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Last July, it was revealed that the Office of Professional Responsibility in the Justice Department — the office “responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct involving Department attorneys” — repeatedly attempted to investigate whether DOJ lawyers acted improperly concerning their role in the President’s warrantless eavesdropping program, but finally stopped their investigation because the President refused to give them the security clearances they needed to conduct the investigation.

Yesterday, Murray Waas reported in National Journal that it was Alberto Gonzales who advised the President to deny those clearances even after Gonzales “learned that his own conduct would likely be a focus of the investigation.” The investigation which they blocked “would have examined Gonzales’s role in authorizing the eavesdropping program while he was White House counsel, as well as his subsequent oversight of the program as attorney general.”

The attempt to obstruct OPR’s investigation by refusing its investigators security clearances has always been extremely suspicious and impossible to defend, and this story never really received the attention it merited. Not only have virtual armies of DOJ lawyers and other officials been given security clearance to work on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” but even more incriminatingly, the President granted multiple security clearances of the type sought by OPR in order to allow the DOJ to investigate the leak of the NSA program to The New York Times.

Thus, when it came to trying to find and punish the whistleblower, the President granted all the security clearances the DOJ needed. But when it came to investigating whether the DOJ lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales, acted improperly, perhaps even illegally, the President blocked the investigation, at Gonzales’ behest, by (as always) invoking and exploiting national security concerns to deny the necessary clearances.

Denial of the clearances to OPR is an extraordinary act. In June, 2006, Gonzales appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee and either refused to answer or claimed he was unable to answer a long list of questions on countless topics. He agreed at the hearing to provide follow-up answers in writing. But for the next six months, the DOJ ignored that promise and provided nothing. It was only once Democrats took over Congress did the DOJ finally get around to answering those inquiries, and did so in the form of a January 18, 2007 letter from the DOJ’s Richard Hertling (recently posted by the FAS here – .pdf).

One of the questions Gonzales was repeatedly asked was whether a security clearance had ever been previously denied to OPR. He continuously refused to answer, but was finally forced to in the January, 2007 letter:

And:

What makes the denial of these clearances to OPR — the first ever in its history — even more extraordinary and suspicious is the sheer numbers of government employees who have been granted these clearances for other purposes. In an April 21, 2006 letter from the OPR’s Marshall Jarrett to Gonzales arguing for such clearances, Jarrett listed but a sampling of others who have been granted these same clearances:

The plainly illegal warrantless eavesdropping program is still, in my view, the area in which real investigations are most needed. And this obstructed OPR investigation is part of a clear, broader pattern whereby all such investigations into the NSA program have been blocked.

The administration has fought vigorously to prevent every possible avenue for scrutiny of their conduct — from the court cases challenging the legality of the NSA program which they continue to try to impede, to prior attempted Congressional investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee, and even to internal scrutiny such as the investigation which OPR sought to conduct. This OPR avenue was almost certainly of particular concern to them — hence the unprecedented efforts to block it — because DOJ attorneys knew that the warrantless eavesdroppoing program was illegal — and internal DOJ documents which they have repeatedly refused to disclose almost certainly reflect that knowledge — and yet the DOJ lawyers authorized the program even in the face of their knowledge of its unlawfulness.

The central purpose of FISA is to require oversight outside of the executive branch for any eavesdropping conducted on Americans because of the decades-long history of abuse of the eavesdropping power. We still do not know how the administration exercised that power in secrecy for five years when they were breaking the law, and it is long past time to find out.

And Alberto Gonzales’ plainly improper role in blocking an investigation which would have encompassed his own behavior should be added to the growing list of evidence showing just how corrupt he is. Despite all of that, it is imperative to keep in mind that there is nothing special about Alberto Gonzales. What he is, first and foremost, is a Bush loyalist, and his behavior is always a reflection, an outgrowth, of how the President thinks and how this administration has conducted itself for years.

UPDATE: House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers wrote a letter (.pdf) to Gonzales yesterday about this matter, citing Waas’ article and directing Gonzales to “immediately address” this question: “did you advise the President that the OPR inquiry should be shut down and did you inform the President that your own conduct would be a subject of the inquiry?” (h/t Bamage).

