Mike Huckabee's other half- not as nice as he is?

With former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee’s miraculous ascendancy to one of the top Republican presidential contenders, he’s worth watching (click to enlarge).
Yesterday, Frank Rich, The New York Times op ed columnist, wrote "The Republicans Find Their Obama": Comparing Huckabee to Obama, Rich observes, “Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.”

But wait! Presidents bring their wives with them to the White House, where they, too, exert a profound influence on the tone of the administration.

According to Steve Clemons of The Washington Note, Huckabee’s wife Janet bears watching. On December 9th he posted "An Interesting Email Exchange with Mike Huckabee Spouse: Janet Huckabee”: ”In 2004, an associate of a friend began a correspondence with Janet Huckabee, wife of then Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. His concern at the time was that Janet Huckabee was simply too aggressive and snarky at a polling station when challenging those who did not show identification at the polls -- and in some cases, sending people away when it was, in fact, their right to vote whether or not they chose to show identification.”

What follows is a fascinating exchange of e-mails between Clemon’s source and Janet Huckabee. Clemons also points out that the Huckabees registered with Target to make it easy for their friends and supporters to buy presents for them for their farewell party from the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion.

That doesn’t bother me nearly as much as Janet’s efforts to discourage people from voting. Each election I work on the national voter protection hotline with the National Campaign for Fair Elections to prevent such behavior.

(photo of 1974 Huckabee wedding – Political Ticker CNN blog; chart: Wonkosphere)

"Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war"

On November 8th, the Senate voted 53 to 40 to confirm Michael B. Mukasey as our next Attorney General. On the final day of his confirmation hearing, he avoided a declaration that simulated drowning, known as waterboarding, constitutes torture under U.S. laws.

Is waterboarding so tricky that a reasonable person can’t figure out whether or not it’s torture?. According to Elizabeth de la Vega, a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience, it's easy to figure out. In "What Real DOJ Trial Attorneys Say About Torture," published in Truthout on November 18, de la Vega describes the White House and Mukasey’s positions on torture: “…More than anything, White House officials want us to believe that the law of torture is so terribly confusing and vague that no lay person could comprehend its complexities…”

“Consider, for example, Dana Perino on October 5, 2007. This was the press conference where the White House spokesperson made it clear…that she was not pleased about the reporters repeatedly asking her to define the term ‘torture.’ She had already told them the day before: ‘It's a very complicated legal matter’ better left to the experts…. [lawyers]

“Newly sworn Attorney General Michael Mukasey…is an attorney, not to mention a former federal prosecutor and veteran federal judge. But, hiding behind a mask of lawyerly caution, he has deliberately perpetuated the same false idea, refusing to acknowledge to the Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats the starkly obvious conclusion that waterboarding is illegal under US law on the ground that legal opinions must be based on 'real life’…

“ What Perino and Mukasey are doing, of course, is deliberately obfuscating the law of torture to support the president's effort to inoculate himself and his henchmen against possible future prosecution. Perhaps they can succeed in confusing at least some percentage of the public (an increasingly small percentage, it appears), but they are not fooling the prosecutors. Indeed, before uttering even one more patently ridiculous and legally unsupportable word in furtherance of this shameful campaign, Bush administration officials should find out what their own Justice Department career attorneys have already said about the law of torture - not in secret memos, but in publicly filed court documents.”

De la Vega goes on to describe the prosecution of ”Charles 'Chuckie' Taylor Jr., son of the former president of Liberia, Charles McArthur Taylor, with committing and conspiring to commit acts of torture on behalf of the former Liberian government's Anti-Terrorism Unit. The statute under which Taylor Jr. is charged - Title 18, United States Code, Section 2340 - is the very law that contains the definition of torture Bush administration appointees seem to find so befuddling…."

Read the whole article.

Then turn to former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman’s article, "Beyond Mukasey's Confirmation, White House Liability Issues Loom Large, published in Truthout on November 13th. “…[A]ttorney general nominee Michael Mukasey's evasiveness on the definition of torture has done something historic. It has made it unmistakably clear to mainstream observers that the president may be criminally liable for violating anti-torture laws. Criminal liability of this White House will have wider repercussions than Mr. Mukasey's confirmation. It will reverberate through his tenure as attorney general and beyond the end of the Bush administration.

