politics

U.S. and Russian relations are at their lowest point since the fall of the Berlin Wall due to an inexplicable confrontation the U.S. provoked against the one country in the world that can actually destroy us against a phantom threat by the Iranians that was a best a decade away.  Kristina Vanden Heuvel lays bare the sheer mindlessness of our foreign policy. 

The U.S. plan to base an ABM system in the Czech Republic and Poland allegedly aimed to target rogue missiles from Iran or North Korea provoked an enraged response from the highest levels of the Russian government and military and overt threats to target nuclear weapons at european countries that fall under the NATO umbrella. 

In as cunning an act of diplomatic stagecraft since Reagan said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall", Putin called Bush's bluff and offered to cooperate on a missile defense system based in Azerbaijan.  Bush having crowed about how much he wanted to let the Russians have transparencies on a system based in Eastern Europe, could hardly complaining when Putin offered to do just that, just in a different and legally sovereign location which would still allow any interceptors the opportunity to deflect ballistic weapons from Iran.   Even Stephen Hadley had to admit the administration will take the proposal under serious consideration, lest the U.S. lose any of the remaining credibility it has left with respect to international security matters. 

This is a clear win, for Russia, who will continue to do business with Iran while having veto power over a  joint U.S./Russia interceptor missile design meant to intercept their own technology all the while basing the worthless interceptor in a region over which you have effective control and from which geographically, none of Russia's missiles could be intercepted by the 'jointly developed system.'. 

Dear Editor:

The people who designed our republic were personally familiar with tyranny to the extent that they knew it to be the default state of government.

They established what they hoped would effectively prevent tyranny from taking root in this country. Their hopes fought against their experience that systems of government are never effective unless observed by the officials sworn to protect and defend them.. Deeply understanding human nature, they knew that public officials would find any constraints first irritating, then unreasonable and finally unnecessary. Officials would always grow comfortable in their power, believing that the overstuffed seats of privilege belonged to them personally. They would learn to treat the white houses they occupied in trust as their private homes, whether those white houses were addressed at Pennsylvania Avenue or Langford Road in Blythewood.

The only break on this dangerous course of human nature is to hold officials in the light of public scrutiny informed by an active and critical press.

So I applaud The State's April 29 editorial critiquing public officials for hiding the difficult, often embarrassing, but always necessary judgment of performance under the shadows of a loosely interpreted exemption from the Freedom of Information Act. You pointed out that it is wise of South Carolina to permit local governments the discretion to decide how much the public may be informed about personnel actions. But you stressed correctly that law does not demand that every awkward issue with a whiff of “personnel matters’ be hidden.

The town of Blythewood far exceeded the secrecy of the usual executive session when the mayor and council passed a critical resolution about my employment status as town administrator after an executive session that was not on the agenda, not posted and seemingly a surprise to some members of council. This executive session was held at the late end of the council meeting after all but a couple of die-hard citizens had left. The press left the meeting early because, reading the agenda, the press saw no public business to be addressed.

I too would prefer that any negative details about my employment with the town of Blythewood be kept private. I would prefer that any facts about my mistakes, as well as any lies to cover the mistakes of others, not be aired publicly. But my preferences, and the preferences of the mayor and council members, are not at issue here. The issue is the more lofty one expressed in the first paragraph of this letter. Whether in small towns or in great countries, citizens have the right to know what is happening to their government, regardless of possible embarrassment.

JOHN HICKS
Gilbert

The fact that Barack Obama is now under the protection of the Secret Service, nearly a year earlier than any other candidate Presidential candidate in our history (except HRC, who will remain under the protection of the SS as long as she is married to Bill Clinton) says a great deal about where we are at as a society.  Howard Fineman confesses the collective guilt and relief of mainstream white journalists attending the first Republican Presidential debate in Simi Valley when he wrote "I talked to my fellow reporters here about this last night, and they were uniformly relieved. So was I."

