Fleischer was in the Foreign Service for four years after college in the 1970s, serving in Washington and Africa. He also worked briefly on Capitol Hill and received a Harvard MBA.

Fleischer describes himself as a turnaround specialist, but his recent business track record is modest.

He is on leave from the presidency of Bogen Communications International, a New Jersey-based maker and distributor of electronics equipment that has about $60 million in annual sales and has had an up-and-down financial performance in recent years.

Earlier this year, Bogen delisted itself from the Nasdaq stock market and now trades only on the Pink Sheets, an electronic exchange with fewer public reporting requirements.

>snip<

Fleischer said he wanted to serve in Iraq because he believes Bush had embarked on "a noble path" in freeing and democratizing the country and he believed he had skills that would be helpful.

He said that from his Foreign Service stint, he was already acquainted with Paul Bremer, the presidential envoy who heads the CPA.

With an assist from his brother, Ari, who "got my resume to Bremer," Fleischer landed interviews that led to his appointment.

Among Fleischer's key tasks was training more Iraqi businessmen in the ways of U.S.-style procurement so they can land part of the $18.4 billion in reconstruction aid the U.S. has earmarked for Iraq.

Competitive bidding "is a new world for the Iraqis," Fleischer said. Under Saddam Hussein, "it was all done by cronies. The only paradigm they know is cronyism. We are teaching them that there is an alternative system with built-in checks and built-in review."

posted by Jerry Bowles 10:16 AM

Sandbox Politics

via Boston Herald:

Republican Senate leaders delayed a vote on veterans' health-care funding yesterday in order to deny Sen. John F. Kerry, who had rushed back to Washington just for the roll call, a chance to act on one of his top campaign issues.

Ever get the feeling these folks could use a hall monitor?

posted by Jerry Bowles 9:16 AM

Bumper Sticker Politics

My wife’s an avid gardener, so our bumper sticker reads “Trim the Bushes: Vote Democratic 2004.” I have also seen the following:

When Clinton Lied, Nobody Died
Bush: It Takes a Village Idiot
Four More Wars!
Torture is the New Black
What Would Jesus Bomb?

Any other ones out there to add to the list?

posted by Josh 8:25 AM

Bloggers and conventions

There’s been a lot of buzz about the major political parties “including” bloggers in the media mix for the upcoming conventions. Considering that this is the first presidential election in which the blogosphere will be an influencer, one wonders if the invites have less to do with politically correct rituals of inclusion than with the realpolitik of cooptation.

News organizations that profit from the news cycle are already a big part of the blogosphere. But of what value is it to bloggers to wannabe, or even be part of the old media with its bought-and-paid-for values?

Beyond the usual suspects, Drudge, Sully, Instapundit, inter alia, the blogosphere has emerged as a force to countervail the self censorship, the narrow coverage, the lies and errors of omission that are the default job description of the old media since 9/11 and “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Bloggers picked up the pieces of the fractured public trust when the old media Humpty-Dumptys fell off the wall.

Being a blogger is akin to being a counterpuncher in boxing, slipping the punch and then hitting back with a vengeance. Even in its benign forms, blogging is an empowering revolutionary act. Bloggers create opinions, some of which play off the news cycle. When those opinions become agents of change they percolate upward and can become news. And when it does happen those political figures and old media types who feel the heat question the blogosphere's legitimacy.

Historically, it was no different in the 1930s when stage actors like Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield were chastised by critics and colleagues when they went off to Hollywood. Or when every screenplay adapted from a novel couldn't hold a shadow to the book. Some like to call the old media "liberal" but it is ultra-conservative when it comes to accomodating change.