There is one reason and one reason only why there is suddenly such a tidal wave of revelations concerning extreme misconduct by the Bush administration: namely, the subpoena power which the American people vested in the Democrats last November. Democrats are unlikely to do anything about the war in Iraq and multiple other critical items, and that is just as disgraceful and infuriating as one can express. But the real promise of a Democratic victory in November was always the investigative power — the ability to expose the true extent of corruption and wrongdoing of the entire Bush edifice. That process is only beginning — there is much, much more to come — but it is a vital prerequisite for demonstrating to Americans just how pervasive and deliberate has been the criminality of this Government, aided and abetted for years by their limitlessly loyal Republican Congressional servants.

UPDATE II: A similar letter to Gonzales which also cites Waas’ article — signed by Senate Judiciary Committee members Feingold, Kennedy, Durbin and Schumer — is here. (.pdf). That letter demands that, “due to the seriousness of this matter,” Gonzales answer questions about the story “as soon as possible, and in no case later than Tuesday, March 20.”

These were the kinds of demands for information — designed to learn what the Executive branch was doing — that were completely ignored by the administration for years and, to their ultimate disgrace, continuously blocked by Congressional Republicans, whose only goal for the last six years has to been to prevent the Leader from having any oversight at all. These demands for information can no longer be ignored. I assume (or at least hope) that Congressional Democrats realize that getting actual, truthful information is going to take more than just a letter or even a subpoena, but at the very least, their ability to demand information keeps these stories alive and enables further inquiry.

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This blog’s move to Salon has been virtually free of technical or other similar problems, something that almost never happens with changes of this sort. But the one ongoing, regular complaint I still hear from regular readers of the old blog concerns the annoyance of having comments appear on multiple pages, thus requiring one to scroll through page after page in order to read the discussion, rather than having all comments open on one page, the way they do with Haloscan and most other blog comment programs.

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Revelations that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned assassination plots against former Presidents Carter and Clinton — especially Carter — are causing great confusion among right-wing Civilization Warriors. After all, as John Hinderaker previously pointed out: “Jimmy Carter isn’t just misguided or ill-informed. He’s on the other side.”

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On February 28, George Bush hosted what he called “a literary luncheon” to honor “historian” Andrew Roberts. Accounts of that luncheon — which describe the “lessons” the guests taught the President (and they call them “lessons”) — really provide an amazing glimpse into the Bush mindset and his relationship with neoconservatives.

Roberts recently wrote the right-wing historical revisionism tract entitled History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. The book, as Roberts himself described it in an interview with Front Page Magazine, “does not consider British imperialism to have been a Bad Thing, argues that the Versailles Treaty was not harsh enough on Germany, [and] defends the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki . . . . ” A central theme is that “Intellectuals of the Left bear a heavy responsibility for the cruelties and savagery of the 20th century,” and Roberts’ world-view is filled with banalities like this:

I fear, in the light of Congress’s recent nonbinding (and utterly self-contradictory) resolution opposing the surge, the gross bias of much of the Left-Liberal media, and the present poll ratings of Sen Hillary Clinton, that the US will lose the will to fight the War against Terror in any manner that might hold out the hope of ultimate victory.

So one can see why Roberts was chosen to be honored as the President’s new favorite historian, and why his “history” book, which affirms George Bush’s imperial worldview in every way, has become one of the President’s favorites.

The White House invited a tiny cast (total: 15 guests) of standard neoconservatives and other Bush followers to the luncheon, including Norman Podhoretz (father-in-law of White House convict Eliot Abrams), Gertrude Himmelfarb (wife of Irving Kristol and mother of Bill), Mona Charen, Kate O’Beirne, Wall St. Journal Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot, etc. etc. The Weekly Standard‘s Irwin Stelzer was also invited and wrote about the luncheon in the most glowing terms.

Stelzer’s account provides truly illuminating insight into what neoconservatives have been filling the President’s head with for years now, and demonstrates how they have managed to keep him firmly on board with their agenda. The most critical priority is to convince the President to continue to ignore the will of the American people and to maintain full-fledged loyalty to the neoconservative agenda, no matter how unpopular it becomes.

To do this, they have convinced the President that he has tapped into a much higher authority than the American people — namely, God-mandated, objective morality — and as long as he adheres to that (which is achieved by continuing his militaristic policies in the Middle East, whereby he is fighting Evil and defending Good), God and history will vindicate him:

On one subject the president needed no lessons from Roberts or anyone else in the room: how to handle pressure. “I just don’t feel any,” he says with the calm conviction of a man who believes the constituency to which he must ultimately answer is the Divine Presence. Don’t misunderstand: God didn’t tell him to put troops in harm’s way in Iraq; belief in Him only goes so far as to inform the president that there is good and evil. It is then his job to figure out how to promote the former and destroy the latter. And he is confident that his policies are doing just that.