Anyone following even mainstream online blogs like Politico.com can see the naked hostility and racism directed Obama's way, if not direct threats to his life.  I don't read white supremacist blogs and sites but I can only imagine what is being said.  You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that one or more people, who are not stupid enough to post hostile messages on the web, may be actively plotting his demise.

By all accounts, Obama's appearances have generated such large crowds that he would be safer walking through Baghdad with a target on his back.  Hiring Blackwater as his praetorian guard would be unthinkable politically for Obama.  The damage to America's already horrendous image overseas would be incalculable if any harm were to come to Obama.  Michael Chertoff and the Department of Homeland Security, who now run the SS, surely didn't need to be reminded of this and the fact that any attempted or successful assassination would make the election of a Democrat all but inevitable in 2008.  This is not to say that keeping Obama safe so that HRC can be eviscerated by the GOP is part of the Republican strategy for 2008, but to ignore this reality would be naive.

Fineman and the liberal media want to keep hope alive and not have a replay of 1968 when we lost MLK and RFK.  Fineman muses that "there is an innocence, almost a naiveté, to Obama and his campaign."  This is of course ludicrous - naive and innocent men do not run for President.  More accurately, the administration doesn't need a martyr on its hands after botching Saddam's execution.     

Watching George Tenet pitching his new book At The Center Of The Storm on 60 Minutes was a nauseating experience.  Not being content with having failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks or to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and his top deputies prior to 9/11, Tenet now insists that he never really believed in the case for going to war with Iraq and was bullied by Cheney et al. 

In a letter to Tenet signed by six former CIA officers, he is rightly exorciated for attempting to burnish his reputation and to cash in on his failures.  Calling him "a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality", the former CIA officers charge that "By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States. Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush Administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis."

Where was this man's sense of duty to the American people?  At least Colin Powell, although equally culpable for making the case for the Iraq War, was asking hard questions of Tenet.  Powell insisted that Tenet sit behind him as he made the case for invading Iraq to the U.N. and Tenet did so.  More than any other single piece of evidence or speech made by any American official, including President Bush's infamous State of the Union address, the American people knew and trusted Colin Powell, who quite obviously realizes that he sold his soul in a misplaced sense of duty to the Commander in Chief leftover from his service in the Pentagon. 

Unlike Powell, who was obviously shut out of day to day foreign policy making despite having the title of Secretary of State, Tenet spoke to Bush every morning about the threats to American security.  While both men should have resigned in protest rather than enable Bush's war, only Tenet could have exerted strong back channel pressure in Congress with his briefings to the intelligence committees.  Had he raised any doubt in private about the intelligence that Congress was spoon fed by the neocon's, we may very well have avoided one of the worst foreign policy and military debacles in our history.

Politics in the United States has always been a phenomenon of the crowd. Citizens donate money to campaigns, elect politicians, come together to lobby government officials, etc.

So what's new?

In an Internet age, the traditional ways people band together to influence politics are cheaper and easier than ever... and new crowd sourcing efforts exist, in fact and in theory, that would've been impossible before.

As Jay Rosen notes, politicians are always claiming to involve a crowd of supporters.

We're looking to cut through all that and isolate any instances where "the many" and their contributions--especially their collected ideas, pooled knowledge or voluntary activity--have actually replaced the few, where the crowd's work has proven more effective, or just better than the ideas, knowledge and actions of hired guns, political professionals, or staff...

Only where the power of many is disruptive to the normal pattern in politics--replacing the old practice or generating a new practice--do we have a story worthy of Assignment Zero.

So how should we organize the story? And what examples do we have so far?

CAMPAIGNS: The Internet makes it possible to organize masses of volunteers and raise tons of money without the firm backing of your political party's establishment -- consider Howard Dean's 2004 campaign, which AssignmentZero editor Amanda plans to write about.

