Iran-Contra II?... Perhaps you've been following the case of the Defense Department analyst Larry Franklin, whom the FBI is investigating for passing classified documents to Israel. Perhaps you've read that Franklin works in the office of Undersecretary Douglas Feith. Perhaps you've noticed that this is the same shop that sponsored Ahmed Chalabi and pushed raw intel about an ultimately disproven partnership between Saddam and Osama. And perhaps you've wondered where this FBI investigation might be headed. If so, then read this. It's the first installment of an investigative project that Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and I have been working on. It's about yet another rogue intel operation involving these same folks and a couple names you might remember from the past: neocon operative Michael Ledeen and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar of Iran-Contra fame.

Hypocrisy Reigns....Shouldn't it matter that conservatives don't get exercised at all over pro-choice Republican Catholics in high-profile positions? Sure, from time to time they take on PCRCs (we'll use the shorthand for simplicity's sake) like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, but that's because they don't consider them "real" Republicans anyway. When push comes to partisan shove, however, most conservatives appear to be willing to set aside their single-minded campaign to promote the sanctity of life for the sake of some high-wattage pols.

Look at the line-up for next week's Republican Convention. On three out of the four evenings, the primetime programming stars a high-profile Republican Catholic who also happens to be pro-choice. Between Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Pataki, their states are responsible for 35 percent of the abortions performed in the U.S. And yet you'll hear nary a peep of protest about this from the conservative Catholic League, a supposedly "non-partisan" organization that has been frothing in continuous outrage over John Kerry's pro-choice leanings.

The dirty little secret about these groups is that they don't demand that Catholic politicians -- who, according to church teaching, should be held to a higher standard because of their visible status -- conform to all church positions on issues like the death penalty or war or immigration reform or combatting poverty. And they don't really care if PCRCs stray from church teaching on abortion (sounds like you need to read Evangelium Vitae a bit more carefully, guys...)

What they do care about is defeating Democrats. Some of them don't even try to gloss over that fact. Deal Hudson (the now-disgraced and resigned former head of Catholic outreach for the Bush/Cheney campaign) told the Washington Post last spring that "he believes the denial of Communion should begin, and end, with Kerry."

So they're hypocrites, you say. Thanks for the newsflash, brainiac. So what?

The so what is that, for whatever reason, journalists listen to these guys. Remember last spring, when John Kerry couldn't take a step without some reporter trying to examine his molars for evidence of unswallowed communion host? The issue of whether or not Kerry should, as a pro-choice Catholic, take communion was pressed by conservative Catholics with a partisan agenda and it was wholeheartedly accepted as a relevant story by most major news outlets.

How many reporters do you think are going to ask Rudy Giuliani or George Pataki or Arnold Schwarzenegger if they should refrain from taking communion? Or will call up the bishops of these men and ask whether these PCRCs should be denied communion? Shouldn't it be a story that Republicans get a pass for the sole reason that they are Republicans? And that certain conservative Catholic organizations only care about abortion when they can use the issue to knock around Democrats?

The silence coming out of the Catholic League regarding the prominence of a bunch of heretical babykillers at the GOP Convention is simply deafening. Perhaps they're still busy defending Hudson, who -- according to a press release issued by the group last week -- has been unfairly maligned when all he did was have sex with a "drunk" who was clearly asking for it. Nice.

Next time reporters are tempted to let these guys drive the story, they should think twice. And while they're at it, they might want to turn the tables and write about the partisan involvement of supposedly neutral religious figures. Until then, we'll keep our ears perked for a hypocrisy watch next week. I'm sure the protests by angry pro-life Catholics just haven't been announced yet...

Let The Kids Play....We interrupt this political blog to bring you a brief basketball update -- Argentina: 89, USA: 81. No gold, not even silver. And it's as it should be. The better team won.

Can we please re-think that selection process now?

Notes from the muck... For those who don't know me, I'm coeditor of Pandagon, which I write along with Jesse Taylor. I've spent the past Summer interning here at The Monthly, determined to to see if I like dead-tree media as much as its online variant. When Paul asked me to write something reflecting on my time here, I was stumped. No shocker, I've spent the last four days feeling that way. Politics, and blogging in particular, hasn't seemed the most appealing use of my energy. Every time I sat down to fire off yet another chapter of "Why John O'Neill is a disgraceful liar", I've had a voice running through my head saying "Screw it: I'll resign from the blog, bid the Monthly farewell, put down my pen, turn off the news and go for a run on the beach. I can go to law school or do graduate work, I can enter academia or join the working world. I can spend more time with my girlfriend and wake up later. It'll be great."

