Hullabaloo

Monday, July 26, 2004

 
Lordly Derision

Just a quick note to link you to the most cynical blogging of the convention so far, from my dear friend Lord Saleton of Slate.

It is so awfully boring having to sit through these tedious speeches by the shrill and the mendacious and the inauthentic Democrats. I'm so glad I'm an independent so that I don't have to be associated with the soiled riff-raff who actually have to win elections and govern in this country. I remain so grandly pure.




digby 7/26/2004 10:10:00 PM |

 
This is so helpful.

Luckily, so far the press seems to have bought the unity theme --- they are always 2 steps behind the zeitgeist. But, those who have their fingers clutching the pulse know that there is a serious internal fight a-brewing (at exactly the wrong historical moment, IMO.)

But, blabbing this stuff to the Dean of CW on the first night of the convention is criminally disloyal as far as I'm concerned. With friends like these...




digby 7/26/2004 09:58:00 PM |

 
Howleriffic

I have a public service idea for the convention bloggers. When you are talking to reporters, why don't you all mention that they should read The Daily Howler?

Sommerby does the absolute best press criticism in the blogosphere and if the press who are interviewing you want to know how bloggers see the press, his site is a good place to start.

Just a suggestion from a boring, partyless couch-blogger.




digby 7/26/2004 09:14:00 PM |

 
Man Of Many Talents

Fine blogger and musician, Brew, has a CD called "Get Out of Iraq" that you can buy there at the convention or online at Simplefears.com

Go to the link for a sample. It's a good tune.




digby 7/26/2004 08:57:00 PM |

 
Send Me

Gotta love Clinton. He just has that Mojo.

I can't remember what the event was, but I remember hearing him do that "send me" riff before and I think it's very powerful. It's a biblical reference that resonates with those who respond to that, but it's also poetic and inspiring to the secular. It's the kind of language that Amy Sullivan and others are alwasy talking about --- not explicitly religious, but resonent to the religious.

He has that very rare gift of being able to discuss complex issues in simple ways without being condescending. (Edwards has that ability, too.) He drew the contrast between the parties in ways that people who don't follow politics and feel uncomfortable with the emotion involved can wrap their arms around.

It was a good night, I think. Everybody up there were Democratic stars and since this is essentially a televised pageant, political star power is a potent plus for us. Since St. Ronnie the GOP has been reduced to flogging cartoon characters like Schwarzenegger, but they don't have real political superstars. Our politicans are actually much more fun to watch.






digby 7/26/2004 08:16:00 PM |

 
Calling All Blogs

Jeff Greenfield is flogging the idea that that stupid picture of Kerry on Drudge is exploding all over the blogosphere and is comparable to the famous Dukakis in a tank pic.

I think it's time to drag out this one again:

Crusader Codpiece looks very impressive here, don't you think?

Oh, and by the way, he fell off his bike again today.






digby 7/26/2004 07:26:00 PM |

 
Blog Conventions

I'm giving out my first day of the convention blogging award to---- a non-blogger. I'm sorry guys, but as interesting as the inside baseball stuff about Verizon and logistics and celebrity sightings is (and it is) the blogging award of Day One goes to Harold Meyerson at the convention blog on American Prospect Online for actually reporting things I hadn't heard anywhere else:

AFL-CIO CAUCUS, SUNDAY, 3:20 P.M.: Labor unveiled one major tactical twist at its delegate caucus on Sunday afternoon. AFSCME President Jerry McEntee, who has chaired the AFL-CIO’s political committee since the Van Buren administration, announced that on the afternoon and evening of George W. Bush’s speech to the Republican convention -- Thursday, September 2 -- union activists will knock on the doors of one million union households in the 16 battleground states.

I like it.

Harman told me that Democrats think it’s possible that Bush may spring into action on the intelligence reform front as soon as Friday, possibly calling Congress back into session to deal with the 9-11 Commission’s recommendations. (Of course, this would also have the effect of shifting attention away from the Kerry-Edwards ticket that will be nominated on Thursday.) The Democrats have no intention of having this issue taken away from them, however. Harman said that tomorrow morning at 8:00 A.M., House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will convene a Democratic House Caucus meeting here in Boston, which Harman will address, to make sure the Democrats have the fullest possible proposal on the table before Bush acts.

I'm sure you are all aware that the day after the convention is like the afterglow day. The campaign found its big release the night before and smoked its metaphorical cigarette and everybody's in love. For Bush to burst through the bedroom door is pretty darned uncivil but predictable. The Dems are all together and they should be able to formulate a counter strategy.

This is interesting stuff.

 






digby 7/26/2004 07:08:00 PM |

 
Message Strategery

Salon has an interesting article up about a fiery meeting earlier today at the Veteran's Caucus where Wes Clark, James Carville and Max Cleland supposedly went off the reservation and got the vets all riled up. (This happened after an earlier caucus meeting where Sharpton allegedly went off the reservation and got the Black Caucus all riled up.)

"There's another party out there, and they would have you believe that they're the best qualified to keep America safe and secure," Clark said. "I'm here to say it's not so."

In a building riff that brought veterans to their feet, Clark said: "That flag is our flag. We served under that flag. We got up and stood reveille formation, we stood taps, we fought under that flag. We've seen men die for that flag, and we've seen men buried under that flag. No Dick Cheney or John Ashcroft or Tom DeLay is going to take that flag away from us."

Clark's fiery performance knocked the GOP-style stuffing out of the veterans' event, turning it into a Bush-bashing barnburner. By the time Carville reclaimed the stage he was in full sputtering ragin' Cajun mode. "I know the Kerry people back there are having a heart attack," Carville said. "They're saying, 'There goes Carville, the mad dog, the pit bull.'"

Uh huh.

It seems to me that the Kerry campaign's public face of cheery optimism barely holding back the furious grassroots is a pretty good strategy. Everybody keeps parroting the party line like "positive" and "upbeat" when they're talking to the celebcorps while even speakers like Jimmy Carter(?) allude to Bush's national guard service and lying. You end up wondering what they'd be saying if Kerry hadn't "given the word" to be disciplined. He shows leadership and the Democrats look like they're ready for a fight. The Republicans are frustrated because they want the Democrats to make the mistake they made in 1992 and go over the top.

It's as if the Party has Jack Nicholson's smile.






digby 7/26/2004 06:18:00 PM |

 
I Already Need A Drink

Is there anything more thrilling than watching the likes of Anderson "Pretty Boy" Cooper spew stale, outdated uninformed conventional wisdom all over national television? I've watched a lot of conventions but the coverage of this one is shaping up to be the most condescending and unelightening ever. They might as well have sent Ashley and MaryKate. (Actually, have you seen either one of them in the same room as Anderson Cooper?)

May I recommend a trip over to C-Span? The speeches are boring, but at least they are sincere. (Fox News team just got a hearty boo from the crowd.)You get to see lots of shots of the delegates instead of the absurd celebcorps who haven't even the slightest interest in anything but trivia. And the films are actually quite good.

As Professor DeLong plaintively cries, "Why, oh why can't we have a better press corp?"



digby 7/26/2004 04:34:00 PM |

 
Conventional Wisdom

I gather that Theresa Heinz-Kerry was rude to a reporter for a right wing rag that has been smearing her all over Pennsylvania for the last year and that there are a lot of totally, like, cool parties that people want to go to but can't get in to but maybe they'll get into if they meet the right cool person who can get them in. And it was fine for all the media celebs to go to a ballgame but it was a total disaster for Kerry to do so. All of this is a sign of Democratic haplessness.

Meanwhile, the "drama" of the first night  is whether any of the speakers will deviate from what are alleged to be Kerry's direct orders not to "trash" Bush. It's ex-president's (and shouldhavebeen president) night and you never know what those crazy left wing kooks are going to do.  Will Carter tell Bush to go fuck himself?  Will Al Gore tell the GOP to shove it? Will Bill call Junior and Dick major league assholes? Who knows? But it's so exciting watching the media speculate about it. Because if the Democrats  do deviate from Kerry's direct orders,  you know what that means.  The Democrats are in ... disarray. Which means that the mediawhores can just read from all the scripts of Democratic conventions from the last 40 years and concentrate on those fantastic parties.

One little observation: if you get into those allegedly cool parties they are usually populated by people you criticize harshly on a daily basis. Perhaps once you meet them, though, you won't want to trash them on a daily basis because they were, like, so totally cool at that party you got into. That's the dynamic of Washington socializing and it leads to ... Richard Cohen. Frankly, the only blog report of parties I' m truly interested in are Wonkette's.  She is, after all,  a professional.

If somebody wants to take a different tack they might think about trying to get into some uncool parties --- like where the delegates from Ohio go. They aren't very glamorous, but they are the blogworld's much beloved grassroots of the Democratic party. Maybe they would have an interesting, non-blogging, non-media, non-celebrity take on this crazy democracy thing.

 







digby 7/26/2004 02:01:00 PM |

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

 
Brass Knuckles

Check out Terry McAuliffe's new brainchild: Where Was Bush?

The right-wing attack machine doesn't want you asking questions about Bush's record, and they're doing everything they can to change the subject. Here are five facts to keep in mind when facing their attacks.

Questioning Bush's Record Does Not Denigrate Guard
Bush Received Special Treatment in National Guard
Bush's Whereabouts Unclear During 1972-1973
Bush Should Have Done More During 1972-1973
Bush Has Yet to Explain Missing Records

There's a lot more, plus a handy e-mail tool to send this information to everyone you know.







digby 7/21/2004 12:47:00 PM |

 
Anatomy Of A Smear

Dave at Seeing The Forest deconstructs the multi-pronged GOP campaign to smear Clinton for 9/11 and let Bush off the hook. As he says:

Republicans fight back with smears to discredit their accusers. They constructed a 3-part discrediting action that phased in, coming to a conclusion just before the commission releases its report.

For those of you who didn't follow the previous Clinton smears in detail, this is a classic GOP operation. We have the merging stories of Gorelick, Wilson and Berger --- a combination of character assasination, misrepresentation and the exploitation of unrelated credibility issues to form the basis of a counterfactual narrative that is much more juicy than the real thing. A dark conspiracy is set forth in the right wing press, then filters into the mainstream and tittilates the mediawhores with its more exciting version of events. Scoops are given to favored reporters and new facts dished out judiciously to keep the story going long beyond its natural life.

Read Dave's post for the details. This is how its done.


Update: The incomparable Howler has more on this story. I realize that it's long past time we asked just who in the hell is Kelli Arena and why is she always in the middle of these GOP psuedo-scandal pageants? Does anyone out there know who her special friend in the White House is?





digby 7/21/2004 11:34:00 AM |

Monday, July 19, 2004

 
King Of The Scumbags

I wrote sometime back about David Bossie over on the American Street. He's always been one of the more shocking examples of Republican depravity and corruption, and not incidentally, a mediawhore favorite. Eric Boehlert has a bravura takedown of this little miscreant in today's Salon.

Boehlert asks why Bossie is taken seriously in the press. It's an excellent question, but it is silly to actually ask such a thing. Bossie has been doing this stuff for more than a decade and the media have never given a shit that he is a proven liar over and over again. And that's because they never pay a price for sucking up his very juicy dictation:

For David Bossie, professional Clinton-era agitator and renowned Republican dirty trickster, these must seem like the good old days. During the 1990s Bossie, as a grass-roots activist and congressional staffer, was often at the epicenter of churning out stories about President Clinton, deftly feeding the press and Capitol Hill investigators outlandish -- and usually unsubstantiated -- assertions about White House wrongdoing

[...]

Bossie's style during the investigation was to lob scattershot allegations toward an appreciative press corps that rarely seemed upset when the charges he gave them to amplify -- that Whitewater was a criminal enterprise, for instance -- failed to pan out as factual. As Democratic strategist James Carville once put it, "He made collective fools out of about 80 percent of the national press corps." But none of this appears to have marred Bossie's reputation with reporters, even when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- no stranger to hardball partisan politics -- reportedly ordered Bossie fired from his congressional staff position in May 1998. Bossie had overseen the bungled release of supposedly incriminating recordings of Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell's jailhouse phone conversations with Hillary Rodham Clinton -- recordings that had been edited, deleting obvious exculpatory remarks.

Now some critics wonder how a political prankster like Bossie has managed to maintain respectability in Washington, particularly among the press. A Nexis search retrieves more than 100 press references to Bossie this year, with MSNBC proving to be especially accommodating toward him. "Pat Moynihan had that wonderful phrase about defining deviancy downward. Now we're defining credibility downward if we take David Bossie seriously," says former Clinton aide Paul Begala. "There are a lot of credible critics of Democrats. David Bossie is not one of them."

[...]


The press has also been hesitant to discuss, or dissect, Bossie's current role. For instance, during the controversy surrounding the release of "Fahrenheit 9/11," many news outlets, including the New York Times in a June 27 article, simply identified Bossie as the president of Citizens United. But the Times is well acquainted with Bossie's modus operandi; he has boasted about feeding information to its reporters, especially Jeff Gerth, every step of the way in their ill-advised, and since discredited, Whitewater investigation. "We have worked closer [on Whitewater] with the New York Times than the Washington Times," Bossie's colleague Brown once bragged to the Columbia Journalism Review.

And as the Washington Times noted, Bossie made a deal to leak the Senate Whitewater Committee's final report to the New York Times. Yet years later, when Bossie reemerges in the news as a critic of "Fahrenheit 9/11," to unsuspecting Times readers he's described simply as another grass-roots Republican activist.

"At the very least, you'd expect viewers and readers to learn Bossie was fired for doctoring tapes," says David Brock, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal online research and monitoring organization. "That doesn't seem like the type of person whose words are worth much."

"As a principle I'd agree readers ought to know where particular sources are coming from," says Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who has dealt with Bossie for many years. "On the other hand, I don't think David Bossie makes any secret about what his agenda is and where he's coming from."

In the past, reporters who fed off Bossie's wayward leaks were reluctant to shed light on his ability to engineer stories behind the scenes. In the early 1990s, the press printed and broadcast verbatim the Whitewater allegations being leveled by Citizens United and its ready-made press packets. Yet reporters rarely made public the source of their Whitewater leads. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time, the press "has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization without identifying the group as the source of their information."

[...]

Bossie has generated unusual loyalty from some in the press corps. "Dave Bossie has never lied to me, and the Clinton White House has lied to me," ABC News producer Chris Vlasto notoriously told the Washington Post in one of its several Bossie profiles in the 1990s. Vlasto, who did not return a call for comment, made that statement in 1997, five years after the accusations about Whitewater were first raised and two years after the Clintons were exonerated by the Resolution Trust Corp., whose conclusions were confirmed by every subsequent official investigation. "On this record," the RTC reported, "there is no basis to charge the Clintons with any kind of primary liability for fraud or intentional misconduct ... It is recommended no further resources need be expended on the Whitewater part of this investigation." Yet those reporters who subsisted on Bossie's handouts, including some at the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News, did not report the RTC's vindication of the Clintons. ABC's Vlasto, who had invested mightily in the Whitewater story, insisted, "If it comes down to a question of whom do you believe, I'd believe Bossie any day."

[...]

In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter bragging that it had "dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate hearings on Whitewater." Another mailing reported that Bossie was "on the inside directing the probe." Democrats subsequently cried foul that a federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so D'Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his independence from Citizens United.


In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone logs of former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide comparing Bossie's deceptive presence to "Ollie North running around the House."


In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his position after committee chairman Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of "unrelenting" self-promotion in the press, which made it impossible "to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney's Office." (Bossie's habit of self-promotion paid off; during one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)

The breaking point came in May 1998, when Bossie, then 32, oversaw the release of the doctored Hubbell tapes. As Roll Call reported at the time, "At Bossie's request, Burton sat on the tapes for nearly a year until word started to leak that Hubbell might be indicted by [Kenneth] Starr for tax evasion. Bossie, who supervised the tapes along with investigator Barbara Comstock, oversaw the editing of Hubbell's prison conversation[s] and decided to release them the day before Hubbell was indicted." According to Roll Call, Bossie enjoyed unusually close working relations with Starr investigators.

The tapes were edited for "privacy" considerations, according to Bossie. But they were also edited to completely omit key exculpatory passages, including one in which Hubbell exonerated Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing. Gingrich ordered a reluctant Burton to fire Bossie.

