My Favorite Revisionist

"A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind."

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970)
Historian
Columbia PhD 1942
Columbia Faculty 1946–1970

I had forgotten Richard Hofstadter's revisionism of Populist historiography until I read Christopher Shea's thoughtful review of the most recent biography of my favorite historian. Hofstadter was a gifted aphorist; a university is not a service station indeed! The great bane of higher education in this century is the retail stablishment model that is the current fad in higher education. "The customer is always right" translated as "The student is always right. More importantly, Hofstadter foresaw the danger in the Neocon ascendancy. We are going to reap the whirlwind. If this is (fair & balanced snark, so be it.)

[x The Boston Globe]
Spirit of the age: Historian Richard Hofstadter's enduring appeal
By Christopher Shea

Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition, originally published in 1948 when the author was 32, still sells 10,000 copies a year-an astonishing figure, especially for an essay collection lacking an overarching theme. Yet its sharp biographical sketches have struck generations of readers as revelatory: Hofstadter's Teddy Roosevelt is a bloodthirsty, sham progressive; his Abraham Lincoln a careful cultivator of his own legend as a self-made man. Hofstadter's revisionism is so aggressive, his pen so deft, that his publisher considered titling the volume Eminent Americans, after Lytton Strachey's famous hatchet job on British figures.

And that may not even be Hofstadter's most respected book. Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University-where Hofstadter himself taught from 1946 until his untimely death from leukemia in 1970-has called Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955), his study of the Populist and Progressive eras, "the most influential book ever published on 20th-century America." And the title alone of The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) is one of the great intellectual memes of our time.

What was it about this scholar, the half-Jewish son of working-class parents in Buffalo, that caused his work to seem so emblematic of its age-among his generation of historians, perhaps only C. Vann Woodward and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have similar reputations-and so vital that we still read it?

"Intellectual charisma and an eclectic mind," answers David S. Brown, author of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2006), in an interview. Of course, lots of historian could be described that way. "It was also his good fortune," Brown adds, "to be very in tune with his times-knowing where the country was in psychological terms." As it happens, some of his themes seem presciently in tune with our times, too-tension between rural and urban America, grass-roots distrust of experts and intellectuals, democracy's vulnerability to demagoguery. All of which make Brown's biography, the first of Hofstadter, especially timely.

. . .

Hofstadter had a knack for picking topics that resonated with the present. In the late 1940s, Americans hungered to know how history had got them here-to the world of strong federal power and international influence-and The American Political Tradition offered a handy guide to some of the key turning points in, among other things, the evolving relationship between the national government and big business since the era of the Founders. Franklin Roosevelt had partly improvised the New Deal; now it was up to Americans to build a governing philosophy out of the welter of federal programs, he suggested.

In the 1950s, in the shadow of Nazism, scholars were freshly confronting the dark side of popular political movements. Having absorbed books like T.W. Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, Hofstadter contributed Age of Reform, which took on the generation of historians, especially an influential group at the University of Wisconsin, who had idolized the American Populists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as restorers of American democratic ideals, reasserting the rights of farmers against the Eastern political and financial elite.

Hofstadter, though, played up the Populists' distrust of immigrants and city life, their crypto-anti-Semitism ("You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" declared William Jennings Bryan in 1896), and their wholesale rejection of modernity. He and other Jewish intellectuals at Columbia tended to be a bit more skeptical than their Midwestern peers about mass movements made up of angry Anglo-Saxon men.

Some of the angriest white men in the `50s were anti-Communists, spreading alarm about treason on American campuses and in the diplomatic corps. When Hofstadter, in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and then The Paranoid Style in American Politics, traced a direct line from the Know Nothing party of the 1850s to modern McCarthyite conservatives he earned himself the abiding enmity of the right.

William F. Buckley, who helped launch the modern conservative movement, famously complained that Hofstadter "analyzed" liberals but "diagnosed" conservatives. But Hofstadter, Brown reminds us, was also suspicious of many leftists (and they returned the favor). His criticism of the populist tradition led some historians on the left to brand him a neoconservative, in an early use of the term. He was no fan, either, of the trendy leftish educational theories taking over schools-his criticism of them was a precursor, Brown suggests, of attacks on "political correctness."

Brown argues that Hofstadter's attacks on anti-intellectualism "had as much to do with protection of the intellectual from the left" as from the right. Hofstadter had flirted with Communism as a graduate student at Columbia in the 1930s but was turned off by leftist intolerance. Yet in the 1950s and early 1960s (by which time he was an anti-Communist) he was preoccupied with the right: If Barry Goldwater, who wanted to jettison the New Deal, should win election in 1964, he wrote, it "will put the democratic process in this country in jeopardy." (Brown says he sounds a bit paranoid himself.)

To the end, Hofstadter thought of himself as speaking, even when critically, from within the liberal-progressive tradition. Even so, the late 1960s pushed him to the right, relatively speaking, and it's a fascinating question how far he might have drifted in that direction had he lived. He was depressed by the Vietnam War, yet also appalled by the violent protests of some student radicals. He was tapped to give the Columbia commencement address in 1968, the only person both right and left would listen to.

Hofstadter thought the conservative revolution died with Goldwater. He may have been wrong about that, but Brown writes that he was one of the first analysts to see that modern conservatism was a potent grass-roots social movement. Today, Brown writes, the Bush presidency "has resurrected the sharp division in American life between East and West, aristocracy and democracy," intellectuals and men of action-all the great Hofstadter themes.

Indeed, Brown hints that Anti-Intellectualism in American Life would make a good title for a chronicle of the Bush years-which answers the question, at least for Brown, of whether Hofstadter is still relevant.

Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in the Ideas section of The Boston Globe.

Copyright © Globe Newspapers, Inc.

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The Banality Of Evil Redux

Who shared the guilt in 1961 for the Shoah? Who shared the guilt in 1971 for My Lai? Who shares the guilt today for Haditha? In 1964, Hannah Arendt was astounded at Eichmann's dull, bookish appearance during his 1961 trial in Israel for crimes against humanity. Arendt was amazed that evil could look so ordinary. Genocide orchestrated by an accountant? Rusty Calley at My Lai was a callow college dropout and he was convicted of crimes against humanity. Today, Rusty Calley is a jewelry store manager in Georgia. Now, we have the poor Marines at Haditha. Eichmann had his Hitler. Calley had his Trickster. The Haditha Marines have their Dubster. The Dubster's "hero," Harry S Truman, placed a sign on the Truman Oval Office desk: "The buck stops here." Impeach The Dubster already! The charge? Crimes against humanity. Hitler=The Trickster=The Dubster. The buck stops here. If this is a (fair & balanced) Memorial Day meditation, so be it.



















Click on the image to enlarge it. Copyright © 1971 Time Magazine

[x www.tanosborn.com]
My Lai — Haditha — and America's whitewashers
By Ben Tanosborn.

My Lai had its victims, a gruesome display at par with the worst incidents that have come to light in the last century. It also had its gang of perpetrators; soldiers under the command of Lt. William Calley. And it even had four heroes; three from a helicopter crew (Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta) who saved the lives of a few villagers; and a man in Calley’s platoon whose conscience would not permit him to take part in the massacre (Bernhardt). But beyond heroes and villains, for the next few years My Lai would also have a never-ending series of whitewashers, who in good conscience must also be considered villains… by choice or by default.

The whitewashers came in all ranks of importance, from the anticipated ever-present military brass, that initiated and maintained the cover-up, to a host of politicians and people in leadership, all the way to the Commander-in-Chief, President Nixon in this case. The incredible bottom line to this holocaust was, however, that the only person found guilty for this carnage was Lt. Calley, who ended up serving 3 ½ years of “house arrest” in his quarters at Fort Benning, Georgia. The entire sordid affair became not just a national disgrace for which the country could do penance, but a monumental whitewash that to date Americans prefer not to talk about.

In a way, the enablers to the entire whitewash were the American public. Not only were the villains and whitewashers de facto exonerated, but the four heroes in the plot became traitors… to their military comrades, and also to much of the population.

My Lai, photos and all, was just too big a war crime to allow an effective cover-up, or it might have remained a secret to this date. Accounts provided by soldiers who lived through similar criminal accounts, if in a much smaller scale, were kept hush-hush we are led to believe “not to affect the morale of the troops.” It was all done, as it always seems to be in these cases, for the “greater good.” Yes, the end justifies the means!