That's a new one for me. Usually, you'd be hard-pressed to find a 20-year old more politically involved than I am -- I breathe this stuff. So feeling like this is a 180-degree pivot from my normal outlook on life. Worse, it's not confined to my psyche. I'm hearing similar versions of it echoed throughout my network of young progressives.

Blame the SwiftVets. The tawdry, repulsive turns this election has taken. I started my blog to fight a war of ideas, but as the election has progressed, I've helplessly watched myself become just another body arrayed on our side of the dividing line, flinging myself forward to combat each smear, fact-check each lie, reframe each misdirection. And there's the uncomfortable sensation that, were I to zoom out on this picture, I'd see thousands of frames with tiny partisans doing the same thing, an endless repetition of wars waged on ground neither side cares about but a few consultants have forced the election onto. And even though nobody wants that scarred patch of ground -- who cares if Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve or a few days later? -- we're forced to fight over it if we hope to achieve our other goals.

So here I am, talking not about ideas and policies and the high-minded stuff supposedly supplying the political sphere's component parts, but about a war fought -- and ended -- 15 years before my birth. Here I am defending a war hero whose real contribution was to help end the violent venture in which he earned his medals, and who's now being tarred with charges of exaggeration (like the Gulf of Tonkin and Iraqi WMD's?) and opportunism (like coming forth 35 years later to derail a campaign?) from bitter bottom-feeders who want to reelect an Administration that never learnt the mistakes of Johnson's. And I know that if I recede because I'm tired of the messy fight, that'll be one less voice shouting to empower the progressive forces in our electorate, and that small subtraction will make the conservative clamor that much louder. But still, diving deeper and deeper into the muck of this election has left me aching to hear someone, anyone, articulate the Gary Hart level of thinking that dragged me here in the first place. But even that hope is rife with cynicism; we all know where Gary ended up, and thus the lesson is underlined -- you can never stop swinging.

You must, however, greedily grab the reminders of why you fight. One of the comforts keeping me going are the articles that cross my desk: pieces on energy innovation and teacher reform and media monopolies and securities scandals and the trade implications of international soccer, to name but a few recent favorites. The nature of the blog is to be caught in the moment, to unleash your most stunning broadsides in response to stories broken mere instants before. The nature of the magazine -- particularly this magazine -- is to transcend the moment, to enter the world of ideas and put the lie to those who prefer to cast the election as a battle over trivialities like old war stories and cheesesteak orders, to remind us it's still a contest whose ultimate result will be policies and a presidency, and the ideas the coming Administration implements remain of the most urgent importance.

Next month’s cover story took on the likely shape of a second Bush term, soliciting contributions from people like Todd Gitlin, Grover Norquist, E. J Dionne, and some Kevin Drum guy, among others. This morning I reread it. It did its job, reminding me that this administration isn't pretty and their actions are by no means trivial. Sometimes I need that refresher, the assurance that the dispiriting battles are fought in service of a more historic purpose. The truth is I'm not always proud of my involvement in the former, but being at the Monthly has kept me firmly aware of the importance of the latter.

Tortured Writing... In a previous post, I tried to figure out from the first day's coverage of the new Schlesinger panel report on Abu Ghraib and a quick scan of the thing myself what the report actually says about the degree to which Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was responsible for the prisoner abuses. The question I couldn’t quite answer was whether or to what degree the panel thought Rumsfeld and other top administration officials screwed up by issuing policy directives that loosened the definition of acceptable interrogation techniques to include practices such as stripping prisoners nude and threatening them with dogs.

Believe me, the whole idea of such practices gives me the willies. But, call me callous, I can imagine that if I were a national security decision-maker I might find myself allowing them in certain very tightly-controlled circumstances. The danger of that attitude, of course, is that it is hard to keep such procedures under tight control. Once you allow them, enterprising subordinates are likely to apply them to circumstances you didn’t intend or in ways that go beyond what you intended. And mistakes like that can lose you a war. So if you’re going to even consider opening up this particular Pandora’s box, you’d better be listening to all points of view, and if you go forward, you’d better be concerned and attentive to the point of paranoia about how the policy is being implemented.

