overheated blog world. If not for that, history had almost erased it.

If you were lucky enough to tune in CSpan this past weekend, you might have seen the White House Correspondants annual dinner. It's been a cute little ceremony for decades, full of cheap forced chuckle political humor and idol worship by all the powerful insiders that feed us their crap all year long. It's like a celebration of all the lies they got away with in the previous 12 months.

For what seems like an eternity, the thinking portion of our population has been totally excluded from power. Little wonder our country is doing so poorly. The cream doesn't rise to the top anymore. But for 30 minutes, at one dinner, an accident occurred. Somebody with a brian, and a conscience, accidentally got a microphone inside the same room as George W. Bush and his lap dogs. This wasn't supposed to happen. And confusion was rampant, once people figured out this most serious of errors of letting in somebody inside with a brain.

Stephen Colbert, standing just several feet away from a red faced President, was able to spew out more truth in 30 minutes, than has been spoken in 5 years. If you missed it, go find it. The videos are all over the web. Air American Radio, CSpan, DemocracyNow, and many others are now publishing the text, and offering downloads of the video. But this was not just a speech. This was a work of art. A work of art Andy Kaufman would have been proud of. Colbert crossed a line that has never been crossed in my mind. He passed up the Smothers Brothers, Dixie Chicks and Michael Moore on this one. This was one of our own, on the inside, telling it like it is directly to the faces of those who are ruining this country. He forced them to listen to truth. They could not run. The cameras were watching. They could not arrest him, like they often do mothers of dead soldiers who want to speak. No, Colbert drew his sword, and there was no apology. No letting up. He gave them all exactly what they deserved.

I've watched the video several times, and I cannot express the total joy I feel each and every time I see it. I'm going to have this speech printed, framed, and hung by my desk. This is the single greatest political act on behalf of my country that I've seen since the release of Michael Moore's Farenheit 911. And it's very sad that this is the single greatest political act in years. It simply shows us how far we have fallen, when only a comedian is able to communicate honestly to the highly sheltered faces of those in power. And you can bet he won't be invited back. They will be more careful next time. So, please, go find this story. See it. Learn it. Know it. Because a lifetime may pass before something like this ever happens again.

I bow to Stephen Colbert. There is really nothing else worth talking about this week other than this. I urge people to go to www. thankyoustephencolbert.org and thank him. They have tens of thousands of thank you notes posted already.

Flatline & Brooks - March 3, 2006

2006-03-08T22:16:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Flatline & Brooks. "New York Times" columnist David Brooks, and Fake Democracy Founder Johnny Flatline.
First, the president's trip to India and Pakistan. The India nuclear deal, what do you think of it?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I support it.

JIM LEHRER: You support it?

DAVID BROOKS: To the extent that that's very important. Listen, the argument -- and it's going to go to Congress, and there's going to be a kerfuffle about it -- is that we're...

JIM LEHRER: A what?

DAVID BROOKS: A kerfuffle.

JIM LEHRER: Kerfuffle, OK.

DAVID BROOKS: ... that we're extending, we're allowing, we're basically destroying some of the non-proliferation agreements that have been made, some of the precedents that have been laid down.
But my sense of the politics is -- and this will be a tough fight -- but my sense of the politics, from the context, is that members of Congress talk to people, especially in the business community, whose idea of India is excited. They come back from places like India and China with their eyes agog because of the growth opportunities.
And I think most politicians, and certainly in the administration, see the repair of the American-Indian relationship as one of the historic achievements that they and the Clinton administration before are responsible for, that they're very excited about, and that the key thing in who should get nuclear weapons is the nature of the regime. And the Indian regime has been a good democracy.

JIM LEHRER: Johnny, do you see that same kind of thing David was talking about in Congress...

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, David is the corporate power line, so he‘s regurgitating for you how large corporate barons prepare for their allocations of cheap labor and personal profit at the megalomania level. But this is nothing more than the feeder fish in the wake of the ship. David is missing the real point here, and that is the Cheney strategy for domination of strategic world resources.

JIM LEHRER: That's part of the deal.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, this Indian democracy is as fragile as our own. There are plenty of big shots there who can also be bought off against their country’s own interest just like ours. Look, the issue about India is very simple. The issue is Iran. Cheney wants to attack Iran, or at least keep others from getting it, which is what we’ve done with Iraq. He needs to isolate them. Now what does China and India need more of? They need more oil. And they are willing to do business with Iran despite us. If they get tied to Iran with pipelines, and other valuable energy sources, it makes it that much harder for the US to go bomb civilians or take over production plants. So by selling India nuclear power, we are basically trying to buy them off of Iran so we will be free to have another pile of land to blow up our bombs in. In the end, it may backfire, because both India and China will just want both, which is why I have to wonder if Cheney & Company are not in a huge hurry to pick a fight with Iran before they run out of time.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the reality is they're going to have a nuclear program anyway.

JIM LEHRER: It's a major thing here.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think one of the things the Bush administration has always emphasized, whether it's in Iraq, or Palestine, or anywhere else, it's the nature of the regime, stupid.
And so they've also emphasized: You judge countries by how they behave. If they're a democratic country, transparent, they behave constructively in the world, the standards are different. That's why the standards are different on this trip between India and Pakistan.
And there is money involved, but it's not only the deals of the nuclear reactors that will be sold. It's the oil market, reducing world demand for oil. It's India playing a role in the Middle East, stabilizing the region. And, as I mentioned, it's the incredible growth in the Indian economy, which is such a -- the Indian and Chinese economies have become these great ideas and these great facts that are dominating political life.

JIM LEHRER: All right, now Pakistan...

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Ah yes, a transparent model of democracy. Just as Bush dreams of in his sleep. I guess the lap dog media doesn’t want to report this, but when Bush went to India, there were plenty of protestors, and the Indian security agents behaved a lot like Carl Rove would have wanted, blocking it from view when our emperor passed by. In fact, Bush didn’t have any truly public meetings or appearances to speak of. He’s too much of a hot potato for that. In many ways, he was like Musharraf is in his own country. A prisoner. Certainly no kissing of babies in the streets. And we don’t even understand our own role in this anger. Most Americans probably don’t even remember that the US military bombed a building inside Pakistan recently. We are getting to be like Israel - blowing up architecture in the search for justice. It’s so easy for us to forget these tiny details and be confused as to why other people in foreign lands might be a tad bit unhappy with us.

JIM LEHRER: David, a lot of people say, "Hey, we have no choice with Pakistan. You can have all these abstract and wonderful policy ideas, but we've got to deal with Pakistan, because we need them so badly vis-a-vis the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, fill in the blank."

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, this is why I'm glad I'm not in government. If you're sitting outside, you can hurl epithets, "Oh, you coward; you're betraying your principles."

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: But if you're in government, you have to deal with the reality that's there.

JIM LEHRER: And that's what it is?

DAVID BROOKS: And if you were running Pakistan, we'd all be happy. But, you know, you aren‘t, and Pervez Musharraf is. And so you have to deal with the guy. But I think what was raised in the discussion earlier is the concern that you do you hear from the people who are expert in the area, which is this guy's a shah. Is this guy going to collapse, if he's that . . .

JIM LEHRER: And the lack of support below...

DAVID BROOKS: Right. Then what do you do?

JIM LEHRER: ... was what the point was made.

DAVID BROOKS: Because then you really have -- someone said to me who knows the region pretty well that his biggest nightmare is not Iran and not Iraq; it's Pakistan collapsing, because then what do you do? And that really would be incredibly ugly.

JIM LEHRER: New subject. The Katrina videotapes that have been released the last couple of days, Johnny, do you see anything there to bring a tear to your eye, or shock or outrage?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I think it was Monday or Tuesday where I told some friends that I was going to watch the calendar and count the days Bush could go without some big public screw up. They used to come monthly, but now they are almost daily. I was curious if he could make it just one week, free of trouble. Just one week. I know it‘s hard for an incompetent administration like this to go that long, but anything is possible. It wasn‘t more than 24 hours that this tape came out, showing that his people lied once again. A tape that they claimed didn‘t exist, in fact, did exist. Don’t you know somebody got sick of watching the lie, and purposely got that tape out because they couldn’t take it anymore? And it wasn‘t pretty, because once again, they had to do the backstroke to protect the President from himself. Reminded me of 911, where Michael Moore showed us tapes of Bush sitting in a chair at school, not knowing what to do. Enough said. No surprises here. He’s a dope, we all know it. And the funniest part is people like you guys continue to try to have serious conversations about him.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, in the one, he didn't ask a question, but then we heard on the news summary today that he was asking, "Were the levees breached?"

JIM LEHRER: But not on the tapes . . .

JIM LEHRER: He asked Brown, and Brown reported it...

DAVID BROOKS: And Governor Blanco said they weren't.

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And so you've got a little sense there of the fog of war or whatever, the fog of hurricane.
So I do think that, you know, there are a couple of things to say. First of all, the president was a little engaged and that there was this fog and this confusion. Nonetheless, I think the thing you do get from the tapes and that first tape that we saw was him saying the right thing, which was, "We're going to give you all the support you need. We're going to be there."
But then what the president said didn't turn into the machinery of government working. And that's, frankly, a pattern we've seen in the administration before.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: You see how beautifully David did that. He did the talking point thing. The fog of war. The confusion of the moment. The uncertainty. The past 6 years have been a fog. It must be getting hard to defend such a complete idiot. I think you guys are really starting to embarrass yourself at this point. You’re embarrassing your country. This guy is a criminal. The real discussion we should be having right now, is not what he said on a Katrina tape. The level of discussion we should be having is how to impeach him after he so blatantly thumbed his nose at Congress, putting himself very publicly above the law. Where on earth is you sense of morality and dignity? How low must this guy sink before you see it?

JIM LEHRER: All right, now fit the tapes and also what's happened in Iraq the last several days into this remarkable drop in the president's approval ratings in all of the polls.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. I actually don't think -- I disagree with Johnny. I don't think Katrina had a big public opinion reaction, and I was surprised by this. But if you look at the charts...

JIM LEHRER: The video thing or just the whole thing?

DAVID BROOKS: The actual Katrina thing.

JIM LEHRER: The whole thing, OK.

DAVID BROOKS: If you look at the charts, I didn't just see a big change when Katrina happened. I think Iraq drove the slow decline of the president's approval. But then I think this week the decline from wherever it was, 40 to 37 or 34, I think that was the ports.

JIM LEHRER: The ports, Dubai. I forgot about that.

DAVID BROOKS: And then what the ports did was offend Republicans, because he had lost all the Democrats a long time ago, but it was Republicans. And you look at the upsurge of Republican anger, and especially people who are defining themselves as conservatives. I saw a 67 percent approval rating among conservatives, a third of conservatives not approving of President Bush. That's very high, and that's two issues, well, three, two and a half, the Iraq, but immigration and the ports.

JIM LEHRER: Johnny? Dare I ask?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Jim, Bush had me at torture. He had me at secret prisons. He had me at axis of evil. He had me at Guantanamo. He had me at WMD lie. He should have had everybody at 6000 web photos of tortured prisoners. He should have had everybody after he thumbed his nose to Congress after illegal wiretaps. The fact that we are wondering if Katrina is significant, is paltry. If that was his worst deed, I would be delighted. That’s just incompetence. What’s worse than incompetence? Criminal behavior. His complete destruction of our constitution and our empire is a crime far worse, with consequences far more lasting and devastating to this country. I would gladly trade all of that damage for a poorly managed flood. Congress is just as bad as Bush, because they don‘t have the guts, wisdom or courage to stop him. If Bush’s polls are sinking, it just means the lies are starting to fail. But it’s been one big whopping six year lie. I can only hope some people grow up and start learning how to question authority. And it wouldn’t hurt to start right here at this table.

JIM LEHRER: Let me ask you this, David. I've asked -- we all have -- we've talked to people in political life all the time, from presidents on down to JPs, and you ask them about polls. "Oh, I don't care about polls. I don't run my government or my precinct by polls." And how does somebody not -- how does somebody really ignore a poll that is dramatic and as difficult as this is?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, on two levels. There are two different levels. First, I think Bush really does think at this point in long, historical terms. He's convinced he'll be vindicated in Iraq in the long term. That said, if you talk to people in the administration, just as they're talking casually, they're super aware of these numbers, because it's not only that it's some -- I mean, he's never running for office. But if they want to get something through on Capitol Hill, the numbers really matter.
The politicians fixate on these approval numbers. And if you're trying to get a controversial piece of legislation, 47 or 48 is a lot better than 37 or 38. And then, when you talk about November, I know they want to be up around 47 or 48 by November, just so the president can help more candidates. That's looking pretty unlikely.

JIM LEHRER: So David says they fixate on these polls, and yet when you interview him, they go, "No, no, no, I don't look at any polls."

JOHNNY FLATLINE: It means that Carl Rove needs to dream up some better lies. He’s pretty good at it, maybe he’ll find some useful ones.

JIM LEHRER: Robert MacNeil used to say, we only talk about ratings on the NewsHour when they're very high.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, the polls may not matter. Remember, we have electronic voting, and insider fund raising. Democratic opinion can take a back seat when a few million votes can be massaged. Did you guys forget that Bush didn’t really win his first election? He’s not a choice of the people. He stole power like Musharref did.

DAVID BROOKS: I certainly don’t agree.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you both very much.

Flatline & Brooks - February 24, 2006

2006-03-01T21:20:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks: Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks. Johnny, how do you see the situation in Iraq?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Iraq is not the front for fighting terror. Let‘s get that straight. Iraq is the sink hole for the obliteration of the American empire. That‘s what Iraq is. It‘s exactly what every educated person with a brain said it would be. Our government is ignorant, and Iraq’s mess is the result of our incredible ignorance, greed, and disdain for educated thought.

JIM LEHRER: David, now picking up on that, we had a couple of analysts on the program last night and they both said there is nothing the United States can do now except try to facilitate discussions. And if the folks don't want to discuss, it isn't going to happen because we want --

DAVID BROOKS: Right. I'm not sure there is anything politics can do. One of the things we learned is the limited prestige of politicians, the limited effect of politics. Politics in societies like this and in all societies only goes so deep. And beneath that is religion. And it's the religious leaders who have come to the fore and it's religion that has caused a lot of the sectarian violence because of the two sects in the Islam faith, but it's also the religious leaders that have urged some unity, and it's really up to the culture, it's up to the organic culture whether they want to stick together.
And one does get the sense as much as there is, you know, this outrage, this horrible thing that happened, and as much as there has been the sectarian killing, we have been waiting for civil war for a couple years now.

JIM LEHRER: It's true.

DAVID BROOKS: And there have been many instances that would kick it off. The number of deaths, the number of Shia who have been shot, lined up and shot, the number of atrocities has just been amazing. And in each case there has been an upturn in violence and there are death squads on the Shiite side but they haven't erupted into civil war. So there has got to be some social cohesion there holding these two groups together.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: And let’s not forget about the other religion that is American based. The religion of wasting money and faith in the American warrior industry. It’s so powerful, that 99% of all politicians dare not criticize it or oppose it. It’s the monster that is eating our own flesh. And it’s the monster that has killed more Iraqis than any particular religious sect. It has tortured more Iraqi's than perhaps anybody else over there. So before we get high and mighty and talk about the irrational religious sects of Iraq, let’s not for the religious sect called American neocon militarism. It’s a faith far more dangerous, far more radical, and far more deadly than anything else on earth.

JIM LEHRER: David, I hesitate to bring this up, another subject, I hesitate to bring it up because you said on Wednesday night it would be gone, and this is that port security issue. Now it looks like everybody has agreed to, what is called a cooling-off period, do you see that as a good thing or bad thing?

DAVID BROOKS: All politics is local, complete vindication from my point of view. You know, they are going to reach some settlement -- listen, I didn't say it would be gone by -- in two days.

JIM LEHRER: I'm sorry, can we check the record please--

DAVID BROOKS: You are lying about my record Senator. You know, I think what's happened is that the -- the argument hasn't moved. The people who are suspicious of port have no argument. Their argument is Arab port, Arab port, these two things should not go together.
On the other side I think there has been a welling up of reasonable people piling up bit after bit of evidence to show that UAE and Dubai, the most important thing is they have been tremendous allies in the war on terror. We now know that 700 U.S. ships just last year were in the Dubai port being serviced by this very same company that is being blocked. Nobody blew any of those ships up. The UAE has been threatened by al-Qaida for being such a good ally to the U.S. They have been our best ally and one of our best allies in the region in the war on terror. And they are the ones we are kicking in the teeth. And so to me the argument just gets stronger by the day.

JIM LEHRER: Johnny, you probably don't even want equal time on this, right? You are going to throw in the towel, right?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, it‘s a funny one because Bush has clearly backed off his hard line, after he saw how politically foolish his position was. There‘s arguments for it, there‘s arguments against it. What is much more amusing here is how Bush is basically a victim of his own rhetoric. He has promoted this world of fear and terror, and then when this comes up, his own religion of fear is what‘s making it so hard for him to fight for it in public. Now if he could continue with a backroom deal, like this was, then he would be pleased. But transparency has never been good for this administration, because we get to see how crooked they are when that happens. This administration claims to be big on security, but they are not really investing in security. They are only interested in investing in war, which is the fastest way to give money away to friends. That’s the strategy. That’s the strategic thinking that Bush claims to have.
Hong Kong can scan every container in its port, every day. That’s because they invest in security, economics, and making money. But the US doesn’t invest in itself. The US is a squandering nation. We squander. We don’t invest. Bush may not be worried about your personal privacy, or your political privacy, but he is very worried, apparently, about the privacy of what corporations are moving around in steel containers. He wants to know what might be in your shoe at the airport. But he’s not concerned about what’s inside a 60’ long metal box. That's because they focus on stealing from us, the people. That's where they invest their energy. It's crystal clear.

DAVID BROOKS: There are a lot of different issues here. One, this is a global economy. We have a lot of ships that come in, a lot of cargo is going to come in. There is a global economy; that is the bedrock of our prosperity, the bedrock of world prosperity. That is not going to change. The second issue is the port security.
Here I'm completely with Johnny; I am quite happy to have a debate about port security. I just don't want it to turn in to a xenophobic horde which focuses on the fact that some Arabs were running it. If this was that debate, that with be fine, but this horde got started because a British company sold to an Arab company. That is what this is about and if we have it in this context it's just a terrible tone to set. This is not Clint Eastwood, this is a Gregory Peck movie, one of those movies where they wanted to lynch some guy and needed some reasonable person to say hold on, let's look at the facts.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Perhaps we can also end the xenophobia of Mexican immigrants while we’re at it. We want to build a fence to stop immigrants the way China walled itself in for centuries, to it's horrible disadvantage. But we don’t want to build a screening system that might stop the flow of a nuclear weapons. I don’t know about you, but I fear loose Russian nukes a lot more than a loose poor Mexican farm worker.