Now the hamlets of Pinkville have given way to the streets of Haditha, and the probable murder of two dozen Iraqis, including women and children, by a large, yes large, group of marines. If it turns out to be as horrific as noted in some of the leaked details, and there wasn’t a single marine with enough humanity in the group to put a stop to this, God have pity on us as a nation… and as human beings.

It has been six months since the incident occurred, far too long to conduct an adequate investigation had the military chosen to do so. But the delay probably had as much or more to do with the timing in the formation of the Iraqi government than with the preparation of Americans at home for this “new truth.”

Vietnam is far away in time and memory. But now Americans have to cope with new unpleasant realities: a government that lied to them, so as to enlist their support for an illegitimate war; then Abu Ghraib, and the realization that the military is far from squeaky-clean when it comes to torture, human rights and compliance with international law. Now, it is the pride of the military, the marines, who are being put to the test. And this may turn out to be a test like no other in the history of the Corps.

Revenge for the killing of a fellow marine is no reason to kill innocent, defenseless Iraqi women and children; nor is frustration, even when insurgents are at times fed and sheltered by civilians in the area, or when complicity is suspected. Criminal reprisal as an answer to physical and/or mental strain is just unacceptable behavior in human beings, much less in soldiers. When soldiers get to a point where they are apt to crack, they should be kept in their barracks or sent home. Just what role does the military leadership play in all this? Commanders, doctors and chaplains… aren’t they all gravely derelict?

How many more Hadithas are there… will we ever know what happened in Fallujah, and so many other places where the US military has no reason or right to be?

One must wonder. One, two… three decades from now some of these people who are committing crimes in Iraq, or those whitewashing their behavior, are likely to be in positions of political power in these United States. One could even become senator, president, or secretary of state. The whitewash, it appears, never ends.

Ben Tanosborn resides in Vancouver, WA (USA) where he operates a business consulting firm and blogs daily.

© 2006 Ben Tanosborn

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An Iraqi Double-Nightmare (For Us)

The news from Iraq gets worse and worser. As we sink into a Vietnam-like quagmire, we have U. S. Marines shooting men, women, and children in retaliation for a guerrilla attack that took a Marine's life. ¹The Cobra sinks her fangs into The Rumster and The Dubster for leading us into disaster in Iraq. Then, ²Paul Mulshine, a New Jersey Republican loyalist and newspaper columnist for the Newark fishwrap, exposes the fraud of our nation-building in Iraq. The former Vietnamese collaborators with French colonialism were our great hope for democratizing Vietnam. Now, we are placing our democratic pipedreams in the hands of a known terrorist who masterminded the attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut with an innovation known as the suicide car bomb. Our rocket scientists in State and Defense brought Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, the new Iraqi PM, out of exile in Syria to head the newest democratic government in Iraq. We are in a quagmire that is getting deeper and deeper. If this is (fair & balanced) dread, so be it.

¹[x NYTimes]
Don't Become Them
By Maureen Dowd

When I started in newspapers, I shied away from police brutality stories, letting other reporters cover them.

I knew there were cops who had no right to be cops. But I also knew, because my dad was a detective, the sort of blistering pressure men and women in uniform were under as they made snap life-and-death decisions. I'd cringed at the 60's refrain that the military and the police were "pigs."

After my dad killed a robber in self-defense — the man had tried to shoot him point-blank in the face, but that chamber of the gun was empty — he told a police psychologist that he could not swallow or eat because he felt as though he had fish bones in his throat.

So I felt sickened to hear about the marines who allegedly snapped in Haditha, Iraq, and wantonly killed two dozen civilians — including two families full of women and children, among them a 3-year-old girl. Nine-year-old Eman Waleed told Time that she'd watched the marines go in to execute her father as he read the Koran, and then shoot her grandfather and grandmother, still in their nightclothes. Other members of her family, including her mother, were shot dead; she said that she and her younger brother had been wounded but survived because they were shielded by adults who died.

It's a My Lai acid flashback. The force that sacked Saddam to stop him from killing innocents is now accused of killing innocents. Under pressure from the president to restore law, but making little progress, marines from Camp Pendleton, many deployed in Iraq for the third time, reportedly resorted to lawlessness themselves.

The investigation indicates that members of the Third Battalion, First Marines, lost it after one of their men was killed by a roadside bomb, going on a vengeful killing spree over about five hours, shooting five men who had been riding in a taxi and mowing down the residents of two nearby houses.

They blew off the Geneva Conventions, following the lead of the president's lawyer.

It was inevitable. Marines are trained to take the hill and destroy the enemy. It is not their forte to be policemen while battling a ghostly foe, suicide bombers, ever more ingenious explosive devices, insurgents embedded among civilians, and rifle blasts fired from behind closed doors and minarets. They don't know who the enemy is. Is it a pregnant woman? A child? An Iraqi policeman? They don't know how to win, or what a win would entail.

Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, who has flown to Iraq to talk to his troops about "core values" in the wake of Haditha and a second incident being investigated, noted that the effect of this combat "can be numbing."

A new A&E documentary chronicles the searing story of the marines of Lima Company, 184 Ohio reservists who won 59 Purple Hearts, 23 posthumously. Sgt. Guy Zierk recounts kicking in a door after an insurgent attack. Enraged over the death of his pals, he says he nearly killed two women and a 16-year-old boy. "I am so close, so close to shooting, but I don't." he says. "It would make me no better than the people we're trying to fight."

Retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, one of those who called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, told Chris Matthews that blame for Haditha and Abu Ghraib lay with "the incredible strain bad decisions and bad judgment is putting on our incredible military."

While it was nice to hear President Bush admit he had made mistakes, he was talking mostly about mistakes of tone. Saying he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive" would have been O.K. if he had acted on it, rather than letting Osama go at Tora Bora and diverting the Army to Iraq.

At his news conference with a tired-looking Tony Blair, Mr. Bush seemed chastened by Iraq, at least. But he continued to have the same hallucination about how to get out: turning things over to the Iraqi security forces after achieving total victory over insurgents and terrorists.

Stories in The Times this week show that Iraqi security forces are so infiltrated by Shiite militias, Sunni militias, death squads and officers with ties to insurgents that the idea of entrusting anything to them is ludicrous.

By ignoring predictions of an insurgency and refusing to do homework before charging into Iraq on trumped-up pretenses, W. left our troops undermanned, inadequately armored and psychologically unprepared.

It was maddening to see the prime minister of Britain — of all places — express surprise at the difficulty of imposing a democracy on a country that has had a complex and ferocious tribal culture since the Gardens of Babylon were still hanging.

Maureen (The Cobra) Dowd won the Pulitzer Prize for reports stemming from the Clinton impeachment trial. She is an equal-opportunity viper who struck The Trickster and now strikes The Dubster. Double-Ouch.


Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company

²[x Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ)]
Nonstop nonsense from neoconservatives
By Paul Mulshine

In Iraq, the terrorists have won, at least if you accept Washington's definition of "terrorism."

The post of prime minister is now in the hands of the Dawa party, the same group of people that U.S. officials called the "Dawa terrorists" back in 1983. That was when they attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut with what was then an innovation in terrorist warfare, the suicide car bomb.

The new Iraqi prime minister, Nouri Kamal al-Maliki, was an active party member back then. He was hiding out in Syria, presumably thinking unkind thoughts about the country that would later bring him to power in his native country.

The intellectual authors of the Iraq war, the so-called "neoconservatives," are fond of talking about the terrorists we're fighting. But they never mention the terrorists we're fighting for, including that party of ex-suicide bombers to whom we've helped hand the most powerful position in the new government.

This is a strange phenomenon. It's as if Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman had pursued a long and costly war in the Pacific only to put a kamikaze pilot in charge of Japan. Actually, it's worse. The Dawa party has from its inception had a very specific mission: to restore control of Iraq to an Islamic government. It never could have done this on its own, but thanks to some deep thinkers in Washington, the party is well on its way.

Among those deep thinkers is Max Boot, a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Times. In a recent column, Boot asserted that, now that the United States has brought democracy to Iraq, we should concentrate efforts on Egypt.

The idea of spreading democracy to the Mideast remains central to the neocon philosophy. That philosophy is not grounded in reality. We've seen two great experiments in democracy in the past couple of years. In Iraq, the Dawa is actually among the most moderate members of the ruling coalition, which is busy replacing a secular government with an Islamic republic. In the Palestinian territories, meanwhile, the homicidal Hamas won a free election.

