Republicans demand equal time to harangue students

Next Tuesday President Obama plans to talk to high school students in Virginia and make the speech available simultaneously to schools around the country as a White House video feed. His focus will be encouraging students to do well in school and to take their studies seriously.

As might be expected, when news of the plan became public it immediately caused a furor among conservatives, who are used to having only Republican presidents talk to students. Schools are being inundated with complaints about the attempt by that man in the White House to indoctrinate children with his 'socialist agenda' and to create a 'cult of personality' such as exist in Cuba and North Korea. Initially Republican critics sought to prevent schools from letting students see that man in the White House speak, or keep their children home from school to teach them a kind of civics lesson.

Today, however, GOP leaders settled on a more aggressive strategy. Congressional Republican leaders demanded that the television networks grant them equal time to respond to the President's message on September 8.

Schools in several states quickly agreed to show students the GOP rebuttal, and in Texas one school system near Dallas that already announced it will not allow Obama's address to be seen decided to make the Republican rejoinder mandatory.

The Republicans have selected Bill O'Reilly to deliver their rebuttal. His spokesman announced that O'Reilly will focus on the danger of personality-driven politics. He'll also stress that students should cease from studying foreign languages, which he'll describe as 'unAmerican', and disrespect their teachers, who are unionized. O'Reilly will especially encourage students to engage in bullying and harrassment. In the long term, he'll say, they should try to drop out of school before they can be confused by too much information.

WSJ: Obama set to reverse himself on criminal interrogations

Last year while campaigning candidate Barack Obama used to boast about a law he helped to enact in the Illinois state legislature, which required all police interrogations to be videotaped. This mandate of transparency, he said, would discourage abusive interrogation practices in the future and serve to hold accountable any public servant who dared to engage in them. Today, however, Evan Perez and Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal report that President Obama is on the verge of ordering the Justice Department to block the disclosure of evidence of extremely brutal interrogations – on the grounds that it would be too embarrassing for the public to see quite how abusively government employees behaved.

The three videotapes in question, from 2005, show the interrogations of multiple suspects (none ever charged with any crimes). Officers inflicted a variety of diabolically clever forms of torture on them as well as plain old physical brutality. For example, one preferred method of "interrogation" was to bang a suspect's head against the wall repeatedly.

Although the Justice Dept. wishes to publish the tapes, in compliance with an ACLU lawsuit seeking their release, some of the wise establishment types surrounding the new president reportedly are urging him to reverse his earlier position on transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. Their reasons?

According to the WSJ, they argue that release of the tapes would hurt the government's credibility, hand a propaganda victory to America's enemies, and alienate some officers - who might not be willing in the future to engage in such practices if their recent misdeeds are not concealed. As one government official commented anonymously, making public the details of government wrongdoing would make officers "disinclined to take any risks in the future."

And there you were thinking that the whole point of exposing criminal deeds was to disincline people from repeating them in the future.

A tip of the hat to Milo for alerting me to the WSJ report.

Dick Cheney's New Year predictions

On Christmas day my old friend Milo came for a visit. He watches the Sunday blabfests so that I don't have to, and usually sends me the good bits right away. But what with one thing and another, he didn't think until this afternoon to mention that the Great Man himself made an appearance on Fox News Sunday. He made some startling predictions for 2008, Milo told me. From Milo's description I knew the interview would make good material, so I went and reviewed the video.

It's not that the man's opinions about anything are worth a damn. He has been wrong more spectacularly about more things than just about any of the other very serious people in DC—consistently, laughably wrong.

Were it not for his lofty position, and his personal standing within the tightly interconnected neocon family running the government, he would have been ditched by the TV producers long ago. On the basis of what he actually has to say, the Great Man is demonstrably useless. But no matter how ridiculous his every appearance turns out to be, he's eagerly sought for further interviews.

And predictably, on Fox News Sunday his forecast for 2008 produced some real good 'uns. The biggest "news" was his prediction that there'll be a brokered Republican convention next summer.