JIM LEHRER: All right. Thank you both very much.

Flatine & Lowry - February 17, 2006

2006-02-22T19:18:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: And to Flatline and Lowry: Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline and National Review editor Rich Lowry. David Brooks is off tonight. Johnny, and so after a week, is the Cheney story over?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, according to FOX it‘s over. They have put countless numbers of paid off pundits on the screen, insisting the story is dead. Talk about working hard at wishing something away, they are doing it. And that alone should be cause for suspicion.

JIM LEHRER: Rich, what's your view about whether or not the vice president mishandled this? I mean, forget the accident itself but the uproar that ensued afterward over the handling, is there some fault there?

RICH LOWRY: Yeah. I think they clearly should have gotten it out as soon as possible on Saturday night. But there were extenuating circumstances. They're down there in the boondocks, Cheney has no staff. My understanding is that he was understandably crushed and shaken by the incident. So they wait to do it Sunday, and they're also thinking if they had just put out a statement Saturday night "Oh, by the way, Cheney shot someone and we don't know his condition but we're just letting you know" there would have been a firestorm anyway. And if they had released any information prematurely that was incorrect, they also would have gotten hammered for that.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think about that, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I grew up in the Texas hunting business. The whole state is covered up in important people on hunting trips. This was not Siberia. Look, we are dancing around the obvious here. Any good prosecutor would tell you Cheney had to be stinking drunk. The responses are too telling. I mean, wife beaters leave trails this good. He refuses any public appearance for a over a day? Law enforcement is delayed. One thing I’ve learned in my own Texas hunting experience, is rich guys on hunting trips like to drink. In this case, Cheney probably drank irresponsibly. People may not realize that he has a colorful drinking past like Bush. I think Cheney was drunk, and his victim might have been drunk as well. And shooting somebody while drunk is a felony in Texas, which is why Cheney has been so secretive on this. On top of that, he was hunting without a proper hunting license. Us little people get fined for that sort of thing. But watch him get every possible benefit of the doubt by his fans. Since I view him as a war criminal and traitor to the United States, I’m not so willing to give him such benefit of my doubt. He’s a liar, I know he is, so I don’t believe a word he says on this.

RICH LOWRY: but in terms of news value it ended today when Whittington came out and looked pretty hearty and gave an incredibly gracious statement. If he had done that three days ago, been in a condition to do that three days ago, everything would have been different. And also his turn for the worse bollixed the White house plan for dealing with this.

JIM LEHRER: The heart problem on Monday.

RICH LOWRY: Right. Because initially they're going to have - my understanding - they're going to have the president make a lighthearted remark about it Tuesday, figure that takes care of the Tuesday news cycle; do something with Cheney Wednesday or Thursday, and I'm not sure what, and then have this Wyoming event Friday. But when he has the heart condition, you can't joke about it anymore, and it kind of blew up that initial plan.

JIM LEHRER: Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist, a former speechwriter for the first President Bush, had a piece in the Wall Street Journal I think yesterday, an op-ed page piece where she said this could, in fact, lead to Vice President Cheney stepping down and the president picking a successor who would be in great shape to be the 2008 Republican nominee. Does that make sense to you?

RICH LOWRY: No, no, and I think there's zero chance of that, especially the way it played out later on in the week here where I think the vice president put it behind him. Also, you know, Vice President Cheney is not responsible for the president's political problems. He could be the most popular vice president we've ever seen in this country and he'd still be in the low 40 percent approval. The vice president's standing just doesn't matter that much. Plus, selecting a presumptive 2008 nominee would be extremely controversial and divisive in the party. That's why I think it's very unlikely that would happen.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh, sure. Attaching your future political career to the most defective administration in American history is just brilliant. I wonder how many will just lunge at the chance? If things continue like this, I can assure you, the next President will not be Republican. Oh, wait. I forgot that our elections are rigged. So maybe we will be getting Republican presidents forever.

RICH LOWRY: And also, ironically, just given the polarized poisonous nature of our politics, the fact is that he's a hate magnet, as Peggy Noonan put it, makes him more popular with the Republicans and makes him more valuable in terms of reaching out to the Republican base.

JIM LEHRER: What kind of marks would you give the press over the handling of this incident, particularly the White House press corps, they were the people in the front lines, so to speak, on this?

RICH LOWRY: I think it was absurd overreaction. And, as I said, I think Cheney's office should have gotten it out sooner but a 14- or 18-hour delay in the scheme of things over this kind of incident I think is meaningless.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: He probably was drunk, he probably broke the law, and he needed 18 hours to sober up. My God, wake up you patsies. I fault the White House press core for not going for the obvious here. Think about it. You are Cheney, which means you are higher than God. You screw up big time in friendly territory. Judgement is clouded and panicked. What do all dishonest powerful people do when they screw up? They cover up. They hide. They delay. They have trouble getting their stories straight. Communication among their troops gets clouded. It’s right there beating you over the head, yet you just can’t help but play along with their little charade.

JIM LEHRER: Oh, you don’t buy that?

RICH LOWRY: Exactly. I still think it's an absurd overreaction but it's the reason that there was the overreaction.

JIM LEHRER: Now, staying on Cheney here there's been word this week of the possibility, at least, that the vice president has some direct involvement in the Plame/Libby situation. How do you read that?

RICH LOWRY: Well, I think it's mostly what we've been talking about and hearing about. Well, one, the vice president did accrue more power to his office in this executive order a couple of years ago where the president says the vice president, too, has power to classify and also my understanding is to declassify material. And apparently he used that to allow Scooter Libby to talk to reporters about the national intelligence estimate about Iraq's WMD programs. And this is being, I think, conflated with the Plame matter and being spun into some scandal. I just don't think it is because that national intelligence estimate ended up being declassified itself and released to the press and a lot of the people who have been complaining about Cheney's secretiveness and all the rest of it this week I'm sure are the same people that wanted to see the basis for the war being released and declassified at that time.

JIM LEHRER: Do you have a view on this, Johnny?

Johnny Flatline: I do.

JIM LEHRER: Share it with us.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: The Bush family has been known to punish those who cross them. This is an arrogant family. And Cheney’s ability to lie about the obvious, is more stubborn than Bush. I think Cheney to this day, won’t admit that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. This guy has absolutely no regard to honesty with the public. He’s a dictator of the first degree. And if he and Bush are telling bold faced lies about WMD’s, it would not surprise me that they would turn a spy who was ruining their lie. They took pretty harsh action against Mary Mapes who was instrumental in both Abu Graib news releases, as well as Bush’s little AWOL incident. These guys take no prisoners. They are brutal, vicious, and evil.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. Finally, Katrina, this has been the week of Katrina on the Hill, both the House and Senate have had hearings. How has Michael Chertoff, the secretary of housing -- of Homeland Security, handled this, do you think, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Incompetent. What else do you want me to say? The Bush administration does not look for talent when they hire. They work by cronyism. Bush is a crony himself. He certainly didn’t get his job based on ability, so why should we expect him to hire others any differently. He has lived in a world of insider favors, and that’s his thought process. He’s an elitist ignoramus, a child of spoiled privilege. All of these guys don’t have a clue how to do their jobs. We don’t need another hearing to convince anybody of that. This is just a finger pointing session to make Congress feel better about itself. We are living in the Republican dream. They dominate every branch of government, so life is supposed to be perfect. Competence is supposed to be high. Everything should be getting better. So I’m very confused as to why we are now pointing to incompetence. How can that be possible if the Republicans are in control of everything? Who is going to be responsible for these failures?

JIM LEHRER: Rich?

RICH LOWRY: It's classic government failure. The whole thing was a government failure and part of it has to do with the nature of the Department of Homeland Security, which is just a monstrosity with these 22 separate organizations thrown in there without a lot of thought by either party in Congress or apparently the President of the United States. So I have a little sympathy for Michael Chertoff and trying to manage this unmanageable thing.
But it came down in the end of the day to leadership and something is stuck in my mind that Michael Brown said last week during his hearings. If this had been a terrorist attack in New Orleans, he said, it would have been all different. And I think there's something to that because it was a classic case of fighting the last war where that was what the federal government was really primed to respond to and they didn't have the same level of awareness and initiative in the word of that report that came out this week when it was a natural disaster.

JIM LEHRER: Did you hear anything from Chertoff this week in response to the criticism that makes you think he can fix this?

RICH LOWRY: You know, he's going to try. It sounds like he has the right ideas. He's basically still trying to make this department cohere; and one thing he talked about this week is, you know, making every one of those 22 separate entities that has some operational capacity, sort of melding them and making them work together. But it's a huge task.

JIM LEHRER: You have got 22 seconds, Johnny.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I will paraphrase Jerry Springer, who said, ‘if that Superdome had been filled with thousands of white high school cheer leaders, our government would have had every helicopter known to man out there getting them out instantly. We all know why that didn’t happen here.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you both very much.

Brooks and Flatline - February 10, 2006

2006-02-16T22:28:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: Here in the non-Muslim world, how do you think the non-Muslim world has been handling this cartoon controversy, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Not much worse than how neocon Americans handle criticism.

JIM LEHRER: What do you mean by that?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, for starters, we learned from the British that Bush wanted to bomb Al Jazeera’s headquarters. Now what kind of leader of the free world would want to bomb a TV station? That kind of violent desire is no better than what we observe among poor angry people in the streets. Rich people riot, too. They just use more sophisticated means to destroy.
This cartoon controversy is significant, but it’s a bit arrogant to put all the criticism on the Muslims for this. If we were a more shining example of honesty and compassion, perhaps they could handle our cartoon jokes a little better. We pretend to have free speech, but it’s constantly under attack not by Muslims, but by our own government. Bush wants to hide information from us. He wants to hide what he does each day. He wants to hide the Abu Graib photos to protect us from the truth. He spends billions of dollars in propaganda to sway our minds. He gets people fired who do their job too well, like Mary Mapes did on his military record with Dan Rather. People in power use money to control which opinions get aired on TV. Our Congress act insulted if anybody dares to really perform any meaningful review of a high level nomination. Remember Ms. Cheney after 9/11, trying to shame anybody who dared to question our war? She said we needed moral unity - which is the most Hilteresque phrase I’ve ever heard in my life. That’s the same reasoning used by violent right wing Muslims to have people killed for insulting their religious icons. Ms. Cheney may not want you killed for protesting her so called moral war, but she would certainly like to see you lose your job and your employability.
We use dishonest means in this country to quell speech that big power doesn‘t want heard. Real freedom of expression is where the real battle is. If we believe in our freedom, this is where we should stand strong, because while it might be insulting, it sure as hell beats bullets and bombs. If that was the worst we ever did, I think most Muslims could not only learn to forgive us. They might even learn to laugh a little.
So yes, we can criticize and analyze them. But in the end, we arrogantly forget that we are probably worse, because in the grand scheme of things, we usually kill more people.

JIM LEHRER: Who have we killed?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Just pick your decade. Right now it’s mostly Iraqi’s. Nobody is counting, but it’s surely over 100,000 dead Iraqis. If we were as Christian as we pretend to be, those deaths would weigh, should weigh, very heavy on our conscience. But it doesn’t. We find an excuse, blame it on 911, or whatever. It’s absurd.

DAVID BROOKS: I would say it's about four or five centuries. It's really a group of people, some educated people have who gone back to the 13th Century, some who never left the 13th Century, but basically who have decided that the way we live with this barrage of ideas, the way we live our life trying to improve ourselves, is not the way they want to live their lives.
They believe the truth has been revealed and the central epic in history is not progress; it's the conflict between the faithful and the invader, and the infidel and the Jew and the crusader, and that that's essentially the conflict they see and the conflict they long for.
And it is - I think it is a major week for the West because it has reminded people how vast the conflict is between us and some elements of the Muslim world.
We have seen in Indonesia and also in Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani has been very strong against the protests and you have begun to see a lot of moderate Muslims rise up. But nonetheless, it's an ugly - it's an ugly scene.

JIM LEHRER: But is it a conflict that is possible to say, okay, we have this conflict, now let's move on, or is there any resolution? How do you resolve something like this?

DAVID BROOKS: The protest in London, the slogans and the signs were "Go to Hell Freedom" behead anybody who attacks Islam. The imam in Copenhagen said they believe in freedom, we believe in the prophet, as if the two are totally opposed.
You know, I do think it's not a clash of civilizations or the West versus Islam, but these people who were the fundamentalists have opted totally out of our civilization and, you know, we've been sort of measured in how we respond to them which I think is silly. I mean, they are fundamentally opposed to the way we live; whether we're measured or not is not going to make any difference in their minds.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: This is where liberal arguments start to make sense. I say the best medicine for this, is more cartoons. Let’s continue to inflict an argument of words. That’s far better than bullets. Teach our enemy how to fight us with words. Let them make fools of themselves by giving them more things to be fools about. This is how Ghandi beat the British. This is how MLK beat the whities. They both shamed opposition by revealing the absurdity of their violence.

DAVID BROOKS: You know, there's political differences, obviously but what's at stake here is so much different. I think that the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician, the gay Dutch politician, who made this point, we can have multiculturalism or we can have pluralism, but we can't have both, with a subset of people that doesn't believe in pluralism that wants to enforce laws on homosexuals, on women. So you have got to make this choice and that's the choice Europe is making. I think they're feeling it much more seriously than we are but that's the choice they found they have to make.

JIM LEHRER: So to summarize, both of you think this is going to get worse before it gets better?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I hope the free world defends it‘s freedom, by continuing to promote free thought. We certainly have a dire shortage of free thought in this world.

DAVID BROOKS: We're involved in this democratic moment where they feel threatened, at the same time they feel strong; they're winning elections. But the elections are a threat to their mentality.

JIM LEHRER: All right. The NSA surveillance story: How would you summarize the week on that story, David?

DAVID BROOKS: I think surreptitious movement.

JIM LEHRER: Oh, my.

DAVID BROOKS: We've had this with this lockdown and we've talked about it week after week where the White House says we had the power, we had the power, and a lot in Congress said we don't have the power.
And I think what you've seen are first two things, Democrats much less willing to talk about it for political reasons; the Republicans more willing to talk about it, Brownback and Specter and Lindsey Graham, so suddenly more opposition is coming from the Republican side than the Democratic side.
But secondly, I think you've become to see some signals that they're thinking of having - the White House - thinking of having some conversations with the Hill, maybe to find some way which we've been talking about of trying to get both parties together to have some law that will regularize the oversight or this spying, or whatever you want to call it.

JIM LEHRER: How do you read it right now?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, we are moving further away from democracy, as the President operates above the law, Congressional puppets submit to it, and the law of the land for Bush is determined by vote. If the majority thinks he can‘t break a law, then there‘s no need to discuss it further. The ruling is cast. There‘s no prosecutor, there‘s no judge, there is just a mob with pitchforks saying, ok, you can do it, because we voted, and the yes‘s won. That‘s the new law of the land. As Bush told his staff a few months back, the Constitution is “just a God Damned piece of paper.” He’s obviously correct. It’s a worthless piece of paper, only used for convenience. For gun control, it’s obeyed to the letter. But for control of Bush, or free speech, or civil rights, it’s a law of convenience, applied to only the little people.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it is a positive issue for them. I think you've seen Democrats disappearing from the talk shows because a lot of them don't want to talk about this issue, especially with the riots around the world, people say, hey, this is a scary world. There have been these defections, if you want to call them that. People say, Congress has a role here, Congress has a role in oversight. But what they're trying to do is preserve the program, just give it that legal framework.

JIM LEHRER: Lindsey Graham, Mike DeWine, and all those people say the program is fine, let's just take the legal argument off the table and move on.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I wish I could go make a legal framework for myself, after I break the law. Yes judge, I killed her, but I’m here to create a legal framework for the killing so that is can be made legal after the fact. A legal framework is a beautiful talking point because it sounds so innocent. Did Carl Rove feed you that line?

DAVID BROOKS: No.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, if you created it, you should get Rove to pass it to the others. It’s a wonderful way of admitting Bush broke the law, but making it sound innocent and honest. Very effective. I have to admire those Republicans. They know how to sound so innocent when they break the law. They are all like slick lawyers. Nixon should have created a legal framework for Watergate. Then he could have stayed in office.

JIM LEHRER: Michael Brown, the FEMA hearings, we heard the discussion between Senators Lieberman and Bennett. What's your impression of what's going on here? What are we finding out that surprises you, if anything?

DAVID BROOKS: I think we are finding out, I wonder if Michael Brown is now going to be become a hero as he begins scapegoating the administration when he was the symbol of the administration he was the villain. Now suddenly he'll be the poor little scapegoat.
I think what most senators, Sen. Lieberman and Sen. Bennett, both said, and they were - what you saw in those two senators were pretty a non-partisan look at the hearing and Susan Collins, also the chairman. They said the guy has some responsibility but it's not clear that not only him and it's clear that there was this complete failure of this chain of command.
As for the exact timeline, and I think Sen. Bennett spoke about this, it's incredibly hard to tell exactly what happened when and who as Sen. Bennett said, the importance of which call and what moment. I'll suspect, as he said, we'll never know that. We know it was a big mess-up and that's all we need to know at least from my point of view.

JIM LEHRER: Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Homeland Security was a mistake. Adding more bureaucracy was not a smart move. It was a political move. And very unRepublican, I might add.. Hopefully, at minimum, we can learn that lesson from these hearings. But almost all government investigations are geared to cast blame away from those running for re-election. Politicians only know how to grand stand when they investigate things. Half the time, they don’t even ask questions, because they aren’t even interested in the answers. Instead, they make speeches, like some judge who has already made a ruling. I wouldn’t hold out much hope for anything meaningful, or anything we don’t already know.

JIM LEHRER: You mean for things like Katrina?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Our government is less and less focused on the need of our people, because it is mostly focused on things that don‘t matter: drug wars, gay marriage, tax breaks for the rich and so on. The reality of suffering people is bit too much for these clowns. The head of FEMA is more concerned about his wardrobe than the plight of poor people with no home. I’ll bet he wears a nice suit to the hearings.

JIM LEHRER: One quick thing before we go. There's been some criticism of the political overtones of the Coretta Scott King funeral this week. Do you have any thoughts about that?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. I thought when they swore in Hillary, it was a little much. No, I think - you know, I think there are moments when you don't politicize. And a funeral is one of those moments just as a matter of principle. I don't care whose funeral it is. You just don't do it there.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think -- the big criticism has been of President Carter.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I think one must consider the person in the funeral. This lady made a lifetime of fighting injustice. So it‘s hard for me to imagine her being displeased with the idea that some bold comments were made in her honor against an abusive administration. I don‘t know why you think there‘s been big criticism of Carter. What you mean to say is, there‘s been more right wingers upset with Carter, because he was the most effective at embarrassing their dictator. So of course, they seek to criticize anybody who effective at making them look bad. I was proud of Carter for being so blunt, for saying things that Democrats in office don’t have the guts to say, while Bush and his wife cowered in the background, right behind him. He’s so rarely in a real public, where the audience is not profiteered, that the only time he can ever hear what the public thinks, is when he goes to a funeral. And that’s because he can’t filter the people who attend. So yes, this was a good thing. I hope it happens again, real soon before Bush goes back to hide in his shell.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you both.

