Day: November 13, 2006

Elections Are Over — Now Where Is Mark Foley?

Jon Ponder

On Oct. 1, Republican former Rep. Mark Foley checked into the Sierra Tucson Treatment Center in Arizona, purportedly to deal with the alcohol abuse that he cited as a contributing factor to his sexual pursuit of teenage boys.

Rehab at the center usually lasts 30 days (at a cost of $30,000) but on Nov. 1 we learned that Foley was going to stay at the center for at least another week — thereby conveniently keeping his name out of the press in the final days of campaigning for the midterm elections.

Well, the elections are over and the damage done by his scandalous behavior has taken its first toll. His party lost both houses of Congress, in no small measure due to the revelation of his salacious emails to young House pages.

The elections may be over but the Foley scandal is not. We are still waiting on findings from the House Ethics Committee. We need to know when the House leadership, including Speaker Hastert, Majority Leader John Boehner and others, knew about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward the pages. We need to know whether there was a cover-up by GOP House leaders and, if so, who else may have been involved.

So many questions but let’s start at the top: Where is Mark Foley?

Meanwhile Morgues in Iraq Are Filled to Capacity and Bodies Are Piling Up

Jon Ponder

And the band played on:

In October, Lancet published a report that estimated that the number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000, which would make the war an official huminatarian emergency. But pro-war factions were quick to kick up dust around the report by disputing its methodology, despite the fact that the statistical modeling is commonly used in marketing and for estimating the size of television audiences.

Baghdad’s morgues are full. With no space to store bodies, some victims of the sectarian slaughter are not being kept for relatives to claim, but photographed, numbered and quickly interred in government cemeteries.

Men fearful of an anonymous burial are tattooing their thighs with names and phone numbers.

In October, a particularly bloody month for Iraqi civilians, about 1,600 bodies were turned in at the Baghdad central morgue, said its director, Dr. Abdul-Razaq al-Obaidi.

The city’s network of morgues, built to hold 130 bodies at most, now holds more than 500, he says…

Bodies are sent for burial every three or four days just to make room for the daily intake, sometimes making corpse identification impossible.

“We can’t remove all the bodies just so that one can be identified and then put them all back in again,” al-Obaidi said. “We simply don’t have the staff.”

Al-Obaidi said the daily crush of relatives is an emotional and logistical burden.

“Every day, there are crowds of women outside weeping, yelling and flailing in grief. They’re all looking for their dead sons and I don’t know how the computer or we will bear up,” he said.

While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered on city streets or floating in the Tigris River.

The United Nations estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. The Iraqi health minister last week put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about 150,000 — close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000 to 50,000.

In October, Lancet published a report that estimated that the number of Iraqi deaths at 655,000, which would make the war an official huminatarian emergency. But pro-war factions were quick to kick up dust around the report by disputing its methodology, despite the fact that the statistical modeling is commonly used in marketing and for estimating the size of television audiences.

GOP Wakes Up to Fact That Bush is Worst President Ever

Jon Ponder

As a coda to Republicans’ losing Congress this year, the firing of Donald Rumsfeld may serve as the tipping-point moment when the GOP could no longer ignore the fact that their former Dear Leader, George Bush, is indeed the Worst President Ever in the history of the United States.

History may well show that the forced resignation of the secretary of defense on the day after the election is the equivalent in the political realm of Pres. Bush’s mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has suggested that if Bush replaced Rumsfeld two weeks before the election, voters would not have been as angry about the unpopular Iraq war. Republicans would have gained the boost they needed, according to Gingrich, to retain their majority in the Senate and hold onto 10 to 15 more House seats.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, agreed with that assessment.

Bush should have removed Rumsfeld “as soon as he had made up his mind. And that’s a hard thing to calculate. But it’s highly doubtful that he made up his mind between the time the election returns came in on Tuesday and Wednesday when Rumsfeld was out.”

“And if Rumsfeld had been out, you bet it would have made a difference,” Specter said. “I’d still be chairman of the Judiciary Committee.”

The same thought occurred to veteran Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., who was on the verge of becoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. After the election, Shaw said that if Rumsfeld had stepped down before last Tuesday, Shaw and other Republicans might have won.

“It could have made a difference in who is running the Congress,” said Shaw.

Let’s stipulate that lying — often gussied up as “misleading” or “shading the truth” — is part and parcel of politics. But George W. Bush came into politics with a record and a reputation as someone who lies compulsively.

In this instance, whether he lied to the press before the election when he said that Rummy and Cheney were doing “fantastic” jobs and would stay on through the end of his term, or whether, as my colleague Trish has suggested, he lied after the election in order to cover his tracks, the fact is, he lied one time too many — and he may have contributed to the undoing of his presidency, and his party, in the process.

Hat tip to JR