Or, as luncheon attendee Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute recalled (also in The Weekly Standard) the President saying: “I want to have my conscience clear with Him. Then it doesn’t matter so much what others think.” (Novak also revealingly marveled that “The President was not at all intimidated by his fifteen or so guests” even though the guests included Podhoretz, Himmelfarb and “Irwin Stelzer himself” — in Novak’s world, one expects the President to be intimidated to be in the presence of such powerful neoconservative luminaries, not the other way around).

Stelzer recounts what he calls the multiple “lessons” they taught Bush at this luncheon. One of the key lessons is Roberts’ view that the U.S. should be most concerned with its relationships with the other “English-speaking countries in the world,” and not worry nearly as much about all those countries where they speak in foreign tongues (“Lesson Four: Cling to the alliance of the English-speaking peoples”).

But that “lesson” led Bush to bewilderingly wonder why there was such rising anti-Americanism all over the world, even in English-speaking countries such as England (“‘Is it due simply to my personality?’ he wondered, half-seriously. ‘Is it confined to intellectuals?’ asked a guest”). Anti-Americanism, the neoconservatives instructed Bush, is something he should just ignore. As long as he continues to follow neoconservatism, that is all that matters:

The combined Roberts-Stelzer response: The causes of rampant anti-Americanism do indeed include dislike of Bush. But there are others: the war in Iraq; anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian sentiment, laced with some covert anti-Semitism; and resentment of American power. Roberts urged the president not to concern himself with these anti-American feelings, since in a unipolar world the lone superpower cannot be loved. His advice: “Get your policies right and history will prove a kind muse.”

Nothing matters — not the disapproval of the American people of the President’s actions nor rising anti-Americanism around the world. He should simply ignore all of that and continue to obey the mandates of neoconservatism because that is what is Good and his God will be pleased.

Other lessons that Bush was taught that day: “First: Do not set a deadline for withdrawal. That led to the slaughter of 700,000 to 1 million people in India, with the killing beginning one minute after the midnight deadline.” They also told the President to ignore the fact that other powerful countries and even empires that tried to dominate the world have all collapsed. Those incidents are irrelevant and teach us nothing because — unlike the Glorious Leader today — those people simply lacked the Will to Power. Thus:

Second lesson: Will trumps wealth. The Romans, the tsars, and other rich world powers fell to poorer ones because they lacked the will to fight and survive. Whereas World War II was almost over before Americans saw the first picture of a dead soldier, today the steady drumbeat of media pessimism and television coverage are sapping the West’s will.

They also instructed the President to continue his policies of indefinite imprisonment without charges: “Third lesson: Don’t hesitate to intern our enemies for long, indefinite periods of time. That policy worked in Ireland and during World War II. Release should only follow victory.” “Victory,” of course is decades away — it’s a Permanent War — so the “lesson” they are teaching is to imprison people forever with no charges and not to worry about all those whiny French complaints that doing so is un-American. American values are no competition for the imperatives of neoconservative glory.

The lessons continued. “Appeasement,” of course, is the Ultimate Evil, the Great French Sin. Hence: “Fifth lesson: We are fighting an enemy that cannot be appeased; were that possible, the French would already have done it–a Roberts quip that elicited a loud chuckle from the president.”

Finally, the neoconservatives left Bush with the overarching instruction — namely, the only thing that he should concern himself with, the only thing that really matters, is Iran. Forget every other issue — the welfare of the American people, every other region around the world — except the one that matters most:

The closing note was a more serious one. Roberts said that history would judge the president on whether he had prevented the nuclearization of the Middle East. If Iran gets the bomb, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries will follow. “That is why I am so pleased to be sitting here rather than in your chair, Mr. President.” There was no response, other than a serious frown and a nod.

The President, concluded Stelzer with great satisfaction, “worries less about his ‘legacy’ than about his standing with the Almighty.” And as a result of this luncheon, the President’s standing with the Almightys in the neoconservative circle was as secure as ever. Another luncheon is likely planned soon, since Stelzer also noted that “Bush has circulated copies of Natan Sharansky’s The Case for Democracy to his staff, and recommended Mark Steyn’s America Alone.”

