The Commentariat -- June 19, 2014

Obsolete videos removed.

Alissa Rubin & Rod Nordland of the New York Times: "Alarmed over the Sunni insurgent mayhem convulsing Iraq, the country's political leaders are actively jockeying to replace Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, American and Iraqi officials said Thursday. The political leaders have been encouraged by what they see as newfound American support for replacing Mr. Maliki with someone more acceptable to Iraq's Sunnis and Kurds, as well as to the Shiite majority." ...

... Justin Sink & Alexander Bolton of the Hill: "President Obama is not close to seeking congressional authorization for airstrikes in Iraq. After a White House meeting between Obama and the top four leaders in Congress, all sides involved signaled they want to leave options open for handling a politically delicate and fluid crisis that threatens to leave jihadist terrorists in control of Iraq." ...

... The video of this photo-op, where we see Mitch McConnell -- if not John Boehner -- smiling & looking normal in the Oval Office just strikes me as bizarre:

... BUT then I remembered that several months ago McConnell released this video for news organizations to use for outside groups to use in their ads -- presumably in clips -- with stories about Mitch. Fake smiling is what he does:

Carl Hulse of the New York Times: "House Republicans will vote on their leadership on Thursday, but the outcome will essentially keep them in a holding pattern, with the real contest months if not years away.... The coming months will determine who can emerge as heir apparent to Mr. Boehner in the absence of Mr. Cantor and get established as the new voice and face of the House majority." ...

     ... CW: One possible scenario: Brat loses the general election to Democrat Jack Trammell, & Cantor gains back his seat in two years. This wouldn't give him back his job as minority leader, but he could still go for the top spot. This of course also depends upon whether or not Cantor & his family find the newfound mega-income that will accompany his loss too appealing to give up.

Rebecca Riffkin of Gallup: "Americans' confidence in Congress has sunk to a new low. Seven percent of Americans say they have 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in Congress as an American institution, down from the previous low of 10% in 2013. This confidence is starkly different from the 42% in 1973, the first year Gallup began asking the question."

** What DickKnew. Charles Blow: "... it's so galling to read [Dick] Cheney chastising this administration for its handling of the disaster that Mr. Cheney himself foresaw, but ignored." ...

** ... E. J. Dionne: "The Cheney polemic would be outrageous even if our former vice president's record on Iraq had been one of absolute clairvoyance. As it happens, he was wrong in almost every prediction he made about the war." ...

... Jonathan Chait: "Dick Cheney [Is] Not Completely Sure If Obama Is a Traitor." ...

... Here, Chait argues that we should be listening to the people who repeatedly got it wrong. Because, like, maybe they have good arguments now. CW: Also, Monkey Types Shakespeare Sonnet. After typing millions of random characters of gibberish.

Sam Kleiner in the New Republic: "With the capture of Ahmed Abu Khatalla, the alleged mastermind of the Benghazi attack, Senator [Lindsey] Graham [R-S.C.] is once again accusing Obama of being weak on terror for failing to try the suspect in the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay.... [Republicans'] attempt to push this case into a military commission is not only misguided, it is dangerous. In depicting disarrayed groups who perpetuate terrorism as unified actors in a 'war' on the United States, we send a signal that bolsters their credibility.... The Obama administration's balanced approach is spot-on, and hackneyed criticism from Republicans like Senator Graham once again misses the mark. This process of conducting an interrogation by the military and then putting the suspect in federal court allows for the military to do what it is best at and for prosecutors to do what they are best at. Republican attacks here are to be expected, but they have been proven wrong time and time again." ...

     ... CW: Seems to me there was a time when prominent Republicans behaved more-or-less honorably -- especially on matters of national security -- & raised objections to Democratic actions on issues with which they genuinely disagreed & had some sort of substantive evidence or philosophical reason for disagreeing. That "Republican attacks here are to be expected" is a sad commentary on the dissolute state of the party.

Jonathan Topaz of Politico: "One word — 'Iraq' -- was never mentioned at the unveiling of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's official portrait with Secretary of State John Kerry." CW: A reminder that so far George I Know There Are WMDs Here Somewhere Bush, Condi "Bin Ladin Determined to Attack" Rice & Colin "Weapons of Mass Destruction" Powell so far have not joined Cheney, Bremer, Wolfowitz, et al., on the op-ed pages & Sunday shows.