But don't worry, the neocons tell us. Things will all work out just fine after we spread democracy to all those other countries where the great masses of people seem to prefer Islamic fundamentalism to Western secularism.

Never before has a philosophy of foreign policy been so thoroughly discredited so quickly by events. Yet its proponents seem not to have noticed. Boot is but one among many neocons who got everything wrong about Iraq but still insist everything's going right. Just before the war began in 2003, for example, Boot wrote that "the conquest of Afghanistan definitely denied the terrorists an important base of operations. The ouster of Saddam Hussein will achieve the same purpose."

Oops. Before the war, there were perhaps a few dozen terrorists based in Baghdad. But now, if one accepts the neocons' definition of "terrorist," there are at least 20,000, perhaps more. And that's just on the enemy side. The terrorists now in the Iraqi government have in the past few years killed dozens of times as many Americans as terrorists linked to Saddam ever did.

The forces of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whom we "liberated," have killed hundreds of American troops and wounded thousands. And while other terrorists of all descriptions now have bases all over Iraq, al-Sadr has a base right inside the Green Zone, where his party plays a major role in the new government. The sad fact is, if every al Qaeda sympathizer and ex-Baathist in Iraq were to disappear tomorrow, we'd still need to keep troops around indefinitely just to make sure our new allies didn't go back to their old tricks.

This is as complete a foreign-policy screwup as can be imagined. President Bush certainly deserves blame — but not from the Democrats. They bought into the neocon philosophy from the beginning and have only recently come around to offering tepid criticisms, none of which involves the central error of promoting democracy where it is not in our interest. Only a few far-right critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have questioned whether this exercise in nation-building was a fitting use of American force in the first place.

The problem, near as I can deduce it, derives from Americans' failure to understand that the rest of the world does not share our two-party system. If A is bad, the typical American thinks, then his opponent, B, must by definition be good, or at least better.

But what if, while A is indeed bad, B is awful, C is despicable, D is reprehensible and E is downright monstrous? This is a simple enough concept to grasp, yet it seems to elude even the deepest of our deep thinkers.

Paul Mulshine is a longtime columnist and former editorial writer for The (Newark) Star-Ledger. His years of covering New Jersey provide readers with umatched insight into local politics. Whether he is writing about sport-utility vehicles, Bruce Springsteen or the state of the New Jersey Republican party, Mulshine’s voice is distinctive, informed and very New Jersey.

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The REAL Skinny On Couric, Cooper, and Hannity

Like Lee Siegel, I know where some of the talking heads on the tube came from. Bill O'Reilly was shoveling manure on an Iowa feedlot. Roger Ailes of Faux News was traveling by and the right front tire of his car blew out. While awaiting the tow truck, Ailes watched O'Reilly shovel bullsh*t. The rest is history. Rush Limbaugh was a pharmaceutical salesman before he exhibited his "talent on loan from God." Loading up hundreds of Oxycontin pills in Florida just came natural to this bloviating huckster. The rest is history. Ann Coulter was an acne-ridden adolescent boy when he discovered that he had a shrewish right-wing harridan within his skinny body. After Ann visited the noted sex-change doc (Stanley H. Biber, MD) in Trinidad, CO(?), the rest is history. If this (fair & balanced) fantasy, so be it.

[x TNR Blog — Lee Siegel On Culture]
COURIC, COOPER, HANNITY. WHERE THEY CAME FROM:
by Lee Siegel

Most times, I would rather do just about anything than read one of John Tierney's calculatedly curmudgeonly columns in The New York Times, but last Sunday, he had a great and funny one.

It was about someone named Guy Goma, who emigrated to England from French-speaking Congo, and started learning English only four years ago. Waiting in the offices of the BBC to be interviewed for a computer job, Goma was mistaken by a BBC television producer for an expert on trademark law who was supposed to comment on a news show about the verdict in a courtroom-dispute between Apple Computer and the Apple Corps record label. Goma found himself sitting with the host, before the cameras, and immediately slipped right into the role, acquitting himself with panache.

Tierney used the occasion to reflect (bravely) on how little talent punditry requires. If only he knew the whole story. Thanks to funding from several private foundations that wish to remain anonymous, I've spent the last week looking into the true origins of some of our most prominent news anchors and commentators. This is a Lee-Siegel-on-Culture exclusive. Tell your friends.

Katie Couric. The host of the "Today Show," and soon-to-be anchor of CBS "Evening News" was delivering a Domino's pizza when network executives mistook her for crack investigative crime-reporter Ginny Flynn. With the exception of some tomato sauce on her cheek, Couric did her bit so well that it took weeks before anyone looked into the whereabouts of Flynn, who was eventually found drugged and dancing at a strip bar in Lodi, New Jersey owned by Sal "Masterpiece Theater" Bonpensiero. Producers had thought the tomato sauce on Couric's cheek was blood from a real crime scene. She's been saying cheese ever since.

Anderson Cooper. Imagine. You work for an agency that supplies actors for special events. Your specialty is "Martine, the Crying Diva," and your best clients progressive families who want to throw a birthday party for their openly gay teenager. Rushing up the street outside CNN's New York studios to retrieve a pair of pumps you left behind at a celebration the previous night, you run into a desperate associate producer. He is looking for someone to cry on camera while reporting on a collapsed delicatessen in Queens. E lucevan le stelle.

Sean Hannity. Most people know that "Pork Chop," as his friends call him, worked in construction before he moved into broadcasting. During the winter, though, Hannity had to find another way to make a living. So he became one of the pharmaceutical industry's most popular "subjects" for its clinical trials. Since it is dangerous for subjects to mix radically different drugs, they usually stick with one medical condition. Hannity's specialty was hemorrhoids. It was Norm Plitzker, an ambitious young producer at Fox, who saw Hannity on a street corner screaming, stomping his feet, and begging passers-by to pour a Smoothie into his behind. The rest is history.


Lee Siegel is a critic and essayist living in New York City, whose writing about literature, art, politics, film, and television has appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He received the 2002 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. Currently, Siegel is a senior editor at The New Republic.


Copyright © 2006 The New Republic

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Is The Dubster Hearing Footsteps?

"Kenny Boy" has done the perp-walk out of the Houston Federal Courthouse. Ditto for Jeffrey Skilling. The latter felon donated a small percentage of "Kenny Boy's" $140K donation to The Dubster. You don't get a frat-boy nickname for only $6K. Even so, the Enron crooks are headed for hard-time. Meanwhile, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is doing an impression of Inspector Javert tracking Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. At this moment, the Special Counsel is bearing down on The Dickster. Will The Dubster do a number on his cronies a'la The Trickster? H.(arry) R.(obbins) (aka Bob) Haldeman and John Erlichman were the fall guys for The Trickster. Scooter, Turd Blossom, and The Dickster may end up on the same cell block as "Kenny Boy." Be still my heart. If this is (fair & balanced) retribution for All The President's Men, so be it.

[x AP]
Lay, Skilling convicted in Enron collapse
By Kristen Hays

HOUSTON — Former Enron Corp. chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted Thursday of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud in one of the biggest business scandals in U.S. history.

The verdict put the blame for the demise of what was once the nation's seventh-largest company squarely on its top two executives. It came in the sixth day of deliberations following a trial that lasted nearly four months.

Lay was also convicted of bank fraud and making false statements to banks in a separate trial related to his personal banking.

Lay was convicted on all six counts against him in the trial with Skilling. Skilling was convicted on 19 of the 28 counts against him, including one count of insider trading, and acquitted on the remaining nine.

"You have reflected on this evidence for the last few days and reached a very thorough verdict, and I thank you," U.S. District Judge Sim Lake told jurors.

He set sentencing for Sept. 11.

Lake set a $5 million bond for Lay and ordered him to surrender his passport before he leaves the courthouse. The judge said the bond already in place for Skilling was sufficient. The judge said he did not believe home confinement was necessary for either.

The former corporate titans are now felons facing years in prison after being convicted of running an elaborate fraud that gave the company a glamorous illusion of success.

Jurors declared through their verdict that both men repeatedly lied to cover a vast web of unsustainable accounting tricks and failing ventures that shoved Enron into bankruptcy protection in December 2001.