Flatline - On Chameleons

2006-02-13T23:56:00.000-06:00

This is valid commentary, with loads of potential. I may venture to say, highly likely to be at least a percentage correct, if all bets are on the table. The incest of candidate selection is one of the big give-aways of the poor condition of our democracy, and something I've written about in various papers entitled "The Mathematics of Democracy." However, the evidence brought forth of the rather absurd connection between Bush to fundamentalist religion is compelling as well (self serving as it may be). Even Mommy and Daddy Bush are personal friends with Billy Graham.
Pat Robertson has been given loads of power from Bush (financially speaking). The Reagan administration was far more secular than the Bush family - and Reagan was pretty nutty. Gore Vidal has also written some interesting chapters on the intense fundamentalist beliefs Reagan. Chomsky has commented on how seculars still had the upper hand on Reagan's staff. And I've seen plenty of articles about Dubya thinking he is a tool of God. I'm not so sure they are faking it at all. The religious arm of this country is deap, and strong and wealthy. And it has it's dividends to power. There are plenty of powerful, rich people in this country who firmly believe in the shit they shovel. I know they also use this to keep a lid on the masses. But many of the elite who execute this crap, also believe in it. It's like a reinforcing ego mechanism, where the more power they get, the more sure they are that the belief is right. The Pope is a great example. Plus, the evidence that Bush is just plain stupid is overwhelming. In fact, the error rate of this administration is extremely predictable, based on their shear ignorance and arrogance factor - a lethal combination. Just listen to Alberto Gonzalez for 5 minutes, and pull your jaw off the floor as you ponder his thoughts. And despite the Bush history to the CIA, there is just too much divide going on under the ocean floor, between the smart arm of our intelligence employees, and the dishonest, dumb, greedy, political arm - led by the newly appointed American terrorist Negroponte. I don't see enough organization there to be monolithic. In fact, I think there's a silent civil war going on between the brains and idiots, even in the intelligence community.

The Bush types might get rich in the short term, stealing from America, and third-worldizing our population based on your theories, but the price of the theft might cost us our world power. Russia did it. The still have billionaires. But their world power is in shambles. My bet is the United States will definitely lose it's position as the world's most powerful country in my life time. People who still work for living (like the Chinese) will take over that top stop. I'm compelled by Jim Rogers, who thinks the 21st century will belong to China. America has had it's turn. Wasn't it Benjamin Franklin who said that even America will eventually fall to tryanny in a century or two? Warren Buffet has made some frightening predictions in recent months. He, like many, expects the dollar to crash, and crash hard rather soon, perhaps changing the policital landscape in a big way, and he seems to be hinting at that. If there was money to be made for big power, then why is Buffet taking billions out of the country and hiding it in other currencies of the world? The investor guru Marc Faber thinks war will increase as world tensions keep going up. None of these outlooks are very promising for us minions of America. And my favorite analysis of all comes from the great Ortega y Gasset, in The Revolt of the Masses. I think his theory, which is nearly a century old, might hit the nail on the head. Translated through my contemporary eye, it goes something like this:

Our democracy is dead, because we have eliminated honest competition from the political model. In fact, the USA has one of the highest incumbant re-election rates in the world. 300 million people can compete for American Idol, but they cannot compete for President or Congress. The death of this competition means the death of democracy, because dishonest competition prevents the best and brightest people from attaining their appropriate positions of responsibility. The result is tyranny, because we find our country is being run into the ground by complete idiots, raised on political incest and theft. Arrogance is what keeps them blind and keeps them moving. When the cream can't rise to the top, we get guys like Dubya Bush - non-intellectuals who are totally incompetant and can't finish a sentence. The CEO of America is not the best and brightest we could find for the job. Far from it. And now we get to pay the price for raising an idiot to the podium. Ignorance is expensive. Enron is a microcosm of America. Both has the same accounting techniques. And both have leaders who think their kingdom is so entirely invincible, they never even consider the mere possibility that maybe, just maybe, the cards could come tumbling down. What previous empire hasn't suffered the same fate?

Visitor Comment - Chameleon Analysis

2006-02-13T23:51:00.000-06:00

Johnny you're a smart guy and way up on what's happening as I see it. But Bush 'wasting' treasure on the war is really a great investment for the future of people like him and rich folks. If I may illucidate: A missle costs roughly a million dollars say. Rich contractors made those missles. Now take that concept and run with it. Just the tip of the iceburg. Another thing(which if you don't mind-I'd like to point up) that's often overlooked and not understood about this awol son-of-a-bitch is that: he's his father's son. The father lead a double life before becoming the head of the CIA. So? Well he is the consumate chameleon for one. Authors give homage to his duplicity and cunning. So logic dictates the Son understands the power of secrecy and things better left out of conversation such as secret prisons full of dissidents. Talk about your faking a democracy. And my belief is one shouldn't be put off by his espousal of religion. It's a smoke screen. He's about raping our country of it's resources and shooing in the Mexicans and other poverty stricken peoples. And making damn sure the rich never get taxed.

Brooks & Flatline - February 3, 2006

2006-02-08T23:44:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Brooks and Flatline-New York Times columnist David Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline. Mark Shields is off tonight.

JIM LEHRER: Johnny, how do you read the coming of John Boehner as House majority leader?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: We took away a skunk and put back a stink bug.

JIM LEHRER: What do they mean? No difference?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Still smells bad, although, nothing can stink quite as good as Delay can. He’s a pile of shit. Brown and runny. The new guy, well he stinks when you pluck him, or step on him.

JIM LEHRER: I see.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Come on, does anybody really care who the Republican criminals pick to lead them? This is like musing over who the next mafia mob boss will be. It‘s not relevant. The rubber stamp is still made of rubber.

JIM LEHRER: But David, aren't some people saying this is less about John Boehner than it is about Blunt and his connection to Tom DeLay and the need to - or the perceived need, at least, to disconnect completely from Tom Delay?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, branding matters.
And Roy Blunt's a perfectly nice guy who all they all like; when he lost, they gave him a standing ovation. He is quite popular, a good guy but he was branded as the status quo.
And when this guy John Shadegg, who was the third candidate, came in and said reform, reform, reform, he moved the whole debate over a little. And then Shadegg was too new so they went to Boehner, who I think is a bipartisan person.
I think the big difference with Delay is much less team-oriented, much less my team, your team.
But, you have to remember these races -- when you hear about what happens in these meetings, it is so emotional. These House Republicans - maybe House Democrats too - they are so passionate, they tear up, they cry. And they really had this emotional thing within the family.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with Johnny that very little changes though?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, no, in part because I do think there is going to be less partisanship, less team spirit than Delay, which is easy because nobody was more partisan that Delay
But two other things are going to happen: First of all they are going to have to have reform agenda. And the House -- is yet to be determined but I think it will be pretty serious. I think Republicans are pretty wary of what’s going to happen. And then the second thing that is going to happen is they have got to have a positive agenda. They have got to have an agenda of how people face their life every day. And they're really beginning to think about a fresh agenda, which is something people in the House have not been doing because Delay has been consumed with himself for a year.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh yeah, they are going to change the world, balance the budget, give us pay raises, bring peace to Israel and Iraq, pacify the Iranians, give us a tax break, end all gay marriage and put women in jail who abort their babies. It’s going to be so glorious, this Republican government, that when I start getting those telephone calls from Al Queda, they will be there to block those calls and bomb the Muslim call center where they originate.

JIM LEHRER: A lot of people have asked me just in the last 24 hours, hey, why in the world is the House majority leader such a big deal anyway? Why isn't the speaker of the House the one who makes all these Tom Delay type decisions? How did Delay get to be so powerful?
DAVID BROOKS: I actually think he is not that powerful. I think Dennis Hastert - and I have asked a lot of members about this, who really runs the House, there was a perception that it was Tom Delay but I think Dennis Hastert ran the House and runs the House.
But I will say that what is happening in the future, I think there is some debate, there is some fresh thinking in part because the area of crisis.
I began to hear members talk about why don't we make it a two-year budget as opposed to a one-year budget, which is the wonkiest but oldest reform, probably John Adams was talking about it, taking the budget over two years. But it is a symptom of hey, something is new here, we have got to change. We just got to change.

JIM LEHRER: One thing before we leave the subject, Roy Blunt said today that the media calls for a new face in the party's leadership rather than a desire by Republicans for change is what drove the outcome. People were -- the Republicans were reading the media clips instead of listening --

DAVID BROOKS: I had a Republican senator say to me last week, he said, if you ever get in trouble, blame the media.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: And for God‘s sake, if you are Republican, don‘t ever blame yourself.

JIM LEHRER: New subject, David, the NSA surveillance issue, what did you make of that intelligence, the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing yesterday, when all the leaders of the Intelligence Committee on one side and the senators picking at them on the other?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. I guess what struck me first is how partisan it is. You know, we've been talking on this show for a couple weeks about getting together and saying reform, let's reform the FISA bill, this law that governs the intelligence and so we can all agree, we'll have the program, we'll get it under some judicial framework so, very little hint of that. Republicans utterly confident that they don't need the frame -- that it is legal, Democrats very angry.
And I tell you what struck me emotionally myself was all the members saying how badly the nation had been hurt by the publicity -- not so much because Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida didn't think they were being surveyed but they were saying that intelligence agents all around the world were saying, can't you guys keep a secret? And as a member of the media, and even the New York Times, you know, that's something -

JIM LEHRER: Which broke the story --

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, which broke the story -- you do have to think. I was struck by the fervor with which they all said that.

JIM LEHRER: You mean people like Porter Goss, head of the CIA -

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

JIM LEHRER: And Negroponte -

DAVID BROOKS: And Negroponte.

JIM LEHRER: -- who is not an emotional --

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, a serious guy.

JIM LEHRER: What did you think?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Negroponte. Isn’t that the guy who helped Reagan finance the death of thousands in Central America under Reagan? He’s a terrorist, right? Oh, wait, he’s on our team, so that means he’s good. I’m sorry, it’s so confusing to remember who is good and who is evil sometimes, because both sides like to kill so much. Negroponte, the killer, is in charge of our national secrets. Is he listening to my calls? Can I trust him? I am white, so I guess I don’t have anything to fear. But I'm liberal, and he has a long, long record of killing liberals in other countries. Hmm. I don't know? This guy actually scares me even more than Cheney does.
I‘m sorry for getting off base here. The wiretaps, yes, this is the kind of talk they are desperate to portray because they are all scared to death of their President being found guilty of committing a crime, which, uh, he did break the law. But since he's a Republican, he is above the law. It's only citizens and Democrats and little people who actually have to follow the law.

JIM LEHRER: There seems to be a lot of attention on the whistle blower somewhere in some spy agency.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, in the Bush government, there is no Crime Stoppers number to call when you catch the President breaking the law. You basically get hung out to dry, or maybe even jailed for catching a criminal. Carl Rove has a special forces team to deal with these t ypes.

JIM LEHRER: Those hearings are on Monday, we will see what happens. Before we go, how does the State of the Union look three nights later, David?

DAVID BROOKS: A lot heavier and more substantive. (laughter)

JIM LEHRER: Johnny, how did the state of the union look three days later?

DAVID BROOKS: That's all I get?

JIM LEHRER: Flesh it out a little bit.

DAVID BROOKS: I think what you're hearing is from conservatives --

JIM LEHRER: They're upset, conservatives are upset?

DAVID BROOKS: Liberals are upset, where's the beef? You know, a lot of little - conservatives are upset because this is big government conservatism, there is nothing government won't take over. And you are hearing a fair bit of that from the right.
I would say the first thing I noticed is that there is ferment on energy and portable healthcare. Bush didn't propose huge things on this. But there is a debate starting that we need a big energy program and we need to make healthcare portable.

JIM LEHRER: Not necessarily what he proposed.

DAVID BROOKS: But something. Almost every senator and representative I have spoken to said I want to have a big plan, let's do something big, and so it's beginning.
It will wait for the next president but it sort of moved the ball a little I would say.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: This speech was a waste of time. The real news will be after the speech, when he releases his budget. Never listen to what they say. Watch what they do.
The only things Bush has proven he is good at is wasting money on war and giving our money to his friends. That he can do. But everything else is just empty air.

JIM LEHRER: The Wall Street Journal editorial page leading the thing -
Quickly, before we go, there was also a big report criticizing the administration on Katrina this week. What do you think that -- is that having any resonance?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: You read the editorials in the Wall Street Journal? Isn‘t that like listening to FOX news? I mean, the news in that paper is excellent. But the editorial department is another story. That is the laughing stock of the media. But, hey, maybe they got one right this time. I didn‘t read it, so I can‘t comment. But I’m sure the people of New Orleans must be delighted with Bush right now. They probably think he is a flawless president beyond reproach.

DAVID BROOKS: Michael Chertoff would say he would do the designation which the GAO was calling for in a terrorist attack, they weren't prepared.
You know, I would just -- no I don't think we are stunned that this is a disaster. It confirms my basic view of this whole disaster all along -- it was August. People were on vacation. And they were not ready in late August.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yeah, well read Richard Clarke’s book about the 911 fiasco, and you’ll see how they insist on not being prepared. I really think they are too busy working on things that don’t matter to the rest of us. There is simply not enough time to do anything that matters. The next 3 years will be a contest to see just how much crap the American people can take from their pathetic leader. I’m going to buy that bumber sticker that reads “2008, the end of an error.” For me, that sums up the kind of news we have going on here.

You know, I realized something yesterday when I was gasing up my car. You know how gas is now about 75 cents more than it used to be. Well, it dawned on me that the extra 75 cents is an idiot tax. That’s right, it’s an idiot tax. That extra cost has got to be the cost of having Bush for President. All of the war, the conflict, the tension, the distrust, the scared markets, the failing dollar, that’s all Bush. He gets full credit for increasing the risk of the world. And that extra risk has been monetized in the gas system by nearly a dollar a gallon. Just remember that whenever you buy a new tank of gas. You are giving an extra 5 or 10 dollars into thin air, thanks to George W. Bush. That’s what I call the stupidity tax. And we all have to pay it.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you both very much.

Flatline & Brooks - January 27, 2006

2006-01-31T22:05:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: To the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Johnny, how do you read the John Kerry’s sudden push for a filibuster, what is that about?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I can’t remember the last time this happened. I would love to see a good fillibuster. The last time I can remember any politician really fighting for something that mattered, was maybe when Clinton shut down the government over the debt problem. It’s a shame that heroes these days only rise one at a time. Al Gore tries to help Dean, and nobody helps him. Gore tries to help point out that Bush is breaking the law. Congressional echoes have been muted. Byrd tried to stop the war. Nobody helped him. And now Kerry is trying to be a leader. And who the hell is voting for Alito? Senator Byrd. I mean, these guys can’t win for losing. But hell, maybe that’s his revenge on Kerry for supporting the God damned war. I think they must get together for each problem, and choose just one person to show reason and courage.

JIM LEHRER: David, do you think this debate could have an effect on the way Alito operates as a justice?

DAVID BROOKS: In the case of Clarence Thomas I think it absolutely had an effect.

JIM LEHRER: Is that right?

DAVID BROOKS: So I think that is quite possible.

JIM LEHRER: How do you read this filibuster thing?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, thought he should have done it while wind surfing; it would have been a more popular --

JIM LEHRER: I knew he was going to say something. Didn't you know he was going to say something like that?

DAVID BROOKS: We were looking at Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, it is the first time he's looked happy in years. One-liners, one week of happiness -- don't ruin it for him.

JIM LEHRER: That's right.

DAVID BROOKS: And it is a week of happiness for Republicans. But as for what John Kerry did, vote no. Just -- you want to register your opposition, vote no. You do not screw up the process. And you know, I think the Republicans make a good point when you say we were against Ginsburg but we voted for her. But if you are against the person, vote no. Don't screw up the precedent that says, you know, we're not going to filibuster. I think that is a valuable precedent.
I think if you are opposed to somebody you vote no, you don't take the option, which is always there in the Senate, of totally wrecking the process. And so, you know, I thought what Kerry did and what Kennedy did was, you know, it endangered the institutions of the Senate.
But there is now a habit in this town, especially among liberals in opposition that you got to be the most vehement. And that's the way that you prove you are the most pure.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh, give me a break. Are you trying to say filibusters are immoral, and liberal? That only a liberal would dare filibuster? And Republicans, bless their heart, are civil? Did you hear the trash talk coming from Republicans this week, daring Democrats to try to stop Alito? I heard them say things like “bring it on.“ or “I’ll clean your clock.“ What kind of behavior is that for an institution? And this review process by Congress, where Alito gets the job so long as he fails to answer any questions, is good for institutions? And a Supreme court that picks our President over the will of the people, that is good for institutions? I could compare the Supreme court picking our President equal to any filibuster, only much more dangerous to our institutions. And a judge like Alito who appears likely to protect a law breaking president is good for our institutions? You say Republicans didn’t filibuster Ginsberg? What Republicans. The think final vote for Ginsberg was 96-3. Alito will get nowhere close to that support. I know Republicans don‘t care about rules or laws, you said so yourself. They prefer to design the rules after the game begins and pretend they speak for the majority. Kinda like they do the shape of voting districts. Kinda like the way they count ballots. No, if there is dishonor in a filibuster, then surely, we have greater honor than that, violated these past 5 years. If this is the worst sin you can come up with for the Democrats, then that’s quite a complement.

JIM LEHRER: You've got to have 41 votes to have a filibuster.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t know if they have that. But so what? What is the damage in trying? Must one fear a fight just because you might lose? Look the bottom line is, no matter what you do, there‘s a far right winger out there who will find a way to pretend he‘s insulted. That’s who they are. But it‘s a farce. People will forget this in a week. Alito will be judge and nobody will care. And I’ll tell you what will still be around. The war in Iraq, and the Abramoff scandal.

JIM LEHRER: I was going to ask you about that.

DAVID BROOKS: I was talking to a bunch of Republican senators yesterday and they couldn't understand why would they want to go on record, why would they want this vote; they couldn't understand it.
But I think it is for this reason. There are some Democrats who are going to go with the groups. And that is going to be their funding base and Kerry I think will be among them. And then there are some, Mark Warner and Hillary is the interesting one who will try to present a more centrist view and who will not appeal as much to the angry base. And you know that is the geography.
Reid is not in favor of this, he said so, he doesn't think -- he's almost saying what David is doing, just vote no and let's get out.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: There seems to be this ideology in modern American politics that unity is crucial to everything. Republicans vote together on nearly everything, even when the cause is completely insane. There is no division. And if you dare divide yourself from the group, you get chastised in private, and probably intimidated and threatened. That’s American democracy Republican style. Get in line, and stay in line.