CHRIS WALLACE: Mr. Vice President, I know you've said you don't intend to comment on the presidential race –

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: And I won't.

CHRIS WALLACE: - but if you were -

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: I won't go there. You can ask your questions all you want, Chris, but I just cannot allow myself to be drawn into the politics of this campaign. It's just not something, frankly, I feel comfortable doing.

CHRIS WALLACE: If you had to predict what will happen in one month, two months, down the road who will end up –

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: Look, as much as you'd like me to tell you what's going to happen, we just don't know. This race is wide open at this point, and frankly we don't know how the votes will turn out. We haven't decided, the voters haven't decided that yet. We don't even know at this stage who the vice president will be.

CHRIS WALLACE: You mean who the running mate will be?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: Yes, but he'll become the next Vice President, I'm certain of that much.

CHRIS WALLACE: The Republican candidates will win the election?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: Of course. But the decision about the running mate will be mostly up to the nominee, if you will. But we don't have one yet, and it's much too early to talk about that. We have several very strong candidates on the Republican side of things, and any one of them I can see becoming president. So there will be a robust primary campaign, and it will be a tough fight, but fair, and I think it's going to come down to the wire frankly.

CHRIS WALLACE: You think it won't be decided for a few months?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: I think it will end up as a brokered convention, Chris. All the signs are there, and so it will be up to the delegates to choose the best man for the job. And frankly, I think they will have to look beyond the announced candidates to find a compromise that all factions, all wings of the Party can agree on.

CHRIS WALLACE: The eventual nominee won't be any of the current frontrunners?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: No I'm pretty certain it won't be.

CHRIS WALLACE: You look like you have an idea who will end up being the candidate.

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: I do. I think it's very likely to be Bill Kristol.

CHRIS WALLACE: No kidding?

MR. VICE PRESIDENT: No kidding. Bill has what it takes to win. He's been consistently right on the war on terror. He's universally admired. He knows that you don't come to this town to make friends. He doesn't need to call in advisors to figure out what to think. He takes a line and sticks to it. You won't see him changing course. That's what we need.

Dick Cheney appears to be positioning himself to be the kingmaker, if not the next VP. After Wallace presses him repeatedly about whether he'd agree to be Kristol's running mate, Cheney concedes that "the Party can do with me what it wills."

His predictions about the Democratic race were if anything less credible:

CHRIS WALLACE: I'm back with Dick Cheney discussing his predictions for 2008. Who will the Democrats nominate?

DICK CHENEY: I'd like to think they'd choose Senator Lieberman, but I'm pretty sure they don't have the sense to see he's their best candidate.

CHRIS WALLACE: Plus he's widely despised.

DICK CHENEY: Yes and it's rare that somebody that reviled, frankly, becomes his party's candidate. So I think they'll end up with that funny little guy. The anti-war one.

CHRIS WALLACE: Kucinich?

DICK CHENEY: No, the other one, Paul.

The Vice President also seemed to predict that Lynne Cheney would be elected to the Senate in New England, but then back-tracked. It was a peculiar moment in the interview.

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don't want to get ahead of myself on that. Forget I said anything.

Cheney's predictions for Iraq were very much as you'd expect:

• That the Iraqis would discover "new, untapped sources of electricity" in the western deserts



• That "98, 99% of reconstruction projects" would be completed satisfactorily and under budget in 2008



• That NATO would send "an additional 100,000 troops" to take over security in Baghdad



• That "Prime Minister Maliki will convert to Islam" as a good will gesture to the Sunnis



• That Blackwater's image will be restored as it "gradually takes over day to day operations in Fallujah."

Finally, and most surprisingly, the Great Man predicted that the prison at Guantanamo Bay would be closed.

THE GREAT MAN: You'll see, when these guests of the nation are released and they can speak freely about their experiences, it will turn out that they enjoyed the best possible treatment in our care. There will be testimonials to our kindness, frankly a lot of them. All the naysayers will be shown to have exaggerated, if you will, the torture aspect of it.

Milo didn't think the latter was likely to occur, and I have to say I agree with him.