London Honors for Kathleen Turner

Kathleen Turner was chosen best actress yesterday when the 18th Critics’ Circle Theater Awards were announced in London. Ms. Turner won for her performance in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Connie Fisher, who emerged from a British television competition to win the role of Maria in a West End revival of “The Sound of Music,” was voted most promising newcomer.

Tom Stoppard’s “Rock ’n’ Roll” was named best new play, and Rufus Sewell of its cast was named best actor for his portrayal of Jan, a Czech student who leaves Cambridge for Prague in 1968 in response to the arrival of Soviet tanks.

The State of the Union - NYTimes editorial

January 24, 2007

Editorial

The State of the Union

The White House spin ahead of George W. Bush’s seventh State of the Union address was that the president would make a bipartisan call to revive his domestic agenda with “bold and innovative concepts.” The problem with that was obvious last night — in six years, Mr. Bush has shown no interest in bipartisanship, and his domestic agenda was set years ago, with huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans and crippling debt for the country.

Combined with the mounting cost of the war in Iraq, that makes boldness and innovation impossible unless Mr. Bush truly changes course. And he gave no hint of that last night. Instead, he offered up a tepid menu of ideas that would change little: a health insurance notion that would make only a tiny dent in a huge problem. More promises about cutting oil consumption with barely a word about global warming. And the same lip service about immigration reform on which he has failed to deliver.

At times, Mr. Bush sounded almost as if he’d gotten the message of the 2006 elections. “Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on — as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done,” he said.

But we’ve heard that from Mr. Bush before. In early 2001, he promised to bring Americans together and instead embarked on his irresponsible tax cuts, a divisive right-wing social agenda and a neo-conservative foreign policy that tore up international treaties and alienated even America’s closest allies. In the wake of 9/11, Mr. Bush had a second chance to rally the nation — and the world — only to squander it on a pointless, catastrophic war in Iraq. Mr. Bush promised bipartisanship after his re-election in 2004, and again after Hurricane Katrina. Always, he failed to deliver. He did not even mention New Orleans last night.

When Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, Mr. Bush’s only real interest was in making their majority permanent; consultation meant telling the Democrats what he had decided.

Neither broken promises nor failed policies changed Mr. Bush’s mind. So the nation has been saddled with tax cuts that have turned a budget surplus into a big deficit, education reform that has been badly managed and underfinanced, far-right judges with scant qualifications, the dismantling of regulations in order to benefit corporations at the expense of workers, and a triumph of ideology over science in policy making on the environment and medical research. All along, Americans’ civil liberties and the constitutional balance have been trampled by a president determined to assert ever more power.

Now that the Democrats have taken Congress, Mr. Bush is acting as if he’d had the door to compromise open all along and the Democrats had refused to walk through it.

Last night, Mr. Bush also acted as if he were really doing something to help the 47 million people in this country who don’t have health insurance. What he offered, by the White House’s own estimate, would take a few million off that scandalously high number and shift the burden to the states. Mr. Bush’s plan would put a new tax on Americans who were lucky enough to still have good health-care coverage through their employers. Some large portion of those are middle class and represented by the labor unions that Mr. Bush and the Republicans are dedicated to destroying.

Mr. Bush’s comments on Iraq added nothing to his failed policies. He did, at last, propose a permanent increase in the size of the Army and Marines that would repair some of the damage he has done to those forces. But that would take years, and it would do nothing to halt Iraq’s spiral. Mr. Bush failed to explain how he would pay for a larger force, which would almost certainly require cutting budget-busting weapons programs. That would mean going up against the arms industry and its lobbyists — something Mr. Bush has never been willing to do.

Mr. Bush almost certainly didn’t intend it, but his speech did reinforce one vital political fact — that it’s not just up to him anymore. There was a big change last night: the audience. Instead of solid Republican majorities marching in lock step with the White House, Congress is controlled by Democrats. It will be their task to give leadership to a nation that desperately wants change and expects its leaders to work together to deliver it. The Democrats’ challenge will be to form real coalitions with willing Republicans. If they do, Mr. Bush may even be forced, finally, to compromise.

Say what you will about the flaws and shortcomings of the two-party system. After six years of the Bush presidency, at least we know it’s a lot better than the one-party system.

NY Times Editorial: Maneuverings

January 21, 2007
Editorial
Retreat and Cheat

President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program was once deemed so vital to national security that it could not be subjected to judicial review. Last week, the White House said it was doing just that.

In 2005, the White House would not even comment on news reports about the C.I.A.’s prisons because Americans’ safety depended on their being kept secret. In 2006, Mr. Bush held a photo-op to announce that he was keeping them open.

The administration has repeatedly insisted that it was essential to the American way of life for Mr. Bush to be able to imprison foreigners without trial or legal counsel. Now the administration claims it was trying to bring those detainees to trial all along but was stymied by white-shoe lawyers.

By now, this is a familiar pattern: First, Mr. Bush and his aides say his actions are so vital to national security that to even report on them — let alone question them — lends comfort to the terrorists. Then, usually when his decisions face scrutiny from someone other than a compliant Republican Congress, the president seems to compromise.

Behind this behavior are at least two dynamics, both of them disturbing.

The first is that the policies Mr. Bush is trying so hard to hide have little, if anything, to do with real national security issues — and everything to do with a campaign, spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney, to break the restraints on presidential power imposed after Vietnam and Watergate. And there is much less than meets the eye to Mr. Bush’s supposed concessions.

Generally, they mask the fact that he either got what he wanted from Congress or found a way to add some other veneer of legitimacy to his lawless behavior. The campaign to expand presidential power goes on, at the expense of American values.

Mr. Bush’s aides don’t try very hard to hide it. The day the shift on domestic wiretapping was announced, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales gave a speech in which he sneered at the idea of allowing judges to review national security policies. The next day, he was in the Senate refusing to turn over the agreement that he said would provide judicial review for the wiretapping. And his lawyers were in court arguing that a lawsuit over the warrantless eavesdropping should be dropped because Mr. Bush said he would stop the operation.

We don’t know exactly what agreement the White House made with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about eavesdropping. But there is evidence that Mr. Bush got some broad approval for a wiretapping “program” rather than the individual warrants required by law. Because the court works in secret, the public may never know whether Mr. Bush really is complying with the law.

Nor is there likely to be an explanation of why the White House could not have sought the court’s approval in the first place. The White House’s claim that the process is too cumbersome doesn’t ring true. The law already allows the government to wiretap first and then ask for a warrant within three days. The real reason is almost certainly that the imperial presidency had no desire to share power even with the most secret part of the judiciary.

Why else would the president have turned down more than one offer from Congress to amend the 1978 wiretapping law after 9/11 to make getting warrants easier and faster than the three-day rule?

For that matter, why did the White House initially refuse to work with senior Republican lawmakers to create a legal court system for the Guantánamo detainees? Instead, Mr. Bush ordered the creation of kangaroo courts, expanding presidential authority at the expense of Congress and the judiciary, and at the expense of justice.

The Republican-led Congress (with the help of cowed Democrats) refused to hold Mr. Bush and his presidency to account on any of these issues. The Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress just before the midterm elections last year, gave Mr. Bush a pass on what he had already done with the detainees outside the law, and did not stop him from jailing non-Americans indefinitely without due process. Congress absolved American intelligence agents of past abuses of prisoners and approved future abuses, and Mr. Bush happily announced that the C.I.A. prisons would stay open.

There are signs, from people like Senator Patrick Leahy, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that the Democrats will be tougher than the Republicans on these issues. The eavesdropping program and Mr. Bush’s secret deal with the surveillance court are a very good place to start.