“We now know that the reason Mr. Mukasey refused to acknowledge that waterboarding meets the legal definition of torture, or at the very least cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment, clearly had nothing to do with not being briefed about the procedure. If he didn't know at the time of the Senate committee hearing, he certainly learned afterwards that the US had considered waterboarding criminal and prosecuted it for at least a century. The real reason, as mainstream news analysts now acknowledge, was that publicly admitting waterboarding is torture or cruel and inhuman would have put the president in jeopardy of criminal charges.”

This article is also well worth reading in its entirety.

I note that on this day 62 years ago, 24 Nazi leaders went on trial before an international war crimes tribunal in Nuremburg, Germany, which brings me to The New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich’s October 14th article, "The Good Germans Among Us," in which he states, “ It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves…. By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s 'enhanced interrogation' techniques have a grotesque provenance: ‘Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions and long-time sleep deprivation.”

Rich’s final comment: "Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those 'good Germans' who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo. It’s up to us to wake up our somnambulant Congress to challenge administration policy every day. Let the war’s last supporters filibuster all night if they want to. There is nothing left to lose except whatever remains of our country’s good name.”

I wonder if our generation will be described as the “torture generation.” We live in a democracy, albeit a weakened one, but it’s not a dictatorship yet. How can we not be blamed if we allow our leaders to continue to torture?

(photo: Able2Know.org)

Columnists Frank Rich of The New York Times and Jon Spitz of the Mendocino County Observer comment on the Mukasey confirmation

From New York City (population 8,214,426) to Laytonville, California (population 1,301), the confirmation of Judge Michael Mukasey as our 81st Attorney General has our best columnists hopping mad.

Most of you know Frank Rich. Jon Spitz (photo) isn’t quite so well known, but I’m working on it. My first of what I hope are many posts featuring Jon’s columns appeared on October 23rd.

You may have already read Rich’s column, "The Coup at Home." He links Musharaff’s arrest of judges, lawyers, and human rights activists in Pakistan last week to Mukasey’s confirmation:

"Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad."

You won’t read what Jon says about it unless you happen to buy The Mendocino County Observer this Thursday in Laytonville or go here. Titled “Truth or Dare,” Jon describes the awkward position Mukasey found himself in when asked if waterboarding is torture. His inability to answer this straightforward question didn’t bother six Democrats, who joined with the Republicans to confirm Mukasey last Friday.

There’s a lot more to Jon's column, and it’s as interesting and as well written as Frank Rich’s.

Frank Rich explains why I can't keep up with Bush Administration malfeasance

Frank Rich, who writes a Sunday op ed column for the New York Times, writes from a perspective that involves taking a step or two back so he can view the “bigger picture.”

In my March 19 post, I excerpted from Rich’s op ed, The Ides of March 2003, a chronology “of some of the high points and low points in the days leading up to the national train wreck whose anniversary we mourn this week.”

This past Sunday, Rich’s column, Earth to G.O.P: The Gipper is Dead (subscription required but reposted here) cleared up why I’m having such a hard time saving, reading, and trying to write about what the Bush Administration is doing.

The focus of the article was the first Republican presidential debate and the prospects for any Republican Presidential candidate in 2008. According to Rich, “Aside from tax cuts and a wall on the Mexican border, the only issue that energized the presidential contenders was Ronald Reagan.”

Rich then takes a step back and looks at the Bush Administration through a telephoto lens: “… it could be argued that the Iraq fiasco, disastrous to American interests as it is, actually masks the magnitude of the destruction this presidency has visited both on the country in general and the G.O.P. in particular.

“By my rough, conservative calculation — feel free to add — there have been corruption, incompetence, and contracting or cronyism scandals in these cabinet departments: Defense, Education, Justice, Interior, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. I am not counting State, whose deputy secretary, a champion of abstinence-based international AIDS funding, resigned last month in a prostitution scandal, or the General Services Administration, now being investigated for possibly steering federal favors to Republican Congressional candidates in 2006. Or the Office of Management and Budget, whose chief procurement officer was sentenced to prison in the Abramoff fallout. I will, however, toss in a figure that reveals the sheer depth of the overall malfeasance: no fewer than four inspectors general, the official watchdogs charged with investigating improprieties in each department, are themselves under investigation simultaneously — an all-time record.”

No wonder I’m having a hard time keeping up!

(photo of Frank Rich – ColbertNation.com)