The Democratic and Republican national conventions are marginally relevant, stage-managed political charades. Like Noam Chomsky says, one party, two right wings. Great stuff for the old media to bandy about. The right stuff for us bloggers is to stay at home and blog about it. Keep your powder dry...

posted by Groom 7:08 AM

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Cult of Personality

I heard the news today, oh boy. Thousands of people lined up at the Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue to see Bubba and buy their personally autographed copy of his overstuffed opus Mein Leben. Some of them camped out in front of the store all night. When asked why, one woman described Clinton as "like a rock star." Coming on the heels of two weeks of Reaganophilia it's enough to make you think maybe us Americans are a pretty shallow bunch of people who have exactly the government we deserve.

posted by Jerry Bowles 4:47 PM

Eight more days... Christmas in July at Negroponte's in Baghdad

In Baghdad the hottest ticket in town is the "transition" ceremony. But nobody seems to know where it's happening. Could it be at CBS Studios over on W. 57th where Chevy Chase said they did the "moonwalk"? Very hush-hush, on the QT. Will John Negroponte be there? How well will the Iraqis cotton to their new Jewish and ethnic Greek ambassador from Bushovic? We know he says he was only "acting on orders" when as US ambassador to Honduras he removed references to torture from his reports. But this mensch can cover torture like white on rice.

posted by Groom 4:37 PM

Enron lawyer brags… no indictment for “Kenny boy”

Michael Ramsey, attorney for ex-Enron chairman and Trilateral Commission member "Kenny boy” Lay, says his client will never be indicted of a crime… never. Beltway kahoona Bill Bennett is the mouthpiece for the Enron board. And, let’s see… Baker & Botts cleaned up Kenny’s mess by closing the deal for Dynegy to acquire Enron only 2 months after 9/11. Bush family retainer “Dial M” for Mueller is over at the FBI unable to find the anthrax perps who shut down Congress and greased the skids for the Patriot Act, and Elder Ashcroft is busy with his daily eugenics prayer meetings. If I was running a sports book in Vegas, I’d open with an 8-5 line that Ramsey is right.

posted by Groom 12:03 PM

Hello, Senator Obama!

That giant sucking sound you hear is all the air quickly escaping from Jack Ryan's Senate campaign in Illinois. Seems before he and actress Jeri Ryan got divorced, he tried to drag her off to sex clubs in New York and Paris, for a little Horizontal Tango in public. Quelle romantique!

posted by Michael 11:59 AM

Who's tackier: Clinton or Bush?

This morning on New Hampshire Public Radio, I heard some talking head say that Clinton was either "the tackiest President" or "one of the tackiest Presidents" (I'm not sure which).
I didn't particularly mind Clinton being called tacky back when he was President, though I didn't agree with it. But he's now been succeeded by a truly tacky person, and I don't like Cilnton being called tacky if Bush isn't called tacky, too.

George W. Bush tells fart jokes (and worse), gives strangers nicknames without their permission, pats bald men on the head, and in general gives little indication that he's a man of class. He's a towel-snapper: the kind of guy I used to move away from if he sat down next to me at a bar.

Call Clinton tacky if you want to. But acknowledge that Bush beats him in the tacky department.

posted by Vicki 11:48 AM

Slip Sliding Away,
Slip Sliding Away...

Paul Simon’s song came to mind when I saw the Washington Post/ABC News poll being released today on the eroding support for Bush on how he is handling the war on terrorism. Bush has lost 13 percentage points since April, and now for the first time more Americans, 48 percent, prefer Kerry over Bush (47 percent) in handling the war on terrorism.

I like the way the chorus in Simon’s song ends. You’ll recall, “You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away.” Is it November 8 yet?

posted by Josh 9:50 AM

High Noon at Desperate Gulch

All that we know we know by contrast. The black by the white, the sour by the sweet, the good by the evil, the grapes by the wrath. Whatever. You get the idea. Heroes need bad guys in order to be heroic. Without the Miller gang, Gary Cooper is just another small-town pedophile happily whiling away a connubial afternoon playing hide the pop shooter with his new teenage bride.

And so it is written in Karl Rove’s big cowboy fake book—always provide your hero with a really evil bad guy to act as a foil. This is not genius, of course, but simple product differentiation. It is particularly useful when your “product” is a simpleton who is incapable of getting his lines right or juggling two conflicting ideas at the same time. The bad guy acts as a useful diversion, deflecting attention away from the tongue-tied hero. Take a look at Deadwood, for example, and see how easily Ian McShane, as the evil Al Swearingen, carries the rest of the cast (many of them fine actors) on the back of his brilliant treachery.