JIM LEHRER: Does that make sense to spend time on Alito, though?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, though you know for liberals these issues until that the court decides are the core issues. I mean, I understand from an ideological point of view, I just think it is irresponsible from an institutional point of view.

JIM LEHRER: The Hamas victory in the Middle East, what does it say about wishing for democracy, watching the president yesterday explain in -- almost in euphoric turns terms about the turnout in the election but then he didn't like the results, has he got a problem with this?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. I mean what he should have said is that we've got a really diseased region over there with totalitarian dictatorships and all these revolutionary movements of which Fatah was one and Hamas is another - different sorts of anti-democratic revolutionary movements that are stuck there.
And to go through the process so we can get the region to be in a normal situation, we have to basically induce a crisis. And the crisis is this transition from revolutionary movements to democratic movements. The problem is you have got to have a democratic mentality.
And so in this transition process it's all mixed up. And you can have total chaos. The hope is that you will slowly move and people will develop democratic mentalities over the long-term.
But you've got this crisis to go through. And as a friend of mine says, sometimes the fever doesn't break and cure the patient; sometimes the fever kills the patient. And that's just a realistic bet the administration took. And I think it was the right bet because I think at the end of the day, most Palestinians do -- are Democrats, do want to have some sort of normal democratic regime.
And you know, I think eventually we'll get there and the past wasn't a great paradise anyway. So I think it was worth the process but it's a long-term process and we are now at that crisis moment.

JIM LEHRER: Johnny, what do you think?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I‘m amazed at how many are surprised about this. Look, Hamas is the Republican party of Palestine. They believe in fighting back. Bush should admire that. But they also take care of the homeless and the poor with medical care, housing, and food. That’s not very Republican, but it has a funny way of attracting votes. I know that is difficult for rich Republican brats to understand, but it does work. And Isreal is also a terrorist organization that doesn‘t believe in the existence of Palestine. So, we should just get over it. The will of the people is a reflection of their struggle. The voted for the right team. We support the wrong teams. They are not poor stupid misled followers. We are stupid rich misled leaders. Isreal has been fighting Hamas for years, and calling them terrorists, and it never made sense, because Hamas IS Palestine. To be Palestinian, is to be Hamas. Nobody would acknowledge that. Well, now we see the proof. Palestinians didn’t turn to Hamas. They were part of Hamas. And now we have honest math to prove it for all the world to see. Names are not important here. Human beings are.

DAVID BROOKS: It's possible that they do tend to polarize each other. But there is one positive thing that has happened. Somebody finally held Fatah and the Palestinian Authority accountable. Europe and the United States never held them accountable. They were given $7 billion after Oslo. They stole essentially 90.5 percent of that money for mansions, for Swiss bank accounts. We never held them accountable. Europeans kept giving them money regardless of the corruption. And finally somebody is holding them accountable.

JIM LEHRER: Their own people

DAVID BROOKS: Their own people, which is the voters. Now I think our job is to hold the voters accountable, to remind them in a democracy choices have consequences.
You choose Hamas, we understood why you choose it. Nonetheless, we can't deal with a Hamas. We're going to isolate you. In the battle over the next years is the administration saying we can't deal with Hamas, the Israelis saying we can't deal with Hamas, the Palestinians saying in the first sentence we can't deal with Hamas. And in the second sentence but they are making these little gestures, let's deal with them.
And so I think it important to maintain a clear front that we're not going to deal with Hamas because decisions and votes have consequences.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Israel desperately wants to marginalize the group that knows how to fight back. That‘s to be expected. I don’t know how it will sort out, but I wish the US would stop trying to fund it and control it. Our track record is not admirable.

JIM LEHRER: Meanwhile, the NSA surveillance debate, the president and his folks went out for the first three or four days this week. Where, quickly, where do things stand on that? The critics were out as well. Everybody has been talking about it. Any movement on either side?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, the Republicans are great at brain washing the public. And they are making this an Al Queda issue. And I suppose there are plenty of sheep who will follow them over this cliff. There is supposedly an Al Queda phone book. You know. The Al Queda yellow pages. And the NSA only makes calls from that book. You can sign up for the do not call list, I’m not a terrorist, I’m a white American and they won’t wire tap your phone. It works a lot better if you join the Republican party. I think one poll said it all, where maybe 51% said warrantless phone taps were fine. But when asked if the government could listen to YOUR phone, the percentage dropped about 15 points. That’s tells me how naïve some people are about empathy and the law. They don’t mind breaking laws to catch bad guys. They just assume they will never be personally affected by this. That is so typical of the crisis this country is in.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I could say among Republicans there is a clear sense this is a winner.

JIM LEHRER: You mean, politically.

DAVID BROOKS: Politically, it's a winner. I was joking -- the Republicans are going to hold their convention at the NSA headquarters next year to sort of underline the issue. I still don't see why we're not at this point -- why Democrats, most Democrats say we want -- we think the program is necessary, we just want it in a legal framework. Why doesn't some Democrat or some Republican say here's the piece of legislation to put it in a legal framework? We really haven't seen that from either side.

JIM LEHRER: The president was asked about that yesterday and I asked Alberto Gonzales about it and they both said no, we don't really need that. We don't want that, because it would tell too much about what is about -- about the system itself.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, some have said if the President does it, then it‘s legal. That‘s their view of the law. That the President is above the law. And so far, I don‘t see any sheriff riding up to the White House to bring the man out in handcuffs, so I suppose they might be right. If Bush gets away with this, the arrogance factor is going to be unbelievable this year. But what else is new.

JIM LEHRER: Yes, absolutely right, and I appreciate it very much. And I appreciate both of you being here tonight.

Flatline & Brooks - January 20, 2006

2006-01-23T20:33:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, the analysis of Flatline and Brooks-- Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
The NSA surveillance story, speaking of privacy, David, how well is the administration doing explaining what it's doing and why?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, they come out politically quite strong. Cheney gave a speech yesterday, Karl Rove gave a speech today. I think Michael Chertoff is giving interviews.
Politically I think they are doing great, if they can be the party of anti-terror and the Democrats are the party of the ACLU, that's a winner for them. You know, I expect them to come out with satellite dishes lapel pins, just to remind everything they're watching.
What I don't understand, frankly, is why don't they just say, hey, we think the program is legal, but a lot of serious people don't think it's legal. So we're going to work with Democrats and we'll try to get some arrangement so we can all think it's legal.
Politically, I think it would be a great thing to do, because it would split some Democrats who think spying on domestic people who have contact with al-Qaida is a good idea from those who don't.
But then, substantively, I think it's a decent program they've got, and most people seem to support the idea of the program, as long as we can get it within some legal framework. I'm not quite sure why the administration hasn't gone that extra step.

JIM LEHRER: How do you feel about how the administration has played this, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, that’s a true Republican line - you’re either with us, or against us. If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists. Cheney and sons has apparently decided that the law is simply too inconvenient to follow. It’s too inconvenient to try enemies in our judicial system. And now, it’s too inconvenient for the judicial system to participate in the oversight of our spying programs. And since they don’t have time to follow the law, we are unpatriotic for questioning their motives here. This is the same President to lied about the war. This is the same President who has defended torture. And now, this President thinks that nobody should have to provide any oversight to his actions. We are supposed to trust him. I mean, what is the difference between this and a dictatorship? Where does the line end? What if Bush decides it’s too inconvenient to step down as President at the end of his term? It’s simply beyond me how much power is too much power in the eyes of this administration. There doesn’t ever seem to be enough power in their hands. Cheney thinks we hurt the country when we popped Nixon out of office, and now he’s trying to restore Bush to Nixon’s once grand authority. And we are supposed to trust this? And there doesn’t seem to be any constitutional breach that ever unhinges Congress. I mean, torture should have unhinged them, and it didn’t. I really can’t understand what this country is becoming. There doesn’t seem to be any intellectual backbone in anybody in Washington. It’s like all the things we were taught about our constitution are really meaningless. We are truly living in a fake democracy.

JIM LEHRER: They claim, of course, they are within a legal framework.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh yeah. Their attorney Alberto Gonzalez, who defends torture, and considers our old laws quaint is saying this. What a surprise. And Cheney and Rove, defend it. Now there’s two honest men for you. Cheney still thinks 911 was planned by Saddam, and Rove is looking for the right buzz words to help shut down objective thought on this subject. These guys are all evil warmed over.
Look, the main question about this most recent abuse of the law, and it‘s certainly on the first, but the main question is whether or not Bush is actually spying on political adversaries. I‘m not convinced he‘s spying on Al Queda, because he still doesn‘t know what country most of them actually live in. So this whole things smells like a dead animal to me. I never believed his WMD story, and I don‘t believe this either.

JIM LEHRER: What about that explanation, just on that one point? They could argue they didn't have to, but what's their argument for not doing it, just because they didn't have to?

DAVID BROOKS: No. I think their argument -- first of all, they would say when the Congress gives you the right to go to war, it expects you to spy on your enemies. That's normal. But then I think the second thing -- and I think this is their strongest case, the technology has changed. The problem is we don't exactly know what they're doing, but if, as one suspects, that they are doing these vast data mining searches where they capture a laptop and then they are going through computer files like Google, frankly, and picking out a lot of names and a lot of numbers and a lot of e-mail addresses to get a FISA warrant on each one of those little numbers --

JIM LEHRER: That's the federal law that controls surveillance.

DAVID BROOKS: Right, and that is the legal framework. You would have files deeper than this building. So I think there's a legitimate argument to be made that the technology has changed, and we need a new framework. And they would say, no, we don't, we've got enough flexibility. I'm just saying they should be accommodating.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Files deeper than a building? And are you saying FISA doesn’t have the staff for this kind of task? Has that even been proven by anybody. Did Bush exhaust FISA, and then one day said, “enough is enough. Forget FISA.” I don’t hear anybody making that case. Why can’t we just call this what it is. It’s an abuse of power, plain and simple. And it’s just another in a long list of abused power.

JIM LEHRER: What about the Democrats on this? We had Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, on the program the other night, and I asked him what should be done about this in the context of Senate hearings that are come up and whatever, and he didn't have a solution to this. He didn't even say go to court. Is there a political solution, beyond going to court?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t know. Most of Bush’s evils have never had to pay any price. The only price paid so far has been to Tom Delay and Scooter Libby. I don’t know what it will take for Bush to pay a price. I mean, he’s down in the polls, but they know how to steal elections, so that’s not a big worry. But I don’t know why he’s still in office. It’s amazing how above the law he is, and defiantly so. I think he’s actually daring Congress to try to stop him. But as luck would have it, Bin Laden came out this week, which I’m sure Bush will milk for all he can. I think Bush must be keeping him in some Motel 6 somewhere, bringing him out when he needs him to help scare up his base.

JIM LEHRER: The fact that they're still out there, they're still under --

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, this administration isn’t really interested in terrorism. They are interested in fooling Americans into thinking they care, but they don’t. They never have. Their interest is in controlling the oil reserves of the middle east. That is far more important to the main decision makers of American power than anything else. So we can yak and yak about terror all you want, it doesn’t make a hill of beans difference to Bush.

JIM LEHRER: What about Al Gore? Al Gore came out very strongly -- we haven't heard from him a lot lately, and he came out very strongly this week and accused President Bush of violating the laws of the United States. What did you think about that?

DAVID BROOKS: I thought his speech this week was less hysterical than normal. You know, he made a whole series of charges and some of them I think were over the top, saying he lied us into war, all that kind of over rhetoric. But frankly, as the Dems say, most of the legal opinion does seem to be on the side saying that the Bush administration has dubious legal grounds for this, and that was his strongest case. So, you know, it served a purpose.

JIM LEHRER: Al Gore a good messenger?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Al Gore is far less hysterical than the hysterical President who told us Saddam was going to blow us all up. Al Gore stated far more facts in one speech than Bush has ever stated in his lifetime. It‘s just a shame that the guy who really won the Presidency, wasn‘t allowed to serve his term. I can only imagine how much better America would have been with Gore instead of Dumb Dubya. In fact, I wouldn‘t even be here right now, because it was the shear criminality of Bush that inspired me and thousands of others to go into political criticism. Gore always seems to step forward when we are on the crux of possibly doing some real good for this country. The first time was when Howard Dean almost took over the power base and Gore emerged to try to help him, knowing that even the Democratic Party would do him in. That failed because no one man can beat the tyranny of power that holds our government. And now, when the smell of Bush’s stink was hot, and while Congress was too timid to be honest, Gore steps forward to say what they were all saying in private, but too chicken to say on camera. That’s courage. And someday, people will appreciate what Gore tried to do, and they will lament his failure to succeed.

JIM LEHRER: One thing, for the record, we asked Gore to come on the program and talk about his speech. He declined and he said he's not doing any interviews. So he was a one-shot -- it could have been from his point of view a one-shot deal.

DAVID BROOKS: I will say this is a common complaint about people who give substantive speeches and they don't get the coverage. And that was an example -- I will say I've heard from people in the White House that they give substantive speeches and they know they're not going to get coverage so one of the things they do is they'll attack John Kerry or attack Harry Reid, put in a little paragraph, specifically attacking a Democrat by name, because they notice that's when we in the media perk up, and so they devise little tricks to get some coverage.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: The best way to get good coverage is to be a bribed paid off power puppy Republican. You’ll get better coverage than a liberal independent any day of the week.

JIM LEHRER: Right, you get what you get. I mean, you get -- never mind. Whatever. Lobby reform, both the Republicans and the Democrats have plans out this week. How do you read it? What's going on? Is something going to really happen this time?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, who knows. They have tried reform in the past, but the corporations that own these guys are very resourceful. And besides, the corporations write these laws and tell politicians what to do. So, expect no change. They are just trying to look busy until all the indictments get finished. The money is the problem. If I start seeing more publicly financed campaigns, then I’ll be a believer. When I start seeing more incumbents losing office, I’ll be a believer. But being a politician in America is among the safest of all political positions in the world. I’m not so sure they will focus on that, because that is where the crux of the problem is. These guys have been in power for too long. They all need to go. The real talent in the 300 million Americans, is locked out. So expect mediocrity from the lack of competition in our political system.

DAVID BROOKS: I was thinking they should do these reform press conferences in golf shoes, holding a five iron just to see - where they come from. A lot of it would help, especially the revolving door, congressmen immediately becoming lobbyists --

JIM LEHRER: They have to wait two years and now only a year.

DAVID BROOKS: Some of the stuff is trivial, whether you can accept a $20 gift, or a zero dollar gift. I don't think that matters, and frankly, I'm troubled by some of the stuff. Right now they take trips to the Middle East and elsewhere sponsored by lobby organizations. I think those trips are good. I think, on balance, they learn something from a lot of those trips, but the problem is the money, and here, I would differ. I think the problem is the earmarks, but you have got to address the earmarks.

JIM LEHRER: Just head on, you mean? Do away with earmarks?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, there are many ways to do it. You could limit it to a percentage of a bill. The other thing is Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann, two scholars here in town, have pointed out it's enforcing the rules, that if you can stick stuff in the legislation, there's no oversight and nobody gets to read the bill and then vote on it, of course it's an invitation to corruption.
I don't think you need to go to complete public financing, which raises a whole bunch of issues. I think there are other ways to address the earmarks and address enforcing the rules.
There's just a lot of ideas. Gingrich, Newt Gingrich has an idea that you should only be able to raise money in your district, not here in town, which would destroy the restaurants here. But it's not a bad idea. There are others - Rahm Emmanuel, Democrat of Illinois; Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona -- there's just a lot of stuff still burbling forward.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I keep hearing that name Gingrich. Didn‘t we run that guy out of Washington for immorality? Apparently not, because he continues to speak like a Congressman, and Congress continues to listen to him like a congressmen. That‘s the kind of corporate power that keeps guys like Newt around. In a real democracy, he would be ancient history. But in our paid off fake democracy, he‘s still an important power broker, because who needs to get elected in this day and age to have corporate right wing power on your side?

JIM LEHRER: Thank you both, very much.

Flatline & Brooks - January 13, 2006

2006-01-14T19:33:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: As a conservative, David, are you comfortable with what you heard Samuel Alito say this week?

DAVID BROOKS: Liberals are troubled and conservatives are comfortable, so I guess I'm comfortable. My semi liberal friends are saying Karl Rove planned this whole week.
And so when the Rove conspiracy theories come out, you know it was a pretty good week for conservatives. Alito did very well. Some people are charmed by Roberts' good looks but I thought Alito was substantive and good and most of all, just a question of personality, modest. This is a country all about narcissism and self-display; he is not like that.

JIM LEHRER: You like him, the personality that came across?

DAVID BROOKS: A lot more than I thought I would, actually. He seemed like a serious, fair-minded person.

JIM LEHRER: But just in political ideological or position terms, did you hear him say anything that made you say huh oh?

DAVID BROOKS: Not particularly. I'm a little squishy on the social issues though. But, you know, I thought on issues like abortion, he said there's the power of precedent but he didn't commit either way, which I think is what he should say.
On executive power, frankly a lot of that got so arcane I don't know what the unitary executive means. So I think a lot of regular people will be having -- having problems judging that. But as a matter of politics it was a great week for Republicans. There's no question about that.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree, a matter of politics, a great week for Republicans, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I would call it an embarrassing week for Congress. The Democrats asked really stupid questions, and didn‘t demand much when he dodged. The Republicans just sat there, as if they had nothing to do except defend him. This guy is about to get a life time appointment, garnering 1/9th the power of 1/3rd of the government. And just because Bush appointed him, most of the Republicans thought their duty was to do absolutely nothing except protect him. So they had almost zero curiosity to double check him. And the Democrats hoped to hobble him in a show. This just proves to me that Congressmen are all about show. The lack of substance to this inquiry was intellectually embarrassing. It’s like the only skill he has to show, is that he doesn’t have a big temper. So long as he doesn’t lose his cool, he is fit to decide if women should have abortions or not. That’s makes no sense to me.

JIM LEHRER: He not one time lost his cool.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yeah, and big deal. That‘s what power has come down to. Your ability to not show emotion. And boy, did they land a whopper with Alito. While to David this may seem as cool and under control, I saw Alito as highly protected and naïve. That would explain his incessant worship of power and authority, and his deep seeded disdain for dissent. Thus, he is conservative, and nobody will really know what that means until he starts judging top level cases. It saddens me to see the American intellect drop so low in these hearings.

JIM LEHRER: Is there any question in your mind, Johnny, that he will be confirmed? But do you agree with Sen. Specter it's going to be a party-line vote in the committee and then probably in the full Senate as well?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I can‘t see Alito losing this bid, no matter how many Democrats have doubts. Moderate Republicans don't think he's change anything. Radical Republicans think they are sneaking in another Scalia.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?

