Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

The invaluable Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress, on his Emerging Democratic Majority site, discusses results of the latest Pew Research Center Poll. Things continue to look gratifyingly bad for The Weasel: Public views of Bush's character have taken a nose-dive since the last time Pew asked people for their impressions of it:

In fall of 2003, 62 percent said Bush was trustworthy and just 32 percent said he was not, a 30 point positive margin. Today, however, it's almost an even split--49 percent say he's trustworthy and 46 percent say he isn't. Similarly, he's slipped from 56 percent he does/38 percent he doesn't on "cares about people like me" to 48/49 today.

The biggest shift has been on "able to get things done", which has fallen from 68/26 to 50/42 today. And even characteristics like "a strong leader" (68/29 to 55/41) and "warm and friendly" (70/23 to 57/37) have declined substantially.

Across the board, those stellar character ratings which supposedly meant Bush could weather any political storm have become mediocre to poor. And he's lost the most ground among independents, only 38 percent of whom now believe Bush is trustworthy or cares about people like them. Even more amazing, less than half (48 percent) of indepedents now think Bush is a strong leader, which is a massive 24 point decline since Pew's previous measurement.

I've been wondering since November -- aside from any questions about voting-machine "problems" -- how the hell enough voters could possibly have thrown in their lot with the monkey who is The Weasel. It's still a mystery that so many continue to think he's "trustworthy." (Standards for trustworthiness having obviously changed over the course of the last several presidencies.)

But now, a more stimulating form of the same question presents itself for consideration: How low does he need to sink, and how pissed off does the electorate need to become, in order to chase him from office? When he gets down into the 20s or below, will he still be behaving as if -- ha, ha -- he "has been given a mandate by the American people"?

I suspect yes.

Which brings us to this:

(See the other distractions itemized by Ward Sutton's "Sutton Impact" cartoon, courtesy of the Village Voice.)

I haven't previously written here on the Downing Street memos, for the obvious reasons: I have little to say that others aren't saying, more effectively; and WLIR (let's be frank) is by design not exactly a major stop along the way for Web surfers hungry for breaking news.

But if the story of the Downing Street Memos can be kept alive, as these comments indicate it can, then The Weasel's regime may have met its tipping point.

For one thing, there isn't just a Downing Street Memo (as Sutton's cartoon implies, and as widely believed even among people who read newspapers). There are eight Downing Street Memos, plural, which you can view at the Afterdowningstreet.org site. The one which everyone cites, the July 23rd, 2002, memo, is there of course. But that was just the culmination of a whole series of them, all of which indicate that the notorious "fixing of the intelligence around the policy" was taking place throughout the build-up to the misAdministration's assault on the beaches of Congress and public opinion. Following are some excerpts.

From the "March 8, 2002 Memo from Overseas and Defence Secretariat":

• "The US administration has lot faith in containment and is now considering regime change." (Whoops, I thought that didn't happen until the WMDs failed to materialize!)
• "[T]he greater investment of Western forces, the greater our control over Iraq’s future, but the greater the cost and the longer we woul [sic] need to stay. the only certain means to remove Saddam and his elite is to invade and impose a new government. But this could involve nation building over many years. Even a representative government could seek to acquire WMD and build-up its conventional forces, so long a Iran and Israel retain their WMD and conventional armouries and there was no acceptable solution to Palestinian grievances." (Uh-oh. You mean the freedom-loving Iraqi people may not actually give up on national objectives to which they'd acquiesced under Saddam Hussein?)
• "A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers advice, non[e] currently exists. This makes moving quickly to invade legally very difficult." (Translation: In the absence of legal justification, the noun "invasion" and the adjective "legal" cannot appear in the same sentence.)
• "The return of UN weapons inspectors would allow greater scrutiny of Iraqi programmes and of Iraqi forces in general. If they found significant evidence of WMD, were expelled or, in face of an ultimatum, not re-admitted in the first place, then this could provide legal justification for large-scale military action." (Or, of course, if they found no evidence of WMDs at all, then an invasion could proceed anyhow.)

From "David Manning Memo - March 14, 2002 memo from David Manning (UK Foreign Policy Advisor) to Tony Blair recounting Manning’s meetings with his US counterpart Condoleeza Rice (National Security Advisor), and advising Blair for his upcoming visit to Bush’s Crawford ranch":

• "Condi’s enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed." (Prescient of her, eh? -- considering that liberating Iraq from the yoke of Saddam wasn't put about as a justification for invasion, for over another year.)
• "Bush is still smarting from the comments by other European leaders on his Iraq policy." (One of the few contexts in which one can legitimately couple The Weasel's name with any form of the word "smart.")
• "I think there is a real risk that the [US] Administration underestimates the difficulties. They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it." (Duh.)

From "March 22, 2002 memo from Peter Ricketts (Political Director, UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office) to Jack Straw (UK Foreign Secretary) providing Ricketts’ advice for the Prime Minister on issues of the threat posed by Iraq, connections to al Qaida, post-war considerations and working with the UN":

• "...even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW [chemical weapons/biological weapons] fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up." (Translation: "Chiefly, it is extremely worrying that we have no evidence at all.")
  
• "US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al Aaida is so far frankly unconvincing." (Yes, some of us on the west side of the pond noticed that, too.)
• "Military operations need clear and compelling military objectives. For Kosovo it was: Serb[i]a out, Kosovars back, peace-keepers in. For Afghanistan, destroying the Taleban and Al Qaida military capability. For Iraq, regime change does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam." (Jeebus. Someone was actually saying this in March, 2002? A staunch member of the Coalition of the Willing, at that!)

From "March 25, 2002 memo from Jack Straw (UK Foreign Secretary) to Tony Blair in preparation for Blair’s visit to Bush’s Crawford ranch":

• "The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few." (This echoes -- perhaps unintentionally -- the old kid's rhyme, "Don't worry if your job is mall,/And your rewards are few./Remember that the mighty oak/Was once a nut like you.")
• "... in the documents so far presented it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly differently from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action." ("It has been hard to glean" = "There is no evidence at all.")
  
• "A legal justification is a necessary but far from sufficient pre-condition for military action. We have also to answer the big question - what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything. Most of the assessments from the US have assumed regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq's WMD threat. But none has satisfactorily answered how that regime change is to be secured, and how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be better." (But it's not important to have everything planned out in advance! Sheesh, those wobbly-kneed Brits!)
• "Iraq has had NO history of democracy so no-one has this habit or experience." (And yet there's a first time for everything. The Americans took to democracy like fish to a pond, and yes it's true they're not behaving like they still believe in it, but even so...)

The whole thing, you know, would be merely incredibly depressing -- certainly cause for outrage -- if it weren't for the real possibility of its being the proverbial smoking gun, one to turn the tide of public opinion: away from reflexive jingoism, and back in the direction of common sense, decency, truth, justice, and the real American way.