Yet, in 1999, Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his "outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement." And it wasn't just the conservative base that continued to embrace Bossie after the Hubbell tape disgrace; so did many in the Washington press corps.

[...]

when the Enron scandal broke, Bossie appeared on Fox News and repeated GOP talking points that both political parties deserved blame because, after all, Enron's former CEO, Kenneth Lay, slept in the Lincoln bedroom once while Clinton was in office. But that in fact never happened. Also that year, Bossie appeared on TNN'S late-night show, "Conspiracy Zone With Kevin Nealon," where he dissected, yet again, the supposed mysteries surrounding the suicide of Clinton aide Foster. Also that year, Bossie guaranteed that Sen. Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2004.

In early 2003, Bossie's group released a pro-Iraq War commercial starring former Tennessee senator and "Law and Order" actor Fred Thompson -- to "combat the left-wing propaganda" Bossie asserted was coming from Hollywood. Bossie also made TV appearances to rail against France for its Iraq stance and call for an American boycott of French products.

This spring Bossie returned to his roots, producing an anti-Kerry ad that used recent "priceless" MasterCard ads to parody "another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts." (According to Bossie, the ad's light touch was meant to stand in contrast to the left's "hate-filled speech and vitriol" aimed at Bush.) The spot, actually seen by very few TV viewers, produced a nice publicity bump for Bossie as the same network of reporters and pundits he'd cultivated for years with tips and leaks welcomed him into the unfolding campaign coverage. MSNBC's Chris Matthews announced on "Hardball": "Let me go to David Bossie. That ad is great, by the way."

I especially like Michael Isikoff saying that everybody knows Bossie has an agenda as if a) "everybody" is a Washington insider and b) having an agenda is no different from being a lying sack of shit who worked as hard as he could to harrass a legally elected president out of office with the willing help of a criminally irresponsible press corps.

But then, that's why we call them mediawhores.








digby 7/19/2004 08:50:00 PM |

 
Ouch

I get all these e-mail press releases from the Kerry campaign every day and they are quite amazing. Here's one from earlier today:

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM

(1) PUT RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGY FIRST: We recognize that we need to cater to our right wing base rather than pesky moderates like Nancy Reagan and Orrin Hatch. Therefore will put ideology over science and deny all credible scientific evidence that stem cell research will save lives and that global warming exists.

(2) DENY A WOMEN?S RIGHT TO CHOOSE: We will continue, at all costs, to ensure that women are denied their Constitutional right to choose. We will appoint judges who will work to rollback that right and we will fight for legislation that infringes on this right.

(3) REWARD OUR WEALTHY CONTRIBUTORS: We will continue to pass tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest Americans who fund our campaigns and get us elected.

(4) NEW BUSINESS FOR OUR FRIENDS WITH NEW NO BID CONTRACTS: We will provide no-bid contracts to our closest friends to ensure they will receive the largest contracts possible. Also, we will relaunch our secret energy taskforce so we can add more loopholes for big oil.

(5) ADD $10 TRILLION IN DEFICITS: In the past four years, this Administration has successfully taken the country from a $5.6 trillion surplus to a $5 trillion deficit ? a $10 trillion loss of revenue. We want to take the next step by adding an additional $10 trillion to the deficits, leaving the burden on the next generation.

(6) HARM OUR ENVIRONMENT: We will rollback generations of environmental regulations that protect our air, land and water. We will poison our water with arsenic and mercury; we will allow drilling in our most pristine natural wilderness; and we will make sure taxpayers pay to clean up our toxic waste sites.



(7) CUT AID TO CHILDREN AND DECIMATE PROGRAMS FOR SENIORS: We will cut domestic programs that provide health care, early education and nutrition programs and after-school services to thousands of American children. We will continue to fail to live up to our commitment to fund our education mandate by $27 billion. We will also pass our $2 trillion plan to privatize Social Security.



(8) BREAK OUR COMMITMENT TO VETERANS: We will once again promise veterans will be provided for under a Republican administration. We will then fail to provide the funding veterans need for health care, cut 500,000 veterans from the system entirely and close veterans’ hospitals across the country.



(9) RUSH TO WAR IN IRAQ: We are proud that we stubbornly rushed to war in Iraq without our allies, sent our troops into combat without proper equipment, over-stretched our military, and failed to plan for the peace.



(10) LET AL QAEDA OFF THE HOOK: We will continue to divert our attention and resources from Afghanistan, break our promises to rebuild that nation. We let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora to continue planning attacks against the U.S. from his hideout reportedly in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.


(11) LEAVE AMERICA VULNERABLE: We will under-invest in port, chemical and nuclear security, claiming the war in Iraq protects us here at home, and hope no one notices Ridge’s and Ashcroft’s warnings of an imminent attack on the homeland in the coming months.

www.johnkerry.com

I guess the gloves are off.


digby 7/19/2004 07:31:00 PM |

 
To GOP, He's Dishonoring His Father

Politically, the booking is a triumph for the Democratic ticket of Sens. John F. Kerry and John Edwards, which promptly trumpeted its ability to attract 'individuals from all political backgrounds.' Affronted Republicans moved to discredit the famously renegade son, who often disagreed with his family's politics and is an outspoken critic of President Bush.

'I think his speech is a cute little story for convention coverage, but I don't think it's the sort of thing that will influence any voters,' said Gary Bauer, a conservative activist and domestic policy advisor to President Reagan.

Summing up a sentiment widely held among conservative groups, Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America called the planned public appearance 'sad.'"

[...]

Although Michael Reagan has consented to appear at the GOP convention, Ron Reagan's scheduled speech at the Democratic gathering is galling to many Republicans.

"Ron Jr. has either allowed himself to be used or he's knowingly partaking in something whose purpose is to damage the party his father spent all of his adult political life in," Bauer said.

Not quoted in the article was noted GOP strategist Richard Cohen who just last week declared Reagan a "grave robber," a statement even Bauer rejected as insensitive. Bauer nonetheless complimented Cohen for his dedication to journalistic objectivity and invited him to the very exclusive Hannity and Colmes after party at Hue during the GOP convention.






digby 7/19/2004 01:31:00 AM |

 
Counterpunch

I know that many people believe that Kerry has not sufficiently come out swinging against Bush for his lies and distortions. It is said that if he would only look the American people in the eye and tell it like it is, he would win in a landslide. Like those before him he has simply refused to fight back.

Well, he has a new ad out and people should be relieved that he's finally taking the fight to the Republicans. Here's the transcript.

(Open on TV set showing Bush negative ad, camera pulls back)

"I'm fed up with it. I've never seen anything like it in 25 years of public life, George Bush's negative TV ads. Distorting my record, full of lies and he knows it.

I'm on the record for the very weapons systems his ads say I'm against. I want to build a strong defense, I'm sure he wants to build a strong defense so this isn't about defense issues. It's about dragging the truth into the gutter. And I'm not going to let them do it. This campaign is too important the stakes are too high for every American family. The real question is will we have a president who fights for the privileged few or will we have a president who fights for you.

George Bush wants to give the wealthiest 1% of the people in this country a new tax break worth 30 thousand dollars a year. I'm fighting for you and your family, for affordable housing and health care for better jobs for the best education and opportunity for our children.

Its a tough fight. I know that. Up hill all the all the way. But I'm going to keep on fighting because what I'm fighting for is our future."

You can see the ad here.


Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est La Meme Chose



digby 7/19/2004 01:00:00 AM |

Sunday, July 18, 2004

 
Cover-Up

I just love this controversy over on World O'Crap about the scaredy cat little stewardi and their trembling passengers all excited by a bunch of "middle eastern" musicians talking to each other, not smiling and going to the bathrooms on an airplane. (Why did you know there is no law that mandates middle easterners should be required to eat with their hands?)

Personally, I think somebody needs to report these complainers to the TSA and get them on a no-fly list ASAP. They might be nice blond Murikans who could never harm a flea, but from the description they sound to me as if they could easily be Tim Mcveigh types who would be very happy to take down and airliner and blame it on the Syrian mandolin players. I don't feel comfortable allowing people like that to eat their food with utensils or be allowed to whisper to one another privately on an airplane.

Someone should have the FBI look into this. Evil only prevails when good men do nothing. Just as the writer of this tale in the Women's WSJ (what --- is the regular one too, like, totally boring?) believes that her feelings are what should guide the actions of the police in matters of terrorism, I think mine should too. Paranoid white conservatives scare the shit out of me. I don't want them on my airplane. After all, just as terrorists can learn to play instruments as a ruse, a home grown American terrorist can easily get hired on at Women's WSJ to write silly, unbelievable essays. In fact, it's the perfect cover.


Kevin at Catch has more on the chilling middle eastern flautists and Julia comments as only Julia can.




digby 7/18/2004 08:05:00 PM |

 
Dirty Texans

Via Talk Left:

Obscenity charges will be dropped against a Burleson woman arrested last fall for selling sex toys to undercover police officers, her attorney said Saturday.

[...]

Pat Davis, president of Passion Parties Inc., the company that supplies Mrs. Webb with her erotic merchandise, said the decision to drop the case is overdue.

[...]

Mrs. Webb was arrested in October after selling erotic toys to a pair of undercover police officers. The state's obscenity code forbids the sale of devices designed to stimulate the genitals, although some stores avoid prosecution by promoting the products as novelties.

I hear they're going to outlaw hands and lips next session. Lord knows what people might do with those things.




digby 7/18/2004 07:21:00 PM |

 
Job One

In a powerful post, Brad DeLong brings up a point that I think needs to be said about current politics in the Democratic Party by simply juxtaposing Barbara Ehrenreich's essays in support of Nader in 2000 and her repudiation of him in 2004.

Ehrenreich's pro-Nader argument (or rather her anti-Democrat argument) from 2000 is truly puerile --- but typical. I respect her for many things, but modern partisan politics is obviously not a field that she understands in the least. Her primary concern in the year 2000 was the perfidy of the centrist Democrats who had been leading the country, in her view, into ruin. Indeed, she seemed almost wholly unconcerned with what the Republicans would do with full control of the government, characterizing Junior as some kind of DLC Democrat who might try to place a couple of conservative judges on the Supreme Court but that's about it. She was completely self-absorbed and laughably naive about the nature of the political opposition.

DeLong asks the question, "What changed between 2000 and 2004?" Commenters predictably said, "four years of George W. Bush." And once again, I reply, "what in gawds name were you people doing for the previous eight years?" Apparently, many Democrats were watching their favorite infotainment programs and uncritically saw the partisan bloodshed of the 1990's as some sort of sit-com instead of the bare knuckled, political power grab it was.

It was clear to many of us in 2000 that the Republican Party had completely run amuck and that George W. Bush was simply a brand name in a suit that the Party was putting forth to hide their essential ugliness from the American people. It was obvious to some of us that this was an unprecedented partisan battle and that this insular, myopic view on the left was going to hurt us very badly. I have little patience for the idea that it took this massive demonstration of GOP power under the Bush administration to convince people that the first, most important order of political business was to check the Republican power grab. It was obvious in 2000 to anyone who was paying attention.

Nowadays, I'm told it's not that the Democrats are just corrupt but that they are corrupt pussies who never fought back until we gave them some spine. This is simply untrue. For a decade Democrats battled back a Republican juggernaut of unprecedented force (and a GOP landslide in 1994) while simultaneously fighting an extremely hostile media and a left wing faction that couldn't deal with the fact that the Democrats, after 12 years of right wing ascendency, found a way to get elected and stop the inevitable slide to a permanent Republican majority. On that, (and not for the last time) they actually joined with the right wing in their loathing of the strategy that won elections in a conservative era and kept the Republicans from total political dominance. (This is not to say that the same strategy would work today. But, the argument of purism vs pragmatism hasn't changed for the last thirty years, no matter what new strategy was proposed.)

Now that the purists have finally been sufficiently schooled in the consequences of letting Republicans have their way, I'm glad to see they are rejecting quixotic, third party politics for the time being. However, their view of modern partisan politics is as parochial as ever. For instance, I hear tell that we are going to finally "fight back." And that seems to consist of charging mindlessly onto the battlefield, shouting slogans and beating our chests about taking our country back. It seems to be thought that if only we shout loudly enough, everyone on the sidelines will be impressed with our passion and join the fray on our side. And the Republicans, I guess, will be so shocked and awed that they will lay down their arms and capitulate.

I'm afraid that it's far more likely that when the Democrats rush onto the field shouting our high minded slogans, the Republicans will simply explode a dirty bomb, killing untold numbers and scare the shit out of everybody else. The cable news ratings will go up and up and up as the media once again embeds itself on the side of the GOP in denouncing the "crazy" left wing terrorists.

Inchoate passion is not persuasive. And, to believe that "fighting back" consists of browbeating our elected politicians into standing up and denouncing Republican badness and wrongness is infantile. We grassroots types and bloggers and blowhards --- as well as strong unelected voices like Gore, Dean and others --- can stand up and give fiery speeches and have some effect if we're willing to take some social heat for it. But in the real world of power and politics, passionate rhetoric is just one small piece of the puzzle.

The reason the Republicans have been as successful as they are, despite their policies being unpopular, is that they use their power to the nth degree, whether the public mandates it or not. They are confident in their ability to spin their partisan use of democratic institutions with bromides about values and morality and freedom and democracy. Underneath their rhetoric is a pure lust for power, but they have been very good at obscuring that by claiming victimhood and portraying themselves as the party of strong individuals speaking truth to(liberal) power.

Our problem is that we actually believe in democracy so we don't think it's right to shove our agenda down the throats of the American people without their permission (hence Clinton actually delivering on the centrist policies he ran and won on.) This means that in order to defend the country from impending fascism while we try to further a progressive agenda, we have to to protect democratic institutions, allow moderates a voice proportionate to their constituency and patiently try to bring the country around to our way of thinking.

Bill Sher at Liberal Oasis has been talking about this for months. As he says, liberals haven't made the case that "liberal ideals are politically pragmatic" (and it's not as if they weren't given the opportunity during the primary campaign to do that.) Deluding yourself into believing that the public is just going to wake up one morning and reject this Republican image of us (and them) that's been painstakingly stitched together for decades is wishful thinking. Only 20% of people people identify themselves as liberals and that should tell us something. We have a lot of work to do and it isn't going to get done by standing around giving our politicians vague orders to "fight back" whatever that means.

Certainly, fighting back as a minority party is about as useful a pitting a high school baseball team against the New York Yankees. The first order of business to is win the presidency so that we can reverse this frightening foreign policy debacle and stop the bleeding on the domestic front. And that's a big agenda at this point. But if we want to actually enact a progressive agenda it will not be enough to stand around and rail at the Democratic minority in congress for being unable to "win." We need to be in a majority before anything gets done.

The fact that in one short three and a half year period this government has managed to spend the country into oblivion to the benefit of the very rich and has completely shot a half century of international leadership all to hell should, by all rights, translate into a landslide election for our side. And, yet it remains neck and neck. We have a Democratic base as fired up as any in my memory and yet we are still fighting among ourselves about the relative purity of our candidates and how if only they'd "fight" we'd win --- as if we haven't had some recent lessons in how certain satisfying fiery rhetoric is spun in the media to our extreme detriment. We can go down "fighting" like that or we can win by "fighting" using superior tactics and strategy.

And, yes we need to work to change this toxic political environment over the long term. We should use the newfound energy created by this Bush backlash and the new communications tools at our disposal. It was long past time that we created some political instutitons of our own to battle the political institutions of the right and groups like CAP and MoveOn and fledgeling efforts like Air America are our future.

But, right now we simply cannot forget that the single biggest problem we face is not our own lack of ballocks or the perfidious compromising DLC or the money that is required to run a modern political campaign. This country is in grave danger if the Republican Party maintains its grip on total institutional power. And they will not give it up easily and if they lose in the short term they will scratch and claw to get it back. They aren't going away. Keeping them from total power must be our first priority, what ever it takes.