Well, let’s just say that this is not a characterization that applies to Secretary Rumsfeld. And it sure doesn’t apply to his boss, President Bush, who ultimately signed off on the change in policy. The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl has waded through the whole report, finds it confusing on this point, but ultimately argues—convincingly I think—that from the report’s own findings that responsibility for the abuses runs directly to Rumsfeld and Bush.

Shock and Awe... I know it shouldn't matter. After three and a half years, we’re all well aware of the president’s peculiar style of leadership--his aggressive ignorance, the cocky way he asserts obvious falsehoods, his seeming indifference to the negative consequences of his policies. We’ve long incorporated these qualities into our estimation of the man. Either we think they’re intolerable and want him out of office, or we think they’re forgivable, acceptable, even charming, and want him to stay. Either way, they shouldn’t come anymore as a shock.

And yet they do.

A Slot for Ralph... Since the GOP is giving Ralph Nader so much help getting on ballots, maybe they should just go ahead and let him speak at the convention. If you agree, you can sign the petition.

Poll Vault... I don’t know quite what to make of the new LA Times poll that seems to show a perceptible move towards Bush since last month on an array of fronts. Alas Ruy Teixeira is on the road, so we may have to wait for his always-interesting analysis. But a couple quick thoughts.

First, the swift boat vet attacks do seem to have done some damage:

“In the July Times poll, 53% of voters said Kerry had demonstrated in his Vietnam combat missions the "qualities America needs in a president," while 32% said that by "protesting the war in Vietnam, John Kerry demonstrated a judgment and belief that is inappropriate in a president."

In the August survey, that balance nudged away from Kerry, with 48% saying he had demonstrated the right qualities and 37% saying he had exhibited poor judgment.

Likewise, the share of voters saying they lacked confidence in Kerry as a potential commander in chief edged up from 39% in July to 43% now; the percentage that said they were confident in him slipped from 57% to 55%. Both changes were within the poll's margin of error, yet both tracked with the poll's general pattern of slight Kerry slippage.”

Second, running rather contrary to these findings, is how respondents (registered voters) answered the question of whether Kerry “misrepresented his war record and does not deserve his war medals, or that he fought honorably and does deserve his war medals” (the poll was taken over the last few days). Overwhelmingly, the respondents sided with Kerry—10 to 1 in the case of Democrats (no surprise), 50-50 among Republicans (interesting) and 5 to 1 among independents (wow!).

From this I draw the conclusion that the longer the medals issue stays out there, and the more the focus remains on the swift boat veterans’ numerous lies and the Bush administration’s connections to them, the better for Kerry—which is why the Kerry camp is smart to keep that part of the story alive and hammer away on it without mercy.

But if the overall mildly positive results for Bush in this poll are real--and it must be said they run counter to many other polls--then clearly the Kerry campaign has screwed up.

What was the biggest screw-up? Personally, I don’t think it was their decision not to fight back harder and earlier on the swift boat attacks. Yes, the campaign seems to have been foolishly unprepared. But waiting for the mainstream press to acknowledge the story and begin shooting it down was not necessarily a bad strategy, given the circumstances. And as noted in a previous post, I can also appreciate (even if not ultimately agree with) their reasons for not having Kerry be more assertive about why he protested the war.

Instead, I think the biggest mistake so far has been that Kerry gave a convention speech with virtually no policy specifics. I know, I know, people say that’s boring; you don’t want a speech to go on and on, laundry-list-like; the most important thing was to introduce himself and his larger themes, etc. But the fact is that you came away from that speech with little concrete idea of what Kerry will do if he is elected president. The policies are there, and a number of them—in healthcare and education, for instance--are quite bold and promising. And Kerry does talk about them on the stump. But in the one moment this entire summer when he had the American public’s attention, he and his staff chose not to give over even five minutes to a discussion of his specific agenda.

The consequence of that decision can be seen in LA Times poll:

“The poll spotlighted another challenge for Kerry. After a Democratic convention that focused much more on Kerry's biography than his agenda, 58% said they knew even a fair amount about the policies he would pursue as president; nearly 4 in 10 said they knew not much or nothing at all.

By comparison, although Bush has put forward few specifics about his second-term priorities, 70% said they had a good idea of the policies he would pursue.”

Now we’re headed into a GOP convention during which the president is set to give a speech chock full of new policy proposals. Maybe it’s too late for him. Maybe the voters think Bush has no credibility on this stuff anymore because most of his other policies have produced nothing but disaster. Maybe it’s savvy of the Kerry campaign to wait until the debates to have a real policy discussion. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But it just seems to me that it's almost always better to frame the discussion than to have your opponent frame it, and at a time when the country could be debating John Kerry’s agenda for the future, we’re going to be debating George W. Bush’s.