DAVID BROOKS: I do. It is a shame. But it is what it has come to because the executive power is still an important part of this issue, but it is abortion. And as long as we don't have an abortion debate in this country, we are going to have these sorts of issues which really all about abortion in the attempt to target and destroy people who happen to disagree with you on abortion.

JIM LEHRER: Well, let's talk about that. Based on what you heard him say, what you do think he will do if he is confronted with a decision or a vote or a position he must take on abortion?

DAVID BROOKS: My gut instinct and it was the same with Roberts is that personally he's probably pro-life. But he would not overturn Roe v. Wade; that is just my gut instinct. He like Roberts seems like the sort of person who would not want to overturn a 38-year-old apple cart, or however many years it is, that is my gut instinct.

JIM LEHRER: What does your gut tell you?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: My gut is that he will clearly do what he said he would do in a memo years ago. He will hurt abortion to the maximum extent possible, without drawing direct fire. That means he will participate in the gradual dismantling of the law, indirectly, and incrementally. People forget that in some states, it‘s already quite difficult to get an abortion. I don‘t think Alito has any problem whatsoever telling other women what they can and can‘t do with their bodies. Having 8 men on the Supreme Court is absurd and ridiculous, when you consider that this job is an appointed position. Bush and Clinton, together, had an easy chance to make this court representative of the 50% female population of this country. It‘s just inexcusable in 2006 that we are still stuck with a bunch of tight ass stuffy Ivey League white men.

JIM LEHRER: In other words, you agree with Professor Tribe who said in that clip and said before the committee today that there won't be -- may not be an overturn; it will just be picked away at?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Absolutely. I just said there are almost no women on this court. But look what we do have. Suddenly, there is this huge population of Catholic men on the Supreme court. The largest representation of male Catholicism in the history of American government. That’s no coincidence. Ultimately, it might have to be a state‘s decision. Because we know states like California will go into civil war before they will outlaw abortion. And places like Arkansas is full of bumper stickers equating abortion to murder. If culture is this divided, I guess so be it. I'll never ever let my family live in places like Arkansas. It‘s really stupid though, because a study just came out on South America. Colombia does not have legal abortion, yet, statistically, the number of abortions in that country is roughly 1 abortion per woman. In Equador, I think it more like 2 abortions per female. And these are places where it‘s done illegally. It‘s just a joke to think for a second that any woman who has tasted this freedom we have up here, is going to just roll over if the laws change. I would feel much better if a court full of women made this decision. This is where the real self righteousness sets in. Why do so many white men get to decide what women can or can‘t do? In the modern world of emerging modern women, I dare these tight assed white men like Scalia to take on the soul of female America -- especially female protestant based America. They’ll pull off his balls if they thinks he get so personal with their rights.

JIM LEHRER: Now, let's go to other the issue, the hot-button issue, whatever hot button means in this context. But that is executive power, particularly as it relates to surveillance and all of that, that is on the front burner right now. What clues did you pick up from -- about what Judge Alito might do on that issue?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, well I think that goes case by case. But, I think the underlying thing here was a political current that was going on which is the public was not outraged by the NSA story and that the polls clearly reveal that and I think that was where the big political impact came through.
And I think that is one of the reasons this was a good week for Republicans. Republicans like Lindsey Graham were sitting up there saying I'm worried about terrorists.
A lot of Democrats were saying I'm worried about the NSA. And if the American public has the ability to choose between which party, they're going to choose the party worried with about terrorists. And I think that political current out in the country helped propel the Democrats from being too aggressive on Alito.

JIM LEHRER: There was an expectation going into these hearings, in fact we talked about it here, that the Democrats would attempt to use the Alito hearings as a way to really vent and vet this issue; they didn't pull it off, did they?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: No, David is way off on this one. The issue has nothing to do with any choice between freedom and terrorism. That is the narrow minded Bush argument. If you let the idiots frame the argument, they will always try to trap you into thinking there are just two choices - theirs or evil. And this has nothing to do with that. The argument on executive power is whether or not Bush is a President or a Dictator. Bush thinks he’s a dictator, and can murder, investigate, imprison or torture people all by himself, without any other branch of government monitoring what he does. That’s the question. Bush is reaching for the same kinds of things that the Hitlers of history have all reached for. Bush will try to make us think that if we dare double check his actions, then we are aiding terrorism. That’s complete bullshit. First of all, Bush wouldn’t know a terrorist if it bit him on the ass. He doesn’t even know what country they are in. So we all have a right to doubt his word when he claims his wiretaps are to stop terrorism. If that is so, then why is he spying on antiwar groups through the NSA and FBI? The reason there are doubts on Bush, is because it appears more likely that he is abusing the law, not for fighting terror, but for the sake of power for himself. And Alito might be the kind of judge who loves executive power so much, he’s will to buy this b.s. that Bush feeds us when he breaks the law. Alito might think torture is ok, just like he thinks it’s ok for policemen to shoot running suspects in the back. I mean, chasing after people on foot can be real annoying.

JIM LEHRER: The torture case.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Did you notice how McCain and Congress whipped Bush on torture, and then Bush on signing day basically thumbs his nose at the whole deal and says, this law applies to everybody except me? This kind of arrogance is beyond anything I think this country has ever seen.

DAVID BROOKS: Come back to this political issue because I really think it a big issue of this whole week politically, which is why have the Democrats gone from a two or three to one registration advantage after World War II down to where it is even, and there are many reasons for that, that long, slow slide.
But two of them are not being tough on crime and not being tough on national security. And voters who looked at this week saw a party, I think, that was not tough on crime, was worried about law enforcement abuse more than about crime, not tough on Social Security, worried about NSA-type abuse than the terrorists.

JIM LEHRER: You mean in their questions to Alito.

DAVID BROOKS: In their lines of questions. And I think after every election loss the Democrats say we've got to get back in touch with white, middle-class America. And I think the members of this committee didn't do that, in fact, underlined some of the doubts people have about the Democratic Party.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh, I think David is trying to rewrite history again. But that‘s common with Republicans. The Democrats lost their edge when President Johnson integrated schools. I suppose Lincoln lost his edge when he freed slaves. Since Republicans don‘t have that kind of courage, you can expect them to take the low road to power, just as they have kissed the asses of religious right, just to get their money and their vote. But that‘s ok. The brown people are making a lot of babies, and their day is getting closer each day. I think David forgets that Bush lost the first election, and had to steal it to win, with the help of the Supreme Court demanding that we stop trying to find out what the will of the people was. So this huge hold of power that David thinks Republicans hold over America is really a wet dream they keep milking while the can. But at the rate they are going, their ultimate doom is virtually guaranteed. The democrats always look unorganized because they are more democratic, and represent a wider range of people. That's not disorder. That's democracy. The republicans look more organized and effective because they are more bought off and more fascist. So of course, their soldiers march in line better. But don't mistake their order for competence. This is possibly the most incompetent government in history. And the spin on reality is getting harder to pull off with each passing week.

DAVID BROOKS: I thought that was actually a crucial moment in the hearings because there was Leahy and others saying how do you justify a strip search of a ten-year-old girl and aside from the judicial issues, Alito coming back and saying if we don't have searches of children, that's where every drug dealer will put their drugs.
And so in this case, the girl was brought aside, they had a female person do the search. And it -- that seemed to be an important moment because it's really a clash between two different value systems. And personally, I was persuaded by the Alito argument.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: You would be. I can only imagine guys like you worrying about all of the frightening 15 year old girls, ready to take over the streets of America. Life will never be safe again unless Alito comes in to save the day, and protect us from 15 year old girls. Thanks for warning me about that David. I almost let my guard down.

JIM LEHRER: What in general and quickly, David, and then to you, Johnny, did you think in general how well -- how did you think the senators did both Democrats and Republicans in posing direct, relevant questions?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think we all saw they went through the cycles of vanity, arrogance, bullying, meanness. You know, but I thought -- the guy is a decent guy. If you thought the Democrats should have hit harder and somehow they would have exposed the dark, evil innards of Sam Alito, you were going to be disappointed, but that's not the Democrats' fault. He's just the guy he is and I don't think you blame the Democratic senators.
For one thing where I thought Ted Kennedy went over the line. First, well, the main thing was in the Princeton thing, the CAP. And there is a report out today that one of the things he read from this magazine, from this conservative alumni association was not a racist thing; it was a parody of a racist thing.
And if you do that, that is just intellectually dishonest to quote something as if this is the real belief and it was some stupid parody.
And I thought in many cases they were shaving the evidence, distortion of the evidence -- that was just beneath what a senator should be doing.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I think the CAP thing, which is clearly a racist effort, was where Alito had to flat out lie. I don‘t buy that he could completely forget being a member to something that he bragged about years before on a resume. I‘m not buying that for a second. And I was moved by critics that believe Alito is being dishonest over his recusal history and Vanguard. I was moved by those who pointed out that this is not supposed to be about how nice Alito is. We are not in a beauty contest here. This is about law. Alito might be nice, polite and calm. And he might be honest, although I question that. He might have some good friends. But law is about judgment. And just because you are honest and try hard, doesn’t mean you will make the right decisions, or make decisions that would please me as a citizen. The Supreme Court has been very divided for years, narrowly so. And the balance has now been tipped. I expect us to see the consequences in short order. I just hope this is the last judge that Dictator Bush gets to appoint. I don’t think the country would be able to take a third Bush appointee.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. All right. Thank you both.

Flatline & Brooks - January 6, 2006

2006-01-11T00:35:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Johnny, what rumbles do you hear as a result of the Abramoff pleas?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, first of all I’m an independent, and I make my money like most Americans, by working. So, I can’t tell you what the criminals in Washington are doing and thinking. I can guess. But I don’t hang with the rich and spoiled. But isn’t it funny to see these leaches run for the hills now that pay back has arrived? When they get scared, I start to think there is a God. Look how many want to return the dirty money.

JIM LEHRER: There's a list in the daily Hotline of about 100 members of Congress who gave money back too.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, it‘s sad, because the entire life of a politician revolves around handouts. Everything they stand for is based on favors owed to rich people. So, it‘s always a question of degree when they cross the line.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with the consensus next door just now, that there's going to be a timeout, as Mr. LaRocco said?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think so. I just had lunch in a fancy restaurant and I could hear my echo because there was nobody else at lunch. No lobbyists were there --

JIM LEHRER: You were paying for it.

DAVID BROOKS: Of course. I had six waiters waiting on me. It's having a big effect. I disagree with Mark that the White House is heavily involved. I think they did a good job of shoving off Abramoff when he came up to them.

DAVID BROOKS: But the big effect is that it's been a spring time for change. All the people, and especially Republicans who are watching this thing develop, finally are beginning to take some action. And the most important action they've already begun taking is getting rid of Tom Delay
It's pretty clear among House Republicans that they want him out, and there's going to be an election. And there's a contest, there's already jockeying going on of who's going to replace him -- Roy Blunt, John Boehner -- and then the other thing that's happening across the political spectrum, a really acceleration of the reform ideas from Jeff Flake, from Arizona, a Republican, from Rahm Emanuel, from Barney Frank; just a whole bubbling up of reform ideas.

JIM LEHRER: One at a time, Johnny. You agree that Delay is gone, as far as being the leader --

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Now if he could just take Bush and Cheney with him, we could all live in a better world.

JIM LEHRER: There was even a petition today --

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, Republicans don‘t ever fire their criminals. They just give them other jobs. Newt Gingrich is still around, and Republicans still seem to care what he thinks. Maybe Delay can get a job with FEMA.

DAVID BROOKS: Tom Delay was for the elimination of all Democrats. And so I think it was mostly partisanship. By the way, businesses like regulations that crush their competitors, by the way.
So he wanted to get rid of the Democrats. Then, here, the problem is not Delay, it's DeLayism. And DeLayism is, (a), the merging of K Street with the Hill, which Delay was really in charge of. And the second thing was the frantic money chase. The idea was that you contribute to the party, you qualify for chairmanship by out raising everybody else and giving the money around to people on your team that.
So that was the real problem. And so, to me, the fundamental problem that they have to deal with is not the lobbying, not $50 dinners, I could care less about that. It's the fundamental incentives that Delay and Abramoff in a much worse way took advantage. And those incentives revolve around two things: Earmarks where an individual can control a federal contract worth 100 million bucks. There's bound to be graft when you got individual members.
And second, moving outside the rules: When they can put in a little spending provision, after the conference report is done at 2:00 in the morning and nobody ever sees that. Then you are bound to get graft because those two big problems in the process.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think those things will now fall as a result of the Abramoff case?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the tough one and the big one is the earmarks, these little pork barrel projects which have exploded.

JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Well, back to my point, which was the leadership change that's going to happen as a result of this, Delay, everybody agrees, Delay is gone. So what is going to happen in his place? Is Hastert going to remain speaker? Is the rest of the leadership going to remain in place? Or is it just Delay --

DAVID BROOKS: Well, personally, I think they should sweep the carpet and get some new blood. They've got a lot of young talent. But if I was betting, I'd say Hastert would remain, then I would bet on a guy named Roy Blunt, who's been acting majority leader from Missouri, John Boehner from Ohio is the other likely candidate.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: But let’s not forget this thing about the removal all Democrats from power. That kind of arrogance was the thing that guaranteed Delay’s ultimate doom. Delay took the Saddam route to power, meaning, he didn’t care how many people he ticked off. He simply tried to rule through power and fear. And that alone might get you a little ways. But it’s a temporary road for sure. Bush makes a similar miscalculation, where he doesn’t seem to care how many people in the world hate him, or hate us. He thumbs his nose at the entire world because he currently holds the most power. That kind of arrogance never pays. Never has. He might feel powerful now. But more he continues this way, the more he guarantees the ultimate collapse of his poker hand. It’s just stupid politics. Arrogance is one of the single greatest enemies of all great empires. Bush and Delay embody arrogance to such perfection, it’s hard to imagine them not ultimately failing. The goal here is to prevent the rest of use from going down with them. That’s the real danger to these kinds of people. Delay getting the shaft is very healthy for America. That’s a simple fact. But he’s not the only one who needs to go.

JIM LEHRER: What do you think of the idea that lax regulations led to the mining explosion this week?

DAVID BROOKS: That could be a problem, it's not this problem though. This problem was caused by the explosion of earmarks from like 4,000 earmarks a year to 14,000 earmarks a year. It's caused by people in the middle of the night putting in a piece of spending which their lobbyists know about and they know about but nobody else knows about, and nobody can vote on. That I think is what has actually caused this problem.
And not only Abramoff is the extreme example. It's Duke Cunningham is another extreme example, the California guy who was bribed. It's the fevered raising of money, if you go into these restaurants, and then it's the fevered putting these spending provisions in for special interests.

JIM LEHRER: Do both of you agree that the -- some good could come of this, that the Abramoff thing is so severe, such a jarring thing, that they can't -- somebody is going -- everybody has to do something about it, whether you are a Democrat or Republican, no matter where you are in the pecking order?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, I thought when Enron failed, the country would wake up. I thought when soldiers were dying, the country would wake up. I though when New Orleans washed away, the country would wake up. Maybe it‘s a slow process. The implosion of greedy power is certain fascinating to watch. But I can never be sure how much Americans will get worked up over Abramoff.

JIM LEHRER: The Alito hearings begin on Monday. What should we expect?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think the betting is he will be what he is. He's sort of a nerdy guy who never makes broad statements. And so he will make narrow legalistic statements about individual decisions. I think the expectation is will be a lot of Democratic votes against, a lot of Democratic questions about executive power, and abortion, other things.
But I think the expectation is that he'll get -- keep most of the Republican votes, and you even hear Republicans saying let's not get complacent about this. So the odds favor him. But it will be a lot bloodier than Roberts.

JIM LEHRER: A lot bloodier than Roberts?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh, I don‘t know. The Democrats have never put too much backbone into stopping any candidate. It reminds me of the Bush election. Nobody wants to imagine that things could get a lot worse. so who cares if the courts steal our elections from us? I’m sure Alito will get in, and we will have to sit back and see if this really makes any difference, good or bad.

JIM LEHRER: What about David's point that the executive power issue, as a result of the NSA revelations and all that could --

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh, this country is tinkering with dangerous ideas. We have executive power gone amuck, torturing at will, running secret prisons. Doing all sorts of things that insult our democracy. We have a Surpreme Court that decided to pick their own President, rather than letting the people of Florida do so. These are not impressive legal situations. And there seems to be no law that Bush can’t break. This kind of tyranny is now law. It’s lawlessness. Does Alito have an intellect that can rise above this? I have no clue. Time will tell. We certainly won’t know from these hearings, because they are designed not to reveal anything of substance.

JIM LEHRER: But you don't expect this thing to -- the nomination is not in jeopardy as we sit here tonight, right?

DAVID BROOKS: I mean it's not a loss by any means, but my expectation is people in his position are pretty good at this. And the individual witness, whoever he is, the nominee, has an advantage against the blowhard senators. So you have to expect he'll do fine.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: But the biggest insult is the fact that our court will be filled with 9 white guys. Oh, i forgot, there is one womany left, and one black guy who thinks like a white guy. Bush should be utterly ashamed of himself. But he isn’t capable of shame. Our court should be 50% female, with Asians, Latinos and others. How about an Asian woman? Any President with a brain would have sought out better representation in our highest court as a sense of reponsibility to our democracy. Shame on Bush for being so narrow minded. But what else is new?

JIM LEHRER: All right. Thank you both very much.

Flatline & Brooks - December 30, 2005

2006-01-03T22:45:00.000-06:00

RAY SUAREZ: And now more on the Abramoff scandal in our end-of- the-week and end-of-the-year political analysis with Flatline and Brooks: Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Well, is this on the verge, David, of being a big story that's going to carry us through '06?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, that's the buzz-- yes, I think there is an expectation there will be a lot of members of Congress or at least several members of Congress. Here is a guy who dragged candy canes through the halls of Congress, bent the rules and broke the rules. The expectation is there are a fair number of people who grabbed those candy canes.
And the other thing I would just like to say is that there is also a few people in the executive branch, there are also people in the activist community --Glover Norquist was a college Republican friend of his, Ralph Reed, there are some columnists who have already been found to have accepted money from him.
Abramoff is a guy who corrupted, if he wanted to close a casino from an opposing tribe, he hired social conservatives, if he wanted to open a casino from one of his tribes, he hired libertarians, he just hired a lot of people and they are all going to be tainted.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, let’s not gloss down criminal behavior as “hiring.” Hitler hired a lot of people, too. Abramof is not some billionaire who simply hired a lot of people. He’s a middle man of undemocratic power. A guy who distributed abusive power to it’s destinations. Money was handed to him in large buckets from people who wanted to buy special access, and they got it. He’s not the only one who does it. But he’s one who got caught, and it’s a big deal because he is obviously connected to the very highest ranks of our government. I mean, Tom Delay is not a mere side show here. He has more connections to this man than the hair that’s connected to my cocker spaniel. Bush is connected. That’s not minor. That's not coincidence. That's evidence.