If Kerry wins, I'm sure that Barbara Ehrenreich and others will be upset that he is not sufficiently liberal. On the other hand, the right wing will be apoplectic that he is preparing to sell the country to the terrorists. The media will be slavering for anything juicy the David Bossies of the Mighty Wurlitzer will feed them. That is the nature of our politics today. That is the reality in which President John Kerry is going to be operating. And it would be nice if most Democrats didn't put their sleep masks back on and pretend that John Kerry can be a super-hero who magically defeats terrorists and Republicans with one hand tied behind his back, while providing health care and prosperity for all --- and then claim that he and the Democrats are pussies because they can't perfectly accomplish all that in the face of a powerful and ruthless opposition.

It's a new day, but the Republicans are hardly down and out. We need to get our priorities straight and start thinking like strategists instead of petulent teenagers. This notion that we will prevail if only our politicans will just speak up is to say that the problem has an easy, emotionally satisfying solution. It doesn't. It's a big, big deal and this party had better get its act together and figure out how to neuter this radical Republican Party before they immolate the lot of us.

Dave Johnson has some excellent advice on the kind of thinking that can actually defeat the GOP and pave the way to a new liberal ascendency. It's a very good place to start. Also read the Republican Noise Machine by David Brock. Maybe it takes a former right wing operative to see that left still doesn't understand the insidious nature of their opposition.


Update: Hats Off to Matt Stoller who is trying to do God's work in bringing the fractious Democrats together. An e-mail exchange with him is what set me to thinking about this again. The pragmatists vs. the purists --- the eternal battle for the soul of the Democratic party. It's good to remind ourselves that our internecine battle is, and always has been, about the right strategy to get where we all agree we want to go.

The Republican schism is much, much deeper.






digby 7/18/2004 09:37:00 AM |

Saturday, July 17, 2004

 
They Don't Like Democracy

Charles Pierce gets to the nub of the argument:

There really is only one issue in this election. Since the Extended Florida Unpleasantness, this has been an Adminstration utterly unconcerned with any restraints, constitutional or otherwise, on its power. It has been contemptuous of the idea of self-government, and particularly of the notion that an informed populace is necessary to that idea. It recognizes neither parliamentary rules nor constitutional barriers. (Just for fun, imagine that the Senate had not authorized force in Iraq. Do you think for one moment that C-Plus Augustus wouldn't have launched the war anyway, and on some pretext that we'd only now be discovering was counterfeit?) It does not accept the concept of principled opposition, either inside the administration or outside of it. It refuses to be bound by anything more than its political appetites. It wants what it wants, and it does what it wants. It is, at its heart, and in the strictest definition of the word, lawless. It has the perfect front men: a president unable to admit a mistake because he's spent his entire life being insulated from even the most minor of consequences, and a vice-president who is viscerally furious at the notion that he is accountable to anyone at all. They are abetted by a congressional majority in which all of these un-American traits are amplified to an overwhelming din.

So, now we are faced with the question: Do you want to live in a country where these people no longer feel even the vaporous restraints of having another election to win?

BUSH-CHENEY UNLEASHED. Up or down? Yes or no?

There you have it.

Jon Chait in TNR amplifies this theme:

Here we have a sample of the style of governance that has prevailed under Bush's presidency. It's not the sort of thing you would find in a civics textbook. Bush and his allies have been described as partisan or bare-knuckled, but the problem is more fundamental than that. They have routinely violated norms of political conduct, smothered information necessary for informed public debate, and illegitimately exploited government power to perpetuate their rule. These habits are not just mean and nasty. They're undemocratic.

What does it mean to call the president "undemocratic"? It does not mean Bush is an aspiring dictator. Despite descending from a former president and telling confidants that God chose him to lead the country, he does not claim divine right of rule. He is not going to cancel the election or rig it with faulty ballots. (Well, almost certainly not.) But democracy can be a matter of degree. Russia and the United States are both democracies, but the United States is more democratic than Russia. The proper indictment of the Bush administration is, therefore, not that he's abandoning American democracy, but that he's weakening it. This administration is, in fact, the least democratic in the modern history of the presidency.

I think it's very important to note that this is not something that's confined to the Bush administration alone as if they are some sort of GOP anomalies. The fact is that this is an ongoing, serious problem of the modern Republican Party in general. They are congenitally opposed to compromise which leads inevitably to rule by force.

Chait argues that the Bush administration is not destroying democracy but rather weakening it. I would suggest that that adds up to the same thing. They are unlikely, except in a desperate situation, to attempt a military coup or do something dramatically attention grabbing like cancel the election. They aren't that stupid. They can attain everything they want over time by simply eroding democracy to the point at which it has all of the trappings and none of the substance. That process has been going on for some time now and escalating gradually to the point at which we now find ourselves with a presidency (which has always been the repository of Republican ruling fantasies)that quite blatently declares that it has no responsibility to uphold the laws if it deems them an impediment to national security.

But it's not the Bushies, it's the party. Removing Bush will not solve this problem. Indeed, I'm sure the GOP congress would love to get back into action and resume its natural investigative role which they have been shut out of while Republicans are in the white house. Their egos demand a little bit of the spotlight.

I'm sure there are many Republicans who simply don't see what is happening and would be horrified if they did. Not even the Democrats who have been on the receiving end of these undemocratic power plays seem to have been aware until recently of what has been going on.

I have been repeating this "undemocratic" mantra since the mid 1990's. (You can google this blog for the word and you'll see that I've done my best to bore everyone to tears with it.) It is a huge threat to this country --- one that has been magnified a hundred fold by the events if 9/11. It's not tin-foil kookiness and it's not partisan angst. It's real. And while I have little doubt that many reasonable sorts (which, by the way, I am also) will shake their heads sadly once again at my shrillness and hysteria for taking this view, I'll continue to do it. The Emperor has no clothes. I see what I see. I'm glad to have some company.




digby 7/17/2004 10:37:00 AM |

 
TBogg Madness

Kevin at Catch interviews the King of Snark. How come the funniest guys are always merchandise managers?






digby 7/17/2004 10:25:00 AM |

Friday, July 16, 2004

 
Funk Soul Brother To The Rescue?

Check it out now.
The Agonist has posted this Stratfor report:

Moscow and Washington are quietly negotiating a request by the Bush administration to send Russian troops to Iraq or Afghanistan this fall, Russian government sources tell Stratfor. The talks are intense, our contacts close to the U.S. State Department say, and the timing is not insignificant. A Russian troop lift to either country before the U.S. presidential election would give U.S. President George W. Bush a powerful boost in the campaign.

More at the link.

The U.S. inviting the Russians into Afghanistan to help us fight the Mujahadeen is so incredibly ironic I can't even go there. A KGB agent rescuing the neocons is simply hysterical.

What do you suppose Pooty-poot will want in return?




digby 7/16/2004 08:16:00 PM |

 
The Natives Are Restless

Following up my post from yesterday:

More than half the Republicans in the House have signed a formal complaint to President Bush about the failure to give prominent conservative, pro-life party members even one prime-time speaking role at the Republican National Convention.

[...]

The pre-convention rebellion by so many conservative House members is driven by re-election concerns and frustration over policy differences with the White House in the past 31/2 years, Capitol Hill Republicans said privately.

Public revolt is the last thing the Bush campaign wants to see, after the Senate Republican leaders failed Wednesday to get even 50 votes to back a constitutional amendment against homosexual "marriages."

Last month, Republican convention planners announced a prime-time speakers' list, which was approved by chief Bush strategist Karl Rove.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Gov. George E. Pataki, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani -- all of whom are pro-choice -- are lined up for evening speeches.

[...]

"The most conservative speaker right now is John McCain, who is truly a fiscal conservative. But a lot of conservatives believe the conservative movement that got us here is being ignored at the convention," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican.

[...]

Mr. Pence said signers of his letter agreed that "millions of voters will be tuning into the convention to hear someone give voice to the traditional moral values that brought them to the Republican Party in 1980."

"The strength of the Republican majority in America is not in the California governor's office or in the moderate politics of George Pataki," Mr. Pence said. "It's in the millions of pro-family voters who will campaign for our candidates and turn out on Election Day."

This controversy just guaranteed that Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer will bring up the fact that Rove tried to keep the real conservatives off the podium at the one event at which they really wanted to appear moderate and mainstream. The bad news is that nobody's going to watch the conventions who isn't already decided. Still, it doesn't hurt and it's illustrative of the problem the administration is having with its base.





digby 7/16/2004 04:53:00 PM |

 
The Grown-ups

Karl Rove, special advisor to President Bush saying that Sen. John Kerry thumbed his nose to U.S. troops in Iraq at a political rally in Irvine, Calif., on Thursday, July 15, 2004.



digby 7/16/2004 04:23:00 PM |

 
Expert Witnesses

"Human life is the gift of our creator, and it should never be for sale," Bush said. "It takes a special kind of depravity to exploit and hurt the most vulnerable members of society. Human traffickers rob children of their innocence, they expose them to the worst of life before they have seen much of life. Traffickers tear families apart. They treat their victims as nothing more than goods and commodities for sale to the highest bidder."

The president gave his brother, Florida's governor, a verbal pat on the back, observing that Jeb Bush had signed a state law making such trafficking a felony.

The president then turned to his other brother Neil who testified:

Bush: "I had sexual intercourse with perhaps three or four, I don't remember the exact number, women, at different times. In Thailand once, I have a pretty clear recollection that there was one time in Thailand and in Hong Kong."

Brown: "And you were married to Mrs. Bush?"

Bush: "Yes."

Brown: "Is that where you caught the venereal diseases?"

Bush: "No."

Brown: 'Where did you catch those?'

Bush: "Diseases plural? I didn't catch..."

Brown: "Well, I'm sorry. How ... how many venereal diseases do you suffer from?"

Bush: "I've had one venereal disease."

Brown: "Which was?"

Bush: "Herpes."

digby 7/16/2004 04:14:00 PM |

 
Those Crude Democrats

I just heard that Don Imus referred to Senator Clinton as a "fat buck-toothed crook introducing her rapist husband...." at the convention. (I don't have a link, so it may be wrong.)

When asked to respond, Steve Schmidt of the Bush campaign said, "... there was a great deal of extreme venom and vitriol that spewed forth."

Oh wait. That was about Whoopie Goldberg at a private fundraiser. This Imus comment only went out to tens of millions of people both on radio and television. It was just entertainment for the folks. Whoopie, on the other hand, made a lewd joke in front of Democratic partisans about Bush's name (which, by the way, was hardly original --- I had a bumper sticker that said "lick Bush in 88")

Now, both Kerry and Edwards appeared on Imus yesterday, apparently. But then, they don't tend to go around snuffling and whining every time somebody says something rude. That's the specialty of little old lady quilting circle of the Bush administration.






digby 7/16/2004 03:40:00 PM |

 
One Simply Doesn't, Darling

I was so relieved to see another card carrying liberal standing up for what's right against all this unseemly politicking by those nasty Democrats. And how very clever he is to use someone who isn't actually a Democrat to do it. 

Ron Reagan also proceeds as something of a medium, channeling his father's unknowable views on such matters as Bush's very public religiosity. At Reagan's interment in Simi Valley, Calif., for instance, he said, "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."

Let's leave aside the implied accusation that Bush is publicly religious not out of conviction but "to gain political advantage" and question the appropriateness of the statement -- at the burial and citing the dead Reagan. And let us also concede that if Ron Reagan were not his father's son, not only would he not have been at that funeral -- by virtue of what achievement? -- but no one would have paid him any attention. He had, as he well knew, expropriated his father's fame and stature for his own purposes.

It is the same with stem cell research. Once again, Ron Reagan will be speaking solely because of his name and because, by implication, he is articulating his dead father's convictions. Maybe he is -- I would like to think so -- but there is no way of knowing where Ronald Reagan would have stood on stem cell research. He was not, to say the least, a rigorous thinker and might well have wound up in Bush's corner. Who knows? "

Thank goodness, we have good, right thinking liberals out there who are willing to defend Crusader Codpiece's religiosity as true and authentic, publicly opine that President Reagan would likely have backed Bush's stem cell plan, call the anti-Bush son of the GOP icon a phony and a grave robber and generously compile a handy list of talking points that John Moody can simply xerox and pass out to the press.("Even the radical leftist Richard Cohen said....") And how terribly clever of him to criticize this "Jr" for shamefully appropriating his father's name.  Ooooh, the Bushies must have gotten quite a giggle out of that one.

Left leaning pundits simply must carry water for Republicans whenever they can because  otherwise rude people would call into question their  superiority as individuals and we simply can't have that. The rule is that you may be critical of Republicans one out of every three columns, but if you do more than that, people will begin to suspect your gentlemanly credentials. Why, how ever would one hold one's head up over the vichyssoise at Sally's if one could not believably titter condescendingly about the hapless Democrats?

I'm telling you, the Democrats' worst enemies are the liberal punditocrisy. They are useful idiots at best and consciously social climbing at worst. They either don't understand the game the GOP is playing or they are too self-absorbed to see it. Either way, their total co-option by the Mighty Wurlitzer agenda is truly impressive.


That Reagan Jr fellow has very bad manners. Just like the Democrats who are giving him a platform for his depraved body snatching speech. He may be right on the issue, but it's so ill-bred for him to bring it up. I don't want anyone to think that I don't notice that. I simply must call things as I see them. That's why I'm superior to the partisan rabble. Uhm, Sally this potage is just delicious. As are you, my dear.








digby 7/16/2004 02:50:00 PM |

 
Go Fukuyama Yourself:

Famous academic Francis Fukuyama, one of the founding fathers of the neo-conservative movement that underlies the policies of US President George W. Bush's administration, said on July 13 that he would not vote for the incumbent in the November 2 US Presidential election.

In addition to distancing himself from the current administration, Fukuyama told TIME magazine that his old friend, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, should resign.

In other news, Dick Cheney admitted he's always known that deep down he is really a woman and hell reported hail and freezing rain.


Thanks to Kevin at Catch





digby 7/16/2004 11:11:00 AM |

 
Wingnut Victimology
 
Thomas Frank's op-ed in the NY Times:
 

Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage.

Then again, what culture war offensive isn't doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.

Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party's all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior's very object.

The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote "no," and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.

 
This really hits the nail on the head. The right's sense of victimization is absolutely necessary to rally their faithful.  It's the same thing, by the way, that fuels the islamic fundamentalists. Perceived humiliation. In her new book about terrorism, Jessica Stern writes:
 

To understand this, it is worth considering the causes of terrorism. Several possible root causes have been identified, including, among others, poverty, lack of education, abrogation of human rights, the perception that the enemy is weak-willed. I've been interviewing terrorists around the world over the past five years. Those I interviewed cite many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause of terrorism. But the variable that came up most frequently was not poverty or human-rights abuses, but perceived humiliation. Humiliation emerged at every level of the terrorist groups I studied — leaders and followers.

The "New World Order" is a source of humiliation for Muslims. And for the youth of Islam, it is better to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to this humiliation. Part of the mission of jihad is to restore Muslims' pride in the face of humiliation. Violence, in other words, restores the dignity of humiliated youth. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers, but the perpetrators and their sympathizers. Violence is a way to strengthen support for the organization and the movement it represents.
The word humiliation, alas, is now coming up in Iraq as well. Baghdad is of profound symbolic importance to Muslims because it was the capital of the Islamic world during the golden age of Islamic civilization. Televised pictures of American soldiers and their tanks in Baghdad are a "deeply humiliating scene to Muslims," explains Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, who calls the war in Iraq a "gift" to Osama bin Laden.

 
The GOP and its corporate masters have successfully used this perceived humiliation of the "salt of the earth" red staters for cynical, manipulative reasons for decades.  It has consolidated the power of the real elites by scapegoating "cosmopolitans" and modernity as the cause of the average Joe's problems.  But, just like their counterparts in places like Saudi Arabia, in this process they have found it useful and necessary to empower racists, paranoids and religious fundamentalists, some of whom have violent tendencies.
 
This scheme is about to blow up the House of Saud to its own detriment and everybody elses. We've got to  short circuit it here. That means that the humiliation factor has to be neutralized.
 
 
 
 
 
 


digby 7/16/2004 10:00:00 AM |

 
Beavis and Butthead in '04

How embarrassing

"I will stay here until 2006. I will stay here, and I will fight like a warrior for the people," he said. "And there is no one that can stop me. If anyone pushes me around, I will push back, including the Democrats and the special interests. Trust me."