The conviction was a major win for the government, serving almost as a bookend in an era that has seen prosecutors win convictions against executives from WorldCom Inc. to Adelphia Communications Corp. and homemaking maven Martha Stewart.

The panel rejected Skilling's insistence that no fraud occurred at Enron other than a few executives skimming millions from secret scams behind his and Lay's backs, and a lethal combination of bad press and poor market confidence sank the company.

Both men testified in their own defense. Skilling is expected to appeal.

The government's victory caps a 4 1/2 year investigation that nabbed 16 guilty pleas from ex-Enron executives, including former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and former Chief Accounting Officer Richard Causey.

All are awaiting sentencing later this year except for two who either finished or are serving prison terms.

Many deemed the outcome of the Lay-Skilling case a final exam of sorts of the federal government's ability to prove complicated corporate skullduggery.

Enron's implosion and the subsequent scandals vexed Wall Street, sent skittish investors fleeing, increased regulatory scrutiny over publicly traded companies and prompted Congress to stiffen white collar penalties.

Former WorldCom head Bernard Ebbers awaits a 25-year prison term for orchestrating the $11 billion accounting fraud that bankrupted the company. Stewart did five months in prison and more time confined to work and home for lying about a stock sale. Adelphia Communications Inc. founder John Rigas and his son got double-digit prison terms for looting their company.

HealthSouth Corp. founder Richard Scrushy bucked the trend with his acquittal last year of fraud charges despite five former finance chiefs pointing the finger at him in a $2.7 billion scheme to inflate earnings. He dropped in on the Lay-Skilling case during Fastow's lengthy testimony in March, saying the ex-CFO couldn't be believed.

But those cases were much simpler than that against Lay and Skilling.

The government's vast investigation seemed to stall until Fastow pleaded guilty in January 2004 to two counts of conspiracy and paved the way for prosecutors to secure indictments against his bosses. Fastow also led investigators to Causey, who was bound for trial alongside Lay and Skilling until he broke ranks with their unified defense and pleaded guilty to securities fraud just weeks before the trial began.

Kristen Hays is an AP Business Writer.

Copyright © 2006, The Associated Press

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Give Me John McCain Anytime

John McCain's commencement speeches at both Liberty University (yuck!) and Columbia University were graceful. Read them by clicking on these links: Columbia Speech and Liberty Speech. Compare McCain's rhetoric to ANYTHING uttered ANY TIME, ANY PLACE by the Moron-in-Chief. If this is (fair & balanced) oratory, so be it.

[x Slate]
John McCain: His unique gift for politics.
By Michael Kinsley

All successful politicians must have at least some talent for telling lies about what's in their hearts and convincing people that it is the truth. But Sen. John McCain has a unique genius for telling the truth from his heart and making people believe that he is lying. And these people are his supporters! They admire him as a straight-talking truth–teller, and they forgive him for taking positions on big issues that they find repellent on the grounds that he doesn't really mean what he says.

"Oh, he has to say that to get the Republican nomination," explain many Democrats with girlish crushes on the charming, funny, intelligent, and heroic Republican senator from Arizona, and/or a special loathing of their party's own star, the junior senator from New York. "That" might refer to McCain's strong right-to-life stand on abortion, or his strong support for the war in Iraq, or his recent rapprochement with Jerry Falwell. They respect McCain as an honest man among sneaks, a straight shooter amid bull artists. They long, understandably, for some fresh air in the fetid atmosphere of politics. And McCain delivers that.

Even better, he delivers the fresh air without the cloying aroma of piety. Or rather, he can be pious, but the piety is diluted and made bearable by the knowing wink. He makes jokes at his own expense. That's attractive in a politician, but sometimes it is nothing more than a party trick. McCain goes further: Like Bob Dole, he makes jokes—mean jokes, in public—about others. That takes more wit and more guts. McCain is a good kind of cynic: He shares his cynicism with the rest of the class. The cynicism makes the piety bearable, while the piety makes the cynicism acceptable.

Journalists love him, of course. His frankness flatters us, and he flatters us more directly as well. Visiting a big convention of journalists last fall, McCain joined a group that was gambling at the hotel casino until the wee hours. In his speech the next morning, he cleverly nailed his audience and himself by declaring that he was happy to be among "my base."

McCain's "base" (poli-talk for his most loyal supporters) is actually larger than that. In a presidential run, he would have the votes of millions who disagree with him on major issues but like him anyway. His challenge is to get the votes of more people who agree with him. The fact that his base of support is people who disagree with him explains both why so many ideological soul mates dislike him, and why they may support him anyway. It's because they think he is their best shot at winning. Thus if McCain becomes president, it will be the result of a cynical calculation by people who don't like him even though they agree with him, on top of support by people who disagree with him but admire his lack of cynicism.

As his pre-campaign for president, McCain is delivering four university graduation speeches. He gave two this week, at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and at Columbia. His words to these two different audiences are quite similar. Read the texts. They are marvelous: witty, self-mocking, above all, interesting. When McCain climbs onto an old war horse like, say, filial obligation, you really do not know where he may take it. It would be wonderful to have a president whose speeches were not a duty to listen to.

But how many Americans and Iraqis should die so that we can enjoy entertaining presidential speeches? If you support the war, that is a nonsense question. If you don't, it is more pressing. McCain is admirably clear: He supported going to war and he supports continuing it until … well, not so clear, but longer than most Democrats would care for. His discussion of the Iraq war in the Liberty University address is a bit of a cop-out. It's mostly about how we all have the duty to express our beliefs and the right to disagree.

This discussion is also a guarded reference to McCain's famous feud with Jerry Falwell. In 2000, McCain called Falwell ''an evil influence'' on the Republican Party. That won McCain a lot of the points he now enjoys among people to his left. Now he needs some to his right. But if the subject is ''evil,'' it is not good enough simply to say that we all have the right to disagree. And ''evil'' is not too strong a word for Jerry Falwell. Respectful disagreement may be possible with James Dobson, and ''silly'' or ''senile'' might be a more apt description of Pat Robertson. But Falwell is a man who promoted tapes during the Clinton administration accusing the president of murdering political opponents. Sure, he has the right to say whatever he wants. But that is not the key point about Falwell. McCain made the key point six years ago. Today, he ducks it.

McCain is like another larger-than-life character in American politics: Colin Powell. Both men are so admirable and so likable that people convince themselves against all evidence that Powell or McCain must agree with them on the big issues. In Powell's case, the theory always was that he was speaking truth to power from within, while telling the necessary public fibs to hold onto the privileged position this service required. With McCain, something more magical is going on. He says plainly that he is for the war, or against abortion choice, and people hear the opposite. It's a gift, I guess.

Michael Kinsley is Slate's founding editor.

Copyright © 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

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Tom Tomorrow's Take On The Dubster & The Dickster

The drill is the same as usual with graphics in this blog; click on the image to enlarge it. If this is (fair & balanced) visual savagery, so be it.















Copyright © 2006 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Out, Damned Rumster!

The Rumster is a war criminal. There is no sugar-coat that will obscure that fact. When a general ends his career with a call for the firing of the Secretary of Defense, it is no laughing matter. All of The Rumster's smirks and wisecracks do not detract from the point that The Rumster must go. By implication, The Rumster's commander-in-chief must go as well. If this is (fair & balanced) verisimilitude, so be it.

[x Wall Street Fishwrap]
The Two-Star Rebel
By Greg Jaffe

For Gen. John Batiste, a tour in Iraq turned a loyal soldier into Rumsfeld's most unexpected critic.

Six days after he called for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to leave his post, retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste faced a crushing moment of doubt.

Earlier that morning, Mr. Rumsfeld had brushed off Gen. Batiste and other critics as inflexible bureaucrats, uncomfortable with change. A few hours later, President Bush vowed to stand by his secretary.

Now CNN's Paula Zahn was grilling Gen. Batiste: "So, do you plan to continue with these kinds of attacks ... when the president has made it clear he's not budging?"

"I have yet to determine if I will do that or not," Gen. Batiste said.

Afterward, the 53-year-old officer retreated to a deserted parking garage outside the television station. For 30 minutes, he paced up and down, he says, literally shaking. Military officers, like Gen. Batiste, are constantly reminded that their role is to advise civilian leaders and execute their orders -- even if they disagree with them.