CW: Meant to link this yesterday. Tom Edsall of the New York Times: "Over the past three decades, Congress has conducted a major experiment in anti-poverty policy. Legislators have restructured benefits and tax breaks intended for the poor so that they penalize unmarried, unemployed parents -- the modern-day version of the 'undeserving poor.' At the same time, working parents, the aged and the disabled are getting larger benefits.... For the poorest of the poor, the results have been devastating."

Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post thinks that if Republicans take the Senate in November, House Republicans will be emboldened to impeach President Obama. This sounds a little wild, but as Capehart notes, "If Republicans are willing to ignore their leadership and jeopardize the full faith and credit of the United States, there really is nothing they aren't willing to do.... Obama is not on the ballot in November, but Obama is on the ballot in November. Democrats have it in their power to keep the Senate and save the Obama presidency from the all-but-certain asterisk of impeachment. Obama is not on the ballot in November, but Obama is on the ballot in November. Democrats have it in their power to keep the Senate and save the Obama presidency from the all-but-certain asterisk of impeachment."

In that little paper he owns, U.S. immigrant Rupert Murdoch writes an op-ed urging legislators to pass immigration reform. Firewalled. Google this blurb to read it: "There is rarely a good time to do hard things, and America won't advance if legislators act like seat-warmers."

Annals of Journalism, Ctd.

Brian Beutler of the New Republic: "... offering Dick Cheney or Doug Feith or Paul Wolfowitz column inches and airtime without also flashing neon culpability disclosures amounts to a conflict-of-interest error these editors and reporters and producers would never allow if they were soliciting somebody from, say, the American Petroleum Institute." ...

Kelly is right about this, a 2010 remark by Joe Biden of which I was unaware:

George Will Begins His Slow, Painful & Necessary Retirement. Tony Messenger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial page editor: "Starting today, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson replaces George Will [on our editorial page].... We believe that Mr. Gerson's commitment to 'compassionate conservatism' and his roots in St. Louis will better connect with our readers, regardless of their political bent. The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it."

CW: The other day I linked a column by Dana Milbank on the rude & unseemly treatment by members of a Heritage Foundation panel on Benghaaazi! & their audience to a Muslim attendee who asked a question. In a post titled "Dana Milbank's Heritage Disaster,' Dylan Byers of Politico, after having seen a clip of a portion of the forum, wrote a highly-critical review of Milbank's column. ...

... Milbank responds to Byers' criticisms & to Byers' practice of "armchair journalism": "... there was indeed a disaster: the sort of disaster that occurs when a journalist, from the comfort of his office, levels accusations based on a nine-minute clip of a 65-minute panel he hadn't attended. (Heritage didn't post the full video until well after the Byers report, and Byers didn't take me up on my offer to provide him earlier with my audio recording.)" ...

... Brian Beutler backs up Milbank. ...

... Update: Byers has a fairly classy response. Although he doesn't take back any of his original post, he points readers to Milbank's rebuttal & reports Milbank's major objections to his own critique. Not exactly a mea culpa, but not at all whiney, either.

Presidential Election 2016

Gail Collins: "Mitt Romney is back."

News Ledes

Reuters: "Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian separatists were locked in fierce fighting in the east of Ukraine on Thursday after rebels rejected a call to lay down their arms in line with a peace plan proposed by President Petro Poroshenko, government forces said."

CNN: "William 'Kyle' Carpenter lost most of his jaw and an eye when he fell on a grenade to shield a fellow Marine from the blast. His body shattered, one lung collapsed, Carpenter was nearly given up for dead after that 2010 Afghanistan firefight. Then he spent 2½ years in a hospital as doctors worked to rebuild his body.... On Thursday, he will become the eighth living veteran of U.S. combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award."

New York Times: "Two major studies by leading research groups published on Wednesday independently identified mutations in a single gene that protect against heart attacks by keeping levels of triglycerides -- a kind of fat in the blood -- very low for a lifetime. The findings are expected to lead to a push to develop drugs that mimic the effect of the mutations, potentially offering the first new class of drugs to combat heart disease in decades, experts say."

Words Matter

Several days ago, contributor P. D. Pepe brought to our attention a forensic examination by Christopher Ketchum, published in the New Republic, of a series of plagiarisms committed by Chris Hedges, formerly a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter & now an independent "journalist."

Not having read the Ketchum piece, I noted that it is now pretty easy to inadvertently plagiarize another's work. A good deal of research is cutting & pasting original or secondary sources, then using those sources to illustrate whatever you're writing about, & attributing the ideas and/or language to the original sources where you've used their material. Even if you use your own language, & it it quite different from the way your source expressed it, you still attribute the idea to him/her, & you cite book & page where the author expressed that idea.