Irving Kristol (Himmelfarb’s husband) has written in the past about the need to exploit religious and moral concepts in order to manipulate the masses, and his intellectual North Star, Leo Strauss, has advocated — as Strauss scholar Shadia Drury documented — that “those in power must invent noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit” — a view Kristol has endorsed. One can see that dynamic powerfully at work in the interaction between these neoconservatives and the President. They have seized upon the President’s evangelical fervor and equated his “calling” to wage war for Good in the world with the neoconservative agenda of endless wars in the Middle East.

And the more unpopular the President becomes as a result, the more of a failure these policies are, the more strongly they tell him to ignore all of that, that none of it matters, that his God and history will conclude that he did The Right Thing, provided that he continues steadfastly to pursue their agenda. And the President believes that. That is why nothing will stop him in pursuing the path he created years ago when, in January, 2002, he became convinced to name not only Iraq, but also Iran, as standing members of the “Axis of Evil” (even though our relations with Iran were rapidly improving at the time) and cited the 9/11 attacks in order to all but vow war on those countries, despite their having nothing to do with those attacks. The President’s “lessons” at the feet of neoconservatives continue, and he is as faithful a student as ever.

UPDATE: Writing in Salon about this same luncheon, Sidney Blumenthal reported (h/t Vast Left):

The subject of Winston Churchill inspired Bush’s self-reflection. The president confided to Roberts that he believes he has an advantage over Churchill, a reliable source with access to the conversation told me. He has faith in God, Bush explained, but Churchill, an agnostic, did not. Because he believes in God, it is easier for him to make decisions and stick to them than it was for Churchill. Bush said he doesn’t worry, or feel alone, or care if he is unpopular. He has God.

We have long known that Bush Is Churchill (along with all the chest-besting neoconservatives who cheer on wars), but now we learn (from Bush) that he has become convinced that he is stronger than Churchill because Bush “has God” and Churchill didn’t.

UPDATE II: I will likely write more about this later, but for the moment, I will simply highly recommend this new article by American Conservative Editor Scott McConnell, which focuses on the role of the blogosphere in expanding the scope of permissible debate over Israel and, specifically, the role played by right-wing Israeli groups in influencing American foreign policy.

Entitled “Bloggers v. the Lobby,” McConnell argues that “the blogosphere is playing a role in bringing to the fore these kinds of dissenting views — though they may be majority views — letting them circulate and evolve under the test of critical argument.” He focuses on some recent writings on AIPAC, Wes Clark, Iran, and domestic politics by Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and this post written by me.

Ezra adds some worthwhile thoughts on this article both here and here, including a reference to Barack Obama’s highly commendable (and startlingly rare) discussion of Palestinian suffering in front of the AIPAC crowd, the day before he addressed AIPAC.

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Revelations about White House involvement in the firing of the U.S. Attorneys means that the testimony of top Justice Department officials to Congress was fundamentally false. And everyone knows that now. As The Washington Post reports:

Administration officials say they are braced for a new round of criticism today from lawmakers who may feel misled by recent testimony from Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and William E. Moschella, principal associate deputy attorney general. Several Democrats have called in recent days for Gonzales to resign.

Lying to Congress is what this administration generally — and the DOJ specifically — has done continuously. They lied to Congress about the FBI’s use of NSLs in order to induce re-authorization of the Patriot Act, and — now that those lies are exposed — they are now forced to retract those statements and change their false testimony made under oath. Alberto Gonzales made repeated false statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the state of the President’s eavesdropping activities, some of which he had to retract and some of which he still has not. And, of course, the false statements made over the years to the Congress by the administration regarding Iraq are literally too numerous to chronicle.

None of these acts occur in isolation. They are all part of the broader view of the Bush administration that the President’s power cannot be constrained by the law or by the Congress. They believe they have the right to lie to Congress about their behavior, even though lying to Congress is, as Atrios noted today, a felony.

It’s so vital to note that this Republican belief in the right to lie to Congress has deep roots back in the Reagan administration and, even before that, in the Nixon administration. I recommended this once before but I really urge you to watch this 1987 PBS documentary by Bill Moyers called The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis. There are multiple clips from the Iran-Contra scandal and the serial, proud lying to Congress and the American people in which top Reagan officials engaged.