Now he was stepping way out of that culture. Gen. Batiste and his wife, the children of career military officers, had spent their entire lives in the Army. He fought in the first Gulf War, led a brigade into Bosnia, and in 2004 commanded 22,000 troops in Iraq, losing more than 150 soldiers.

"I was shocked at where I was," he says. "I had spent the last 31 years of my life defending our great Constitution." Over the course of the war in Iraq he says he saw troop shortages that allowed a deadly insurgency to take root, felt politics were put ahead of hard-won military lessons and was haunted by the regretful words of a top general in Vietnam.

The war in Iraq should have been a decisive victory for the U.S., Gen. Batiste told himself, as he paced in the parking garage. He blamed Mr. Rumsfeld for his "contemptuous attitude" and his "refusal to take sound military advice." As he got into his car to drive home, he recalls thinking: "If I don't speak out, who the hell else will?"

Since March, seven retired generals have called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. Some critics argue that the dissenters, a fraction of the hundreds of generals who have retired in the last decade, have axes to grind or have no first-hand experience working with the secretary. Three were passed over for promotions or forced to retire. Two left the military before the Bush administration took office. (See a gallery1 of other former military officers' criticism of Rumsfeld.)

Gen. Batiste stands out among the generals who have called for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign because he is the only one who served in a high position in the Pentagon and commanded troops in Iraq. He turned down a promotion and resigned last fall. He then spent the next seven months trying to decide whether to speak out in public, weighing a strong sense of duty and respect for his chain of command against a feeling that he owed it to his soldiers and their families to speak out.

Among the generals who have spoken out, "the only one that really shocked everyone was Batiste," says Don Snider, a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Mr. Rumsfeld has suggested that the criticism of him by the retired generals is a byproduct of the sweeping reforms he brought to the Pentagon and the Bush administration's bold efforts to win the global war on terror by spreading freedom in the Middle East. "There's a lot of change going on; it's challenging for people, it's difficult for people," he told reporters recently.

For many senior military officers, today's debate over whether to speak out has its roots in the Vietnam War. All of today's senior generals either fought in the lost war or joined a military struggling to recover from it. "Their memory of Vietnam is that the military was abandoned by the American people and betrayed by the civilian leadership. It is hardwired into them never to let that happen again," says Andrew Bacevich, a professor of International Relations at Boston University and a retired Army colonel.

Gen. Batiste grew up on military bases, in the U.S., Europe and Iran. He followed his father, who fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, into the military. One of his most powerful memories is of his father, then a colonel, returning from Vietnam in the late 1960s. "I remember picking him up with my mom and sister at Dulles Airport. He came home so unceremoniously," Gen. Batiste says. "The people in the airport could not have cared less."

Gen. Batiste speaks in the short, crisp sentences of a person accustomed to giving orders. He graduated from West Point in 1974 and joined an Army damaged by the Vietnam War. As he walked into his battalion headquarters building for his first day at Fort Hood, Texas, he recalls medics carrying out the corpse of a soldier who had overdosed on heroin. "I thought to myself, 'Holy s-t, what have we done to this Army?' " he says.

In 1977, he married his battalion commander's daughter. He rose quickly through the ranks, serving as the military aide to Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey at Fort Benning, Ga. "I wrote on his officer evaluation that I wished he could have replaced me and I could have worked for him. That's how highly I thought of him," says Gen. McCaffrey, who retired in the 1990s.

Gen. Batiste fought in the first Gulf War, a quick victory that for many officers ratified their work to rebuild the Army after Vietnam. In 1995, he led one of the first 3,000-soldier brigades into Bosnia to protect embattled Muslims from the Serbs. The infantry officer figured out how to use his brigade's 70-ton tanks and attack helicopters to intimidate the enemies without firing a shot.

And Gen. Batiste learned how to turn potential adversaries into allies. Eight months into the mission, he was summoned to a hotel to meet with hostile Serbian officers and ended up in the middle of a rollicking wedding party, with a band and snaking conga line. He collected $100 from fellow officers and presented it as a wedding gift. The excited bride and groom both kissed his cheeks three times.

In 2001, Mr. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrived at the Pentagon with a mandate from President Bush to transform the military into a lighter, faster force. Mr. Wolfowitz tapped Gen. Batiste, who had been recommended by his superiors, to become his senior military assistant.

Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz kicked off their tenure with a massive review of military spending. To ensure that the generals and Congress didn't organize to block change, Mr. Rumsfeld insisted that much of the review initially be conducted in secret. As Mr. Wolfowitz's aide, Gen. Batiste had access to some of the high-level discussions.

Initial plans called for shrinking the Army by as much as 20%, to pay for high-tech airplanes, space and missile defense systems. In discussions with Mr. Wolfowitz, Gen. Batiste argued the virtues of a big Army, drawing on his Bosnia experience.

Some on Mr. Wolfowitz's staff say Gen. Batiste often offered a parochial Army view. He touted the Crusader artillery cannon, which was too heavy to move by plane and didn't mesh with President Bush's vision of light, agile forces. Studies dating to the Clinton administration branded the cannon unnecessary. Mr. Rumsfeld eventually spiked it.

The general says he forged a close relationship with Mr. Wolfowitz. "He is a brilliant, dedicated hard-working man," Gen. Batiste says. "I didn't always agree with him, but he listened. He was a fair man." Mr. Wolfowitz declined to comment for this article.

Gen. Batiste didn't feel the same way about Mr. Rumsfeld, who served as a Navy pilot from 1954 to 1957. Mr. Rumsfeld's plan to cut the Army by 20%, before 9/11, reflected a belief that new technology made it possible to win wars with smaller ground formations. "He came in with a lot of ideas about warfare that I thought were just bankrupt," Gen. Batiste says.

Gen. Batiste left the Pentagon in July 2002, after being promoted to command the 1st Infantry Division, one of the Army's 10 active-duty combat divisions. Half of his division was deployed in Kosovo. The rest of the Germany-based unit began preparing for war in Iraq.

Before the start of the war, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki suggested that it would take several hundred thousand troops to stabilize Iraq. Both Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowitz publicly said that was wrong. Like many Army officers, Gen. Batiste was deeply upset by their public rebuke. "I won't ever forget the treatment of Gen. Shinseki," Gen. Batiste says.

But he kept his reservations about the war plan to himself. "You don't know what you don't know until you are there on the ground," Gen. Batiste says. In January 2004, after a personal sendoff from Mr. Wolfowitz, his division deployed to Iraq. Gen. Batiste oversaw a territory about the size of West Virginia in the heart of the Sunni Triangle.

Once in Iraq, he believed some of his reservations were justified. Like most units in Iraq at the time, the 1st Infantry Division's humvees lacked armor. His soldiers contracted with Iraqis to weld whatever metal they could find to the sides of their humvees.

He also felt the unit didn't have enough reconstruction funds. When Mr. Wolfowitz came to visit in June 2004, Gen. Batiste said that his division had spent $41 million in three months on rebuilding. It had $23 million left for the remaining six months of the year. That wasn't enough, he says, to repair infrastructure destroyed by decades of misrule and sanctions, such as sewer, electrical or health-care systems. In addition, reconstruction funds put unemployed Iraqi men, who offered a potential recruiting pool for the enemy, on the U.S. payroll.

Over the course of the year-long tour, Gen. Batiste says he had to deal regularly with troop shortages. On three occasions, he was ordered to send soldiers to help other U.S. units in the cities of Najaf and Fallujah to put down revolts. Typically, the Army holds a couple of units in reserve to deal with unforeseen flare-ups. But the desire to keep the force as lean as possible meant there were no extra troops in Iraq.

Each time his soldiers left their area, attacks, intimidation and roadside bombs spiked, Gen. Batiste says. "It was like a sucking chest wound," he says. Relationships that soldiers had painstakingly built with local sheiks -- who had been persuaded to cooperate with U.S. forces at great risk to themselves and their families -- were lost when the soldiers were sent elsewhere, he says.

Gen. Batiste told Mr. Wolfowitz about this problem during the June 2004 visit, saying increased unrest in his sector was the "direct result of the boots-on-the-ground decrease." But he told Mr. Wolfowitz he believed his soldiers were making progress.