I know that Republican politicians  need to relate to the public on a personal level because their policies are so unpopular (and their constituency isn't the brightest group either) but this is just ridiculous. First, they foisted that half-wit frat boy on the nation and then put a cartoon character in charge of California. Obviously, there's no reason that The Poorman's favorite Republican can't take the seat in Illinois --- gawd knows he has the codpiece.





digby 7/16/2004 12:57:00 AM |

Thursday, July 15, 2004

 
It's Their Party And Their Problem
 
Please Democrats, whatever we do, don't let the Bush campaign convince even one of us that this election is "unique" in that the key is to excite the base and forget about the moderates and undecideds. It's Rovian bullshit and Noam Scheiber explains why:

This explanation strikes me as a little convenient for the Bushies. While you obviously never want to ignore your base, the reason the Bushies are focusing so hard on their's isn't that they've carefully appraised the political landscape and concluded that this is their best strategy. They're focusing on their base because they have to: Despite Karl Rove's best efforts, the Republican base still isn't shored up.

Rove's grand plan was to spend the first three years of Bush's term stroking conservatives' erogenous zones--lots of tax cuts, conservative judges, regulatory rollbacks, and religiously hued social policy (the administration's marriage initiative, its efforts to restrict access to abortion, its retrograde stem cell research policies, etc.). The idea behind this stuff was that it would give Bush the political capital to tack leftward during his re-election campaign.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the center: Rove discovered that conservatives don't just want to win on some issues, they want to win on every issue. Conservatives went ballistic over last year's Medicare prescription drug bill, over additional money for the reconstruction of Iraq, over the deficit and the failure to control spending generally, and over the administration's perceived indifference to gay marriage. Equally maddening to conservatives were proposals like a manned mission to Mars and immigration reform. So rather than spend this year reaching out to moderates, as planned, Rove found himself in full retreat, junking Mars and illegal immigrants, embracing a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Both sides of the partisan divide have their little problem with purism. The Nader factor is illustrative of ours. But, let nobody ever say that we are anywhere close to being as rigid and uncompromising as the right wing of the Republican party.

I wrote a piece on American Street sometime back called "Welcome To Our Nightmare Mr Rove"  in which I discussed this very problem with the wingnuts. Interestingly, it played off of another article by Scheiber in which he discussed the intractability of the right wing. I wrote:

His thesis, basically, is that Republicans are temperamentally unable to compromise because they see things in black and white,  manichean terms --- otherwise known as Yer-With-Us-Or-Agin-Us, My-Way-Or-The-Highway or the I'll-Hold-My-Breath-Until-I-Turn-Blue philosophy of politics. He further explains that Democrats' collection of interest groups means that activists who agitate for certain issues like gay rights or choice are more willing to compromise because they are usually personally affected by government and are therefore, more apt to feel the immediate consequences of incremental change. (Regardless of the motivation, it seems to me that Democrats are just more "into nuance" e.g. smarter.)

What he does not point out, however, is that if this description of the Republicans political viewpoint is correct it illustrates why they are fundamentally unqualified to govern in a democratic system. If one is unwilling to compromise then any kind of bipartisan consensus is impossible and rule by force becomes inevitable.

This is undoubtedly why we have seen a steady encroachment of the constitution in the last few years. First came the impeachment, the nuclear option of partisan warfare. Then we saw the Supreme Court intervene in a presidential election despite a clear constitutional roadmap for dealing with just such a situation. Now they are pre-emptively endorsing the radical idea of a constitutional amendment to remedy a supposed problem that has not even been decided by more than two state supreme courts and one act of civil disobedience in California. (And, if California is any guide, amending the constitution will shortly become the default strategy for all of the right wing's pet causes.)

Karl Rove, however, has to win this election in a system that requires that his boy at least feint to the middle. His strategy, as Schreiber delineates above, didn't work. There is no pleasing the right wing and there is no room for compromise. And, he is learning, just as the centrist Dems learned in the 90's when they tried to maintain a bipartisan consensus, that if you give these wing-nuts an inch, they'll take a mile. The more you move to the right, the more they move to the right. There is no meeting half way.

Welcome to our nightmare, Mr Rove.

This problem is their problem in the election. (It will be our problem when we win and try, once again, to govern.) We Democrats have many issues, not the least of which is our unceasing ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. But, this uncompromising, black and white worldview isn't one of them. We must not let them draw us blindly into a "battle of the partisans." Bush and Rove are still having to cater to their base and that is their electoral nightmare. Let 'em have at it. We'll go to the middle and win the election.


(Incidentally, to toot my own horn just a tiny bit, that piece from American Street was chosen by Barbara O'Brien of Mahablog fame as an excerpt in her new book called Blogging America. Buy the book. It features many great bloggers and is probably the first book published on the subject)

 
Update: Donkey Rising  crunches the numbers and comes to a similar conclusion. The independent and swing voters are looking to be ours for the taking if they keep this up.  










digby 7/15/2004 09:38:00 PM |

 
Good Timing

I think this new book by E.J. Dionne sounds just great. It's all about how the Democrats are wimps and need to start fighting back the ruthless tough guys in the GOP. He thinks we need to frame the issues to our advantage instead of letting the Republicans do it for us.

I'm all for that. Maybe a good place to start would be for left wing pundits (who never said a peep about this for a goddamned decade thus enabling the wingnuts to completely dominate the discourse) to not write books called Stand Up, Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge during an election campaign in which the dominant theme set forth by the Republicans is how wimpy the Democrats are and how the world needs ruthless tough guys like them to defeat terrorists.

It's just a thought.


digby 7/15/2004 08:48:00 PM |

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

 
Innocence Project

Here's an interesting article on the brewing controversy over "Outfoxed" at Editor and Publisher.

I thought this was particularly revealing:

Fox was active on other fronts. Staffers showed other memos to USA Today writer Mark Memmott who suggested today that "Outfoxed" focuses only on the memos that uphold its view of rightwing bias at Fox. Other memos, he reported, included instructions to give Sen. John Kerry's speeches equal weight with those of President George W. Bush, and to not go overboard covering criticism of Kerry by some of his former "swift boat" colleagues.

That's just funny. Why would the "fair and balanced" network have to distribute memos to its staff reminding them to give equal time to Kerry? And, you have to wonder about why they would need to be told not to "go overboard" on the swift boat charges. I don't suppose that would be because that entire line of criticism played into Bush's lack of Vietnam service, would it?





digby 7/13/2004 01:09:00 PM |

 
Democratic Prospects

LiberalOasis has a very smart post up about how (not) to be a political base.

He's absolutely right, especially this:

Kerry may have the toughest job of all, keeping a majority coalition together over something besides Dubya.

But as we tussle with fellow Dems, we will need to be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the GOP base.

It will behoove all of us to remember in the end, it's not about one faction of the party triumphing over another.

Because when one faction is a loser, that faction could take its marbles and go home. And there goes the majority coalition.

Instead, from the liberal perspective, it's about convincing the so-called moderates of the party that liberal ideals and views are also political pragmatic.

This is a necessary step for us.

Even though there are enough liberals who have financially backed the Kerry campaign to show that we cannot be ignored, there aren't enough self-described liberals in the country to have earned the right to call the shots.

We cannot sit back and just expect Kerry to do what we want.

[...]


A healthy party needs a smart and savvy base -- one that provides money volunteers and energy, one that doesn't alienate the center but defines it -- for long-term success.

Whereas a demoralized base kept at arms length by the Establishment may provide some short term wins, but cannot sustain in the long-term.

Similarly, a myopic base, as the right-wingers are showing themselves to be, can give away substantive gains and destroy trust within its party.

Along with spreading the good word that liberalism is not, as advertised, another word for deviant, I propose that a good first step would be to seriously propose and build a long term strategy to do away with the electoral college once and for all. It is fundamentally undemocratic and it hurts liberals, always has.

Billmon also has an interesting post up today about class warfare.

Even in the white-collar world of my day job, I'm surprised by the venom some of my fellow drones I now direct at our ridiculously over-paid corporate lords and masters. The last few years have been a real squeeze (at least by middle-class standards) in our office - no raises, shitty bonuses - and some of the guys who used to say they voted Republican (because "they keep the taxes down," or "the Democrats will take away my guns") aren't talking that way now.

[...]

But saying the Republicans can't win a class war isn't the same thing as saying the Democrats can't lose one. Populist messages delivered by angry voices rarely work with the political center. They scare more than they incite. Finding the right emotional pitch - optimistic, eloquent, passionate but not belligerent - is the key. FDR understood this instinctively; so did Hubert Humphrey. So did Paul Wellstone. Most Democratic politicians are too scared - or too compromised - to even try.

Personally, I'm all for it as long as it doesn't require that we shitcan certain principles like minority rights as so often happens in American forays into populism.

Both of these posts are food for thought about how to win and how to govern. But, I've got a different question for anyone who cares to weigh in.

The polls continue to show a close race. I hope it isn't and that we will all be breathing much easier come October. But, I'm afraid that a close election will again benefit those who hold the electoral apparatus in their grasp and that means most likely the Republicans. I've lately been entertaining the horrible prospect of what in hell to do if we lose.

Any thoughts?




digby 7/13/2004 12:25:00 PM |

Monday, July 12, 2004

 
Paul Revere Was Unpardonably Shrill

I see that level headed grown-ups are giving us looney leftists another lecture on shrillness. The Bush administration isn't laying the groundwork for another undemocratic power grab with their discussion of postponing of the elections in the event of a terrorist attack. They are just being prudent. Everybody take a deep breath and calm your little selves down. This is silly.

It would be unforgiveably obnoxious to point out that little partisan impeachment episode and the very dubious election results in the state run by the president's brother back in 2000 as evidence that the Republicans are generally willing to go to unprecedented lengths to attain and maintain power. Neither should we be suspicious of their motives after they plainly decided after the WTC attacks to continue to govern with no regard for their political opposition in the congress or their allies overseas. Taking the country to war based upon false information should not be seen as evidence of their perfidy. Some might even say that the Republicans have been systematically defining democracy down for quite some time, but it would be unattractively shrill to mention it publicly.

One could also question the timing of this newfound concern about election tampering, if one were to retreat into leftist hand-wringing. Seeing as 9/11 actually happened during the NY mayoral primary and there was much discussion of whether the city should extend the heroic Giuliani's term, this concept of elections and terrorism is not new. One might wonder why nobody in this great country of ours this didn't think of this sometime before now, what with all the discussion of Homeland Security and electoral reform. But, it would be crude to mention that such things are probably best debated in the US Congress outside the election season rather than dealt with by ad hoc committees just three months prior to a national election.

It is true that the many thoughtful, restrained pundits on the right have made the case that the Spanish elections were manipulated by the terrorists and certainly the administration has been far from reticent in setting forth the proposition that should a similar thing take place here it would be with the express purpose of electing the soft ticket of Kerry-Edwards. It would be unpardonably disrespectful to mention that this is crude political fear mongering for which theme the alleged antidote --- postponing the elections in case of a terrorist attack --- contributes mightily. (And it would be very, very silly to note that this campaign theme is illogical in the extreme because to do so would be to accuse the administration of being dishonest, which is much too hysterical.)

I know that I have been shrill in the past --- as when I opposed the Iraq war because it was clear to me that the Bush administration was mendacious and incompetent to an extreme. And I was rude when I railed about the modern republican party's undemocratic tendencies as they systematically destroyed all pretenses of bipartisanship and consensus in the pursuit of raw political power. When I have said that they are incrementally corrupting the system to such an extent that by the time we notice it will be too late, people find that to be overwrought. These observations are unattractive and uncomfortable for people of genteel disposition.

When it was revealed, for instance, that there were no WMD, that the president intended to govern radically as if he had a mandate instead of a very dicey claim to power or that his administration believed that the president has the right to ignore laws under his power as commander in chief, one would have thought that would serve as a cautionary tale about their intentions. But apparently there is still a tremendous reserve of trust in these people's motives and our system's magical ability to hold back every undemocratic urge with no necessity for public involvement.

Certainly, some believe that our past history of success at beating back bad political actors should be seen as a something of a guarantee that our system will always hold. But, if that's so, it's likely because of one little amendment to our constitution --- the first one. Empowering the shrill is what keeps these people from going too far. Shut them down and the whole house of cards will fall apart.




digby 7/12/2004 05:23:00 PM |

 
Pavlov's Heathers

"Kerry, Edwards show public affection"

By LIZ SIDOTI
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

NEW YORK -- Bear hugs. Pats on the back. Shoulder squeezes. John Kerry and John Edwards are all over each other. The two Democrats and one-time rivals have shared so much public affection since becoming a team Tuesday that the presidential candidate even joked about it in New York after Edwards introduced him at fund-raisers and rallies - and hugged him before turning over the podium.

Kerry grinned and shook his head. 'There's been a lot of hugging this week,' the Massachusetts senator remarked with a chuckle Friday.

Later, Kerry mentioned that Jay Leno had teased the Democratic ticket for being so touchy-feely. Mocking the apparent chemistry between the candidates, 'The Tonight Show' strung together clips of the two in their first three days as running mates with Joe Cocker's weepy 1974 hit single 'You Are So Beautiful' played in the background.

'We make a great couple, ladies and gentlemen,' Kerry joked as New York donors cracked up.

Hugging, kissing and squeezing has become a part of every event since Kerry and Edwards set off on the campaign trail with their wives, Teresa Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards, for the first time together Wednesday.

It doesn't matter if Kerry is introducing Edwards, or vice versa, the scene is always the same, the lovefest playing out at rallies in Ohio, Florida, West Virginia, New Mexico and New York.

With a toothy smile, the North Carolina senator opens his arms wide and wraps an equally sunny Kerry in a bear hug. The two clap each other sometimes once, often twice, on the back with both hands. Pulling apart, they each drape an arm around each other. Kerry waves with his free hand, and Edwards pumps his fist in the air, thumb up. Sometimes the two tilt their heads together to make inaudible comments.

Often described as aloof, wooden and emotionally detached, Kerry now appears much more relaxed and affectionate, his style more closely resembling his younger Senate colleague.

Foes in the Democratic primary season, Kerry and Edwards were joined at the hip as they strode across the lawn of Kerry's wife's sprawling estate in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, making their first public appearance as running mates. Holding hands with their respective wives, the two walked side by side, grinning, laughing and leaning into one another to talk.

As Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico welcomed the ticket on stage in Albuquerque on Friday, Kerry and Edwards threw their arms around each other or patted each other five times in less than a minute, and then clasped hands and raised them above their heads.

It's not just the candidates; their wives have been affectionate as well. On Friday, Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards embraced at three different venues.

And both men have covered their wives - and each other's wives - with kisses and hugs. At an outdoor rally in Beckley, W.Va., Heinz Kerry introduced Edwards, saying: "We have two 'Johnnys Be Good' here. John, without much ado." Edwards walked up and kissed her cheek.

Later in Albuquerque, Kerry returned the favor, leaning in and giving Edwards' wife a peck after she offered words of praise for Heinz Kerry.

Last week I wrote that the absurdity of this "John-John" affection theme was designed to give the mainstream media a bitchy, elitist chortle so that they would be unable to resist passing on the not-so-subtle propaganda point that there is something ridiculous about the Democrats --- particularly to those white males who have a long standing mistrust of liberals. It's done as a joke, in the mode of puerile bully Limbaugh who often insults with a stab in the gut and then claims he is a victim of political correctness if anyone complains. This particular one is the familiar Gore character assassination technique. The idea is to make it just silly enough that to respond with any outrage makes you look ridiculously sensitive but to not respond is to allow this theme of "deviance" of some sort to travel through the body politic in a subliminal way. I heard someone laughingly remark about it in the line at Starbucks -- "It's kind of creepy."

I don't think it really has anything to do with gay rights or gay marriage, although the cruder Michael Savage sorts will take that shot. It's actually subtler than that. It's more about Kerry and Edwards being unserious, soft and strange. And, like the mindless little children they are, the press has run with it without ever questioning whether they might just be being manipulated. Again.






digby 7/12/2004 10:16:00 AM |

 
Friendly Advice

Note to David Brooks who has so generously advised the Democrats on the subject of how our lack of values, religious fervor and embrace of secularism are holding us back at the polls this year: You'd better take a look in the mirror, Mister, before your party goes down that same path to perdition.