Fun With Data....Some highlights from the Pew survey I noted below:

• 52 percent of Americans think it is more important to conduct research than protect embryos in stem-cell research, and that includes nearly 40 percent of those who are certain they are voting for Bush. This is a slight change from two years ago, when 43 percent of respondents thought that new research was most important, while 38 percent prioritized the protection of embryos. (For in-depth analysis of recent polling on stem-cell attitudes, see our friend and colleague Chris Mooney’s writing.)

• While the GOP is seen as the more "religion-friendly" party, Americans don't necessarily believe that today's Democratic party is unfriendly to religion. (In fact, 10% think Republicans are faith-unfriendly and 13% consider Democrats the same). 74 percent think Democrats are either friendly or neutral toward religion. When the breakdown is between conservatives and liberals, on the other hand, liberals have a bad reputation: Only 21 percent think that liberals are friendly toward religion.

• For my money, the most interesting results come when voters are asked whether they think it's appropriate for political parties to ask church members to send in membership directories to help build campaign databases. A full 70 percent of Americans thought this kind of campaign strategy was inappropriate, including two-thirds of conservative Republicans. Evangelicals are more likely to think it's okay than Americans from other faith backgrounds, but even in that community, only one-third thought that this was a proper action for political parties.

• And when it comes to maintaining a clear, bright line of separation between church and state, younger Americans are less concerned than older ones. While 33 percent of those under 30 think it's acceptable to ask church members to help out campaigns, only 20 percent of those over 65 agree. In part, that's because public debate about church and state has been so imprecise and muddy over the past few decades that many people have forgotten the original intent was to protect religious institutions from the interference of the state as much as it was to protect the state from any religious influence.

• Oh, and nobody thinks Catholic leaders should be able to deny communion to pro-choice politicians. Well, okay, 22 percent of voters do, but that number is driven up by Protestants who shouldn't count anyway because what do we care if a Catholic takes communion or not? We use Wonder bread and grape juice, for goodness sake.

God the Running Mate....There's a new Pew poll out on Americans' religious and political views. I'm working on a few other things right now and still running some of the numbers, but I'll be back shortly with some of the highlights. In the meantime, check out this animation video sponsored by a coalition of religious groups that is out to remind everyone that God and Religion aren't wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Republican Party--or the Democratic, for that matter.

The groups are also getting ready to run a full-page ad with the same message in the New York Times, just to remind all of those good Christians in town for the GOP Convention. It's about time someone outside the Religious Right got some media savvy and gumption. Good for them.

Command in Chains... The big unanswered question about Abu Ghraib prison scandal has been: to what degree, if any, do Bush administration policymakers, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in particular, bear responsibility? Obviously, nobody at the top ordered this kind of sick (and militarily counterproductive) abuse, or wanted it to happen. But did their decisions to some extent “set the conditions” for it?

The most high-profile investigative effort to find an answer has been conducted by a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, which released its final report yesterday. If front pages are verdicts, then the Bush administration can’t be too happy. “A Trail Leads to Rumsfeld,” reads the headline of the analysis piece in The New York Times. “Rumsfeld’s War Plan Shares the Blame” reads the equivalent piece in The Washington Post. Still, in reading the coverage, I’m a bit confused.

From what I can tell, Rumsfeld’s leadership contributed to the problem in three ways. First was his best-case-scenario planning, or lack of planning, for what might happen after Saddam’s regime fell. The Pentagon leadership, noted Schlesinger, “did look at history books. Unfortunately, it was the wrong history.”

Second, and most disastrously, was Rumsfeld’s decision to put too few troops in Iraq, and to shut down anyone who questioned that decision. The Times notes that the report “sidestepped” the broader question of overall troop numbers, instead focusing on the short staffing of MPs. As the Post puts it:

“At one point, the report noted, there were 495 detention personnel in Iraq, compared with an authorized level of 1,400. The ratio of military police to detainees at Abu Ghraib was as high as 1 to about 75, the report said, compared with a ratio of 1 to 1 at Guantanamo Bay.”