With Saddam on ice and Osama either dead or out of commission, the administration has now cast the mysterious Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the role of bogeyman. "I always said that Saddam Hussein was a threat," Shrub opined the other day. He was "a threat because he provided safe haven for a terrorist like Zarqawi, who is still killing innocents inside of Iraq."

Partly true. Somebody claiming to be Zarqawi has been responsible for the escalating violence in Iraq. Alas, our multi-billion dollar intelligence services seem to know remarkably little about this guy, i.e., what he looks like, how tall he is, how much he weighs or even if he has a prosthetic leg or simply a gimpy real one. The Bushies claim, but have offered no proof, that Zarqawi got medical attention in Baghdad before the war and that clearly means he was in league with Hussein’s boys. If so, this must be one of those things that Dick Cheney “probably” knows that nobody else does. There is also not much evidence that Zarqawi, if he’s a real person and not a currently fashionable terrorist brand name, is in league with Bin Laden. Our torture-loving Secretary of Defense admitted as much yesterday when he suggested that Zarqawi might, in fact, be an Osama rival—an upstart Wal-Mart to Osama’s Kresge.

Zarqawi has been linked to Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist terrorist outfit, but that story too has some inconvenient facts for the administration. The group was militantly anti-Saddam and operated out of northern Iraq before the war, in territory protected by the U.S.-imposed no-fly zone. In fact, NBC News reported last March that “long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out [Zarqawi’s] terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself–but never pulled the trigger.” They didn’t because they felt it would undermine support for the war. If anyone provided Zarqawi sanctuary, it was the Pentagon.

It sure looks like Zarqawi had already caught the eye of some clever casting director in the White House who recognized that it’s always a good idea to have an understudy on call in case your principal villain is captured or killed. After all, the show must go on.

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:10 AM

Ron Reagan’s Curve Ball

(With Groom and Jerry pitching baseball, I couldn’t resist.) Last night, just when I thought it was safe to turn my TV on again and watch Chris Matthews (the only truly balanced reporter in the daily political business), I did and it wasn’t.

There was Ron, the son of Ronald, doing the final, final, final eulogy. He looked and sounded like the old man (excuse my irreverence). I said, oh no, here they go again (borrowing a phrase from the Gipper). Can’t they leave this alone already? And then I was stunned. Here is what he said, his curve ball:

“Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man. But he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage. True, after he was shot and nearly killed early in his presidency, he came to believe that God had spared him in order that he might do good. But he accepted that as a responsibility, not a mandate. And there is a profound difference.”

In his interview with Matthews Ron didn't name names, but when asked he had Bush in mind, he widened the strike zone by saying there are a lot of politicians using religion to justify what they do, and yes (another Gipperism) Bush was one of them.

Now if Kerry, or more likely MoveOn.org, could find a way to replay this soundbite, it would be at least strike two on Bush. With the Supremes as umpires, strike three is unlikely. But maybe if he hit it, Bush would be limited to a ground rule double and not the homerun he wants to make out of his JC and JP (John Paul) connections.

posted by Josh 7:48 AM

Kerry, Kerry he's our man, if he can't do it, Teddy can

Nice to see that Teddy is pinch hitting for his surrogate little brother, outing Bushovic and his coterie of Dr. Strangeloves for fomenting a new arms race. As Jerry points out, it is baseball season. Maybe Kerry is too busy doing extra infield practice with Red Sox great Bill Buckner, learning how to protect the right field line.

posted by Groom 4:38 AM

Monday, June 21, 2004

Night Thoughts

After the ten day Ronniethon, we now face the prospect of having to endure Bill Clinton and Michael Moore for the next few weeks. Surely this qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment. I have sought refugee by reading and watching a lot of Yankees and Mets baseball although the Yankees bore me and I've decided that Art Howe is a much more interesting manager than Joe Torre, who always plays his millionaires by the book. Howe will actually have a left-handed batter pinchhit for a right-hand batter against a left-handed pitcher. Now, that's radical.