Oliver North became a beloved hero among Republicans because of how proudly he admitted to misleading the Congress. The North footage is just striking. It begins at 5:20 of the video, and it is really worth watching because his boastful tone cannot be conveyed by the transcript, but this an exchange North had with House counsel John Nields that made North a superstar among the Republican faithful:

NORTH: I will tell you right now, counsel, and to all the members here gathered, that I misled the Congress.

NIELDS: At that meeting?

NORTH: At that meeting.

NIELDS: Face to face?

NORTH: Face to face.

NIELDS: You made false statements to them about your activites in support of the Contras?

NORTH: I did.

North then goes on to “justify” why lying to Congress was the patriotic thing to do. Days later, North’s loyal secretary, Fawn Hall, described the prevailing ethos at the Reagan National Security Council this way: “Sometimes you have to go above the written law.”

All of that lying began with President Reagan himself, who, exactly at the time when the U.S was defying its own embargo on Iran by offering weapons to the Ayatollah Kholmeni in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages, was beating his chest with tough-sounding — and totally false — proclamations like this: “Let me further make it plain to the assassins in Beirut and their accomplices wherever they may be, that the U.S. will never make concessions to terrorists.”

In November, 1986, Reagan went on national television and issued this flat-out and totally false denial:

The charge has been made that the U.S. has shipped weapons to Iran as ransom payment for the release of American hostages in Lebanaon — that the U.S. undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false.

Reagan officials Eliot Abrams and John Poindexter were both convicted of charges arising out of their lying to Congress, and both were given highly sensitive jobs in the Bush administration, where Abrams remains today. Obviously, not only is lying to Congress not considered a disqualifying flaw by the Bush administration, it is considered a virtue, an exercise of a legitimate right on the part of the President. The heroes of the Republican movement in the 1980s were heroes not despite their lying to Congress, but because of it. It’s considered heroic and noble.

Of course, the reason that lying to Congress is a felony is because Congress is composed of the representatives of the American people, and when executive branch officials lie to Congress, they are lying to the country. They subvert the entire constitutional order by preventing the American people from exercising overisight over the executive branch through their representatives in Congress, and it turns the President into an unchecked, unaccountable ruler. That is precisely why lying to Congress is considered to be virtuous and an entitlement by this administration and the movement which spawned it (the truly bizarre demands for Lewis Libby’s pardon further reflect not merely an indifference, but this same admiration, for those who lie in pursuit of The Right-Wing Cause).

Illegal behavior — in the form of, among other things, continuous and deliberate deceit of the Congress — is pervasive at the highest levels of the Bush Justice Department and it has plainly become a central part of the Republican ethos. It’s become a plank in their ideology, literally. Is it really necessary even to make the case as to why we cannot allow that, and must begin — now — enforcing the law and imposing consequences for this rampant law-breaking?

UPDATE: Kudos to Jay Carney of Time for acknowledging his error in judgment in being dismissive of this story, and giving credit to Josh Marhsall and others in the blogosphere who kept pushing it. Says Carney: “The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I’d first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire.”

That’s a pretty significant acknowledgment from Time‘s Washington Bureau Chief. Like with anything else, the more interaction there is with bloggers, the more difficult the caricatures will be to sustain.

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In his speech to the AIPAC convention yesterday, Dick Cheney laid out his thirst for literally endless war — and his equally intense aversion to war-avoidance — as unabashedly as can be. The towering question which America faces is whether it wants to continue to embrace this bloodthirsty and truly crazed vision (which many leading presidential candidates seem to share), or whether we want to repudiate it fundamentally. This is what lies at the core of Cheney’s world view:

An enemy that operates in the shadows and views the entire world as a battlefield is not one we can fight with strategies used in other wars. An enemy with fantasies of martyrdom is not going to sit down at a table for negotiations. Nor can we fight to a standoff — (applause). Nor can we fight to a standoff, hoping that some form of containment or deterrence will protect our people. The only option for our security and survival is to go on the offensive, facing the threat directly, patiently and systematically, until the enemy is destroyed. (Applause.)

Cheney, of course, is not merely speaking there about Al Qaeda, but about the whole range of Evil Enemies against whom we must seek merciless and final destruction, including those about whom his audience cares most — Iran, Syria, the Palestinians, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Just compare Cheney’s mentality as he himself described it to the core description offered 43 years ago in Harper‘s by Richard Hofstadter of the defining attributes of The Paranoid Style in American Politics:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic termsb

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.

Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

What Hofstadter described almost five decades ago as the mental hallmark of the right-wing paranoid is exactly what came out of Cheney’s mouth yesterday almost verbatim. That is to be expected, as Hofstadter noted at the end of his essay:

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. . . .

Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

That describes not only Dick Cheney and his followers, but Osama bin Laden and his followers as well. As noted a couple of weeks ago, if you read Cheney’s speeches, they sound conceptually almost exactly like those of Osama bin Laden’s (or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s) — we are in an apocalyptic struggle of Good versus Evil; we must obliterate the Evil Enemy mercilessly and without limits; and the Other Side wants to dominate the world with superior force and the only priority that matters is to crush them. This is how Dick Cheney described the cave-dwelling religious radicals yesterday:

We are the prime targets of a terror movement that is global in nature and, yes, global in its ambitions. The leaders of this movement speak openly and specifically of building a totalitarian empire covering the Middle East, extending into Europe and reaching across to the islands of Indonesia, one that would impose a narrow, radical vision of Islam that rejects tolerance, suppresses dissent, brutalizes women and has one of its foremost objectives the destruction of Israel. . . .

And their aim, ultimately, is to acquire the means to match that hatred and to use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to impose their will by unspeakable violence or blackmail.

Does Dick Cheney really believe that Osama bin Laden is going to rule over a “totalitarian empire” that subsumes all of Europe, the Middle East and even “the islands of Indonesia,” destroy Israel, and impose their will on the world with their stockpiles of nuclear weapons? One can debate what’s really in someone’s mind only with speculation, but I think he probably has come to convince himself of that. There is no doubt that hordes of the hard-core Twenty-Three-Percenter followers have come to believe that. And our foreign policy, and large parts of the domestic behavior of our government, is absolutely predicated on that twisted worldview.

As always, the person whom Cheney quoted most heavily in his speeche yesterday is bin Laden, because they see world events in exactly the same apocolyptic terms. Here is Cheney quoting bin Laden’s thought process which, as is often the case, matches Cheney’s exactly:

Yet the critics conveniently disregard the words of bin Laden himself. The most serious issue today for the whole world, he has said, is this third world war that is raging in Iraq. He calls it a destiny between infidelity and Islam. He said the whole world is watching this war and that it will end in victory and glory or misery and humiliation. And in words directed at the American people, bin Laden declares, “The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever.”

This leader of al Qaeda has referred to Baghdad as the capital of the Caliphate. He has also said, and I quote, “Success in Baghdad will be success for the United States. Failure in Iraq is the failure of the United States. Their defeat in Iraq will mean defeat in all their wars.”

Obviously, the terrorists have no illusion about the importance of the struggle in Iraq. They have not called it a distraction or a diversion from their war against the United States. They know it is a central front in that war and it’s where they’ve chosen to make a stand.

As always, it is the warped, delusional and paranoid rhetoric of Osama bin Laden which shapes our foreign policy and molds (and mirrors) the thinking of our highest government officials. Osama bin Laden, from the remote Pakistani cave in which we are told he is forced to hide, has proclaimed an apocalyptic theological battle, and therefore, that is how we must approach the world. After all, Bin Laden says so, and — as always — he’s right.

Perhaps most amazingly, Cheney continues to pay lip service to this notion: “The war on terror is more than a contest of arms and more than a test of will, it is also a battle of ideas. We know now to a certainty that when people across the Middle East are denied freedom, that is a direct strategic concern of all free nations.”

But no rational person can dispute that we are losing that “front” of the “war” as completely as is possible. And it is Cheney’s vision for endless obliteration of our “enemies” without negotiation or compromise, which is precisely what is fueling, and will continue to fuel, that defeat.

Jordan’s King Abdullah delivered an extremely important though almost completely ignored address to Congress last week in which he implored the U.S. to stop blindly supporting Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians and instead work towards a resolution, precisely because nothing fuels anti-American hatred and Islamic radicalism as much as Israel’s ongoing occupation. This is what he said:

Nothing impacts this choice more than the future of peace in the Middle East. I come to you today at a rare, and indeed historic, moment of opportunity, when there is a new international will to end the catastrophe. And I believe that America, with its enduring values, its moral responsibility, and yes, its unprecedented power, must play the central role. . . .