The Post elsewhere explains:

“The pervasive lack of troops, especially those with specialized skills, had a cascading effect that helped lead to the abuse, the report said. As the insurgency took off, frontline Army units, lacking interpreters, took to rounding up "any and all suspicious-looking persons -- all too often including women and children," it said. This indiscriminate approach resulted in a "flood" of detainees at Abu Ghraib that inundated demoralized and fatigued interrogators, it continued."

Third was Rumsfeld’s efforts to parse or otherwise get around legal constrains on how prisoners at Guantanamo could be interrogated, and his decision to apply some of those looser standards to Iraq. Reads the report:

“It is important to note that techniques effective under carefully controlled conditions at Guantanamo became far more problematic when they migrated and were not adequately safeguarded.”

This third issue is the one I’m most curious about. On the one hand, it seems just like the Bush administration to thumb its nose at international constraints that have served us well for years, like the Geneva Convention, and expect that doing so won’t have major negative repercussions. On the other hand, I’m sure that anyone in Runsfeld’s shoes, faced with terrorists who don’t play by the normal rules of war, and an insurgency in Iraq where commanders needed lots of intelligence fast, might have had good reason to rethink old policies. It is for questions like these that God invented Phil Carter.

Update: It should be noted that the panel did not believe that Rumsfeld should resign or be fired for what happened at Abu Ghraib, that you can't judge a leader by just one disaster on his watch. I agree. He should resign or be fired for screwing up the entire war.

Is That The Same Ben Ginsberg?....Hmm. The front-page story everywhere today is that a top lawyer for the Bush/Cheney campaign has, at the same time, been advising the infamous 527 Swift Boat Vets group. The lawyer at the center of the story, Ben Ginsberg, says that everything he's done is technically legal. And that may be true -- I'm not enough of an election law expert to judge.

But what's also true is that Ginsberg himself has attacked what he characterizes as the impropriety of individuals holding dual roles with campaigns and 527s.

An article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer just two weeks ago included this bit about Ginsberg: "Ben Ginsberg, a legal adviser to the Bush campaign, specifically condemned the dual roles played by Democrats Harold Ickes and Bill Richardson, who had official roles at the convention and also within prominent friendly 527s. 'They're over the coordination line,' Ginsberg said of Ickes and Richardson. 'The whole notion of cutting off links between public officeholders and soft-money groups just got exploded.'"

To make things even better, Ginsberg doesn't just advise the Swift Boat Guys -- a role he will no doubt seriously downplay over the next few days. He serves as the official chief counsel to Progress for America, another 527 that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, exists to "form 'issue truth squads' that respond to Democratic attacks on President Bush."

I know these guys are shameless, but still.

Update: Ginsberg resigns.

Next Draft... Paul Rieckhoff, the ex-Army lieutenant who served as an infantry platoon leader with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq and gave the Democrat's rebuttle to one of President Bush's radio addresses, has co-founded an organization called Operation Truth. From its web site , the group looks fairly non-partisan. Among other things, the site warns that the current overstretching of the military is going to lead to a draft. But it doesn't actually say that a draft would be a bad thing. For what it's worth, I happen to think it'd be a good thing. (I've talked to a quite a few ex-military folks who agree with me, by the way.)

Calling RE/MAX... Earlier this year, Ben Wallace-Wells argued in The Washington Monthly that the fragile economic recovery could be brought down by a collapse of home prices. As evidence that there is indeed a housing bubble, he noted economic studies showing that in the nation’s twenty or so most overheated housing markets (where about half of all housing wealth is located), the rise in home prices has far outstripped increases in rents and personal incomes—classic signs of inflated housing values. Alan Greenspan long denied the existence of a housing bubble and indeed helped engineer it with his low interest rate policy. Today, however, he issued a warning:

“In response to a question about soaring house prices, Greenspan conceded that in some areas prices have outstripped growth in incomes and rents. ‘This observation raises thew possibility that real estate prices, at least in some markets, could be out of alignment with the fundamentals.’”

Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much....When I saw the rather large banner, "What Did the 9-11 Commission Say About Saudi Arabia?" across the top of my Washingtonpost.com screen, I said to myself, well, that's gotta be an ad by the Saudis. And, sure enough, if you click on the ad, you jump to a page where our helpful friends at the Saudi Embassy (you know, the one protected by Secret Service agents...) tell us that there is no evidence that the Saudi government funds al-Qaeda, that the Saudis have, in fact, been hunting down that rascal Osama bin Laden for quite some time now, and other interesting tidbits about how great the Saudis are. I don't know about you, but that sets my mind at ease.