It is terribly unfair and ultimately counterproductive of your leadership to exclude the voices of grassroots "Red Lobster" Republicans from your convention. As you have repeatedly stated, the vast, vast majority of real Americans are social conservatives --- or would be if they could just hear the good news --- and they have a right (and you have an obligation) to see that their voices are heard throughout the land. Those fighting the good fight against the homosexual agenda, sex outside of wedlock, women's libbers and satanists are the backbone of America. To treat them with such contempt is to ensure your defeat at the polls this November. Remember, I only have your best interest at heart.

P.S. Be sure to spend lots of time pushing the gay marriage ban and the "women are subservient" themes. These are the issues American's are most concerned with today. Ignore them at your peril.


digby 7/12/2004 09:48:00 AM |

Sunday, July 11, 2004

 
Tin Foil Government

In the comments section of the post below about postponing the elections, Rodger Payne alerts me to a disturbing article in the Atlantic called The Armageddon Plan.

While it doesn't specifically mention postponing elections, the Reagan administration evidently began a series of rather bizarre exercises to practice contingency plans in case of a nuclear attack. Even more disturbing is that Cheney and Rumsfeld, neither of whom were actually in the administration at the time, were intimately involved in the elaborate planning and gaming:

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership. Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington phone number to use in case of emergency.

After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the middle of the night, each man—joined by a team of forty to sixty federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet—slipped away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would head to each of the locations.

Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role.

The inspiration for this program came from within the Administration itself, not from Cheney or Rumsfeld; except for a brief stint Rumsfeld served as Middle East envoy, neither of them ever held office in the Reagan Administration. Nevertheless, they were leading figures in the program.

[...]

The U.S. government considered the possibility of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union more seriously during the early Reagan years than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Reagan had spoken in his 1980 campaign about the need for civil-defense programs to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange, and once in office he not only moved to boost civil defense but also approved a new defense-policy document that included plans for waging a protracted nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The exercises in which Cheney and Rumsfeld participated were a hidden component of these more public efforts to prepare for nuclear war.

The premise of the secret exercises was that in case of a nuclear attack on Washington, the United States needed to act swiftly to avoid "decapitation"—that is, a break in civilian leadership. A core element of the Reagan Administration's strategy for fighting a nuclear war would be to decapitate the Soviet leadership by striking at top political and military officials and their communications lines; the Administration wanted to make sure that the Soviets couldn't do to America what U.S. nuclear strategists were planning to do to the Soviet Union.

[...]

The outline of the plan was simple. Once the United States was (or believed itself about to be) under nuclear attack, three teams would be sent from Washington to three different locations around the United States. Each team would be prepared to assume leadership of the country, and would include a Cabinet member who was prepared to become President. If the Soviet Union were somehow to locate one of the teams and hit it with a nuclear weapon, the second team or, if necessary, the third could take over.

This was not some abstract textbook plan; it was practiced in concrete and elaborate detail. Each team was named for a color—"red" or "blue," for example—and each had an experienced executive who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had served at high levels in the executive branch, preferably with the national-security apparatus. Cheney and Rumsfeld had each served as White House chief of staff in the Ford Administration. Other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of the CIA, and Kenneth Duberstein, who served for a time as Reagan's actual White House chief of staff.

[...]

Ronald Reagan established the continuity-of-government program with a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's National Security Adviser, the President himself made the final decision about who would head each of the three teams. Within Reagan's National Security Council the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H.W. Bush was given the authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with a bland name: the National Program Office. It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Much of this money was spent on advanced communications equipment that would enable the teams to have secure conversations with U.S. military commanders. In fact, the few details that have previously come to light about the secret program, primarily from a 1991 CNN investigative report, stemmed from allegations of waste and abuses in awarding contracts to private companies, and claims that this equipment malfunctioned.

The exercises were usually scheduled during a congressional recess, so that Cheney would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and one other team leader took part in each exercise, the Cabinet members changed depending on who was available at a particular time. (Once, Attorney General Ed Meese participated in an exercise that departed from Andrews in the pre-dawn hours of June 18, 1986—the day after Chief Justice Warren Burger resigned. One official remembers looking at Meese and thinking, "First a Supreme Court resignation, and now America's in a nuclear war. You're having a bad day.")

[...]

The exercises were designed to be stressful. Participants gathered in haste, moved and worked in the early-morning hours, lived in Army-base conditions, and dined on early, particularly unappetizing versions of the military's dry, mass-produced MREs (meals ready to eat). An entire exercise lasted close to two weeks, but each team took part for only three or four days. One team would leave Washington, run through its drills, and then—as if it were on the verge of being "nuked"—hand off to the next team.

[...]

When George H.W. Bush was elected President, in 1988, members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced; having been closely involved with the effort from the start, Bush wouldn't need to be initiated into its intricacies and probably wouldn't re-evaluate it. In fact, despite dramatically improved relations with Moscow, Bush did continue the exercises, with some minor modifications. Cheney was appointed Secretary of Defense and dropped out as a team leader.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the rationale for the exercises changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was obviously no longer plausible—but what if terrorists carrying nuclear weapons attacked the United States and killed the President and the Vice President? Finally, during the early Clinton years, it was decided that this scenario was farfetched and outdated, a mere legacy of the Cold War. It seemed that no enemy in the world was still capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the program was abandoned.

There things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney and Rumsfeld suddenly began to act out parts of a script they had rehearsed years before. Operating from the underground shelter beneath the White House, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney told Bush to delay a planned flight back from Florida to Washington. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed a reluctant Wolfowitz to get out of town to the safety of one of the underground bunkers, which had been built to survive nuclear attack. Cheney also ordered House Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and several Cabinet members (including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Interior Secretary Gale Norton) evacuated to one of these secure facilities away from the capital. Explaining these actions a few days later, Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, "We did a lot of planning during the Cold War with respect to the possibility of a nuclear incident." He did not mention the Reagan Administration program or the secret drills in which he and Rumsfeld had regularly practiced running the country.

Their participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States—inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America keeps on fighting.

What a huge mistake it ever was to let these paranoid wierdos have any control of the US Government. No wonder they all bought Myleroie's nutball theories.

If this is any guide at all, there is absolutely no reason to believe that they would hesitate to suspend elections, institute martial law and stage a coup. Indeed, it appears they've been training to do just that for more than 20 years.





digby 7/11/2004 02:09:00 PM |

 
Romance Heroes

The Fighting Hellmice of the 101st Keyboarders have a new dreamboat to fantasize about:

Some of us first met "Jack" in 2001, when the Taliban had retreated from Kabul, victorious Northern Alliance fighters were parading in the streets, and US and British forces were pouring into Bagram airbase. A dapper man in a black T-shirt and combat trousers, a Glock pistol strapped in his shoulder holster, Idema gave a graphic account of his supposed experiences as a former US army Green Beret who had trained with the SAS and, as an adviser to the Tajik and Uzbek militias, had helped plan the operation to take the Afghan capital.

The meeting took place at the Mustafa Hotel, then being built in the city centre. It was another example of the seemingly endless carpetbagging opportunities then on offer. The owners were, and continue to be, a family of Afghan expatriates from New Jersey, the hotel named after one of three brothers. Sipping whiskey, then retailing at $140 a bottle at the Chelsi supermarket off Chicken Street, Idema offered to organise a convoy to Tora Bora, where the Taliban and al-Qa'ida were making what was thought to be their last stand and where, the Americans were confident, Osama bin Laden was trapped.

After making a few checks with the British military, some of us decided to decline his offer. Those who went were robbed at gunpoint a quarter of the way through the journey by their "guards" and made their way, bedraggled, back to Kabul. Jack professed to be outraged. He would take the matter up immediately with his "good friends" General Quononi, the new Defence Minister, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, the warlord, and the bandits would be summarily executed.

After that Idema would regularly turn up at the Intercontinental Hotel, where most of the foreign journalists were staying, attempting to sell videos and photographs purporting to show Taliban and al-Qa'ida terrorists training for assassinations and rehearsing gas attacks using dogs.

Some of these were bought for large sums of money, and one tape was shown on American network TV. However, Idema later declared he was going to sue over alleged breach of contract, and also threatened to "punch out" Geraldo Rivera and a Fox TV presenter in a dispute over the recordings.

This is the real story of the GWOT and it would be funny if it weren't so embarrassing. But what do we expect? We have a president who evokes Wyatt Earp dimestore novel dialog and we have a bunch of washed up losers hanging around the Mustafa hotel pretending to be glamour boys in a cheap airport thriller.

This war calls for Joseph Heller and Graham Greene and all we've got is Louis L'Amour and Frederick Forsythe.

And lets not forget Doug Upland, who reader James Woodyat reminds me is the "writer" who posts fun wingnut fantasies at Free Republic.

Just yesterday he wrote this one, which I'm sure gave the Fighting Hellmice extreme discomfort in their groin areas when they read it:

The target date was Thursday, September 2. On primetime television, the President would accept his nomination as the party standard bearer. They would prove that, no matter how good the security, they could hit where they want and when they want.

In June, 2004 they had made a dry run with three of the planes in the California desert about two hours east of Los Angeles. The chips and GPS system worked perfectly. The planes were very, very fast and performed exactly as programmed.

All of the planes were put together in their rooms a week before the convention. The deadly cargo would be installed a few hours before showtime.

It was a tense four days in New York. A hundred thousand protestors were causing mischief in the streets and did considerable amount of damage to vehicles and store fronts. The usual suspects were there --- Earth First, free Mumia, A.N.S.W.E.R., N.O.W., PETA, Mothers against Guns, No More Florida 2000, No Blood for Oil Coalition, Berkeley Peace and Justice Center, Legalize Hemp, Blind Women Who Want to Have Michael Moore's Baby, and hundreds of other Democrat groups of whiners who were bused in, many at taxpayer expense.

Michael Berg was scheduled to be a featured speaker at one of the protest rallies, but he was unfortunately accidentally hit in the face by a rock thrown by one of his leftist pals that missed the police officer at whom it was thrown. Berg returned the next day, but with his jaw wired shut, his statement had to be read by Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi blamed FreeRepublic for the rock that hit Berg. When he had his fling with her some years before, Ted Danson proved not only that white men can't jump, but sometimes white men can't see.

It was a stifling hot September day and, since most of the leftists don't bathe very often, the stench in the streets was almost overwhelming.

They wanted to kill and injure as many people as possible. Their goal was for a casualty count in the thousands. To them, it didn't matter whether they killed delegates and support staff or the leftists in the street who actually were their pals. They hoped to get high ranking officials including, of course, the President.

Since the heroic Jumpin' Jack Idema is languishing in a Kabul jail, maybe the stateside hellmice could get together and form a perimeter around Madison Square Garden to protect the prez from the unwashed leftists and their allies al-Qaeda.

Of course, you know what the real problem with all this mayhem would be:

If al-Qaida deliberately kills leftist protesters, it would send the loony left into a conspiratorial tizzy (against Republicans, of course). Politics in this country would get VERY ugly; there would be plenty of revenge attacks by loony leftists (against Republicans, not al-Qaida). It would be very , very bad. Hopefully they aren't smart enough for that.

Conspiratorial tizzy, indeed.




digby 7/11/2004 12:54:00 PM |

 
Covering Their Bases

Tom Ridge wants John Ashcroft to look into the possibility of postponing the election in case of a terrorist attack. Considering that Ashcroft and company have believed that the GWOT justifies everything from unlimited detention to torture it's going to be very surprising if they don't back the idea that doing so would be constitutional.

But constitutionality aside, why would there be any need to do this? We lived under the threat of nuclear war for decades --- real weapons of mass destruction pointed at all of our major cities --- and nobody ever contemplated suspending elections and devised no plans to do so. We have held elections during every war, including the civil war, and didn't contemplate suspending them in case of an attack.

This is absurd. Unless the terrorists are somehow able to prevent large numbers of people from exercising their right to vote by bombing individual polling places there can be absolutely no reason to postpone this election.
Besides, if I recall correctly, the Bush administration made quite a case a few years back that there should be no changing of the rules, even when certain rules are contradictory, in election procedures. I remember that deadlines, particularly, were sacrosanct. Indeed, the dates surrounding election laws were seen as written in stone.

Somehow, I have to believe that if terrorists attack us around the election, Americans will crawl out of the rubble on their hands and knees to vote. But then, that's obviously what they're really afraid of, isn't it?


thanks to John Gorlewski for the tip


digby 7/11/2004 11:32:00 AM |

 
Oh Please

The thrust of the SSIC report is that the CIA greatly overestimated the threat of Saddam Hussein and led our unsuspecting Dear Leader to invade Iraq on false pretenses. Imagine that. And one of the main documents cited in the SSIC report as proof of that claim was the October 2002 NIE report (that, incidentally, had to be specifically requested by Senators on the committee.)

Today's LA Times notes that the SSIC report points to the fact that key revisions were made to the public version of this NIE, which is interesting because nobody knows who did it. Evidently, the public NIE was phrased in language that was much less ambiguous than the original CIA document:

During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting those words into the unclassified document.

"They did not know and could not explain," said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

A similar degree of mystery surrounds the larger question of exactly how the classified NIE morphed into its unclassified version.

According to the committee report, the intelligence community began preparing an unclassified white paper on Iraq's banned weapons in May 2002, at the request of the National Security Council.

Months later, as the administration began to make its public case for war, Congress requested an official NIE. Officials at the National Intelligence Council decided to merge the white paper with declassified elements of the NIE to produce the official unclassified version.

Yes, it's quite a mystery as to who revised that NIE. One clue might be the fact that a month before the NIE was completed, the White House had released a "background paper" called "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" which very unambiguously laid out the case that Iraq was swimming in bio and chem weapons and could make a nuclear bomb in a matter of months. (Interestingly, this very same backround paper has recently been revealed to have used Judith Miller's Chalabi-fed reporting over the CIA's in at least one case.)

Now, this proves nothing about whether the White House "sexed up" the NIE but it's a fact that the White House released a backround report in September of 2002 that made sweeping claims about Saddam's WMD and terrorist ties. It is also a fact that the CIA created a classified National Intelligence Estimate a month or so later that was riddled with caveats and ambiguities about the Iraq threat. And it is now known that someone altered this classified NIE's language for public consumption to reflect the unambiguous assertions set forth in the earlier White House backround paper.

"The fact that the NIE changed so dramatically from its classified to its unclassified form and broke all in one direction, toward a more dangerous scenario … I think was highly significant," the committee's vice chairman, Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), said Friday.

No kidding.






digby 7/11/2004 11:09:00 AM |

Saturday, July 10, 2004

 
As The Yellowcake Turns

An interesting deconstruction of Steno Sue Schmidt's article in today's Wapo by Josh Marshall. Typically, Schmidt spins the GOP case against Joe Wilson and it's the usual mix of innuendo, bad legal reasoning and inside baseball she's known for. And it will undoubtedly take its toll on Wilson's reputation among the kewl kidz as Schmidt's special brand of whorish writing usually does.

When you cut through all the suggestive blather, the main theme seems to be that Wilson lied about his wife recommending him for the job, which even non-kewl kid Kevin Drum believes shoots Wilson's credibility all to hell.

Now, I realize that Robert Novak and the rest will be crowing about this as if they've just uncovered the Rosetta Stone, but I don't get it and I never did. From the beginning, the main thrust of the Rove/Novak item (which for some reason the White House thought would blow Wilson out of the water) was that Plame got Wilson the unpaid assignment which was apparently evidence that he's whipped by his macho secret agent wife and therefore can't be believed. It never made any sense, but I can see that it's going to be trotted out again as the ultimate gotcha and that everybody's going to be running around chasing this story when it has nothing to do with anything and never did. What would her recommendation, (whether Wilson later lied about it or not) have to do with his report?