Gen. Batiste says he also relayed his concerns to his military bosses in Baghdad. "I always spoke out within my chain of command. I spoke my mind freely and forcefully," he says. His immediate commanders, Lt. Gen Thomas Metz and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, didn't respond to requests for comment. His commanders were sympathetic, Gen. Batiste says, but he doesn't know whether his concerns were relayed to the Pentagon.

Just weeks before his troops left Iraq, the general had an opportunity to confront Mr. Rumsfeld publicly. The secretary, who was making a 2004 Christmas tour through Iraq, came to meet with him and take questions from his troops.

Gen. Batiste introduced Mr. Rumsfeld to his soldiers as a "man with the courage and conviction to win the war on terrorism." The general says he was disillusioned with Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership at the time, but felt he needed to pump up his soldiers who were in the final days of a grueling, bloody deployment.

After the speech, Mr. Rumsfeld, accompanied by reporters, met with Gen. Batiste in his plywood office, in the corner of one of Saddam Hussein's unfinished marble palaces. Mr. Rumsfeld asked the general whether he had been given everything he needed, Gen. Batiste recalls. Not wanting to discuss problems in front of the press, he says he deflected the question, by talking about his efforts to train Iraqi security forces.

The defense secretary then turned to Gen. Batiste's boss, Gen. Metz and asked: "What has Batiste told you he needs that he has not received?" according to a Dec. 26, 2004, account of the meeting by the Associated Press. Gen. Metz made no mention of troop levels, but said that Gen. Batiste could use some more unmanned spy planes and Iraqi linguists, the 2004 AP report says.

Today Gen. Batiste says the encounter left him furious with Mr. Rumsfeld. "We had fought and argued about these issues internally ad nauseam and a decision had been made ... . You get what you get and do the best you can. I am not going to air our dirty laundry in public. That is our culture," he says. "It was an outrageous question and he knew I couldn't give him an honest answer in a public forum. I felt as though I had been used politically."

Larry Di Rita, a senior aide to Mr. Rumsfeld, who also attended the meeting, says if Gen. Batiste "had something stuck in his craw, he had ample opportunity" to ask for private time with Mr. Rumsfeld. He says Mr. Rumsfeld blocked out two hours to spend with Gen. Batiste and his troops. "The opportunity was there if there was something he wanted to bring up."

During that meeting, Mr. Di Rita says Gen. Batiste was "upbeat" on progress in his area. "It was an extremely positive interaction," Mr. Di Rita says. He says he finds Gen. Batiste's recent criticism of the secretary "baffling."

Mr. Rumsfeld has consistently touted the virtues of a smaller, faster force, which he says allowed the U.S. to topple Saddam Hussein more quickly. He also has said that a larger force, of the sort advocated by Gen. Batiste, would breed a culture of dependency and resentment among the Iraqis. The better solution, he insisted, was to use a smaller force that would help the Iraqis to stabilize and rebuild the country themselves.

Gen. Batiste's division returned to Germany in February 2005. Despite challenges, he believed he was winning the war in his region. "I thought we had turned a corner," he says today.

He and his family went to Malawi for several weeks to camp and visit his daughter in the Peace Corps. In April, he was offered a job as the deputy commander of the Army's V Corps, a major warfighting command, and told that when the Corps deployed to Iraq in early 2006 he likely would be given a third star, according to Army officials. The promotion would have made him the second-highest ranking military officer in Iraq, overseeing about 130,000 troops.

Despite misgivings, he accepted the job. Gen. Batiste was on course to assume the deputy corps commander position, after he relinquished command of his division. His wife traveled to Heidelberg to visit their new home. But Gen. Batiste began to think hard about resigning. "How can I look myself in the mirror if I take this job," he recalls thinking.

Gen. Batiste barely slept in the days leading up to the change-of-command ceremony, he says, often pacing around his house. He was haunted by something he had studied during his days at the Army War College: the regrets of Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff during the Vietnam War.

Years after he retired, Gen. Johnson told friends that at one point during the war, he planned to confront President Lyndon Johnson and quit, according to a biography by Lewis Sorley, a retired Army officer and Vietnam scholar.

"You have required me to send men into battle with little hope of the ultimate victory and you have forced us to violate almost every one of the principles of war in Vietnam," Gen. Johnson planned to tell the president, the biography says. "Therefore I resign and will hold a press conference after I walk out your door."

He never did. Before he died, Gen. Johnson lamented that he was going to his grave "with the burden of a lapse of moral courage on my back," according to the biography.

That account supports a belief -- held by many in the Army today -- that the U.S. military lost in Vietnam because it was betrayed by ill-informed politicians who disregarded their advice.

Many historians, including Army Col. H.R. McMaster, who wrote Dereliction of Duty, a history of the top brass in Vietnam, say the truth is more complicated. Col. McMaster argues that the generals, split by rivalries and eager to curry favor with their civilian bosses, acquiesced to a policy they knew would fail in Vietnam, without raising serious objections or offering alternate strategy.

For a general to publicly disagree with civilian leaders can mean the end of a career. In one famous case, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was fired by President Truman after expressing his desire to take the Korean War further than the administration wanted.

Gen. Batiste says he had raised concerns within his chain of command. But he felt he needed to do more. On June 19, the day before the change-of-command ceremony, he filled out a retirement form on his computer and faxed it to his four-star commander in Germany.

The next day, Gen. Batiste, speaking at the ceremony, began his protest — but in a way so oblique that only his closest friends would understand. He told the hundreds in attendance that the 1st Infantry Division soldiers had succeeded in Iraq because they had "rigidly adhered to the principles of our war fighting training and doctrine."

He says that was a reference to something he had privately discussed with fellow officers: his belief that Mr. Rumsfeld had violated a fundamental principle of war by sending in an invading force that was too small to impose security after Saddam Hussein's regime had collapsed.

"The guys who knew me well understood what I was saying," Gen. Batiste says.

A few weeks later, he came back to the U.S. and in November, took a job as president of Klein Steel Services, a family-owned company that cuts custom-made steel in Rochester, N.Y. He found the job through an organization that matches retired senior military officials with companies. Gen. Batiste says he liked Klein's leadership philosophy. He also liked that the company did no defense industry work. "I wanted a clean break," he says.

His return to the U.S. was jarring. "It shocked me that the country was not mobilized for war," he says. "It was almost surreal." For some Americans, "the only time they think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car."

This March, the Rochester Rotary Club asked Gen. Batiste to give a speech about the war in Iraq. He had been wrestling with whether to speak out about his frustrations. "I was teetering," he says.

Days before his April 4 talk, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the U.S. had made thousands of "tactical errors" in Iraq. The remark, which he interpreted as a criticism of the military, upset him immensely. He decided it was time to speak out. At the time, two generals had already called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation.

In his Rotary Club speech, Gen. Batiste didn't say Mr. Rumsfeld should quit. Instead, he called the defense secretary "arrogant," and chided him for ignoring senior military advisers. The 100 or so Rotary Club members gave him a standing ovation and the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle ran a brief article on the speech. On April 9, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold called for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign in a Time magazine opinion piece. He was the third general to demand Mr. Rumsfeld leave.

Two days later, a producer from CNN, who had seen the article on Gen. Batiste's Rotary Club speech, asked him if he would appear on the network. On CNN, Gen. Batiste praised the U.S. military and bemoaned the American people's lack of sacrifice and commitment to the war. Finally, he called for a "fresh start" in the Pentagon.

"We need a leader who understands team work," Gen. Batiste said. "When decisions are made without taking into account sound military recommendations...we're bound to make mistakes."

"So the secretary should step down?" the host asked.

"In my opinion, yes," Gen. Batiste replied, making him the fourth general to call for Mr. Rumsfeld to leave.

The next day he was asked on PBS if his protest was a "one-shot deal." "I have never quit anything in my life," Gen. Batiste replied.

Gen. Batiste has walked a fine line since launching his public protest. He believes it is OK for him to call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. But the oath he swore throughout his 31-year Army career to "obey the orders of the president" has convinced him that he shouldn't slight President Bush. "I support my president," he says.

To some, that doesn't make sense. "Who are we kidding? It is a distinction without a difference," says Richard Kohn, a professor of military history at the University of North Carolina. Since the president has said he supports Mr. Rumsfeld, "for Gen. Batiste to speak out is to contradict the president. It is his right, legally and constitutionally. But in my opinion, it is not appropriate or consonant with a professional military career." Public protests by retired generals politicize the Army and undermine respect for the leadership among serving soldiers, he says.