LEGISLATION: One Utah legislator successfully experimented with a wiki that enabled constituents to contribute to school voucher legislation, garnering press attention and ultimately easing the bill's passage.

OPEN GOVERNMENT: Porkbusters is a blogger-driven effort to reduce Congressional pork barrel spending. When founders Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds and N.Z. Bear found out about a secret hold placed on an anti-pork bill in the Senate, they asked their readers to track down the culprit by process of elimination. And they succeeded.

SO WHAT NEXT?

Our goal is a piece of journalism that explains this broad phenomenon.

So are these the best examples we've got, or can we do better? Let's use the assignments on the right to figure that out.

And are the three categories I've used the best way to organize the story? (If not, post your critique or alternative here.)

Questions? Feedback? Suggestions? E-mail me at conor.newassignment@gmail.com

You know things are bad for Bush when Robert Novak eviscerates the administration's Mideast policy in the Washington Post.  Novak is furious that Bush refuses to see and act on obvious signals from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority that they are ready to do a deal, albeit one step at a time (this is called "Diplomacy").  He pulls a 'j'accuse' on his old friend Eliot Abrams on the NSC for deliberately not taking action.  It is obvious to even to the most diehard of conservatives that any forward motion between Israel and the Palestinians would provide some cover for pragmatic maneuvering on Iraq and Afghanistan with friend and foe alike that would allow Bush to declare "Victory!" in time to give the GOP a prayer in the 2008 Congressional races and possibly even the White House.  Even though Olmert and Abbas are talking, the U.S. still needs to bless the proceedings in order for their to be a prayer for any progress.  Is it so difficult for a mid-level State Department person to say that 'the senior Hamas minister's statements are being studied?'  Novak isn't suggesting Bush drag Olmert and Abbas to Camp David and even this miniscule diplomatic nugget would allow both Olmert and the PA some breathing room against the maniacs on both sides. 

Bill Richardson's coup in apparently convincing the North Vietnamese to allow U.N. inspectors back into their facilities is extraordinary on several levels.  First, who greenlit this trip in the Bush administration?  Whoever set this up shows that with the exception of the entire Middle East, at least some level of adminisrative pragmatism has set in for critical foreign policy issues such as North Korea and trade disputes.  If things for Bush and the Republicans weren't so dire, they wouldn't be sending a legitimate, if long-shot Presidential candidate and a good bet for Vice President, to handle a deadly serious issue. 

The fact that Richardson (no relation) is the most qualified person in the country to negotiate nuclear treaties with North Korea, makes it all the more remarkable that he was sent and allowed to take full credit for the whole deal. 

There is a third way here for Bush and his cohorts - move even more quickly get our troops out of Korea, Japan, and Europe.  This will change the terms of the debate with respect to the structure and resource allocation amongst the armed services in the Pentagn.

 Tim Kane of the Heritage Foundation has a compehensive history of geographical U.S. troop deployment from 1950-2005.  America has expended enormous resources to project our power on a global basis on behalf of nations who should have long ago been able to take care of themselves.  Japan is under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, which is of course why Japan has not actually tested a nuclear weapon, since it knows and so does everyone else that it could assemble hundreds of warheads in a couple of months and deliver them by sea, air or ground.  Nearly all of Europe have a NATO guarantee from the U.S. if Russia decides to be unreasonable and crude in its actions.   The South Koreans have some bad-ass warriors, plenty of weapons, and we always have their back.  More importantly, they don't want another war and seem willing to engage the North with a long terrm view of gradual rapproachement.

If we can verify the shutdown of, or more likely, minimize, North Korea's nuclear capability and bring home most of our troops in South Korea and the DMZ home is 12 months,and start moving forces out of Europe and Japn at a fast caster clip our military would have a little breathing room..  It has been the perception that the Iraq War was executed on the cheap, in a lean corporate style, paid for by the less privileged families in America which has fueled the resentment boiling over in America today.  Lying about why we were invading clearly didn't help.