I thought Hollywood was bad with the infighting and obsession with gossip and juvenile power games. But, DC media take the cake. If the Democrats want to get with the program they'd better learn to feed the media tittilating gossip and silly trivia to keep them running in circles. Frame any situation as soap opera and you can get your version of events into the mainstream.




digby 7/10/2004 11:35:00 AM |

 
Big Problem

I think we are all going to have to begin to come to grips with the fact that there is something terribly wrong with our military. It's not just that the Bush administration opened the floodgates to any and all kinds of barbaric behavior. They lost all perspective and fanned the flames of a counterproductive bloodlust for their own purposes and we'll be dealing with that for a generation at a minimum.

But, there is also something deeply amiss when a supposedly disciplined organization can deteriorate into utter chaos and depravity in the short time it took Abu Ghraib to become a hell on earth. And people knew. Lots of people knew, but it continued for months until one lowly soldier armed with irrefutable evidence finally blew the whistle.

U.S. News obtains all classified annexes to the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib:

The most comprehensive view yet of what went wrong at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, based on a review of all 106 classified annexes to the report of Major General Antonio Taguba, shows abuses were facilitated--and likely encouraged--by a chaotic and dangerous environment made worse by constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees.

Daily life at Abu Ghraib, the documents show, included riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, filthy conditions, sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents. Troubles inside the prison were made worse still by a military command structure that was hopelessly broken.

[...]

Col. Henry Nelson, an Air Force psychiatrist who prepared a report for Taguba on Abu Ghraib, described it as a "new psychological battlefield," and detailed the nature of the challenge faced by the Americans working in the overcrowded prison. "These detainees are male and female, young and old," Nelson wrote; "they may be innocent, may have high intelligence value, or may be terrorists or criminals. No matter who they are, if they are at Abu Ghraib, they are remanded in deplorable, dangerous living conditions, as are soldiers."

[...]

As the top commanders battled it out, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were confused over who was in charge, the documents show. Weak leadership in the prison meant soldiers couldn?t accomplish basic tasks, like feed their detainees, much less find someone to prosecute abuse. And without a clear chain of authority, some soldiers just ran wild. "One of the tower guards was shooting prisoners with lead balls and slingshot," a company commander testified. Soldiers ran around wearing civilian clothes, and covered latrines with so much graffiti that a commander had them painted black, and then threatened to post a guard at each location. An Army captain allegedly secretly photographed female subordinates while they were showering in outside stalls.

The most serious riot, at Camp Vigilant, took place on the night of November 23 when guards shot and killed four detainees. "The prisoners were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush,' and 'Bush is bad,'" another Army review said. "They became violent and started throwing rocks at the guards, both in the towers and at the rovers around the wire..." Guards feared for their lives "the sky was black with rocks," the report saidand a mass breakout appeared imminent. The review of the November riot cited the failure of guard commanders to post rules of engagement for dealing with insurrections. Soldiers were hesitant to shoot, and when they did shoot, they often didn?t know whether they were using lethal or non-lethal ammunition because they had mixed the ammo in their shotguns.

Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Battalion. "I don't know how there's not rioting every day," he testified.

Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Major David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E-mails, sent in October and November to Major William Green of the 800th MP Brigade, and copied to the higher chain of command, show a quixotic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Graib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldn't make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day, and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt.

"As each day goes by tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. "...Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs or what ever in the food?," Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners I would take it with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MPs, Medics and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the contractor holds other contracts with the military.

There is no excuse for this callous attitude by officers in the American military in Iraq --- a country we were ostensibly liberating. The insurgency was and is difficult. But, this complete institutional breakdown within just a few short months is shocking. We have a problem.

Much of the blame, of course, must be laid at the top. I'm reminded again of this letter from Josh Marshall's friend in Iraq who wrote:

About the Army - Man, it hurts my heart to write this about an institution I dearly love but this army is completely dysfunctional, angry and is near losing its honor. We are back to the Army of 1968. I knew we were finished when I had a soldier point his Squad Automatic Weapons at me and my bodyguard detail for driving down the street when he decided he would cross the street in the middle of rush hour traffic (which was moving at about 70 MPH) ... He made it clear to any and all that he was preparing to shoot drivers who did not stop for his jaunt because speeding cars are "threats."

I also once had a soldier from a squad of Florida National Guard reservists raise weapons and kick the door panel of a clearly marked CPA security vehicle (big American flag in the windshield of a $150,000 armored Land Cruiser) because they wanted us to back away from them so they could change a tire ... as far as they were concerned WE (non-soldiers) were equally the enemy as any Iraqi.

Unlike the wars of the past 20 years where the Army encouraged (needed) soldiers, NGOs, allies and civil organizations to work together to resolve matters and return to normal society, the US Forces only trust themselves here and that means they set their own limits and tolerances. Abu Ghuraib are good examples of that limit. I told a Journalist the other day that these kids here are being told that they are chasing Al Qaeda in the War on Terrorism so they think everyone at Abu Ghuraib had something to do with 9/11. So they were encouraged to make them pay. These kids thought they were going to be honored for hunting terrorists.

Since Bush came into office it seems as if he has made it his purpose to corrupt every single institution in the United States. From the Supreme Court to the press to the SEC to the US Military there is nothing left of us but the bare bones of the constitution and the hope that we at least have one more free election.

Neither anarchists or terrorists have ever been so efficient.




digby 7/10/2004 10:37:00 AM |

Friday, July 09, 2004

 
Spooky

The General has a scoop on Secret Agent Man and freelance prison warden, Keith Idema.

This is the shocker:

Well, the one identified as Jonathan Idema, appears to be "Jonathan "Keith" Idema," a fine patriotic paintball enthusiast, former Green Beret, ex-con, "father" of a someday-to-be-cloned dog (I'm not making any of this up), a "civilian" military advisor to the Northern Alliance and the "finder" of all those Al Qaeda videotapes liberated from an Afghan house awhile back.

Yes, this is the patriot who provided one of the greatest intelligence successes of the Afghan War, or at least one of the greatest public relations successes of the war--remember, under Our Leader, perception is at least as, if not more, important than reality. Of course, our government has to distance itself from him now, but there's little doubt that he served as a CIA contractor in the early stages of the war--It was a CIA operation.

Not that he was really working for the CIA or anything, but if he was, (hypothetically mind you) would hanging Afghans upside down by their feet be considered the equivalent of pain on the scale of organ failure? I don't think so. No harm no foul.

Read the rest of the General's post for more. This is war planned by the Farrelly Brothers.






digby 7/09/2004 10:47:00 PM |

 
Lick Bush and Dick in '04

And, why does the New York Times think this is worth not just one, but two stories?

This year was Whoopi Goldberg's turn. In her rambling monologue she made lewd jokes related to the president's surname, which President Bush's supporters pounced on as evidence of Democrats' "sickness."

[...]

The Bush campaign, however, immediately scolded Mr. Kerry for reportedly enjoying the show and demanded that his campaign release a video of the event to the public.

"At this event, there was a great deal of extreme venom and vitriol that spewed forth," said Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign. 'Both John Kerry and John Edwards lacked the leadership to stand up and say this kind of rhetoric is wrong and it demeans our civic discourse. The fact that John Kerry said these people represent the heart and soul of America shows just how far outside the mainstream John Kerry truly is."

Oh my goodness, let's see a fine example of mainstream Republican rhetoric, shall we? And it only went out to 30 million people or so, so it's not as if it demeans our civic discourse.

During an appearance on last night's "Tonight Show with Jay Leno," comedian Dennis Miller unleashed a torrent of political humor aimed at Democrats who he says "are going to hell in a handbasket."

[...]

"Those are frightening affairs. That is such an empty-headed scrum those Democratic debates. I tune in, you see all nine of them together, it's like a Pez-dispenser séance."

"You know all the Democrats are going to hell in a handbasket. Now they got [California's] Nancy Pelosi. ... You ever see she has that pop-eyed look all the time? I always thought she might be hyper-thyroid, but then I heard her speak a couple times. She's stupid! The reason her eyes are so wide is that she's as shocked as we are that she made it that high!"

"Robert Byrd, this guy stands there and lectures Bush in the well of the Senate. He was in the Ku Klux Klan! He's demented. You know this guy's burning the cross at both ends! And you know something, if Robert Byrd were your grandfather and he came to Thanksgiving dinner and went off one of these demented screeds, everybody would sit there smiling at him, and as soon as he left the room, somebody'd say, 'Hey, what the hell are we gonna do about grandpa?'"

"And the Clintons won't shut up. If that marriage were any more about convenience, they'd have to install a Slim-Jim rack and a Slurpee machine at the base of the bed. [Hillary] jumps on every opportunity to take a shot at Bush. They have a blackout in New York, she starts blaming it on Bush. You know, this woman doesn't miss a trick – unless it's the one her old man's with on any given night."

I don't recall the Democrats calling a press conference and whining like a bunch of blubbering little sissies over that, but I could be mistaken.

These articles today are yet another perfect example of the press being useful idiots and conscious tools for the RNC. Limbaugh and his gang of thugs are on the air five days a week reaching tens of millions of people every single day, claiming that Democrats are filthy, traitorous enemies of America. (Not to mention his little S&M fantasies about torture to "blow off steam.") But none of that is worthy of mention in two separate articles in the same paper discussing the problems of alleged "hate-filled" rhetoric at a Democratic fundraiser, which the Republicans are blatently flogging as an example of Kerry being outside the mainstream of America.

This must be what they mean by context, balance and objectivity at the NY Times. Very impressive. I know that Bush has Saddam's pistol in the Oval Office, but I wonder if Rove has Pfc Lyndie Raines' famous leash sitting on his desk in the White House? It's such a perfect metaphor for his relationship with the press.




digby 7/09/2004 09:25:00 PM |

 
Life on Mars:

"I want Bush in there, because the other guy is like sending a boy to do a man's job," said Glenn Foldessy, 45, of Streetsboro, Ohio, outside Cleveland.

Back on planet Earth:

Dear Ken,

One of the sad things about old friends is that they seem to be getting older --- just like you!

55 years old. Wow! That is really old.

Thank goodness you have such a young beautiful wife.

Laura and I value our friendship with you. Best wishes to Linda, your family and friends.

Your younger friend,


George W. Bush

digby 7/09/2004 08:46:00 PM |

 
Come And Get It, Little Heathers

Ok. I thought the Drudge "John-John" item was funny and I even posted about it. And it is. But if anyone thinks it's just some sort of one-off joke, think again.

From Wes "wish I was in the land of cotton" Pruden, editor of the Washington Times:

The two Johns lock eyes frequently in deep contact and stop barely short of demonstrating what great kissers they may be. Monsieur Kerry might yet give us a demonstration of French kissing but, if he does, Mr. Edwards, a good ol' Carolina boy after all, will be entitled to slap his face. (Secret Service bodyguards, take note.)

Over the past two days, since Monsieur Kerry introduced his running mate at his wife's estate near Pittsburgh, "candidate handling," in the description of the Drudge Report, "has become the top buzz on the trail."

"I've been covering Washington and politics for 30 years [said one wire-service photographer]. I can say I've never seen this much touching between two men, publicly." Indeed, editors determined to preserve the appearance of a little presidential dignity and campaign decorum on "the trail" are frustrated in their search for photographs suitable for a respectable mainstream newspaper. The photographers, keen competitors for the most startling shot of the day, naturally love it.

The candidates are giving the term "Johns," heretofore familiar only in certain neighborhoods illuminated by the glow of dim red lights, an entirely new meaning. These buff and manly Johns are only following instructions to demonstrate warmth — cuddly warmth though it may be — to contrast with the chilly Republican images projected by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who keep their legs crossed and their hands to themselves at all times. No one imagines George W. inspecting Dick Cheney's cheek for razor burn in anticipation of a friendly kiss to greet the day. The president, after all, is the scion of generations of reserved and genteel WASP breeding, and the veep is a man from Wyoming, where the wrong kind of familiarity can invite a swift and fatal case of lead poisoning.

Besides, says a Kerry spokesperson, "I think we're just seeing genuine affection between them." But he adds nervously, "I hope we do not see them wearing matching outfits when they ride bikes together this weekend." No one suggests that Monsieur Kerry, who sent the Viet Cong fleeing into wild retreat into Cambodia and Laos after serving just four months in Vietnam, is any less a man than John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. John Edwards' smile makes even a feminist's heart throb with erotic speculation. The carefully calculated "candidate handling" is merely a pose to reassure voters that Monsieur Kerry does, too, have a pulse. All that's expected of John Edwards is that he learn to hug (but not kiss) in French. The rest of us will just have to grin and bear it, but from a distance. November is only five months away.

This theme is one of those snotty, RNC-fed bitch items designed to thrill the little mediawhores and make them subconsciously further the image of Democrats as "soft." And, it's about making the little tarts mindlessly portray Junior and Gepetto as the "real men" instead of the empty codpiece and the flaccid chickenhawk they are.

They are very clever with this stuff. The tone is nasty elitist, both frat-boy macho and cheerleader exclusive, the greater purpose being to plant the seed in the minds of Wolfie, MoDo, Timmy and the other Heathers, which is best accomplished by using this patented high school form of ridicule.

As the incomparable Sommerby wrote today:

Our modern press is itself a high elite; despite pious tales about Buffalo boyhoods, its opinion leaders are all multimillionaires, and even hard-charging young elite scribes know they’re on the millionaire track—and they’re careful not to blow it by getting outside the narrow confines of their elders’ world view. Most of these upscale scribes have little class perspective to suppress in the first place. But beyond that, they have no incentive to challenge their group’s perspectives, and that helps explain the nasty treatment Moore’s film has received in the press. After all, is there any elite more phony and fake than the one that is currently trashing Moore’s film? And make no mistake—these overpaid and pampered poodles tend to identify, not with Moore, but with the powdered phonies he mocks.

Republicans understand them because their lives have been shaped by the image of spoiled rich adolescence as well --- an immature elitism, born of social climbing and emotional sado-masochism. They are of the same tribe.

The John-John thing is a joke, to be sure. But, there's a message and they are confident that the mediaqueens will take the bait. They may not pass it on verbatim, but every time they get together they'll be mentioning it with hushed giggles and raised eyebrows. No doubt everyone at The Note just howled when they read Pruden's little screed this morning. He's such a delicious little bitch, isn't he? Pass it on.








digby 7/09/2004 07:31:00 PM |

 
Let's Role Model

Kevin tells me that good, decent Americans are having prissy fits over last night's descent into moral depravity in NYC. The shame, the decadence the...political hate speech!!! Dear Gawd, will they ever stop???

When asked this morning about the lewd, hate mongering Democrats, President Bush said solemly, "John Kerry is a major league asshole. Fuck him, we're taking him out." Dick Cheney added, "Big time. He can go fuck himself."

God bless the grown-ups of the GOP.








digby 7/09/2004 12:30:00 PM |

 
Promise Keeping

In the spirit of the generous advice David Brooks gave to the Democrats on the issue of our lack of proper religiosity, I'd like to return the favor. I'd like to suggest that if the Republicans want to win this fall, they need to embrace this concept with everything they've got. The whole "women should be subordinate to their husbands" idea is one their caucus should run on all across the country. The time has come.

It's true that this might, on first glance, seem counterintuitive considering that most women would burst into wild gales of laughter at the mere idea, but you have to understand that the idea hasn't been adequately explained before. Just because the woman is supposed to "place herself under the authority of the man" doesn't mean it's a one way street. As Orrin Hatch says, "I don't think anybody can read this without understanding husbands have tremendous obligations in order to gain the respect of their wives."

See? It's not like the man gets off scott free. He has to do a bunch of stuff too. That's what these bitche...er ladies don't understand. And that's what our new federal judge, J. Leon Holmes, is going to help them understand --- just like he helps 13 year old rape victims understand that they have to bear their father's child.

Like I said, I think the GOP has a winner with this campaign theme. If the Democrats bring it up over and over and over again --- after all, every single one of the Republican senators voted for it --- it will be bad news for them. There are many tens of millions of women in this country who are just dying to vote for a party that thinks women should be subserviant to men. It would be a terrible mistake to try to hang this around Republican necks. Honest. I mean that. Don't go there.




digby 7/09/2004 11:24:00 AM |

Thursday, July 08, 2004

 
Wouldn't You Know It


Talk about your bad luck.

Pentagon Says Bush Records of Service Were Destroyed

Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.

It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.

The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.

