Musharraf faces more accountability than Bush

S0 Perv Musharraf, who has been president of Pakistan since he took over in a military coup in 1999, has resigned. He faces more accountability for his malfeasance in office than President Bush has. But then impeachment, with which Musharraf was threatened, is not really based on the magnitude of the crimes involved but on the magnitude of the loss of political support. Bush certainly deserves to be impeached based on the way he has trashed the constitution, but the sad fact, ignored by some of the more enthusiastic advocates of impeachment, is that he would almost certainly have had enough support in Congress to avert conviction, perhaps even to avert impeachment, and significant elements of the country would have rallied around him. Too bad. Impeachment got a bad name when they tried it on Clinton.

Anyway, here's the Register's editorial on Musharraf's resignation. The two parties now in control aren't even speaking to each other and what is called a government in Pakistan really isn't one -- which might not be all that bad. Fortunately the Pakistani military still seems to have effective control of the nuclear weapons. I wouldn't be surprised if they took over he government before long. It's been a Pakistani pattern.

McClellan seems remarkably credible

This is a preliminary impression, of course. I haven't read the book yet, though there's a good chance I'll have a copy tomorrow. But I watched the Scott McClellan interview with Keith Olberman tonight, and he seemed pretty credible, in the sense that he seemed to stick to what he had reason to know about and to resist speculating on what he didn't or couldn't know about. I'll have more to say later.

I still think he wasn't much of a press secretary, especially in the sense that he wasn't especially good at communicating what the administration was trying to do. I guess I'm not surprised it took him so long to get disillusioned; loyalists can often overlook vague and growing uneasiness for a long time. My preliminary impression, however, is that he did the book for what he conceives to be patriotic motives. The White House, and Ari Fleischer, of course, are trying to say he didn't have enough access to say what he has said, but of course nobody will admit to having read the book yet. So far I haven't seen a convincing refutation of any of the facts or incidents he's written about.

If he's right that Bush's impulses from an early date were more Wilsonian than defensive -- that he wanted to attack Iraq to impose "coercive democracy" (nice turn of phrase) more than because the intelligence was so supposedly airtight on WMD, it's an important thing to know. It would mean that Bush is an even bigger fool than we thought.

Unwarranted surveillance and the Supremes

The Supreme Court has declined a case brought by the ACLU challenging the unwarranted surveillance Pres. Bush began in 2001, in apparent violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which set up a secret court to consider requests for warrant to do electronic surveillance of U.S. residents. The Register deplored the court's decision. I talked later with Roger Pilon at the Cato Institute, who has come close to accepting John Yoo's contentions that such surveillance is within the president's authority, and Congress didn't have constitutional authority to limit it by passing the FISA law (that's a minority opinion at Cato). I like and respect Roger, but I respectfully disagree. I think the Fourth Amendment limits both executive and legislative authority to do such unwarranted surveillance. In addition, even if the program is legal, it's bad policy and utterly unnecessary. If this program had really stymied some terrorist plans or led to neutralizing some of them, you can be sure they would have been bragging about it.

Bush's Middle East futility

Here's a link to the Register's editorial on Bush's silly trip to the Middle East. It's almost a cliche by now that an outgoing U.S. president has to take one last stab at settling the Israel-Palestine situation before leaving office. I doubt Bush even comprehends it but the trip neatly highlights how disastrously the Iraq invasion has turned out. It enhanced Iran's status as a regional power and emboldened the Ahmadinejads of this world, so now he has to try to cobble together an anti-Iran coalition of countries who have lost (if they ever had) all confidence in U.S. leadership. Pathetic.