Blaming civilian leaders for the woes in Iraq will prevent the Army from addressing its own failures, in preparing to fight guerrilla wars, others say. "This is a shared responsibility. The civilians didn't just do this to us. We did it to ourselves," says Gen. Jack Keane, who served as the No. 2 officer in the Army during much of the planning and early days of the war.

Gen. Batiste has continued to publicly call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, saying he has a "moral obligation" to speak out both for his troops, some of whom are back in Iraq, and his nation.

"My objective is accountability. I think Mr. Rumsfeld's decisions have caused our military almost irreparable harm," he says. "Sadly, I can do more for soldiers outside the military right now than inside."

Greg Jaffe

Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

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I Knew It!

This cartoon rivals the classic from The New Yorker wherein a dog at a keyboard says to another watching dog: "They don't know you're a dog on the Internet." Now, the origin of "Blog" is explained once and for all. If this is (fair & balanced) drollery, so be it.

"Someday you'll be a household name, Blog."

Mary Nadler was born & raised in Saranac Lake, NY. She lives in Los Angeles and has a BA in English Literature.She has taken numerous art courses at various colleges & art schools. Nadler's 1st cartoon sale was to Good Housekeeping in 1994.

Copyright © 2006 The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Trickster Redux

The Trickster And The Dubster have spent more time in public opinion Purgatory than any other prexies. Not only that, but The Frankster reminds us that there are eerie echoes of the Vietnam era. Both The Trickster and The Dubster and all of their men (and women) use treason-accusations to "wag the dog" and deflect attention from their criminal (and impeachable) conduct. Not only are we in a quagmire in "Mess O'Potamia" — as "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" styles that hellish place — but we are sinking into another Watergate era at home. If only Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald can make Scooter flip à la John Dean. Then we'll see the rats scurrying for cover. The thought of The Dubster taking the long walk to the chopper for a final trip in Air Force One to Crawford brings a smile. If this is (fair & balanced) gleeful anticipation, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
By Frank Rich

When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.

The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."

Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.

Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.

Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.

Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.

Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.

Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

Frank Rich's opinion column appears in the Sunday issue of The Times.

Copyright © 2006 The New York Times Company

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I Resemble Those Remarks!

Last month, I enjoyed reading Professor "Benton's" discourse on the seven deadly sins of students. My so-called academic career at the Collegium Excellens was a paraphrase of The Pilgrim's Progress." There are those who would call me "The Man with The Muckrake" for the mild comments made in this blog from time to time. As much as the truth hurts, professors in my orbit were probably deadlier sinners than undergraduate students. However, age and experience provide no protection against the contagion of Sloth, Greed, Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Envy, and Pride. I knew all of those professors and was one of them myself — too often for comfort. If this is (fair & balanced) self-disclosure, so be it.

[CHE]
The 7 Deadly Sins of Professors
By Thomas H. Benton

Last month I sermonized about the "7 Deadly Sins of Students," and it resulted in some predictable reactions: protestations from students and affirmations from professors.

The students, mostly, have learned not to take responsibility for their actions. If they fail to do assignments and miss a substantial number of classes, it's because they are so busy, even though said busyness — if the truth be told — consists mostly of playing video games, watching television, attending sporting events, and going to drunken parties. In my experience, the ones who are truly busy — because they are working long hours at a job while going to school, have children to mind, or serious health problems — are rarely the ones who make excuses about busyness.

It's traditional to think that pride is the root cause of the other deadly sins, but sometimes it works the other way around: Many students have too little to do, and, as the saying goes, "idle hands are the devil's workshop."

But this is not interesting. Slothful students are not news. They have always been thus, and they always will be. To dwell on the shortcomings of students smacks of professorial pride more than anything else. Were most of us any different at their age? If so, it might have been because we had better teachers and better institutions that guided our moral development and had the courage and support to stand behind their beliefs.

In some respects, the students are right: Professors are to blame.

We cultivate students' unmerited pride with high praise for mediocre work. And we tolerate all of the other sins by abdicating responsibility for the culture of our classrooms. Again and again, I have heard students say their classes are so easy that almost no effort is required, even for top grades. Residential student life, at many institutions, is mostly free time to explore and indulge one's vices. And we professors -- too busy chasing our ambitions -- avoid maintaining standards because they are time-consuming and costly to our teaching evaluations.

Once again, the traditional model of the "Seven Deadly Sins" provides a helpful means of understanding why so many students are unhappy with their professors, and why so many professors are unhappy in general:

Sloth: Like their students, professors claim to be so busy that they can't give proper attention to their teaching. Some professors begin classes late and dismiss them early; others rarely keep their posted office hours. Students used to complain about deadwood professors reading their lectures from yellowing notes. That's less common now than canned PowerPoint presentations, film screenings, and group discussions in which students — most of whom have not done the reading — attempt to do the work of the absentee professor.

All of those techniques use up class time with a minimum of effort and learning. In addition, professors can avoid the hard work of grading by requiring fewer assignments, making them "objective" (i.e., machine gradable), and — when written assignments and exams are mandated by the curriculum — inflating the grades. High grades require less written justification, result in fewer student complaints, and require no follow-up advising.

Of course, in many contexts, all of this grading can simply be shifted to teaching assistants and adjuncts who will likewise inflate grades for the same reasons. It's easy to blame the situation on administrators, but the corporate university crept into place because, over the last three decades, professors — out of apathy and a desire to pursue their own interests — have slowly abandoned the governance of their institutions to the values of the marketplace.

Greed: Professors often say that they didn't become teachers out of a desire to get rich, but it's hard to believe that most professors chose their careers solely out of a desire to foster "social justice" or some other fashionable form of ostentatious altruism. More often, I think people become professors out of a lack of options: What can one do, after all, with an undergraduate degree in medieval studies or art history? Most entry-level jobs seem unsatisfactory to people who think of themselves as exceptionally gifted.

Unlike doctors and lawyers, most professors forgo big money, but, as a group, they are even more ravenously hungry for status. Humanities faculty members, for example, are less concerned about the higher salaries earned by their counterparts in science (who do have other career options) than they are about what the humanist in the next office is getting paid. This is where greed shades off into pride, but more on that later.

Perhaps the place where greed is most evident among tenured faculty members is in their general refusal to support better pay and benefits for part-timers and graduate students who increasingly do most of the difficult teaching at the major universities where one finds the tenured professors who are very well paid indeed for that Faustian bargain.

Anger: Everyone has heard the saying, "Academic fights are so bitter because the stakes are so small." Every department is a social experiment in which a cluster of people who regard themselves as underpaid and underappreciated are trapped together for decades, forced to endure each other's annoying eccentricities and utterly predictable habits of mind. Every department is a stew of resentments stretching back at least as far as the careers of the oldest senior professor. Every department meeting — topics, words, inflections, facial expressions — is as rich with historical reference as a monologue from Absalom, Absalom!

Married without the possibility of divorce, angry faculty members exhaust themselves in petty battles over ancient personal resentments that pretend to be principles. And, conversely, because professors become so invested in maintaining the appearance of ideological commitment, it is impossible to discuss matters of principle without the risk of giving personal offense. Instead, professors often choose to cultivate their disagreements in silence or among small clutches of allies who have little more in common than dislike for one powerful person.

Lust: Affairs and adultery happen in departments as they do in other places, but the hostilities linger longer. Apparently, there are also some professors who pursue students in a sexual way, with the perverse justification that it is some kind of initiation into adult life. One recalls the younger Harold Bloom leering at the undergraduate Naomi Wolf (though her belated report of this encounter says more about her lust for media attention than his lust for her). Of course, male faculty members have no monopoly on inappropriate sexual behavior; recall Jane Gallop's observation that her "sexual preference is graduate students." It may be, however, that all of the attention given to lust (and its complex relationship with power) in the last few decades has caused professors to stand aloof from their students — no lunches, no informal mentorship, no emotional warmth, no hugs — because of the risk of false accusations from people with lust on their minds.

Gluttony: A lot of concern is directed at alcohol consumption by students, and rightly so. But relatively little attention is given to alcohol consumption by professors. Like students, professors have a lot of unstructured time in which the consolations of the occasional drink can easily develop into an addiction that affects one's performance and judgment in all kinds of ways.