posted by Jerry Bowles 11:33 PM

Take the Kerry Challenge

My post below suggesting that William Arkin might be on to something in his Los Angeles Times op-ed when he writes that Kerry is a Bushling in disguise has provoked much righteous indignation. I refer the members of the congregation to a post I made here on March 8, 2004 called 10 Urgent Questions for John Kerry. Go there and take the Kerry challenge and see if now--nearly four months later--you can point me to a position Kerry has taken on any of these questions.

posted by Jerry Bowles 2:51 PM

President Charles

The New Yorker knows whose face belongs on a ten-spot.

posted by Jerry Bowles 1:49 PM

Another Strict Constructionist

via Washington Post:

Thomas B. Griffith, President Bush's nominee for the federal appeals court in Washington, has been practicing law in Utah without a state law license for the past four years, according to Utah state officials.

posted by Jerry Bowles 9:55 AM

Summertime in Baghdad

A US Army judge has accepted a request by attorneys for soldiers accused of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib to question Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and other top brass...the shit is hitting the fan.

posted by Groom 8:50 AM

Presidents and Precedents

The concrescence between Reagan’s death and Clinton’s resurrection has not escaped me. Neither has Clinton’s reminder of his reliance on prayer and preachers to cover for his lies and Bush’s current reliance on prayer and preachers to cover for his falsehoods. Although one is a now a little more forthcoming than the other, only Clinton is trying to sell books.

I’ve been on vacation for over a week in places without TV, a laptop or mainstream newspapers so it was mercifully easy to miss the entire Reagan farewell orgy, including Nancy Reagan’s three attempts to replace John John’s salute of his father as the defining image of state funerals. (I’d love to see the notes all the ex-presidents were no doubt making about their upcoming state funerals and which dollar notes they will grace.)

But I couldn’t avoid Clinton’s posturing on 60 Minutes last night. Bush must be out of his mind happy: Reagan endlessly for one week and now Clinton endlessly for weeks on end, bumping Iraq off the front pages while Clinton takes heat for his failures in foreign policy—-making Bush look less bad by comparison. Kerry, on the other hand, has been boxed out of naming a vice-president until Clinton’s marketing of HIMSELF subsides, if the VRWC (vast right-wing conspiracy) lets it die. And when Clinton’s song and dance subsides, the timing of Bob Barr’s take on the impeachment, The Meaning of Is, will pick up the slack, right into and beyond the Boston convention where Clinton will no doubt force a primetime role for himself—saddling Kerry with a comparison he doesn’t need nor one he should be forced to shadow.

Clinton can’t help it, or he simply refuses to do so. Needy kids grow up to be needy adults. Having parsed a two-letter verb into infamy, he now shows us once more why chief executives, both in and out of government (think Bush, Cheney, Ken Lay, John Rigas, Martha Stewart, Denis Kozlowski), do what they do with impunity: its “because they can.”

posted by Josh 8:27 AM

Springtime in The Hague

You know that bunch of high value bad eggs we've had on ice down at Guantánamo for the past couple of years? Turns out they're neither that bad nor that valuable. Another coup for Rumsfeld and his merry band of war criminals.

posted by Jerry Bowles 8:22 AM

My brother's keeper...

After posting the Bill Arkin piece I flashed for a beat on a 1959 photo in the latest Esquire showing John Kerry aboard a Kennedy sailboat with a complement of Camelot characters, including JFK. The 18-year old Kerry was dating one of the Auchincloss girls at the time. Nearly half a century ago… Ronald Reagan and Lew Wasserman didn’t go back 45 years. Poppy Bush and Jim Baker might go back 45 years. Bushovic and Rove can’t count so we don’t know how long they go back. But John Kerry and the Kennedys go back 45 years and when you’re running for the presidency, that speaks volumes.

When Kerry’s campaign hit the wall, Mary Beth Cahill, a Kennedy retainer, was brought in to take over. Teddy took to the hustings to do the dirty on Bushovic and praise the junior senator he mentored...the surrogate little brother he never had.

The frightening question that Jerry got close to but didn’t hit on regarding Kerry is to what extent is his "world view" rooted in Kennedy's inflexible cultural matrix of US global leadership (and dominance) that set us up for Vietnam? How does that notion of intervention to help nations become "American-style" democracies translate to Iraq and the "War on Terror." Kennedy was bullish on Vietnam... he had the "Hearts and Minds" thing going to outflank Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. The Special Forces were his baby. Must we intuit that Kerry is a "hawk" or will Safire "channel" it for us through Nixon?