DAVID BROOKS: Within the Republican Party -- there are different circles within the Republican Party. And this is mostly the DeLay circle. It's not so much the Bush circle or the Gingrich circle.
And there are a lot of Republicans who are secretly glad to see the Delay circle brought down a bit. So there is a lot of intra-fighting and intra-leaking.

RAY SUAREZ: Could this end up having an effect on whether or not Delay -- if he manages to stave off his problems in Texas -- hangs on as majority leader?

DAVID BROOKS: I think there is no -- I mean I think DeLay's political career is finished already. I think people decided, and in part because of this, because the guy was always in shades of gray. He would cross the line and say oh, I'm in the shade of gray. I'm not really going over the line. But the taint with Abramoff, especially as it gets bigger, I think is finishing Delay, absolutely.

RAY SUAREZ: Johnny, name for me your picks for some stories that broke or developed this year that you think are going to carry us well into the next year?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: First of all, can we just enjoy this moment for a minute. Did you hear what was just said? Delay is finished. Did you hear that? We are on the last day of the year, and on network TV, it has been established that Delay’s political carreer is finished. I just want to bask in this for a minute more before we move on.

Ah. Just a second more, please. Ahhhh.

The biggest story of 2005 is the clear and embarrassing incompetence of the Bush administration. He has gone well beyond any low that even I had imagined. I always knew Iraq would be a massive failure. But I never dreamed he would also be picking his nose while a major American city got washed out to sea. I always knew that his cronies, like Delay and Abramof were crooks. But I never dreamed the media and the public would start acknowledging it so honestly. It‘s like we have been in 4 years of complete denial with this idiot of the President, with only about 1/3 of America, or less, truly understanding how bad he was for this country. And in 2005, a majority of the country has slowly come to understand what a basket case we have in Washington. I still don‘t think reality has completely sunk in, because Big Brother is very powerful at warping opinion. Afterall, I think Bush is still beating the low numbers Carter had in the 1970’s. If people were more critical in their thinking, and if the media wasn't so paid off so the truth could be told, Bush should be far below Carter right now. So, while Republicans might be embarrassed with Bush right now, they should indeed be thankful, because his ratings, while very low, are still, way better than he deserves.

RAY SUAREZ: David, your picks of stories of lasting significance.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, first this general trend that Johnny is talking about, a loss of faith in institutions I do think that is pervasive. I'm not sure how much of it is Katrina. Katrina didn't move too many in the polls too much but there is a lack, there is an exhaustion, lack of faith that we can handle problems which I think is also going to make us more isolationist.
The other thing that I'd mention is the rise of political Islam. In Iraq, in Palestine, in Egypt a bit and Saudi Arabia, you have got some pretty serious religious groups who are also democratic, Hamas, in Iraq; how that is going to play out I think is the big story. How those serious Muslim Arab groups who are pseudo-democratic -- are they going to become more democratic or less democratic; I think that is the big story of the year.

RAY SUAREZ: And your big winners for the year, if there are any.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, there are big winners. John McCain who had a very uphill shot of getting the Republican nomination a year ago now has quite a good shot. On the Democratic side I would list Barack Obama, the guy who could have come into the Senate with publicity, all this glitz, and could have been a poster boy but has become quite a substantive, serious senator and really has enhanced his reputation. I would say those are two big ones.
I'd mention Lindsay Graham, the style of candor he brings to the body and then Condi Rice I think has had a very good year.

RAY SUAREZ: Johnny, winners.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I'd certainly say Murtha is the big winner, for being a military man smart enough to understand that not all war activity strengthens a country. And Cindy Sheehan is a big winner for being far brighter than her critics. The only way they would ridicule her, is to speak behind her back. John McCain deserves a thumb for being bold enough to speak out against torture among his party of torturers. These are people who showed a face of this country worth admiring, after so many years of Bush embarrassment.

RAY SUAREZ: Your list of losers.

DAVID BROOKS: I have a small group of losers, being the Republicans and Democrats. The Republicans, the biggest loser in part because of the failures of Social Security, in part because of the drift, in part because of the sleaze that is encompassing. It has been just a horrible year for the party.
I would say the Democrats have failed to take advantage of that and really hurt themselves in the last month with the NSA scandal and with the desire to, on some of the people, including Nancy Pelosi, to withdraw from Iraq. I think that is a long-term loser because their biggest problem on a national level is are they weak on national security, and I think in the past month they have underlined that, which is not to say the Republican Party is not a much, much, much bigger loser than the Democratic Party this year.

RAY SUAREZ: We began this year with a presidential inaugural, a president who had won by a more comfortable margin than the last time, a confident inaugural about bringing democracy to the four corners of the earth, and then a new social agenda including Social Security reform. How does George Bush end this 2005?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I always have a really hard time finding any accomplishment to this administration. If you find one, let me know what it is. Oh, yeah, they have protected their huge tax cuts for the richest Americans. That has never been in question. The richest and greediest of America can be very happy this year. Bush has his priorities in the right place. Mission accomplished. Even the most inocompetent of Republicans knows how to protect the rich.

RAY SUAREZ: What happened to a year begun so optimistically for the president?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, a number of things, the biggest was Social Security. And this was a failure of arrogance to some extent. First of all, the Republicans thought that if the president went around the country he could sell this plan.
And the fundamental reality that people -- they didn't understand as the world gets more globalized and more insecure, voters want security where they can get it. And Social Security offered those voters and especially Republican voters, middle class, lower middle class voters, offered them security, and the White House didn't understand that, nor did they understand how partisanly divided the country was in part because of the White House. And so they pushed a bill which was pretty polarizing.
They were told and warned early on: try something that is a little bipartisan, try to set the second term off on a different kind of course. They didn't do that. And I think it is now only really in the last couple of weeks they really have begun the shift tactics and get their act together again.

RAY SUAREZ: Any shift in tactics on the war?

DAVID BROOKS: No, and this is -- I give Bush a C minus D+ for the year and I'd rate him non-F because I think he has been stubborn on the war, and properly stubborn. And also I think he has now got a policy of training the Iraqis, insisting on these elections, which is a pretty widely accepted policy.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: The momentum and credibility of this President is so low now, it’s really hard to imagine what 2006 is going to be like. I suspect things will get worse, because I think the economy is in real trouble, and we might start to see some major cracks by the end of the year. If that happens, Bush’s problems will just be getting started. And if Americans get in economic trouble, you will see this country drop Iraq like a hot potato. Some think Bush might be drinking again. Remember when he walked into a wall in Mongolia? I don’t know what is going on, but it might not be pretty. I could even imagine a Nixon like ending to this Presidency if the scandals get out of hand. 2006 should be extremely fascinating, and maybe depressing at the same time.

An by the way, I give him an F-, for not believing in democracy, and doing everything in his power to destroy American democracy. There is not a democratic bone in his body. Nor is there an intelligent cell in his brain. And it really shows now. Easily, the worst President this nation has ever witnessed.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, thanks and let's do it again in the new year.

Flatline & Brooks - December 16, 2005

2005-12-20T22:07:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: Now, to the analysis of all of this, of Flatline and Brooks—Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline, New York Times columnist David Brooks.
First on the NSA surveillance story, first what is your reaction to the story itself and how do you react to the president's reaction?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, when you open the paper I work at the paper but didn't see it until I opened the paper, and your eyes pop out.
And the president's reaction is not going to fly. If you are not getting warrants, the burden of proof is on you to say why. I'm perfectly willing to accept that maybe there is a good reason why they had to go around the warrant system. But you got to tell me why.
And you got to tell me why, given that there has been this torture debate where they didn't seem to want to defend that. They just bluntly said we need it but then they never could tell you why.
You know, this is the administration's problem on many of these issues. They want to put up a firm wall, secretly the smart people in the administration know they're going to have to give in and give an explanation, eventually they will cave. Why don't they do it right away?

JIM LEHRER: What do you think, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: First of all, if you go through your records, you can find Bush speaking in a public forum, explaining to people that wire taps require a warrant, and that he was following the law in respect for the constitution. Now we see that he didn’t, a he wasn’t, and you can bet the excuse will be that we are at war, we have to fight terrorists, we don’t have time for warrants. But that will also be a lie, because we have a special warrant system for secret, urgent activity, that allows the President to get warrants, even after the deed is done. The main point being, third party judicial review is required by law, even when done secretly. And this secret judiciary is very rubber stamp oriented. So what’s the excuse except to abuse power? So, I’m prepared to hear plenty of bullshit excuses as to why they have been doing this. But will the media be honest enough to see the bullshit, and expose it for what it is? That’s the big question. Obviously, the so called liberal media leader, the NY Times, saw fit to protect Bush on this for over a year at Bush’s personal request. It’s ironic how this unfolded right at the Senate was arguing over the Patriot Act. And that’s another mystery of stupidity for me. Why on earth does any Congressmen think our country must have a permanent Patriot Act is beyond me. What’s so damned precious about this thing that they can’t stomach the chance of it being reconsidered after some finite amount of time? Why are they trying to cram this constitution violating law down our throats? Bill Frist, have you no soul at all?

JIM LEHRER: In other words, this story broke today and they were going to vote on it and this fed the ant-Patriot Act –

DAVID BROOKS: People are worried about civil liberties and this piles on. And everybody says whoa, whoa, what's going on here.

JIM LEHRER: But I'm interested in your point, David, that eventually the president or somebody in the White House or somebody in the administration is going to have to fess up to this and explain it, right?

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

JIM LEHRER: Do you think that is inevitable as we sit here?

DAVID BROOKS: I think it is inevitable because you look at it and think about it for maybe three and a half seconds. And you know that of course Democrats are going to be upset. But you also know after three and a half seconds a lot of Republicans will be upset.
And when you get that kind of unified wall of suspicion, you at least have to provide an explanation. I mean, maybe there will be a debate about why they needed to go around the warrant system, but you at least have to give an argument. You can't just say trust me, trust me.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bush has been playing the "trust me" card since the day 911 began. Secret prisons, trust me. Torture chamber, trust me. Now it’s wire tapping and spying on Americans, trust me. Let’s not forget that some of these tax dollars have been spent spying on anti-war groups. I mean this is not where terror is born. This is where opposition to the king is born. When you give an idiot dictatorial power, the odds that he will abuse it are 100%. He’s not trying to protect America. He’s trying to protect his own abuse of power. The only question left is how bad does this have to get before our dimwitted Congress finally says enough?

JIM LEHRER: What is going on here? What's going to happen?

DAVID BROOKS: You have this competing interest, I'm not Mr. Civil Libertarian but I know there is legitimate interest in civil liberties as we fight the war on terror.
But I think the people in the White House and I remember the days after 9/11, they went to work thinking they were going to get killed. They went to work thinking there was going to be a missile or something to hit the White House. And they were possibly going to die there in office. And that was the atmosphere. And so their attitude was we're going to do everything we can to prevent this country from getting hit again and everything they can.
And now the attitudes are a little different. Maybe now they would do it differently. But if are you sitting in the White House, to be honest, you would do whatever you can to protect lives. But there is this competing interest out there.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, one must wonder if they are truly interested in protecting anybody, if they don’t even know what country to attack. They were not very interested in the likes of Richard Clarke, who clearly had a better idea of the terrorist threat than any of the bozos they’ve got in there now. So, this entire bull about terror and war, I’m not buying. If that were true, they would be fighting terror more at the root. But they are simply using fear as an opportunity to ram through huge power grabs. Now that the fear is wearing off, people are thinking more calmly, starting to question everything. I’m only disappointed it’s taken this long to see the light. The people with real brains were warning about this inevitable outcome years ago. And now here we are. Who is going to be first to say I was right all along? When is it going to be my chance to say: "I told you so."

JIM LEHRER: Now on Iraq, we just have been told by the way just been announced that the president is going to address the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday night at 9:00. This is the first Oval Office speech, I have been told, since he announced going into Iraq two and a half years ago.
But how do you -- what kind of marks do you give him? He did -- this was, as I said, this was the third interview he did this week on national television -- the one he did with us. But also he made these four speeches in addition to that over the last say ten days or so. How he is doing?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Just pull out one of your tapes of this question with me in past. The answer has not changed. Bush is incompetent, always was, always will be. Must we rub our nosed in this nonsense week after week. Can’t we discuss something else? What about the NFL. I think the stomping of the Dallas Cowboys was more interesting news than Bush’s weekly blunders. The Chargers beating the Colts is more interesting. At least the NFL has fair fights, among truly competitive talent. Washington is just a rigged game of dishonest thieves. You can only talk about for so long before it gets redundant. I think I’ll leave now. You and David can wrap this up without me. If you ask some questions that generate truly unique thought, bring me back in. But this constant questioning of the war is nuts. How much failure must we watch before there is nothing to left to discuss. Bush is clearly incompetent. The only subject left to talk about is how long this broken record can continue to skip.

JIM LEHRER: How do you think the president doing –

DAVID BROOKS: First on the communications I think finally, and I think these four speeches were excellent speeches. We've talked for years with how he doesn't level with people, doesn't say the good and bad, doesn't admit mistakes. He has done all that now. He's talked about Iraq with the granularity that he hasn't before.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

DAVID BROOKS: You know, he did the second inaugural, and it was, freedom, freedom, freedom, then he was doing pallid imitations of that speech; finally we get some granularity and we get some honesty from the way he actually thinks, and I think that's why I thought he did pretty well in this debate, I mean, in your discussion.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

DAVID BROOKS: And one of the things that struck me is he committed to doing the interview before the election - if the election had gone badly, it would have been a tricky day –

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

JIM LEHRER: He didn't know what the story was going to be today on Iraq.

DAVID BROOKS: Exactly. So I think that, whether it is a breath mint or a gulp of Listerine, the speeches have been excellent, I think.
And, you know, what's going to change public opinion is what happened yesterday in Iraq, where you had this tremendous election, the Sunnis coming out, most importantly coming out and showing from their actions and their words to everybody, John Burns, my colleague, that they have a commitment to a democratic and unified Iraq.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

DAVID BROOKS: It's not Shiites wanting to kill Sunnis and vice versa. They have got other identify identities. And they want that Iraq and that gives you hope that they're going to work out the rivalry which they are dealing with.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

JIM LEHRER: Johnny, if you want to talk, maybe you should return to your chair.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

JIM LEHRER: Burns said that on our program last night. He was very impressed with the Sunnis. He talked to a lot of the Sunnis as to why they voted.

DAVID BROOKS: And there is a little low boiling of war going on there - let's face it –

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

JIM LEHRER: Sure.

DAVID BROOKS: -- but people can move beyond it. And that is what we saw. And I think if we are going to move up in the polls and if we're going to stay there, which I think we are, it going to be a little of the speeches but a lot of Iraq is going to change.

JIM LEHRER: On the ground this was a big day yesterday.

DAVID BROOKS: I was a little struck by that. I do think you get an estimate. On the other hand, the estimates going into Baghdad were 150,000 dead, the order of 15,000 body bags so maybe the estimates are worthless.
But I think when you do go you have to do some sort of risk analysis of going in. So, you know, I was a little surprised by that.
I was very much struck, and I'm always, when he speaks, A, he is a lot more comfortable then he used to be in these things, but B. the commitment to winning, where he said our objective is winning. I do think that's at the core of who he is and it's always political analysis of, you know, he's going to the midterms; he's got to get them out. I think what we saw there was the real Bush; his objective is winning.

JIM LEHRER: What about the issue of the troops? You know, I talked to him about it and it was something, he doesn't want to talk about pulling U.S. troops out. What did you think of his rational for that?

DAVID BROOKS: I think what is going to happen, and he sort of implied this, which is they will go back into training missions as the Iraqi army stands up, they will go back - they'll be there for a long time to train.
But you know, the problem is, and I think he alluded to this -- you have got these two sides that really don't trust each other. If we leave, they have no –

JIM LEHRER: You mean the Sunnis and Shiites.

DAVID BROOKS: -- no incentive to disarm; there has to be an important third force there enforcing any sort of joint governing agreement they can reach. And I think these are the sorts of calculations they are making. And the president just can't make a commitment to pulling people out.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that; he has to be careful on this?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

DAVID BROOKS: He said that - what's striking to me was that he brought up Colombia and the FARC because he is clearly thinking about civil wars that happened in the past and how –

JIM LEHRER: -- that go on for a while.

DAVID BROOKS: That go on for a while -- and then they never, they don't just end, they de-escalate slowly. And so there is a long, slow, gradual drawdown period where there is still violence while there's elections. So he is clearly thinking in those terms.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bullshit.

JIM LEHRER: I wanted so to ask you both about what you thought about the Novak thing that the president knows about who did the leaking but we are out of time, so we have to leave it there. Thank you both very much.

Flatline & Brooks - December 9, 2005

2005-12-15T22:27:00.000-06:00

RAY SUAREZ: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks: Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And, David, the president came out counterpunching this week both on Iraq and the economy. The numbers seem to say that things are looking better for the Bush administration. Crisis averted?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, it's all over. (Laughter) I think he rose from thirty-five to forty, so he's clear sailing on to victory. No, look, they made progress. I think they made progress on two fronts. First, the economy really is fundamentally strong, the growth rate is strong. The productivity rate which is more important is strong.
So you know, and you are beginning to see job creation, and even a little hint, which is the problem we've had of some sign that wages may come up. That's still a problem. But some sign of it.
But then on Iraq, finally, we have had this test, and this has really been the test of the Bush administration since his first day, how much are you going to level with the American people about what you are really thinking.
And the Bush administration has always adopted a strategy, we've talked about it hundreds of times, of giving the positive message, you know, just, you know, not being sophisticated but just a simple straightforward show of resolve: The theology of confidence, one writer described it.
Well, finally in the last two speeches they are projecting outward what they talk about inward, which is we've got problems. And we're trying to deal with them.
And that is just a realistic way of talking it to the American people and I think that is why they are seeing rise because they are leveling with people, people basically think the strategy is plausible. And so they are seeing an uptick.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I don’t know how anybody can call our economy strong. We have endured years of some of the lowest interest rates in the history of history, and our economy has barely moved. That should be highly worrisome. Record debts and consumption has only bought us time. The stock market has been flat all year. Corporate America, for 4 or 5 consecutive years, has laid off a million people per year. Many of the world’s best market analysts are not preaching strong buys for America. One of my favorite analysts is Marc Faber has been writing scathing warnings about the future of America’s economy. And he’s not alone. If some of the predictions become more real, the poll numbers of today will look downright pleasant by comparison. And no Republican theology will be able to endure it. Lies can only buy so much.