The disclosure appeared to catch some experts, both pro-Bush and con, by surprise. Even the retired lieutenant colonel who studied Mr. Bush's records for the White House, Albert C. Lloyd of Austin, said it came as news to him.

The loss was announced by the Defense Department's Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review in letters to The New York Times and other news organizations that for nearly half a year have sought Mr. Bush's complete service file under the open-records law.

There was no mention of the loss, for example, when White House officials released hundreds of pages of the President's military records last February in an effort to stem Democratic accusations that he was "AWOL" for a time during his commitment to fly at home in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.

Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director who has said that the released records confirmed the president's fulfillment of his National Guard commitment, did not return two calls for a response.

The disclosure that the payroll records had been destroyed came in a letter signed by C. Y. Talbott, chief of the Pentagon's Freedom of Information Office, who forwarded a CD-Rom of hundreds of records that Mr. Bush has previously released, along with images of punch-card records. Sixty pages of Mr. Bush's medical file and some other records were excluded on privacy grounds, Mr. Talbott wrote.

He said in the letter that he could not provide complete payroll records, explaining, "The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) has advised of the inadvertent destruction of microfilm containing certain National Guard payroll records."

He went on: "In 1996 and 1997, DFAS engaged with limited success in a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. During this process the microfilm payroll records of numerous service members were damaged, including from the first quarter of 1969 (Jan. 1 to March 31) and the third quarter of 1972 (July 1 to Sept. 30). President Bush's payroll records for these two quarters were among the records destroyed. Searches for backup paper copies of the missing records were unsuccessful."

I seem to recall that this used to be the kind of thing for which we assigned special prosecutors and held televised congressional hearings. But that was when we had a president who had no honor and integrity so it was different.

This is just one more of the hundreds of felicitous coincidences that have beset our Crusader Codpiece over the years. Just because people have been trying to get ahold of those records for ages and it's only now that we find out that they were destroyed seven or eight years ago is no reason to be suspicious. I'll bet Junior is just mad as heck about the whole business. The one thing he really wanted to do was clear this thing up before the election.




digby 7/08/2004 09:22:00 PM |

 
Hot Man On Man Action

Drudge had to put down his little mouse and take a long drag off of Lucianne's Virginia Slim Menthol 100 after putting that steamy montage together.

Does anyone smell the faint whiff of GOP flop sweat in the air?




digby 7/08/2004 08:55:00 PM |

 
Four More Years!

Be a Billionaire For Bush

They're taking a Limo through the swing states to tell voters the good news ...

I love these guys.




digby 7/08/2004 08:14:00 PM |

 
I'm Going To Hell

I am against this kind of thing. There really is no excuse for it. However, as I am a red-blooded American, brought up in a certain way at a certain time, I must confess that I sometimes cannot resist a little trip to the dark side.

I hope you all can forgive me. I'm weak.




digby 7/08/2004 05:34:00 PM |

 
Fools On The Hill

I would be with all the BigMediaBloggers on this except that I think having BushCo and the boyz spend a couple of weeks arguing about whether to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage makes them look so ridiculous at this particular political moment that it might just be worth it.

If it was 1998 and the wingnuts had the luxury of playing silly culture war games for fun and profit, I'd say it would be best to get the debate out of the way and off the radar screen. But today, I think there's real value in having the Republicans on the evening news spitting and hollaring about something that ends up at about #733 on the average American's list of priorities. (This is not to say that I don't think the issue matters to many people, pro and con, but it just isn't critical at this moment.)

It just seems to me that the more the GOP is exposed for their deep lack of seriousness, the better off we are. Seeing Inhofe, Frist and "Bowser" Santorum rail about slippery slopes and bestiality on the evening news strikes me as good politics. And it's telling that at this late date they are still playing to their base when they should be awkwardly clapping and singing "Proud Mary" with african american kids and talking about their support for pre-natal care and puppies. Their necessary tack to the middle is seriously off schedule. Is it in our interest to help them get on course?




digby 7/08/2004 05:08:00 PM |

 
Watch What You Say

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if Bush, Ashcroft and Company haven't already screwed this country up so badly that it will never recover:

"How are you?" asked the airport security person who popped up beside me on my way to baggage claim.

"Uh, fine — thanks," I replied, wondering, why are you asking?

As if she'd read my thoughts, she told me there had been complaints about me on the airplane. Then she asked to see the crossword puzzle I'd been working on during the flight. Huh? I thought. Talk about being puzzled! Still, my grin was smug as I handed it over. I'd just completed the Friday New York Times puzzle, for the first time ever.

But the agent ignored the crossword, turning the paper sideways to read a line I'd scribbled in the margin: "I know this is kind of a bomb."

She pointed to the sentence, her finger resting on the word "bomb." "What does this mean?" she demanded.

Suddenly a light went on in my head. I remembered the passenger on my left leaning forward in his seat as I scribbled while we waited for takeoff. Seconds later, he'd clambered hastily over me without apology to make his way to the front of the plane. I'd assumed intestinal complications, but now that I thought about it, he hadn't used the bathroom. He'd spoken briefly with the flight attendants and returned to his seat. As the security woman looked at me, I now realized the passenger had been about as interested in my puzzling prowess as she was.

"I know this is kind of a bomb" is what I imagine Bucky, my main character, would say to Julie, his love interest, in the critical scene of my novel. I explained to the security woman that this is what happens when a 42-year-old man who is to literature what a karaoke singer is to opera tries to put words in the mouth of a fictional 19-year-old.

I opened my laptop and showed her shining example after shining example of similarly awful dialogue. She understood that that word, b-o-m-b, was no reference to ordnance or terrorist weapons of any kind.

But my explanation wasn't good enough for the three Dallas police officers who meanwhile had surrounded me — summoned, I supposed, for backup in case the dangerous character tried to write something even worse.

One took my driver's license to run a fruitless background check (the closest I ever came to being in trouble with the law was accepting a beer at age 17 from the teen-age daughter of the Nantucket Island police chief). A particularly hostile cop asked me a strangely menacing question: "So, how many books have you gotten made?" I started my usual backpedaling answer to that query, honed to perfection in the Dallas bar scene, but he cut me off: "That's not what I asked." I told him I must have misunderstood. He responded, "You're a writer and you don't understand my words?"

[...]

...the honcho gravely warned me that while I hadn't crossed the line, I had walked right up to it. And for that I would be on Homeland Security's watch list.

Have we all just gotten used to the idea of a "Homeland Security Watchlist?" Do we have even the vaguest clue about who might be on it and what criteria are used? Is this one of those times when sage law and order conservatives tell you that if you're innocent you don't have anything to worry about?

Here we have a situation in which some nosy asshole sitting in the seat next to you sees that you wrote the word "bomb," and reports it. And some person in authority says that you've walked right up to a "line" you had no idea even existed and are now on a list which means that if anything ever happens again --- you are overheard saying "jihad" or perhaps "fuck Bush" --- and you are "questioned" again, you are already in the database as someone who is being watched.

Perhaps this doesn't happen often. But there are other stories of little things happening that make me begin to have doubts about our ability to withstand this threat of terrorism. For instance, there was this story last month about a British journalist's dealings with American authorities:

Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.

After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. "What do you want?" he yelled. I said I didn't feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.

As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.

[...]

Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents' names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue - I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, "You are Russian, yet you claim to be British", an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, "Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand," I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I'd have to go back to London to apply for it.

At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their "rules" demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: "How dare you touch my private things?"

"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.

After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me.

Keep in mind, this was last month, not November 2001.

OK, maybe it's silly for me to get so white hot, angry when I read these stories. It's just one female journalist and she was in technical violation. It was only a misunderstanding about the word "bomb" written on a newspaper. Perhaps these are isolated cases. That petty bureaucrats use language that is remarkably similar to that used by our president and his political allies in comparing the wonderful treatment under our police state as compared with that under really awful police states is surely just a rhetorical coincidence.

But, after seeing the Justice Department issue opinions that the president has unlimited powers in wartime and that anything, including torture, is justified to "defend the homeland" it doesn't really seem so silly after all. The stories begin to accumulate, each one a random intrusion by dumb, underqualified government authorities who seem to have watched too much television and have very little common sense.

If this keeps up, sooner or later we will all end up, in one way or another, on the "Homeland Security Watchlist" where anyone from a professional rival to a vengeful neighbor can be the instrument of terror in a way that bin Laden and gang can only envy. In fact, these little people with too much power scare me a hundred times more than the Islamic terrorists. The threat that lives among us is ourselves.




digby 7/08/2004 10:45:00 AM |

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

 
Kerry/Edwards --- It's Got A Ring To It

I'm busy today, so I won't be able to post much, but I did want to weigh in and say how glad I am that Kerry picked Edwards. It was the obvious choice and Kerry handled the mediakids' anticipatory meltdown like the political pro he is. This is a good ticket --- and we know it's a good ticket by the fevered, hysterical reaction of the GOP. (And whoever duped the Post deserves to be put in the Democratic Hall of Fame.)

Last year right around this time, before the Dean phenomenon took off and before my choice, Wes Clark, entered the race, I posted a piece about John Edwards. When I went back to read it, I was a little bit surprised at how much he impressed me and I was reminded of what I liked about him. If it hadn't been for the fact that Crusader Codpiece was being hailed as a Warrior King by every press tart from CNN to The National Enquirer, I would have easily supported his candidacy. He is very, very good.

So, in the spirit of welcoming John Edwards to the ticket without reservation, I'm republishing my thoughts about him of a year ago:

6/22/03

“Equal opportunity for all, special privileges for none.”

I just read something that blew the top of my head off and has me reeling with appreciation and awe. Maybe everybody in Blogovia has already discussed John Edwards speech of last week, but I just got to it.

This is the single most creative re- framing of issues I've seen in many a year. In fact, it is so audacious, it might just work.

Do you want to see a wing nut's head spin around like Linda Blair's in the Exorcist? Try comparing Bush's economic policies to socialism:

This is the most radical and dangerous economic theory to hit our shores since socialism a century ago. Like socialism, it corrupts the very nature of our democracy and our free enterprise tradition. It is not a plan to grow the American economy. It is a plan to corrupt the American economy."

Damn. That is just beautiful.

Edwards gets it. It's about changing the Left/Right paradigm and putting the Republicans off balance, without moving further to the right. This is new and it has the potential to seriously shake up the dynamic, particularly if the economy continues to sputter. This is just great -- a truly new way of coming at the Republicans, using all of their patented propaganda tags against them. It's awfully smart and I would hope that every Dem candidate keeps this in the back of his mind.

I'm not signing on to any particular campaign this early in the race. But, I think the Democratic candidates are all good people and I wouldn't be unhappy with any of them (although Lieberman, with his moralizing and religiosity, would be very hard to take.) I am partial to Clark because I think he neutralizes a potent issue for the GOP, has a great Q rating and it would be nice to catch a fucking break like that for once. Earlier, I mentioned that Dean has a fiesty attitude that I find refreshing and inspirational and John Kerry is a good man with a fine mind and a lifetime of experience to prepare him for the job.

But, Edwards is the natural of the bunch. He's the one who has the talent to really communicate with average Americans and get them to recognize that the Republican Party does not have their best interest at heart. Like Clinton, he is very, very good at explaining complicated issues in understandable terms without being condescending. 20 years as a litigator will do that, and from all reports he was an extremely effective advocate before a jury.

Our economy, our people, and our nation have been undermined by the crony capitalists who believe that success is all about working the angles, working the phones, and rigging the game, instead of hard work, innovation and frugality.

And these manipulators find comfort in an Administration which, through its own example, seems to embrace that ethic.

We will never turn this country around until we put our economy and our government back in line with our values."

[...]

It’s time for a new approach that trusts people to make the most of their own lives and gives them the chance to do so. It’s time to stop emboldening entrenched interests and start empowering regular people. Above all, it’s time to end the failed conservative experiment and return to the idea that made this country great: Instead of helping wealthy people protect their wealth, we should help working people build their wealth."

The President and I agree on one thing: this campaign should be a debate about values. We need to have that debate, because the values of this president and this administration are not the values of mainstream America, the values all of us grew up with – opportunity, responsibility, hard work.

There’s a fundamental difference between his vision and mine. I believe America should value work. He only values wealth. He wants the people who own the most to get more. I want to make sure everybody has the chance to be an owner.

That is progressivism turned inside out. PoMo populism. As with the flag and God, the smart Democrat (and the one who will beat Bush) will take those "bedrock American" advertising symbols and use the patented GOP rhetorical stylebook to his own purposes, because whether we like it or not, that stylebook defines political speech in this era so we'd better start finding ways to use it to our own ends.

(And, through this whole speech he very subtly digs at Bush's pedigreed sense of privilege. Junior is a spoiled little fucker and although nobody wants to admit it, it's something everybody knows. Maybe in 2000 when everybody asumed that they too were going to be rich and privileged, it didn't matter so much. It could have a little more relevence this time around.)

Look at the choices they make: They have driven up the share of the tax burden for most working people, and driven down the burden on the richest few. They got rid of even the smallest tax on even the largest inheritances on earth. This past month, in a $350 billion bonanza of tax cuts on wealth, they couldn’t find $3.5 billion to give the child tax credit to poor people who work. Listen to this: They refused to cut taxes for the children of 250,000 American soldiers who are risking their lives for us in Iraq, so they could cut dividend and capital gains taxes for millionaires who were selling stocks short until the war was over.

[...]

It is wrong to reward those who don’t have to work at the expense of those who do. If we want America to be a growing, thriving democracy, with the greatest work ethic and the strongest middle class on earth, we must choose a different path.

If Junior ever had to debate a trial lawyer like John Edwards, he wouldn't stand a chance trying to defend himself against a charge like that. What in the hell can any Republican say to that argument? They'll scream class warfare, but in light of the charges it starts to sound like sniveling defensiveness. They really have gone to far and all it will take is for somebody to find the right way to educate the American people about what has been done to them.

Third, I will cut taxes to encourage savings and wealth creation for the middle class and working poor, not take away their tax cuts. I believe ordinary Americans are taxed too much, not too little. As a direct result of this President’s policies, all across this country people are seeing their property taxes, their sales taxes, their state and local income taxes, and their college tuition bills go up. Now some in my party want to take away their federal income tax cuts, too. That’s wrong. The answer to Republicans who have made middle-class incomes and nest eggs go down should not be Democrats who make middle-class taxes go up.

I know this President wants to make the next election about taxes. That’s why I’m going to tell America the whole story: “This president is the reason your taxes are going up. I’m going to cut them.”

Woah Nelly. Walter Mondale, take a look in the funhouse mirror. He's saying that Bush is making taxes go UP for ordinary Americans. That is brilliant. Paula Zahn will pop a vein trying to wrap her mind around that concept. It's also true, of course, but rather than get into some long winded discussion of tax rates and the state budget crisis' Edwards just says bluntly, "Bush is making your taxes go up. I'm going to cut them."

Eat shit Grover.

I care deeply about this, because it’s the reason I’m standing here. My dad worked his whole life in the mill. When I was young, my mom folded sheets on the second shift. Both my parents started out with nothing, except a blessing that was worth more than diamonds and gold – the chance to live in a country whose dream belongs to anyone willing to work for it.

A country where the sweat and toil of mill workers can give a boy the chance to one day run for President is a far different place than a country that says how you’re born, not how hard your work, is all that matters. I owe everything I am to the America I grew up in. I hope you’ll join with me and fight with all we’ve got to save it.

The fucking American dream, baby. The immigrant, the working stiff, the self-made man putting in the hours and sweating the blood so that his kids can have a better life. Being the first in your family to go to college and going on to become one of the most successful lawyers in the country, a US Senator and a presidential candidate. It's not quite as inspiring as a rich, alcoholic playboy sobering up at 40 and allowing his daddy's rich friends to buy him a codpiece so he can eliminate the inheritance tax for himself, but it might have a chance.

This is a very interesting direction that Edwards is going. There is some salience to the shame factor among the rich, as well. I happened to listen to a group of Republican ladies discussing politics the other day (don't ask), and they were quite uncomfortable with the idea that their leaders were saying that poor people shouldn't get tax cuts and particularly the fact that some were left out of the recent tax cut bill. One of the gals said, "That's really not right. It makes me feel embarrassed."

