U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote

Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror

by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 [1967] -- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.

....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta. [via Political Animal]

Patachon at Daily Kos has the rest of the article. Kos adds:

And nations with vicious civil wars, like Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Peru, and so on staged elections (of various legitimacy) even while facing down insurgencies.

January was the third bloodiest month for US and allied troops. Will that cease now that Iraqis have voted? Nope. Will economic sabotage of Iraq stop? Nope. Will the terrorists lay down arms? Nope. Will the insurgents? Nope.

The war will continue unabated.

Indeed. The overall trend in Iraq is clear:  the situation has gotten continually worse since "Mission Accomplished" (May 1, 2003). It continued to do so after the capture of Saddam and the hand-over of "sovereignty" to Iraq, both of which were supposed to improve matters. It's naive to think that the election will be any different. I hope I'm proven wrong, but I greatly doubt it.

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. In this case, we, the undersigned bloggers, have decided to speak as one and collectively author a document of opposition. We oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General of the United States, and we urge every United States Senator to vote against him.

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales's advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Convention, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales's legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law's undoing.

In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales's endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint."

Legal opinions at the highest level have grave consequences. What were the consequences of Gonzales's actions? The policies for which Gonzales provided a cover of legality - views which he expressly reasserted in his Senate confirmation hearings - inexorably led to abuses that have undermined military discipline and the moral authority our nation once carried. His actions led directly to documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and widespread abusive conduct in locales around the world.

Michael Posner of Human Rights First observed: "After the horrific images from Abu Ghraib became public last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the world should 'judge us by our actions [and] watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes.'" We agree. It is because of this that we believe the only proper course of action is for the Senate to reject Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General. As Posner notes, "[t]he world is indeed watching." Will the Senate condone torture? Will the Senate condone the rejection of the rule of law?

With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

White House officials said yesterday that President Bush's soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy but instead was meant as a crystallization and clarification of policies he is pursuing in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East and elsewhere.

Nor, they say, will it lead to any quick shift in strategy for dealing with countries such as Russia, China, Egypt and Pakistan, allies in the fight against terrorism whose records on human rights and democracy fall well short of the values Bush said would become the basis of relations with all countries.

Bush advisers said the speech was the rhetorical institutionalization of the Bush doctrine and reflected the president's deepest convictions about the purposes behind his foreign policies. But they said it was carefully written not to tie him to an inflexible or unrealistic application of his goal of ending tyranny. [link via Daily Kos]

You may now return to your regular programming. Happily we have Fafblog to explain to us the true meaning of Freedom.™

There seems to be a presumption among tort reformers that pain and suffering damages are not real. The President’s tort reform proposal permits recovery of all economic damages but limits non-economic damages to $250,000. Some seem to believe that that proposal would provide a fair recovery for injured persons.

. . . .

The damage cap does create injustice in some cases. For instance, a New Fairfield, Connecticut woman was recently awarded $500,000 in damages against a doctor who sterilized her without her consent.

MaryAnn Daly went in for an emergency Cesarean section. While performing the procedure her doctor also performed a tubal ligation. The jury found that the doctor did not obtain his patient’s consent before sterilizing her.

Under the President’s proposal, what damages would be available to Ms. Daly? The tubal ligation would not prevent her from earning money so she would receive nothing for past or future lost wages. The tubal ligation would not cause any future medical procedures so she would receive no award for medical expenses. Her economic damages would be approximately zero. Under the President’s proposal, her recovery would be limited to a maximum of $250,000.

Does that seem fair? The jury, who surely knows more about MaryAnn Daly's damages than you, me, or the President, found that she had been damaged in the amount of $500,000. Is it fair to cut that award in half?

Several years ago in the Atlanta area, a doctor misused a laser while circumcising a newborn. He burned off the baby’s penis. The doctors performed another surgery to make the infant cosmetically a female. Once again, the baby would have a hard time proving much in the way of economic damages. Once again, $250,000 does not seem like adequate compensation for the injury.

Or consider the hypothetical of a 65 year-old man who after 40 years of work decides to retire to spend more time with his wife, children, and grandchildren.

If a doctor mis-prescribes medication that kills the man, there would be little or no economic damages. His retirement would reduce his lost earnings to nearly zero and his death would cut off any future medical treatment. The economic damages could easily be the cost of the funeral.

A damages cap of $250,000 for the death of a relatively young man who does not get to spend a decade or two watching his grand kids grow up does not seem fair to me. Does it to you? [typo in original corrected by me]

The paragraphs I left out are well worth reading, too.

Someone should offer to pay $250,000 to cut off Bush's dick. Would Bush accept? Why not? By his reckoning, that should be a great deal, since unlike the kid whose dick got fried in infancy, Bush has already gotten 58 1/2 years of use out of his.