So if Akhilleus writes that Bill Kristol is a "walking, talking cartoon," Since Akhilleus is a pseudonym, I might write, "One of my contributors likened Kristol to a cartoon," & I'd link the Reality Chex page where Akhilleus wrote the comment. I only "copied" one word of Akhilleus's piece & obviously it isn't necessary to footnote that, but what I lifted was his idea.

Nonetheless, since standard writing is, well, standard, it is sometimes difficult to tell your own work from something someone else has written. Over time, I might forget that it wasn't my original idea that Kristol was a cartoon character, & I might fail to attribute the idea to Akhilleus. I might even write, "Kristol is a walking, talking cartoon." That's a standard English sentence that lifts Akhilleus's original phrase, & I could easily forget it was not of my own making. It sounds like something I would say or write. Akhilleus could either call me out on it or let it go & take it as the highest form of flattery.

However, since reading the Ketchum piece, I've learned that lifting a phrase or two is not what Hedges did. Some of the incidences of Hedges' plagiarism are indefensible. They had to have been intentional. To make matters much worse, he clearly lied about how he came to include extensive passages from the work of another writer. In the most egregious -- and most obvious -- case Ketchum cited, Hedges pretended that he had conducted interviews that a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter had in fact conducted & previously published. Hedges copied the Inquirer reporter & his interviewees almost verbatim. You cannot forget that you never sought out or spoke to or even met the people somebody else interviewed. When confronted by a Harper's editor, Hedges alleged that the Inquirer reporter told Hedges it was A-okay to lift his original reporting without attribution. This is not even plausible, & Matt Katz, the Inquirer reporter, of course denied it. No reporter, nor his paper, would permit such a thing.

In another case, which is sort of funny & tremendously audacious, Hedges lifted a few sentences from Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Since the novel is often required reading in college American lit classes, some readers were certain to catch Hedges on this. In addition, Hemingway's novelistic style is not standard English, & a writer would know, in rereading & editing his own work, that he was not the author of the Hemingway stuff. Hemingway writing contents notwithstanding, nobody else really writes like Hemingway. (In fact, that's the point of Hemingway writing contests.)

At this point, I would say the only reason to read Hedges is to find out what other people are saying. Were I an editor or a publisher, I would not accept any material from Hedges. He should be toast. The fact that publications -- including the Nation -- are still willing to defend Hedges & accept his work is disturbing. ...

     ... Update: Hedges responds to Ketchum's New Republic piece in a statement published by TNR. Ketchum & the New Republic respond to Hedges' statement. If you read the original article & the newly-linked responses, I think you'll come down on the side of TNR. Hedges' response does not comport with what multiple sources told Ketchum & others. This doesn't seem to be a case of he-said/he-said. I think Ketchum made his case, especially on the worst incidents.

P.S. On the subject of words, see also Jeff Shesol's post on Justice Scalia's crafty manipulations of the meaning of words, linked in today's Commentariat. I knew Elena Kagan would be a smart jurist. (I'm still not sure she'll be a smart liberal jurist.) It looks as if Nino has met his match. No wonder he pouts all the time.

The Commentariat -- June 18, 2014

NEW. Ha! Mario Trujillo of the Hill: "The Washington Redskins' logo is disparaging and its trademark must be cancelled, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office wrote in a ruling Wednesday. The Redskins will continue to be able to use the name, but the team will not have all the legal benefits afforded to it when it is registered with the federal government.... The team can appeal the decision in court as it did in the past, and the trademarks will remain registered until after the review. The office made a similar ruling in 1992, but the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia reversed the board's decision after a lengthy litigation process in 2003. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) cheered the decision, going to the Senate floor to call for the team and its owner, Daniel Snyder, to end its use of the 'racist' name." Thanks to James S. for the link.

Mark Landler & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "President Obama is considering a targeted, highly selective campaign of airstrikes against Sunni militants in Iraq similar to counterterrorism operations in Yemen, rather than the widespread bombardment of an air war, a senior administration official said on Tuesday." ...

... The Worst People in the World -- Who Should Know to STFU -- Critique the "Obama Doctrine." Dick Cheney & Liz Cheney, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." If the Cheneys have no shame, you still would think even the editors of the WSJ opinion pages would know better.

... Katrina Vanden Heuvel, in the Washington Post: "Obama, himself 'right' on Iraq during the war's run-up, is also right today to resist calls for direct U.S. military action -- including airstrikes -- in Iraq.... Experience and history have (clearly) taught us that there is no military solution in Iraq. Only a political reconciliation can quell the unrest, and this requires more than bellicose calls for violence from 5,000 miles away." Vanden Heuvel is still knocking David Brooks. (See video & comments in the June 16 Commentariat.) Also, the major media for inviting neocons & other war hawks (McCain, Graham) to speak about the current crisis. ...

... Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast: "Joe Biden’s old suggestion about making three countries out of Iraq may or may not be the best solution here, but it sure doesn't look crazy now, even though he was sneeringly pooh-poohed by the people who swore that the war would lead to a garden of multiplying democracies." (Column also linked below.) ...

... Zeke Miller of Time: "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to step aside from his country as it gallops furiously toward civil war."

David Kirkpatrick & Eric Schmitt of the New York Times: "United States commandos have captured the suspected leader of the 2012 attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, White House and Pentagon officials said Tuesday. Apprehension of the suspect, Ahmed Abu Khattala, is a major breakthrough in the nearly two-year-old investigation into the attack, which also killed three other Americans, just two months before the presidential election in the United States." CW: Obviously, this is an Obama-led conspiracy to influence the midterm elections, which are coming up in a mere 4-1/2 months. Those commandos are Democratic stooges. * ...

... The Washington Post story, by Karen DeYoung & others, is here. (The Post broke the story.) ...

... David Kirkpatrick: Abu Khattala's "apprehension by United States military commandos and law enforcement agents may finally begin to address some of the persistent questions about who carried out the attack and why. Those questions have spawned a small industry of conspiracy theories, political scandals, talk radio broadcasts, and a continuing congressional investigation. Despite extensive speculation about the role of Al Qaeda in directing the attack in Libya, Mr. Abu Khattala is a local Islamist militant, with no known connections to international terrorist groups, according to American officials briefed on the criminal investigation and intelligence reporting, as well as other Benghazi Islamists who know him." CW: Oh. A broader conspiracy than I realized: it appears criminal investigators & intelligence officers are in the bag for Obama, too. ...

... Scott Wilson of the Washington Post: "The weekend capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, one of the suspected ringleaders of the Sept. 11, 2012, assaults on a U.S. diplomatic compound and a CIA-run annex, gives Obama another I-told-you-so moment in Washington's scorekeeping culture. But the achievement is likely to do little to tamp down the partisan fervor surrounding the administration's public management of the deadly Benghazi attacks.... Within hours of the news that Abu Khattala had been captured, congressional Republicans congratulated the U.S. military, if not the White House. But the partisan concern shifted quickly to the questions of where Abu Khattala would be held, at a time when Obama is seeking to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and whether the president would extend legal protections given to civilians charged with crimes. The answers from the administration -- no to Guantanamo, yes to due process -- disappointed some prominent conservatives":

Obviously, he should be put on trial. I'd bring him to Guantanamo. Where else can you take him to? -- Sen. John McCain (R-Az.)

Holding Khattala on a ship shows the haphazard approach which comes from not having rational detention & interrogation policies. Naval vessels were never meant to be detention and interrogation sites. -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)

Nor was Cuba. -- Tommy Vietor, former Obama aide & current Hillary Clinton advisor

You know who else kept detainees on ships? George W. Bush. -- Steve M.

Oh for God's sake. With all of these terrorists, we've had four or five convictions in military courts. We've had several hundred convictions in federal courts. Do the math. -- Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)

* Update: Glad we nabbed a #Benghazi suspect, but the timing is questionable. Did they let him wander, waiting for the perfect political opportunity? -- Former Rep. Joe Walsh (RTP-Ill.) ...

... BECAUSE ... it's important to remember, he wasn't really hiding. -- Rory Cooper, aide to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor

... Jonathan Chait: "Khattala, reports the New York Times,'"told both fellow Islamist fighters and others that the attack in Benghazi was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.' He's part of the cover-up." CW: So it's a pretty vast conspiracy. ...

... OF COURSE Hillary is part of the vast left-wing conspiracy. Evan McMurry of Mediaite: "A couple co-hosts from Fox's Outnumbered Tuesday reacted to the apprehension of Ahmed Abu Khattala ... by wondering about the timing of the capture given former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's book tour and interview with Fox's Bret Baier later this evening." See? She's even sabotaging Fox "News" AND/OR boosting her book tour. ...

     ... CW: I'm pretty sure that using U.S. commandos & the FBI to help Hillary sell more books is an impeachable offense.

... Jed Lewison of Daily Kos does a nice job of taking down the unbridled hypocrisy of the Three Amigos (the group has gone radically gender-neutral by replacing Joe Lieberman with Kelly Ayotte [R-N.H.]). ...