The entire international community has vital decisions to make about the path forward, and how to ensure Iraq’s security, unity, and future. But we cannot lose sight of a profound reality. The wellspring of regional division, the source of resentment and frustration far beyond, is the denial of justice and peace in Palestine.

There are those who say, ‘It’s not our business.’ But this Congress knows: there are no bystanders in the 21st Century, there are no curious onlookers, there is no one who is not affected by the division and hatred that is present in our world. Some will say: ‘This is not the core issue in the Middle East.’ I come here today as your friend to tell you that this is the core issue. And this core issue is not only producing severe consequences for our region, it is producing severe consequences for our world.

The security of all nations and the stability of our global economy are directly affected by the Middle East conflict. Across oceans, the conflict has estranged societies that should be friends. I meet Muslims thousands of miles away who have a deep, personal response to the suffering of the Palestinian people. They want to know how it is, that ordinary Palestinians are still without rights and without a country. They ask whether the West really means what it says about equality and respect and universal justice.

Everyone knows that the Bush administration’s explicit abandonment of any pretense of objectivity or broker role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict — replaced by our virtual participation on the side of Israel in that conflict — has done as much, if not more, than any single other factor to fuel the Islamic radicalism which we claim we are so eager to defeat (the only cause which can possibly compete in terms of significance is our ongoing active involvement in the internal affairs of virtually every Middle East country, as symbolized by our military occupation of multiple countries in that region).

King Abdullah’s message was, of course, the same conclusion reached by the bipartisan, super-Establishment Baker-Hamilton Commission — the conclusion which single-handedly provoked the most vicious attacks on Jim Baker as an anti-semite:

The United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.

There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This commitment must include direct talks with, by, and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel’s right to exist), and particularly Syria — which is the principal transit point for shipments of weapons to Hezbollah, and which supports radical Palestinian groups.

The United States does its ally Israel no favors in avoiding direct involvement to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict.

But Cheney goes before AIPAC and sets conditions on our negotiating — as opposed to waging endless war — that are, by design, never going to happen, and as a result, this is how we are faring in the “war of ideas”:

Israel, Iran and the United States were the countries with the most negative image in a globe-spanning survey of attitudes toward 12 major nations. Canada and Japan came out best in the poll, released Tuesday. . . .

Israel was viewed negatively by 56 percent of respondents and positively by 17 percent; for Iran, the figures were 54 percent and 18 percent. The United States had the third-highest negative ranking, with 51 percent citing it as a bad influence and 30 percent as a good one. Next was North Korea, which was viewed negatively by 48 percent and positively by 19 percent.

We’re sandwiched between Iran and North Korea in terms of how the world perceives us. And there should be no debating whether that collapse of our credibility in the world matters, given that George Bush and Dick Cheney themselves define this “war” as a “war of ideas,” with the goal the winning of “hearts and minds” of people around the world as the key to our national security. It is hardly possible for us to lose that “war” more devastatingly than we are losing it, and the obvious cause is the twisted, bloodthirsty and sociopathic mentality — shared by Osama bin Laden and the Bush movement alike — which was laid out with such ugly nakedness by the Vice President yesterday.

Far more than haggling over Iraq bills that are not going anywhere or picking apart the various proposals of each candidate, the critical priority is to demand that these fundamental premises guiding our behavior in the world be meaningfully examined and debated. The Baker-Hamilton Report actually tried to provoke such an examination, which is why it was so viciously demonized and instantaneously discarded. But until those premises are candidly discussed, we are going to remain on the incomparably dangerous path which the Bush presidency has so fervently embraced.

UPDATE: Speaking of endless war, Dick Cheney and AIPAC, Congressional Quarterly reported last week that AIPAC and its Congressional allies were “pushing to strike a provision slated for the war spending bill that would, with some exceptions, require the president to seek congressional approval before using military force in Iran.” As BooMan documents today, they succeeded: “key language mandating that Bush get Congressional approval before going to war with Iran has been taken out.”

For awhile, many people were resisting the notion that right-wing Israeli-centric groups like AIPAC (as absolutely distinct from the majority of American Jews generally) were “agitating for a U.S. war with Iran,” but the evidence proving that becomes clearer all the time (one commenter here, Gator90, was insistent that there was no evidence of such a connection, but to his great credit, acknowledged that there was in the wake of the CQ story). The AIPAC-type agitators combine with the Cheney-type paranoid militaristic hysterics to ensure that the U.S. continues with its warmonger posture in the world.

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