One of Meredith's commenters directs us to an article in Washington Monthly on tort reform, which makes the point that big medical malpractice judgments are largely due to (surprise!) horrific medical malpractice, often committed by bad doctors who keep messing people up and paying out large judgments, yet never lose their licenses. One obvious solution would be to stop incompetent doctors who repeatedly maim and kill people from practicing medicine, but precious few doctors seem to be interested in that.

Even as President Bush was taking the oath of office and delivering his Inaugural Address beneath the clear, cold skies of Washington, the news wires were churning out stories about the tragic mayhem in Iraq. There is no end in sight to the carnage, which was unleashed nearly two years ago by President Bush's decision to launch this wholly unnecessary war, one of the worst presidential decisions in American history.

Incredibly, with more than 1,360 American troops dead and more than 10,000 wounded, and with scores of thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded, the president never once mentioned the word Iraq in his Inaugural Address. He avoided all but the most general references to the war. Lyndon Johnson used to agonize over the war that unraveled his presidency. Mr. Bush, riding the crest of his re-election wave, seems not to be similarly bothered. (Emphasis added.)

It's really true. The "War on Terra" is the defining theme of the Bush presidency, and Iraq is supposedly its centerpiece.  But Bush didn't mention Iraq once. Nor did he ever use any of the following words:  war, terror, terrorists, terrorism, Saddam, Hussein, weapons, mass, destruction, Osama, bin Laden, al Qaeda. (Remember bin Laden? That guy Dubya vowed over three years ago to get dead or alive, but then lost interest?)

Bush's silence is easy to explain. All of that unmentioned stuff is going disastrously. The U.S. has given up searching for all those tons of nonexistent WMD's that were the casus belli for the war against Iraq. Iraq is an unbelievable nightmare, more and more of our soldiers are dying, and the CIA admits that Iraq has now become the breeding ground for the next generation of terrorists. Osama and al Qaeda are alive and well. Terrorist attacks around the world are rising dramatically. So just blather some stuff about freedom and liberty. Everyone loves that, right? Maybe in his 2006 State of the Union address Bush can declare his love for babies, puppies, motherhood, and apple pie. (REVISED AND CORRECTED)

President Bush's soaring rhetoric yesterday that the United States will promote the growth of democratic movements and institutions worldwide is at odds with the administration's increasingly close relations with repressive governments in every corner of the world.

Some of the administration's allies in the war against terrorism -- including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan -- are ranked by the State Department as among the worst human rights abusers. The president has proudly proclaimed his friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin while remaining largely silent about Putin's dismantling of democratic institutions in the past four years. The administration, eager to enlist China as an ally in the effort to restrain North Korea's nuclear ambitions, has played down human rights concerns there, as well.

Bush's speech "brought to a high level the gap between the rhetoric and reality in U.S. foreign policy," said Thomas Carothers, co-author of a new book, "Uncharted Journey: Promoting Democracy in the Middle East."

"The rhetoric is seamless, but the policy is very muddled. In fact, the war on terrorism has pushed the U.S. to be friendlier with nondemocratic regimes," said Carothers, director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. [via the ACS Blog]

Poll: Nation split on Bush as uniter or divider

. . . .

Forty-nine percent of 1,007 adult Americans said in phone interviews they believe Bush is a "uniter," according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Wednesday. Another 49 percent called him a "divider," and 2 percent had no opinion.

The results nearly match those of a poll taken in October 2004, which showed 48 percent considered Bush a "uniter" and 48 percent called him a "divider," with 4 percent having no opinion.

As in so many other respects, I'm mystified how half the respondents could think Bush is a "uniter."  Tell that to the 57 million 60 million of us who voted against him.

Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Above him, the tower was adorned with a big sign that read, "Mission Accomplished."

Bush, speaking to U.S. troops in Qatar on June 5, 2003:

DOHA, Qatar (CNN) -- President Bush told U.S. troops in Qatar on Thursday that their duty and sacrifice had liberated the people of Iraq and helped in defeating global terrorism.

"Our actions sent along a clear message that our nation is strong and our nation is compassionate," Bush told the troops at the rally. "America sent you on a mission and that mission has been accomplished."

The New York Times, writing of Condoleezza Rice's testimony before Congress on January 18, 2005:

Rice . . . declined to estimate when even some of the 150,000 U.S. troops may return home.

"I am really reluctant to try to put a timetable on that, because I think the goal is to get the mission accomplished," she . . . said Tuesday[.]

"America failed its exam as a superpower," says Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity trade-union leader who became Poland's first post-Communist president. "They are a military and economic superpower but not morally or politically anymore. This is a tragedy for us." [link via Pandagon]