... Michael Tomasky: "What a disappointment! The Republicans are all set to unveil their new select committee to keep the [Benghazi] attack in the news, and Obama has to go and bring the alleged ringleader to justice."

Binyamin Appelbaum of the New York Times: "Federal Reserve officials, who have persistently overestimated the strength of the economic recovery, predicted last June that the economy in 2014 would finally grow more than 3 percent for the first time since the recession. The updated forecasts the Fed will publish on Wednesday are likely to reflect more modest expectations. The economy, after all, actually shrank during a wintry first quarter. High hopes are being replaced once again by disappointing data.... The continuing wait for faster growth has reinforced the concern of some critics that the Fed is retreating too quickly from its stimulus campaign." ...

... New York Times Editors: "The Fed has extracted about all the juice it can from low rates and continues to squeeze.... The basic problem -- spurring demand on the part of consumers and borrowers -- is outside its purview. Only Congress can provide the extra dollars for that, but lawmakers have been unwilling or unable to take action, even just to provide basics like federal unemployment benefits or highway and bridge repair. Given that failure to act, it is a wonder the economy has managed to grow at 2 percent."

Zeke Miller: "Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lashed out at opponents of gun control regulations Tuesday, saying they hold a viewpoint that 'terrorizes' the majority of Americans.'"

One of the most important I think that can happen today, Lynn Jenkins's bill, an idea of fairness, the idea that when you look across the street from the Capitol, you see the Supreme Court, you see the statue sitting there, blinded in the process with the weights in- between. -- House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, talking about something

Dana Milbank: Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca.), who is likely to become the next House majority leader, can't speak in public in full, comprehensible sentences: "... he is a native English speaker and he speaks fluently in private or in small groups. But put him in front of a crowd and his words come out as if they have been translated by Google from a foreign language.... It occurs when he is working from notes or making a prepared statement. What will happen when he takes questions as majority leader, which he seldom does now? ... He has had some high-profile failures as the party's top vote counter (on a couple of occasions, leaders lost or had to cancel votes they expected to win)...." ...

     ... CW: Seems to me McCarthy's double-speak (or half-speak) creates plausible deniability, a plus for any GOP leader, since the facts are seldom kind to Republicans.

Gregory Korte of USA Today: "It wasn't just a hard drive crash that led the Internal Revenue Service to lose Lois Lerner's e-mails from the time Lerner was in charge of holding up tax exemption applications from conservative groups. It was seven hard drive crashes, the lack of a centralized archive, a practice of erasing and reusing backup tapes every six months, and an IRS policy of allowing employees to decide for themselves which e-mails constitute an official agency record."

** Jeff Shesol, in the New Yorker, on Justice Scalia's narrow, rigid reinterpretations of the English language, a "skill" he has used for decades to twist interpretations of laws to his liking. When does "creation science" have nothing whatever to do with religion? When Nino gets out his dictionary. Now, in Elena Kagan, Scalia has met his match:

What Kagan has done [in the Abramski v. U.S. straw purchase case], in a neat twist on Scalia's analogy, is to highlight the ambiguity and contingency of language. And that, for Scalia, is something that can never be acknowledged, because it would lay bare the game he plays. His approach has always been to reach for a dictionary; find, in one edition or other, a definition that drives toward his predetermined decision; and express, eyes wide with disbelief, utter amazement that anyone could even think of seeing it any other way.

News Ledes

Guardian: "Islamist militants have attacked Iraq's largest oil refinery in the city of Baiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad, as Iran raised the prospect of direct military intervention to protect Shia holy sites." ...

     ... New York Times Update: "Refinery workers, eyewitnesses and an Iraqi Army officer reported the seizure of Iraq's biggest oil refinery by Sunni extremists on Wednesday after army helicopter gunships failed to repel their attack. But other Iraqi officials, including the commander of the garrison defending the refinery in Baiji, asserted that fighting was still going on inside the huge grounds of the facility, which had been shut down by the violence."

AP: "Ukraine's president said Wednesday that government forces will unilaterally cease fire to allow pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country a chance to lay down weapons or leave the country, a potential major development to bring peace to the country."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Georgia inmate Marcus Wellons was put to death late Tuesday for the 1989 rape and murder of a Cobb County teenager in the state's first execution where the source of its lethal-injection drug was cloaked in secrecy. Wellons' execution received heightened scrutiny because it was the first one in the country to be carried out since a botched execution occurred in Oklahoma seven weeks ago."