RAY SUAREZ: Does this retooling of the message from the Bush administration on Iraq, Mark, throw the ball back in the Democrats court? Do they have to have some sort of coherent answer that they don't have as yet?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Most Democrat leaders have been little more than weak Republicans. Hillary and Kerry are prime examples of people extremely reluctant to criticize this war. They may be against Bush’s management of the war. But they are not against the war. Murtha, oddly enough, is one of the few to emerge, speaking a brand of English that I can understand. The military is getting weak and demorilized. Our national security is getting worse by the day. The war is not going well. We are not making progress on terrorism. We should get out of Iraq as fast as possible. The list goes on and on, and Murtha, a military man is saying it extremely bluntly, rebutting each and every speech Bush gives. Before Murtha, the only coherent speaker out there, was Mrs. Sheehan. Now, we have a real Congressmen sounding very similar. That’s a pleasant surprise I did not expect to see.

RAY SUAREZ: Could the Democrats easily over read that 20-point?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, they can make mistakes and I think they acknowledged they made a mistake this week. Howard Dean said on a radio program that they couldn't win; that we're not going to win in Iraq.
And that is sort of the implication of the Murtha policy, if we have to get out, it means we can't win. And then Howard Dean went back and said no, no, what I really meant to say was we can win. I think it is important for Democrats to present that.
I don't know electorally whether it is important, if the Republicans screw up bad enough Democrats will win. But just as a matter of policy and as a matter of seriousness, I do think it's important for Democrats. And they don't have to do it as a group but individual Democrats to have a suggestion for a series of policies. And some have; you know, Joe Biden has really been over there again and again and again and he has made concrete suggestions.
A lot of people have been over there and studied the situation in Iraq. I think that one of the things that frustrates a lot of people is people who are fixating on the opposition of Bush, and the things Bush has done wrong, but are uninterested and unknowledgeable in what's happening to Iraq.
And once you get knowledgeable in what is happening in Iraq and you get really knowledgeable about the details of the Syrian border and the Iranian border, then you begin to come up with constructive proposals and you get a serious debate, a serious debate about the future and not what happened three years ago.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yet, we are supposed to believe that the Bush administration is knowledgeable about Iraq? They were wrong about the WMD’s, intell, wrong about the source of terrorism, wrong about when the war would end, wrong about how much this war would cost, wrong about the sacrifices we would need to pay, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet, we are supposed to include them in the body of thinking who know what’s best. I don’t think so.

RAY SUAREZ: Everywhere Condoleezza Rice traveled this week, David, she was asked about how the United States treats people it has in detention from the war on terror.
And there's one version that has come out of the Senate for a defense appropriations bill that has strict anti-torture language in it. The House bill doesn't have that yet. Are they working toward a compromise?

DAVID BROOKS: I think they are. One of the things you see is internally the administration is shifting. And that also came out of Margaret's discussion earlier.
It seems from the outside that Condoleezza Rice does not, as I'm told she said in her private meeting, want this to be a torture presidency. She seems to be lobbying to get toward McCain. Now, other parts of the administration apparently, you know, have different views: The CIA and apparently Vice President Cheney. But one gets the sense from the whole gestalt of the administration that they are moving more toward McCain that is political. And that's political. They just can't veto a bill, their first veto be a torture bill. It is partly the needs to be friends with their allies in Europe which they have really improved in the past ten months.
And I think it is finally the merits of the thing. One thing every military person I talked to, including Israelis and everybody else is that physical torture doesn't work. So what exactly are we fighting about, a policy that doesn't even work?

RAY SUAREZ: So why did it take this long if what David says is true, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: All I saw, was a Secretary of State, traveling from country to country, arguing and insisting that our country does not torture people. Now how pathetic is that? Have we grown so used to this fascist regime we elected, that we don’t notice the blatant insult to our democracy, to our suppposed humanity? Our Secretary of State spent her vast energy, in international diplomacy, trying to convince our allies that we are a non-torture state. And of course, it’s a big lie, which makes it even more pathetic. But that’s what are tax dollars are being used for in diplomacy – to try to make our friends believe that we are not evil, when in fact, we clearly have a very sick Vice President who is fighting and scratching for every inch of torture policy he can protect. This is our new country. Welcome to America. This is Bush’s legacy, the guy that’s supposed to believe in Jesus. Anybody who dares supports this administration should be deeply ashamed of how far we have dropped in moral authority.

DAVID BROOKS: There is one other element of this story which is the rise of Condoleezza Rice. I mean, this European tour was a tremendous success, came very much on the defensive, left all of European foreign ministers saying okay, I buy her argument; there is clearly a desire to want to heal the relationship. She's a star abroad. And she's a star, I would say, at home.
I was with conservatives in Michigan a couple weeks ago, she was the only star, the only person they really like in the administration any more; it's a phenomenal rise.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I can't believe he said that. He didn't say that. I just imagined it.

RAY SUAREZ: Johnny, this week some of the charges against Tom Delay in Texas were thrown out, some were retained. Where does that leave the table set for January and a possible leadership election?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Delay is a ticking time bomb. He never learned the oldest lesson in politics, which is, you don’t piss off everybody. If you do, something will eventually bite back. He was too extreme, got too cocky, grabbed for too much power, and now the pay-back is coming. Like Bush, he is not a consensus builder. He’s an intimidator and a bully. He's a thug. It’s as stupid as the Bush policy that seems intent on angering 1.3 billion Muslims. Such tactics are guaranteed to fail long term, just as certain as the sun rises each morning.

RAY SUAREZ: Can you be as categorical, David?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, I thought this for a long time and what I heard from Republicans I completely agree. I think he will never be back in leadership. I agree that the Abramoff scandal is a bigger scandal. The problem so far is nobody stepped up to run against him. And that takes a little guts because there is still Tom Delay sitting out there.

RAY SUAREZ: Still trying to hang on.

DAVID BROOKS: Right. Oh, he's campaigning, absolutely. He thinks and he is trying to use the immigration issue and a couple other issues to come back and be the party leader. He hasn't accepted defeat. But no Republican I have spoken to is eager to run in this election with him as a leader.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, Delay is not the only knight that’s going to fall. The whole gang is in big trouble. And their arrogance is the key. Just as we recently learned that Bush complained to his staff that the US Constitution was just a God damned piece of paper. This is a President who hates to be criticized, hates to be doubted, and hates anything that gets in the way of his arrogant thoughts – like the constitution or that pesky Geneva convention. Our President is not a defender of the constituion. America must defend its constitution from our own President. This is the kind of mentality that turns Presidents into dictators, and dictators into prisoners. All excesses will be paid back in spades. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

RAY SUAREZ: Johnny, David, thanks a lot.

Johnson & Brooks - December 2, 2005

2005-12-08T20:59:00.000-06:00

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, the analysis of Johnson and Brooks—Jack Johnson of the RRN [Religious Rapture Now], New York Times columnist David Brooks.
David, a big week on Iraq; the president made a speech on Wednesday, major speech at Annapolis, and then yesterday, ten Marines were killed. Where do we stand tonight?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, first on the speech, I think it was the best speech the president has given. My colleagues John Burns and Dexter Filkins wrote that it was sort of a landmark speech because for the first time the war that Bush described matched the war the generals described, and so he really did go a little more on specifics, a little more talked about the mistakes. I thought it was a landmark speech because for the first time the private things I've been hearing from the White House were reflected a little bit in the public, and so some of the candor –

JIM LEHRER: Do you mean kind of skepticism, well, hey, this thing isn't working, we've got to figure out –
DAVID BROOKS: I mean, when I go in for background briefings, I hear a lot of that. I hear a lot of we're going to do this, this isn't working, let's do that. The Republicans never heard that. And I think that's one of the reasons - or the president - and so I think the president is right to move in that direction. I wouldn't say it's fully moved there or laid it out completely, but I think this speech, you know, was the best they've done.

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree, Jack?

JACK JOHNSON: Yes. President Bush has touched the hearts of God fearing Americans. His wisdom has been stunning through this entire process. I think God has presented him with countless challenges, and just like Jesus, he has overcome tremendous odds with each endeavor, always surprising those who underestimate him.

JIM LEHRER: So this speech helped him?

JACK JOHNSON: Well, at times, you can feel the word of God in his voice. It’s so obvious to those of us who are truly in touch with the great spirit. What a better man to face the dark side of humanity head on, protecting families and family values in the name of the Lord.

JIM LEHRER: David, the president's use of the word "victory" has gotten a lot attention. He not only used it a lot in his speech. It's also in the document that the National Security Council put out. How do you feel about his definition of victory?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think that word is there because are we withdrawing just to get out of there, or is success or is victory our exit strategy? And I think they wanted to say we're not getting there - we're not withdrawing just to get out there.
And I think the president really does believe that. I talked to a Democratic senator who said, oh, he's just laying the groundwork so we can get out. I really don't think that's the case.
I think the president is willing to lose the House majority to win this war. I think it's that important. I think it's right to think that.
But just on to what has been happening in Iraq, it has been an incredibly bloody period. My basic bottom line is that we are fighting a war better than we've ever fought it, but that doesn't mean the bad guys aren't also fighting it better than they've every fought.

JIM LEHRER: They're meeting everything we do--

JACK JOHNSON: Oh, you amuse me sometimes Jim. The scripture is so crystal clear on this. Let me get more to the point that David is dancing around. God picked Bush to be our President at a very critical time, and most of the Christian movement knows this. The troubles we have seen in Iraq should not scare us. In fact, this is all part of the God’s plan. Bush clearly understands this, and he has put God first in his decision processes. The people will come along, when they see the truth. So there is really no use in worrying over poll ratings. That is simply a measure of the challenges ahead. But it is not the source of the decision. Bush looks to a higher source for that, which is exactly why so many of us put our complete trust in his hands. God has a plan. In that we must have faith.

JIM LEHRER: Jack, talk about the other side on this, the religious right, the pro-war people. Where are they now in this? How are they doing?

JACK JOHNSON: Well, some are scared, and rightfully so, because we see soldiers dying. But for the most part, I think we stand very solid here. Knowing we have a good representative of Christ in the oval office puts a lot of us at ease. And this Judge Alito nomination only adds more hope that we can put an end to abortion, an end to dark religions in the world, and purify this planet of the sins that have held mankind back for so long.

JIM LEHRER: So you think Bush’s decisions are based on a religious foundation—

JACK JOHNSON: Sometimes God has to speak with a sword. There are all these lies out there being thrown as some of our disciples, like Tom Delay. The devil is always at work. But in the end, we know the power of God will win out over the evil atheists and agnostics. They can never match our determination and power.

JIM LEHRER: Let me ask you both this, starting with you, David, are we drifting, or are we moving, whatever verb you want to use -- toward a division, particularly among the political class on Iraq, which has the Democrats, basically the Murtha position, that the policy should be aimed toward getting U.S. troops out, versus a Republican position, the president's position, which we only get out when certain things have happened. Is that where we're going?

DAVID BROOKS: No, I really don't think we are. I think Steny Hoyer is not alone. I mean, the division within the number one and two people in the House is pretty dramatic and if you go to the Senate, there are a lot of Senate Democrats, they don't like -- believe me, Joe Biden and Barack Obama frustrated with the way the war is being fought - but that doesn't mean they're where Murtha is, and I think a large percentage of people - John Kerry was just there also, so I don't think that's where the division -- the divisions are different.
There's a division, there's a Pew poll that illustrated this, there's a big division been opinion leaders and the country, there's a huge division -- Michael O'Hanlon and the Brookings Institution had a good piece -- saying a huge division in the military where people really think we can succeed over the long term, the people on the ground who are reenlisting in high rates, they tend to think we can win this thing.
And there's a huge division between those people and between the media and the academics who tend to not think we can win. And O'Halloran's point was, if we get out, there is going to be furious anger on the part of the people who are fighting this war, who think the rug was pulled out from under them.

JIM LEHRER: But as Jack Murtha said in all kinds of interviews on this program and elsewhere he was hearing just the opposition of what you just said. . .

DAVID BROOKS: This is from polling data, and this is reenlistment rates which are-

JACK JOHNSON: Martha has lost his way. He will come around when he see the true salvation of the Middle East that Bush has in mind. He is simply not adequately developed spiritually to see the full argument. I’m sure, when he finally sees Jesus in his eyes, he will repent, and go forward to support these brave boys we have sent over there in the name of God. Our military is strong, and will win against evil.

DAVID BROOKS: But the Pew poll showed 65 percent of military officers think we can win. So that leaves 35 percent, that's a significant minority.
And you go to the people on the ground in Iraq and you get these high reenlistment rates because they believe -- and the Marines that I've spoken to, they think over the long term -- and they emphasize long term –

JIM LEHRER: Long term.

DAVID BROOKS: -- that we can win.

JACK JOHNSON: Well, there is a bigger story that is simply not being told here. And that is the coming return of Jesus. His time is very close now. We are probably within just a few years of his arrival. Bush is well aware of this, which is why he appears to be so stubborn in his determination to stand his ground on this war. He knows he must continue the upheaval in the Middle East, because that is the prophecy of Revelations. Any competent scholar of the Bible knows this. He’s done a great job. We must not fear this chaos. As long as you accept God and Jesus, you will be fine. The end of the world is near, but the believers need not fear it. It’s the sinners of the world who should be nervous right now. I’m certainly not. Frankly, I find this all fascinating. Losing a few soldiers will not matter, God bless their soul. They are in a better place now anyway. They have done God’s work and will be adequately rewarded.

DAVID BROOKS: I don't think that. It's a -- listen, we lost ten men. It's a rational position - I mean, it's a close call, like most political calls about whether to get out. I happen to think if you look at the consequence of getting out, it would be much worse, but to say you're a cut-and run if you want to cut this bloodshed, no, I don't necessarily think that. It's a serious position.

JIM LEHRER: Quick, before we go, the resignation of Duke Cunningham, a member of the Congress of California. Anything there besides Duke Cunningham? Is there a larger picture there?

JACK JOHNSON: Oh, he’s a good man. Jesus said we should love our enemies, and that means forgiveness. This man was simply trying to help, and he lost his way a little bit. It’s not a big story, in the long run. Everything will be over, long before he has to worry about his menial services in this world. Let God sort that one out.

DAVID BROOKS: I think what he did was terrible. I don't think it's a broad scandal, though.

JIM LEHRER: All right, we have to leave it there. Thank you, both.

JACK JOHNSON: God bless you both.

Flatline & Brooks - November 30, 2005

2005-12-04T19:23:00.000-06:00

RAY SUAREZ: Now, to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks. That's Fake Democracy Founder Johnny Flatline and New York Times columnist David Brooks. David joins us this week from Philadelphia.
Johnny, the punch and counterpunch over the Iraq war continued this week. Does the vice president's speech of earlier this week tell you that nothing's changed as far as the administration's concern, or that the ground is shifting on the Iraq war debate?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: What makes Cheney more frightening every day, is the fact that he is a mostly hidden away guy. We rarely see him. When he does emerge, it’s usually to tell some huge lie, like Saddam caused 911, or to push for more torture, which is becoming the new image of America to the rest of the world --the big imperialist, lying torture state. This guy is becoming the complete image of evil. And since nobody really believes Bush comes up with any ideas on policy, because Bush doesn’t even read, we can only assume that the entire mess that this country is chalked up mainly to Cheney, the real President of the United States. Has he ever had a compassionate thought in his life? Has he ever had an accurate thought in his life? Has he ever had an intelligent thought in his life? No. But he sounds really smart when saying stupid things. That’s where his talent lies. To any thinking person, Cheney is so ridiculous of a person, we really don’t even bother to listen to his speeches anymore. I would never expect any enlightenment, apologies, or insight from such a narrow person.

RAY SUAREZ: Is that right, David? Have the terms of discussion changed with the Condoleezza Rice interview, with the vice president's speech?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, that has always been the issue. I mean, we've never wanted to stay there forever. I actually think the Murtha thing was a bit misleading, not because Murtha that is not a fine man but because there are only two fellow Democrats who agree with his position.
To me the most important thing that happened this week on the Democratic side were speeches by Joe Biden, who is really one of the most senior and thoughtful Democrats on foreign policy, and Barack Obama, the most promising young politician in America, and both of them distanced themselves from Murtha; both of them basically took the Bush doctrine, which was to train the troops, try to build national political institutions, and they had a few different suggestions. Biden wanted a contact group of international groups to help coordinate Iraq's future.
But basically it was within the parameters that I think are the bipartisan consensus parameters. I think as you think about where we are going forward, as the Barack speech, as the Biden speech, as Hillary Clinton's comments indicated, there is a basic broad agreement on what to do how to train the forces, how to unify the Iraqi political class, how to try to heal the civil war. And so we've got a consensus going forward. We've got bitter debate about the past.
And the White House had to make an argument are we going to talk about the past. Or are we going to ignore all that stuff about prewar intelligence and just talk about the future? I think their first instinct was to talk about the future. But the president's poll numbers and especially when it came to honesty, were slipping so badly, they felt they had to go on the offensive and Dick Cheney's speech was the most forceful evidence of that.

RAY SUAREZ: So out of 435 household members, David, you are suggesting only two agree with Jack Murtha based on what, on their resolution in the house?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't want to get that specific but I think it is certainly not the core Democratic position, if you talk to most Democrats I think most Democrats will say, no, we can't leave now, we can't leave within six months, we have to leave based on facts on the ground. And that's basically what Biden said, what Barack Obama said.
Now they had different suggestions, things they think the administration is not doing which they should be doing. But I think very few, especially leading Democrats think we should leave within six months.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, to David, the so called legitimate Democrats are the ones who defend the necessity of war. The sad part is that we only have two parties, and two choices, not so different from each other for the most part. But to somebody like David, these are all the choices we ever need. It’s a sad state to see how narrow minded our country is. But I would like to discuss this issue about the past, as if the past is a waste of time. Perhaps if Bush has known more about the past, he could have prevented all of the mistakes he keeps making with the future. The past is important, because 4 years ago, the smart people of this country knew Bush’s plan was a bad idea, and they tried to prevent it. Now each year, as more evidence emerges, we can gather another less intelligent group of dissenters and say "You see? Now you understand why Bush is so dumb and so wrong?." And we have to keep reviewing the history as it gets worse, so we can grab dumber and dumber dissenters with each passing year and say, "See? Now do you get it?"
Now, we are basically left with only the corrupt and totally ignorant, where no amount of evidence will ever change them. These are the guys like the knight in the Holy Grail, with their legs and arms missing, saying, "Come back here, I’m not dead yet." We have spent over $250 billion on this war. That’s the goal. Winning was never the goal. Get real. The war will end when the thieves learn they can’t steal anymore money to spend on it. The bribes in California were from a defense contractors, remember? That was one politician. The others are just as paid off, including all of the war loving Dems David refers to. They are programmed and paid to think and talk this way. The robots only get unplugged when the poll drops so low, that even a rigged election won’t fly.