Sometimes professors use pride to turn addiction into virtue: The myth of the "thirsty muse" dramatized by Hemingway and Pollock is still alive, and it includes more than alcohol under the guise of enlightened defiance of bourgeois social norms.

Likewise, obesity for academics is less about gluttony or sloth than it is a form of machismo that crosses gender lines: "I am so busy — and important — that I don't have time to mind my health." On the other hand, sometimes the thin among us substitute delicacy for overindulgence and make a point of complaining how the food in the faculty cafeteria is inferior to the meals they've eaten elsewhere and feel entitled to eat every day.

Envy: The whole system of institutional hierarchies and academic ranks seems designed to make professors unhappy with their present circumstances. There is always somewhere better we should be, if only someone in authority would recognize our talents, which are always out of proportion to the place where we work. And even in the context of our present reduced circumstances, someone else has a bigger office, a larger salary, and it's unfair because we deserve more.

So, instead of building cordial relationships with our colleagues and students, we expend our energies trying to impress people somewhere else. We attend conferences not to enhance our knowledge or maintain collegial relationships based on equality, but to seek out the famous and the powerful (whom we secretly resent) and cultivate their approval and patronage.

Or, if we are so fortunate as to attain titles of eminence, we come to believe that our position is wholly merited by our abilities and adopt a mien of condescension and hauteur that probably does more to breed envy than the unrealized ambitions of thousands whose names we do not care to remember.

Pride: If it does nothing else, the process of becoming a professor should involve the recognition of how little one knows. Even in the smallest subfield, there are always new questions, and revolutions in thought arrive with the regularity of new generations of scholars. Perhaps the evident pride of professors is based upon a secret insecurity: Our intellectual and ideological fortresses are built on sand.

Perhaps the ugliest side of professors is the conviction that specialized knowledge about a few narrow subjects confers intellectual and moral authority on matters about which one knows almost nothing. How is it possible, we wonder, that students who do not share our fascination with the English Civil War and Marxism can somehow also be intelligent and ethical people? How is it that we are not consulted in matters of grave national importance? If the world will not come to us for wisdom, then we will stand aloof and make a world for ourselves where we can torment each other, like Milton's vision of hell, while the rest of the world goes about the business of living, unconcerned with the petty disputes that cost many of us any possibility of happiness.

It is not possible to write about the sins of one's profession without suggesting that one is somehow superior to others and therefore guilty of pride, among other vices. Ultimately, however, I am writing this column for myself. I am making a confession and an apology, which might be representative of other professors' experiences, and which may, perhaps, become as helpful to others as it has been for me.

Thomas H. Benton is the pseudonym of a soon-to-be associate professor of English at a Midwestern liberal-arts college. He writes about academic culture for The Chronicle.


Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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Q: How Do You Know When The Dubster Is Lying? A: When His Lips Are Moving!

The Dubster is going down. LBJ bit the green weinie and The Dubster is going the same route. Resign before you're impeached, you moron! There are buttons for sale on the Net that read: ITMFA. The acronym stands for Impeach The M-Fer Already. As Malcolm X said, "Chickens come home to roost." The Dubster's chickens are clucking ever louder. If this is (fair & balanced) gleeful anticipation, so be it.

[x Bloomberg.com]
Iraq War Is Drawing Less Support Than Vietnam Did at Same Stage
by Heidi Przybyla

Three years into major combat in Vietnam, 28,500 U.S. service members had perished, millions of families were anxious about the military draft and antiwar protests had spread to dozens of college campuses.

Today, at the same juncture in the Iraq war, about 2,400 American soldiers have died, the U.S. military consists entirely of volunteers and public dissent is sporadic.

There's one other difference: The war in Iraq is more unpopular than was the Vietnam conflict at this stage, polls show.

More Americans — 57 percent — say sending troops to Iraq was a mistake than the 48 percent who called Vietnam an error in April 1968, polls by the Princeton, New Jersey-based Gallup Organization show. That's because more people believed that Vietnam was crucial to U.S. security, scholars say.

"People simply value the stakes much lower in Iraq than they did in Vietnam,'' said John Mueller, a presidential historian at Ohio State University in Columbus. Vietnam "seemed vital in terms of the Cold War and stopping the communists. People don't see this as an important adventure.''

The poll numbers suggest that President George W. Bush may come under overwhelming pressure from voters to resolve the war, as did President Lyndon B. Johnson 38 years ago, even though both men vowed to stay the course.

"I doubt that he's going to be able to buy very much time at all,'' William Leuchtenburg, a retired historian who taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a past president of the American Historical Association, said of Bush. With no signs of an Iraq policy change, he said, "Bush and the Republicans will pay a price, particularly in some of the Senate races.''

Congress at Stake

Control of both chambers of Congress is at stake in this November's elections, and any Republican losses will further complicate Bush's ability to continue his Iraq policy.

Already, some Republicans are clamoring for an exit strategy and pressuring party leaders for a chance to discuss the issue. On May 2, House Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said the House may debate the war for the first time later this year.

As passionate as Americans were about Vietnam, some 12 percent of them had failed to form an opinion about the war by April 1968, according to Gallup data.

Today, just 1 percent of Americans are undecided about Iraq. And disapproval of Bush's decision to invade is 15 percentage points higher than approval, an April 7-9 Gallup poll of 1,004 adults showed. That's twice as wide a gap as on Vietnam at this time four decades ago.

Job Ratings Drop

Bush's job-approval ratings are lower than were Johnson's during the far bloodier Vietnam conflict. Among the reasons: the highly publicized intelligence failures that preceded the Iraq invasion of 2003, the fact that Bush began the war, and the shadow of Vietnam itself, historians say.

From January to July of 1968 Johnson's monthly approval ratings fluctuated at 40 percent or above, with one exception, Gallup polling data show; Bush's approval has been stuck below 40 percent since February of this year, according to several national polls. His rating fell to a record-low 31 percent in the latest Gallup Poll, conducted May 5-7 with USA Today.

Some Republicans say Bush's disapproval ratings on the war may have more to do with the more extensive coverage by the media today than anything else.

"You're not comparing apples to apples,'' said John Brabender, a Republican political consultant in Leesburg, Virginia. ``You did not have cable news or the Internet. What expansive news programming has created is a larger voice for dissent, a larger discussion and a comfort level to express it that you've never seen.''

Flawed Intelligence

Some historians say Bush has met with such resistance because of the flawed intelligence he used to make the case for war. He began the effort focused on former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction; in October 2002, Bush warned of a ``smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.''

No such stocks were ever found, and Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA reports have surfaced saying there was no evidence Iraq was reconstituting its weapons. Bush also sought to tie Hussein's government to the al-Qaeda terror network, a link that's never been substantiated.

The closest parallel in Vietnam was the reports of unprovoked North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Those alleged incidents eventually fueled an escalation of the war, with Johnson announcing air strikes in 1965.

Compared with Iraq, "there weren't such blatantly false assumptions exposed at so early a date,'' Leuchtenburg said.

Full Responsibility

Bush's low approval ratings are also a result of his being given full responsibility for progress or setbacks in Iraq, said Bert Rockman, a presidential scholar at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

"Johnson inherited a problem that came from Eisenhower, through Kennedy to him,'' he said. "In Bush's case, this was something he created.''

Finally, the legacy of Vietnam is contributing to the current administration's public opinion woes, according to historians. "The Iraq war stands in the shadow of Vietnam,'' said Robert Dallek, a retired Boston University professor and author of the book Lyndon B. Johnson, Portrait of a President, published last year. "They remember that as a quagmire.''

Public Relations

The similarities between Bush and Johnson extend to how the two dealt with their public-approval problems. In November 1967, the Johnson administration launched a public-relations campaign to convince Congress, the press and the public there was progress in Vietnam. Johnson was counseled by advisers to emphasize "the light at the end of the tunnel.'' While public support rose, it quickly sank in early 1968 as the Viet Cong started what came to be known as the Tet Offensive.

By September 1968, disapproval of the war had risen to levels similar to the dissent over Iraq today, the Gallup data shows.

In a series of speeches last year and early this year, Bush has touted successes in Iraq, including beginning his remarks marking the third anniversary of the invasion on March 19 by saying he's "encouraged by the progress.''

Bush, like Johnson, has signaled that it will be up to his successors to resolve the war.

He said in a March news conference that complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq is an objective that "will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq.''

Copyright © 2006 Bloomberg L.P.

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