In the years preceding the Kennedy presidency we let the French flounder in Vietnam and in Algeria. We looked the other way during the Suez Crisis and then we picked up the pieces to become the free world Superpower. In the years preceding the Kerry presidency, we are occupying Iraq as it approaches a civil war. We are going through the motions while the Saudi monarchy implodes. And we’ve distanced ourselves from France and Germany because Bushovic and his crew think the deals they’ve cut with the Jihadsters are sleazier than the ones we cut with them.

John Kerry will probably become leader of the world’s most powerful rent-a-cop nation. The money behind him expects renewed American dominance in maintaing global security. The further expectation is that the US and the Anglo-American alliance will be the beneficiaries of the capital seeking safe haven from the global Jihad. Payback time for all the capital the Saudis and their friends pulled out after 9/11.

Poised to pick up the chips, why should Kerry not support a pre-emption doctrine. If it brings in more geld to the economy, why should he not believe that the “War on Terror” is a necessary vehicle to implement the further re-engineering of “post-industrial” America... an America that provides more security for world capital than it does social and economic security for its own citizens? Job #1 for the president of the United States is to be ringmaster for the Global Capital Circus. We need the money to finance the “twin towers” of debt and negative trade balance. The Dems are too close to the special interests (and the high paid senators and congressmen who are their lobbyists) to do much to roll back the Bushovic "prescription drug benefit" ditto the AARP leadership that wants to lather America for a nice social security shave.

In an anybody but Bushovic world, Kerry will make the “War on Terror” not only bigger, but better, learning from the Bushovic blunders. Expect the introduction of the non-toxic asbestos draft card. America will remain the world’s “lifestyle leader” not because of its workforce, but because of a small minority of innovators and marketers who give us “the edge.” If Kerry runs into problems, surrogate brother Ted will step in and make sure the right Kennedy retainer is in place. But, hey, didn’t the Bushovics do that for little Slobodan…

posted by Groom 2:26 AM

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Won't Get Fooled Again

I have never paid much attention to what politicans say during campaigns because I've always assumed that: a)they will say anything to get elected and b) they will do whatever is necessary to get re-elected, which usually means building a consensus somewhere near the political middle.

My theory worked until the George W. Bush 2000 campaign when, I suspect, many independents and others turned off by Al Gore assumed that some of the outrageous things Bush was saying were simply for the benefit of his far right base and that "compassionate Conservative" was really code for "centrist." The possibility that Bush--who, afterall, lost the popular vote--would actually embrace and muscle through the most radical and extreme parts of his right wing agenda simply was not considered by anyone I know.

That's why it is vital that all of us Kerry supporters read the Los Angeles Times piece by William Arkin that Groom flags below.

The nut of Arkin's piece is this: most of us are assuming that the reason Kerry has not offered an exit plan for Iraq or repudiated the failed doctrine of preemption or expressed complete support for the Geneva Conventions is because he realizes that the moment he does the Republican machine will start screaming "Kerry is soft on terror."

But, there is another, frightening possibility--what if Kerry's efforts to position himself as Bush Lite are not strategy, but sincere? Arkin suggests that Kerry may actually support the Bush doctrines of preemption and torture. He has, afterall, already called for a larger military with many more special operations units, plus accelerated spending on "transformation," which--Arkin notes--"in today's defense jargon means creation of greater capability to intervene around the world on short notice." Kerry has also proposed the creation a new domestic intelligence agency and a vastly beefed-up homeland security program.

Arkin believes that "Kerry proposes these buildups because he accepts the central premise of the Bush administration: Terrorists are so threatening that we must sacrifice our liberties, change our government and military and, ultimately, our way of life in order to fight them."

Is it possible we're being sucker punched a second time?

posted by Jerry Bowles 7:37 PM

Four more years John Kerry president

Bill Arkin walks through the Bonesman's hotbed of inertia in today's LA Times.

posted by Groom 3:21 PM

Write Your Own Caption Day

posted by Jerry Bowles 9:14 AM