RAY SUAREZ: David, the next set of elections in Iraq are scheduled for Dec. 15. If those are carried off in a relatively peaceful manner might there be a rising Republican chorus to say look, we've done more or less what we said we went in there to do; maybe it's time to start looking for the exit door?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I mean there is already that because the war has become so unpopular. On that issue I don't disagree. But I think when it comes to the president and I think when it comes to leading Democrats, I think they are going to say we are not going to leave until the Iraqi security forces are basically ready.
And that is what George Bush has been saying for six months. He's been saying as they stand up, we'll stand down. That is the position I think most military brass have embraced for six months or maybe a year. So as the elections take place in December, you'll get another step forward. And by the way, we saw a joint Sunni-Shia declaration this week with another bit of good news, sign of unification over there.
So, you know, there will be a slow progress toward where we can start withdrawing troops, but I really don't think many Democrats or many Republicans are going to want to withdraw troops if it leads to the civil war. And that is the issue that we are faced with right now.

RAY SUAREZ: Just one point and that is that Jack Murtha made, and I talked to him before the speech and he's made it since, and that is that Iraqi ministry had its own poll, and 82 percent of Iraqis want us out of there. There is a move now to include that as part of the Dec. 15 referendum.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Makes you wonder where reality is, when Bush makes the USA sound so critical to Iraq, and yet, none of the Iraqi’s agree with him. If Iraqi’s want us to leave, and they do, let’s just leave. There’s nothing to win. There’s nothing to lose. We’ve already screwed up. It’s not a big deal. The screw up began when our CIA helped Saddam come to power decades ago. We did the same thing to Panama, putting Noriega on our CIA payroll. We screwed up Vietnam, and it only got better after we left. Bush doesn’t want to leave, because that’s all he’s got. His entire Presidency hinges on him waiting for Jesus to emerge to thank him for screwing up the Middle East. The defense industry doesn’t want him to leave, because they are making a fortune on this waste of assets. Americans are oblivious to the fact that this whole ordeal is just making us weaker, lowering our wealth substantially. Now the painful cuts will have to come, and nobody will ever remember how much money got wasted blowing up sand. Let’s not waste time looking at the past. If we did, somebody might learn something, and that would be dangerous.

DAVID BROOKS: But that is not the choice. This was the problem with the Murtha speech, frankly, and I have always had a great deal of respect, but if are you going to recommend a policy, you have to have at least a paragraph in your speech on the consequences of your policy and Murtha didn't have that paragraph in the speech.
And so when people are actually looking at the policy options, are they looking at what is going to happen if we withdraw prematurely? And I think most serious Democrats and most serious Republicans think it with be a mistake to base our withdrawal decisions based on polls here or even polls in Iraq.
No one wants to be there, but if the reality is going to be worse, I think most Democrats and most Republicans are going to say okay, we have got to stick it out.
I mean, the good news really is, though, and this is good news in obviously a terrible situation, the Iraqi troops have begun to be performing well. We have had this operation in western Iraq where the Iraqi troops have fought much better than they had before, where they are beginning to hold ground.
You know, as I said before it's still a 50/50 proposition, you can't get optimistic. But we are beginning to see some of the political and military gains from the training and from the political progress.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Oh, yeah, and Bush states consequences in his policy speeches? The only consequences he ever mentions are ones that are completely wrong. Iraq didn’t roll over fall in love with us. The war didn’t cost less than $50 billion. Iraqi oil is not reimbursing us for the cost of the war. Getting out is good. The consequences will not be pretty, but they are necessary, and the only option. Bush’s option, is to deny what will happen anyway. He does not have the power that he thinks he has over the world, and that was the big miscalculation from day one.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, the president is now going to hit the road, Johnny, after the Thanksgiving break to start talking about immigration in the border states. Is this something that could successfully regain the initiative for the administration, change the topic a little bit?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: The Republicans want to build a great wall of China on our Mexican border. They must have gotten the idea from Sharone. Maybe we can put up 60 feet of concrete. This is more of the xenophobia that many predicted would come from frightened Americans, after 9/11. This is the kind of thing Jesus tried to resist, when he said you should love your enemy. Hatred, division, isolation is not a cure for anything with the human race. Jesus was not a Republican, that’s for damn sure. And the Free Trade Agreement was never really about promoting immigration. To the contrary, big corporations would prefer to stop human movement, so they can isolate the poor slaves on their plantations for tiny wages, while increasing movement of their materials. Frankly, I’m surprised to see this issue come up, because places like Texas have become so brown and so Spanish, most have gotten over this issue of Mexicans. In fact, most voters in that state will soon be of Mexican decent. Most embrace their neighbors. This fear feels odd. Perhaps there are still some really scared wimpy people out there who want this isolation. But it feels suspiciously like another attempt for the Republicans to generate some fear among their ignorant base, to keep up their war chest spending. They want us to be a permanent war state. They need things to be afraid of. And brown people are typically what they like to fear. What they really need is something to go wrong. I’m sure Bush is writing letters to Bin Laden, begging him to do something quick.

RAY SUAREZ: David.

DAVID BROOKS: As for immigration, I think what the president is trying to do is first he's trying to rally the base, get the conservatives back on his side by addressing border security. But there is a political strategy here which is not a bad one. And the strategy is you take this issue which fiercely divides really both parties but mostly the Republicans.
You emphasize border security this year. You try to get a border security bill which just emphasizes building a fence on the southern border through the House, which is much more conservative. Then the next year you take it over to the Senate and there you can get something which John McCain has talked about and Ted Kennedy has talked about, getting something to regularize these illegal workers that are here. And then you pass that over to the Senate. And once you've got the balanced picture then you can get back to the House and maybe the conservatives in the House will vote for a more balanced amendment.
But I think politically you do have to start with border security before you get over to the other side of the issue which is regularizing the workers.

RAY SUAREZ: But very briefly, David --

DAVID BROOKS: It is not bad idea.

RAY SUAREZ: -- May this also open up a family fight in the Republican Party. Does it carry that risk?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, absolutely. There is the sort of the more free market side of people who think there should be freedom of movement, people who think we need the workers. There is the more, if you want to call it, socially conservative side who are just anti-immigrant.
But I do think it's possible to see, and some people say you are beginning to see some people on the socially conservative side recognizing the reality that we need these eleven or thirteen million illegal workers. These are the people who pick the vegetables you eat every day.
And on the other side there are some of the free market side are acknowledging that the out of control border is just unacceptable. So you if take these two approaches you can see a marriage. It will be a very problematic marriage to pull off. And that's really the political trickiness of this issue.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: The borders should be wide open, world wide, like they were 100 years ago. We would all be better off for it. Stop fearing humanity is the key. Stop regulating people. Believe in true freedom. The world is not so scary. The fact is, we need immigrants to help pay for all of the new old people coming aboard. If we don’t get less xenophobic, we will regret it big time in the future when there are not enough young people to feed the old. Frankly, I think this issue is going nowhere. But I’ve been fooled by stupid ideas before.

RAY SUAREZ: David, good to talk to you. Johnny, like always, I don’t know how you got past the censors, but I’m sure we will never air this anyway. The Republican dominated executive committee that monitors PBS would never let you on the air.

Flatline & Brooks on Spending - November 18, 2005

2005-11-23T19:08:00.000-06:00

RAY SUAREZ: And again to David Brooks and Johnny Flatline.
Well, Johnny, you heard Norman Ornstein refer to the difficulties of a majority party. Now, I was always told that running everything is actually easier than being in the minority. What is going on?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, it shows you that politicians are more interested in saving their own skin than anything else. When Bush was popular, they didn’t dare challenge his authority. But like a cheap pack of dogs, they smell dead meat and now freely lash out. I guess they only thing most politicians respect is power, and when power depletes itself, they spread away from the vacuum like oil on water. I shed no tears for these guys. And the entire debate over money is so far from reality, we may as well have some accountants from the old Enron in there telling us what is what. But even though it's a tiny thing, the fact that anybody can hit on food stamps or school lunches, while spending ten times more on their rich buddies, should show people just how dark their hearts really are. I can only hope the people who voted in these nuts takes note of what they have elected.

RAY SUAREZ: David?

DAVID BROOKS: I don't totally disagree with that. Yeah, I think what strikes me is that the budget deficit has gone up. The big budget items are off limits. Some of them are the tax cuts. Some of them with the prescription drug plan, things like Medicare where the real money is. I mean, one of the things that struck me is, is watching the Congress, it is like watching two people in New Orleans debate about whether their fishbowl is overflowing when the Mississippi River is coming down on them.
And a lot of these cuts, these cuts are like a few billion here and a few billion there, while you have this massive tax cut, massive Medicare spending plan, and then the normal entitlement problems that have been our permanent problems all coming down.
So there is a great deal of angst about the deficit and the long-term entitlement problems. But because so many things in the budget are off limits that we with can't even talk about, there is really no addressing the real issue, and dysfunctional is not a bad word for that.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, how much of this is an appearance problem, not wanting to be seen continuing to cut the taxes on the profits on investments while you are cutting food stamp eligibility, not wanting to make tough choices about entitlement programs while you are giving a couple of 100 million bucks to build bridges to tiny islands in Alaska?

DAVID BROOKS: There's a lot of that. There's also -- to be fair, the Republicans believe that the tax cut for captain gains help economic growth and are good for the country.
But, you know, the fundamental thing driving this is the moderate Republicans who are flaking off, and who are just tired of towing the line.
Somebody said that when moderate Republicans revolt, it's like Indian summer, it's nice while it lasts but you no know it's not going to last forever. But I'm not sure about that. I have been spending a lot of time with moderate Republicans and when they talk about the president's reputation in their districts, they use words like poisonous, radioactive, hated, loathed. They're in districts often in the Midwest and the Northeast, these moderate Republicans where they have to be against the president. They just have to. And so you are beginning to see that on issue after issue.

RAY SUAREZ: So if you are running, Johnny, in the Chicago suburbs or upstate New York, the president's woes become your own?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, since big brother never tells the truth, it depends on which lies the voting public is willing to believe. What is off limit goes beyond even what the so called honest accountants talk about. One thing that is always off the table is defense spending. How about the 200 billion just spent on Iraq? They don’t even include that in the budget. It’s money that grows on trees, somewhere in China. How many Americans would have gladly taken that money to buy some health care, or food stamps, or day care, or even catching Bin Laden? Remember him? And how many politicians are willing to measure up a war in terms of asset investment? Did we get a good return on our 200 billion? I think not. But nobody dares to think of military strategy in the same context as economics. Yet, it’s exactly that – the relationship between money and war -- that brings empires to an end.

RAY SUAREZ: And some of the advocates of not cutting entitlement spending out point out the burden of those cuts land on many of the people that you are trying to help in the Gulf Coast so the money comes out of one pocket and into another.

DAVID BROOKS: And as more money gets sucked up by entitlement programs, which are untouchable, the rest of the money really tends to be the money that's focusing on helping the poor; and when you make these cuts on the year-to-year program, the non-entitlement programs, you're cutting the poor.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: I guess you know an empire is about to end when every single promise in the world is assumed to be attainable, from rebuilding New Orleans, to saving victims, to fighting bird flu, to reorganizing and controlling the Middle East. As time goes on, we are starting to see how much of these words are just hot air. But at least the rich are not getting over taxed. Talk about an untouchable item, that is one group that never suffers.

DAVID BROOKS: I do feel compelled to add that federal domestic spending has increased faster under Bush than under LBJ. I mean, we are coming off a bunch of years of incredibly high spending increases, the Department of Education is up, what, 50 percent, roughly in that, so if they don't get an increase, it is not like you are cutting into bone in a lot of these programs but, nonetheless, it is not a rational way to do budget.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Bush is the biggest spending President in history, period. And he will be the last President to ever spend this much money.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, can they solve what is bedeviling them this week and get this all done before the end of the year?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think the lesson of these appropriations is that they can win off enough folks to get two-vote majorities, maybe. But, you know, this is not a Congress where the Republican leadership can run rough shod any more, that's for sure.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: One can only hope. I have never seen a political body do more damage to this country in so short a time as this. The Republicans were supposed to be the dream government for America. Where's the dream? All I see is a group of theives and liars.

RAY SUAREZ: That’s all the time we have. Thanks fellas.

Flatline & Brooks on Iraq War - November 18, 2005

2005-11-23T18:20:00.000-06:00

RAY SUAREZ: And to the analysis of Brooks and Flatline: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline. Mark Shields is off tonight.
Well, did the shape of the Iraq war debate change this week?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, it moved. There is no question that home front is George Bush's biggest problem right now. Things in Iraq are pretty much steady state. But things at home are moving -- moving away from the president.
And I would say the Murtha thing will move it significantly because he is a very pro-defense Democrat. And I would say his speech would have some merit if the main problem in Iraq, the main incitement to violence was the U.S. presence.
It is true the U.S. presence is an incitement to violence. A lot of people hate us so much they are committing violence but the main incitement to violence is the Sunni-Shia split. It's the incipient civil war.
Every single expert I have spoken to, Democrat or Republican says that if we get out of there, we will have a full bore civil war. We are a hated authority figure keeping that complete civil war from breaking out.
So as a policy statement, I think what Murtha did was shallow, incomprehensible. I understand his anguish. That is shared by everybody. And that's why the home front is moving so much away from the president. But as a policy, it just doesn't hold up.

RAY SUAREZ: Shallow and incomprehensible, Johnny?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: And the Bush agenda is what? Deep? Brilliant? Let’s go through piece by piece what David just said, because if there is anything shallow to be found, it can easily be found there. First of all, he makes the claim that the only problem Bush has is with Americans, that the Iraq war is in a steady state. Oh, yeah. The war is just dandy. After promising us a quick and cheap war, to be paid for by grateful Iraqi’s with Iraqi oil, now, 200 billion dollars later, 2000 American lives later, 2 years later, with untold numbers of dead Iraqis, things are steady state. I guess that means that we could not possibly spend more money than this, thus, the state is steadily losing it’s resources, respect and power at a very steady pace. Our failure is steady alright. What dreamland could be better for a defense contractor?

As for the promise of civil war, from the so called experts you have spoken to, I wish David had spoken to these experts before the war ever started, because there were plenty of them being ignored by Bush, who warned exactly of this civil war resulting. And the problem is, we can’t stop it. We don’t have the resources or will power to stop it. Perhaps if Bush had been more accurate and honest about the consequences of this war in the beginning, the public would have said no before things got going. But since we are there on a lie, and countless miscalculations, we are supposed to stay the course of failure, because any criticism must be shallow. I just don’t see how it is humanly possible to be more shallow than the Bush Administration.

As for Murtha, it’s funny how the only word any hard liner will respect is a Marine who was shot twice. Now that is shallow. Like it’s important how many times one gets shot. Perhaps we can find another Marine who was shot 10 times. Maybe he will be even smarter. I don’t get this bull hockey that gets played out in Washington, where we measure the size of ones brain based on the number of bullet holes he has received, and which war he fought in. This is yet more evidence of what a violent state America has become, when we are so desperate to get advice only from our warriors – our so called experts on the morality of war. Why must one suffer in a war to understand that war is a bad thing? Are there no lessons left to be learned simply from a good history book? Are we this shallow? Criticism from a warrior like Murtha is evidence of just how bad Bush is doing. To a neocon, no other person is worthy of an opinion. Now that is shallow.

RAY SUAREZ: Does Murtha's statement provide cover for other wavering members of the House and Senate to come out?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Since this war is entirely about getting money in the hands of arms manufacturers, I suppose it’s the only thing that can stop them. Our military was never gung ho about this war, but since it’s virtually illegal for any soldier to criticize their orders, why should we look to them to do any thinking for us? It’s a perfect trap that the corporate raiders love to use to help keep the citizens silent on the subject. Forcing us to wait on a complaining soldier is setting the bar beyond the reach of us ordinary citizens who are supposedly not qualified to criticize a war, yet they want our money to pay for it. The whole thing is a disgrace.

RAY SUAREZ: David, given what Johnny just said about Jack Murtha, does it make any sense for Republicans to say that he has waved the white flag of surrender to the terrorists, opened a policy of retreat and defeatism, or as Scott McClellan did, associate him with Michael Moore?

DAVID BROOKS: No, that is ridiculous. And everyone I spoke to today was infuriated by the White House response and can't understand, by the way, why the White House can't explain their policy.
You know, I had somebody who was on the ground there risking his life saying: Why are they AWOL on the home front; why can't they have a realistic explanation of what is going on here? Why instead are they attacking bitterly the people that are raising legitimate criticisms?
Nobody should be questioning Jack Murtha as a person, as a figure of integrity. The problem with Murtha's speech is that nowhere in the speech does he actually consider what the consequences of withdrawal would be. There is no discussion of what Iraq would look like. There is no discussion of what the Middle East would look like, or what Zarqawi would look like.
So as a policy matter, you can have disagreements. But the way the administration is trying to justify this policy is infuriating people who agree with it.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Johnny, our time is brief. On a separate but parallel track is the debate over prewar intelligence; is this a totally separate matter or did they move in each other's slip stream this week?

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, first of all. Let’s not gloss over the Michael Moore comment, because this is just too hilarious. Even David Brooks gets the stern forehead when mentioning Michael Moore. I guess the ultimate insult a right wing neocon can throw out there is Michael Moore, while the liberal left prefers to compare Bush to Hitler. You can compare me to Michael Moore any day of the week, and I will take it as a huge complement. Certainly, Moore’s name will glow in the history books far more fondly than Bush will. As for the intelligence flaw, just look to Moore’s movie years back. The intelligence was clearly flawed back then at a shallow level to embarrassing for the real believers to even admit to. Why on earth is anybody surprised now?

RAY SUAREZ: Let's talk about the debate over prewar intelligence. It flared up in a big way again this week.

DAVID BROOKS: I think it's a way for the Democrats to try to undermine the president. Again, my problem with it is that you can fault the administration on many things in Iraq. But there is no evidence they consciously lied about intelligence. Maybe they didn't tell the whole story. But they have been cleared by commission after commission. The Democrats have produced no evidence of willful misrepresentation.
And so to charge this, which is a heinous charge, is to me just an absurdity, an insult. And on this, I think the administration is completely correct. The Democrats are often, you know, conspiracy.

RAY SUAREZ: So in the months before the invasion, when the president said it was still possible to stop the war and that war was a last resort, do you think that was true?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think what he said about the war was very consistent with what the Clinton administration said. They believe that Saddam was five years away from a nuclear weapon. The German intelligence thought three years.
That is more or less consistent with what the Bush administration said, what the national intelligence estimate said, which the Bush administration released. You looked at that. You thought Saddam was a real problem with WMD.
And so the idea that they made this up, the idea that they exaggerated, they were lying, no one has ever actually shown evidence that they were misrepresenting in any way.

RAY SUAREZ: Very quickly.

JOHNNY FLATLINE: Well, since Brooks wants to bring in European intelligence to this, let’s look at the Downing Street Memos which clearly prove that Bush planned this war years ago, and was already willing to tell any lie necessary to sell it. How much more obvious can that be? Brooks is pulling the wool over our eyes again, trying to blur the past.