I wish that we didn't have to use rhetoric of religion, values and tax cuts. It's tiring to hear it. But, we do. It's what people's ears are trained to hear in this era. And, there is no use pretending that reversing Bush's tax cuts is going to be a simple matter even if we win the presidency. It makes sense to begin laying the groundwork, however, for reversing the outrageous tax cuts on the rich, which will have to be done. This is a very effective way of beginning to make that case.

And, Edwards is using some language that I think has been too long neglected by Democrats and speaks to something that is an undercurrent of discomfort amongst average Americans who don't follow politics in great detail --- the oddly unamerican nature of our current leaders relationship to wealth and power.

"Here in Washington, we like to think we’re important. But what’s great about America is that whether you’re a senator or a bus driver doesn’t make you a better person. You just have different jobs. America is not a nation of kings and commoners, masters and servants. We’re a nation where every person has equal value, every dream deserves an equal chance, and every soul should be as equal in the law of the land as it is in the eyes of God."

That's a Democrat talking, there, and everybody knows it.

Bush can spout bullshit like "soft bigotry of low expectations" and "I care about the working people", but every poll shows that most most Americans do not believe he cares about or understands people like them. There's power in this message. It's worth keeping an eye on.


digby 7/06/2004 12:28:00 PM |

Sunday, July 04, 2004

 
Don't Tread On Me

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams

Ye olde civil discourse in action.

I've always loved the Fourth of July. It's not just because it's in the middle of summer and fireworks and picnics are fun, although those are good reasons. It's because I've always loved the feelings that American patriotism at its best inspires. Phrases like "all men are created equal" and words like "liberty" are concepts that run deeply in my American soul.

It makes me sick to see those words turned into cheap advertising slogans by people who believe in exactly the opposite, but it has ever been thus. Those words are emotional words, they make you feel things, and good advertising men know that's a key to making a sale. So, I understand. But, I still hate it.

As a Democrat I fall into the liberal category more than the progressive, I'm afraid, although I'm comfortable in each of those camps. I do believe that society needs government for more than defense, policing and contract disputes and I don't have a strong emotional attachment to property rights above all else. Reasonable taxation seems like common sense to me and certain necessary functions don't seem to respond well to the market, so I'm not a libertarian.

But, I am a liberal in much of the classical sense. I have a visceral mistrust of power so intense that all intrusions against civil liberties and individual rights are suspect in my mind until proven otherwise. The idea of innocent men being imprisoned with no due process, people being unable to marry who they choose or have dominion over their own bodies, censorship, forced religion and any other use of power against individuals is something that I believes requires a huge amount of deliberation, debate and thought before it should ever be implemented in the name of security, community or anything else. Indeed, in my mind, humans are such unreliable and incompetent creatures that it's best if we just don't go there at all.

It's a strange form of democracy we have because of its dual purpose of fulfilling the desire of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority. It creates a tension between the two pillars of the American system: freedom and equality. We are always measuring our progress between those two poles and it's never easy. But, to be an American is to hold both of those ideas as ideal. Indeed, America will cease to be America if we don't.

I have never agreed with this manifest destiny, American exceptionalism crapola. We come up so short, so often, within our own country that it is folly of the highest order to believe that we have a right to evangelize to the rest of the world. But, that doesn't mean that we haven't got something fine going here that deserves to be preserved, defended and respected.

There are many reasons to love our country, of course. But, most importantly, I think, it's that it is the repository of a bunch of great ideas about those words that move me so much --- freedom, equality, inalienable human rights. We are very far from achieving the perfection of those ideas, and we do have a bad habit of being most disappointingly willing to toss these concepts aside when it suits us. But, for the most part, we still manage to go one step forward for every two steps back and that's worth a lot.

If you have a chance today, read the Bill of Rights. It's our single greatest political contribution to the advancement of mankind.

Happy Fourth of July, my fellow imperfect Americans.




digby 7/04/2004 11:40:00 AM |

Friday, July 02, 2004

 
Again?

Maybe those Florida second graders should have had Junior read "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," on the morning of 9/11.

Warheads found in Iraq not chemical weapons, military says




digby 7/02/2004 05:23:00 PM |

 
Artistic License

I haven't written all that much about F9/11 because everyone else has covered that ground so beautifully. And, as is often the case, Krugman seems to have distilled the blogosphere's CW and written a wonderful column today that everyone is talking about. He is absolutely correct that the media is bizarrely holding a known left wing polemicist to a higher standard than the president of the United States. How odd.

I only have one small point to add to all this. Susan wrote something today that I hadn't heard anyone else put quite that way. She said the film is a work of art that tells powerful truths.

This is an important thing to realize about film as opposed to the television and journalistic he said/she said methods of persuasion. Film, like the novel, even in a documentary style, tells emotional truth. And F9/11, in the hands as it is of a powerfully talented filmmaker does just that.

The reason people are responding is because they have been terribly confused. Those of us who have been following this story in minute detail are not surprised by anything the film says, from the more conspiratorial connect-the-dots speculation to the real pain and trauma of seeing actual human beings, children and soldiers alike, hurt and maimed for reasons that make little obvious sense. These are things we've been seeing and feeling and trying to sort out since they happened. But, we are filled with a sense of emotional catharsis when we see it because it tells the truth in a much more real way than any news story or blog post has ever done.

And many people who are just living their lives and maybe picked up a paper or watched CNN from time to time have been buffetted by the strange hyper-patriotism, the PR stuntmaking, the reasoning and rationales that don't seem to connect and they are left feeling oddly fractured and discontented. This movie gives them a sense of order out of chaos in which they are able for the first time to make sense of what they are feeling. A counter-narrative that brings their gut and their brain back into balance.

For instance, many people felt uncomfortable with George W. Bush's leadership and they didn't know exactly why. After all, the opinion makers and TV news starts acted as if he were Alexander the Great and Abraham Lincoln rolled into one for a long, long time. Who were they to argue? And yet....

Seeing him read that children's book after his chief of staff whispered "Mr. President, we are under attack," says everything you need to know about his leadership abilities. Until this movie, only a small handful of people had ever seen that footage and understood exactly what it meant. President George W. Bush is a frontman who sat and read to schoolchildren, waiting for further instructions, after the nation was attacked. It fits. Ah hah.

The movie has many of those moments, where what you've been feeling, what's been nagging at the back of your mind suddenly makes sense.

As Krugman and others have rightly pointed out, if the media had been doing their jobs, there would be no audience for Michael Moore today. It's because journalism failed that art has had to step into the void and tell people the bigger, universal truths. To complain that art is not explicitly factual at this late date shows more than a little chutpah.




digby 7/02/2004 04:04:00 PM |

 
Joe Blow

Can I just say how much I hope that Kerry doesn't pick Joe Biden for Vice President? Not that I think he isn't eminently qualified or that he isn't smart, capable and somewhat charismatic in his own way. It's a personal thing. I find him almost insufferably pompous, self aggrandizing and full of shit at least half the time.

Josh Marshall's interview today does nothing to dispel that opinion. Old Joe is always telling tales about how he told the people in power what was what and they finally have to admit that he was right about everything. It's a funny thing, though. When I really tuned in to him for the first time was in the Clarence Thomas hearings. He didn't exactly speak truth to power in that one.


According to this he's been haranguing the Democratic establishment for years to do things his way and they've finally come around. Why, he planned the successful Kosovo strategy virtually all alone, apparently.

Hell, what do I know? Maybe he did. Perhaps it's just a temperamental thing or he reminds me of someone I used to know or something. But, from the first, I've just had the opinion that the guy is an utter egomaniac.

Not that it makes any difference, of course. I'd vote for Satan for VP if he had a D after his name this time.



digby 7/02/2004 02:45:00 PM |

 
God Made Him An Offer He Couldn't Refuse

Marlon Brando died today. I suppose, like all celebrity deaths, some mean more to us than others. This one means something to me.

It's not that I have any particular feeling for Brando as an individual. He was only mildly interesting as a person. Perhaps the most interesting thing he ever said (and it revealed a lot about his acting) was "The more sensitive you are, the more likely you are to be brutalised, develop scabs and never evolve. Never allow yourself to feel anything because you always feel too much." Perhaps his great talent was to be able to channel that enormous sensitivity into his characters.

I have long thought that he was the greatest American film actor ever. There was a time in my life when such a thing seemed very important and I spent long hours watching and studying film. In my view, nobody could touch him at his best. I still think so.

He is now thought of as The Godfather, which isn't a bad role to have as your enduring image. It's the most memorable role in one of the most iconic movies ever made. (In my view, the best movie ever made.) But, Brando's filmography actually contains a handful of the best performances ever captured on film.

In the 50's he epitomized "the method" the natural acting style popularized by the Actor's Studio. But, Lee Strasbourg said that he didn't teach Brando a thing. He showed up fully formed as an actor --- he just had it. For those of you who are too young to have paid any attention to him as anything beyond Don Vito, you really should take a look at A Streetcar Named Desire, On The Waterfront, Viva Zapata and The Wild One.

As great an actor as he was, he wasn't the smartest guy on the block. He got himself caught up in the 60's and did almost nothing of note. And then along came The Godfather. But, that same year he made another movie which I think may be his greatest performance ever --- Last Tango in Paris. Most people remember it for it's explicit sexuality, which was groundbreaking at the time. But, Brando delivers a performance so complex, so intimate, so amazingly sensitive yet brutal that when I was a freshman in college and saw it the first time it went so far over my head that I hated it. Ten years later I saw it again and it left me speechless with wonder. Still does.

Brando reached his peak with those two incredible performances, I think, although Apocalypse Now has stood the test of time much better than I thought when I first saw it. I was caught up in the process of filmmaking in those days and appalled to read that Brando had so compromised Coppolla's vision of Col. Kurtz by showing up on the set overweight and unprepared that I overlooked how remarkable his large, bald shadowed head and hypnotic voice really was. His performances were often like that for me. I'd see the film and get a certain impression. Then I'd see it again later and the brilliance of the performance would just wash over me like a warm wave and I'd get it.

In later years, he was this overpaid character actor with bad celebrity kids.(And sometimes he was just beyond weird as in The Island of Doctor Moreaux.) But, there were flashes of his brilliance from time to time as when he sent up his Godfather role in The Freshman or when he somehow managed to make himself charming and sexually attractive in Don Juan DeMarco despite being an elderly man who weighed 350 pounds. (Now that's acting!)

I'm sure there will be much finer eulogies and obituaries than this one over the next few days. But, this one's from the heart. His legacy is a precious gift to the art of film and acting. RIP Marlon Brando. Thanks.




digby 7/02/2004 11:03:00 AM |

Thursday, July 01, 2004

 
Flounder Filet

Q. Did anyone in the White House or the administration ask Irish television or its reporter, Carol Coleman, to submit questions in advance of her interview with the President last Wednesday?

MR. McCLELLAN: Bill, a couple of things. I saw I guess some reports on that. I don't know what every individual office -- whatever discussions that they have with reporters in terms of interviews. But obviously, the President was -- is pleased to sit down and do interviews with journalists, both from abroad, as well as here at home, and to talk about the priorities of this administration. And I think anytime that there is an interview that's going to take place, obviously there are staff-level discussions with reporters before that interview and to --

Q. -- what are the --

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, to talk about what issues might be on their mind, and stuff. That's -- but, reporters --

Q. That's not the same thing as asking for --

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me finish. Let me finish.

Q. -- and my question is, were questions asked for.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me finish. Reporters, when they meet with the President, can ask whatever questions they want. And any suggestion to the contrary is just --

Q. Right, but that doesn't answer the question. Did somebody in the administration ask her for questions in advance, and is that your policy?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, in terms -- you're talking my policy?

Q. No, the administration's policy.

MR. McCLELLAN: I don't know what an individual staffer may or may not have asked specifically of this reporter, but some of these interviews are set up by people outside of my direct office and control.

Q. Well, will you say from this lectern that it is not the policy of this White House to ask for questions in advance?

MR. McCLELLAN: Will you let me complete what I'm trying to say? Thank you. Just hold on a second. As I said, and you know very well from covering this White House, that any time a reporter sits down with the President, they are welcome to ask whatever questions they want to ask.

Q. Yes, but that's beside the point.

It goes on. I sometimes wonder what the public sould think if they actually saw these little performances by Flounder. The phrase "bullshit artist" comes immediately to mind.








digby 7/01/2004 11:40:00 AM |

 
Timing The Attack

Ezra Klein makes an interesting point about political attacks in this post. First, he says that for a political attack to be useful, it must be accurate. Second, it must be politically accurate and third, it must be effective.

The first point may actually be debatable. For the most part, it seems to me that it only needs to be believable in order to resonate. Still, I would not suggest adopting the character assassination method of political attack. If it isn't accurate, I'm against it.

His second point is really the one that caught my eye because I don't think people understand this and it's important that they do:

Political accuracy is a bit different. It relies on the American people being ready to believe something is true. In April, 45% of Americans said honest and trustworthy were not words that applied to Bush. With that in mind, I think the populace is primed for a discussion over whether or not he is a liar. It's an argument I think we'll win, which is why I advocate it. Now, if less than half think Bush is dishonest, it stands to reason that even fewer will be willing to call him -- or hear him called -- a criminal. That's why I argue against that label. The general rule of thumb here is that levying the charge shouldn't do us damage -- if it does, we're better off keeping our mouths shut.

Absolutely. Here among ourselves in the clubby left blogosphere we've been hurling every insult imaginable at Bush for so long that it's almost impossible to believe that the public in general doesn't see that we are dealing with the most dishonest president in American history, and that includes Nixon. But, until fairly recently, his image held up as the all-american "straight shooter." Only now are they ready to hear the charge that we all know has been true for quite some time.

This is an interesting thing and it's worth thinking about a bit. When, exactly, did the tide begin to turn on that and what precipitated it? How did we finally reach a point where a polemic like F9/11 could cross into mainstream popular culture and have such an impact? When did the public give itself permission to challenge the orthodoxy and why?

There are many possibilities, but I think it's actually one specific event and one slow realization combining to bring people to that conclusion. The first was the strut across the deck of the aircraft carrier which, while it thrilled the punditocrisy and many partisans, also stunk to high heaven as a phony PR stunt. Straight shooters don't play that way.

The second, of course, is the missing weapons of mass destruction. People may not consciously blame Junior for lying, but there is a strong sense of discomfort at the idea a president would say the words "I will disarm Saddam Hussein" about 4,752 times and it turns out there was nothing to disarm. The dissonance is palpable.

So, we seem to have reached a point at which the public is ready to hear that the Empty Codpiece is a liar without it shocking their emotional perception of him as a straightshooter.

But, Ezra's point is extremely important. While those of us in the vanguard of leftwing politics are out there shaking our fists, which is as it should be, we must also recognize that politicians have to be aware of the greater public's capacity to absorb that reality. They must be coaxed along, not bludgeoned by our leaders. The bludgeoning is our job.


P.S. That Ezra's good isn't he?







digby 7/01/2004 11:24:00 AM |

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

 
Oh Hell

American military police yesterday raided a building belonging to the Iraqi ministry of the interior where prisoners were allegedly being physically abused by Iraqi interrogators.

The raid appeared to be a violation of the country's new sovereignty, leading to angry scenes inside the ministry between Iraqi policemen and US soldiers.

[...]

Iraqi ministry of interior officials admitted that around 150 prisoners taken during a raid four days before in the Betawain district of Baghdad had been physically abused during their arrest and subsequent questioning.

The men were captured in the first big Iraqi-led anti-crime and anti-terrorism operation, which took place a few days before the transfer of power, with US military police in support and using US satellite images.

Senior Iraqi officers described those captured as 'first class murderers, kidnappers and terrorists with links to al-Ansar' - a militant group in the former Kurdish no-fly zone - who had all admitted to 'at least 20 crimes while being questioned'.

[...]

US military spokesmen would not comment. "We can't confirm that this took place," a spokesman said.

One of the prisoners bared his back after his initial arrest to reveal open welts allegedly caused by baton and rubber hoses.

A bodyguard for the head of criminal intelligence, Hussein Kamal, admitted that the beatings had taken place.

Nashwan Ali - who said his nickname was Big Man - said: "A US MP asked me this morning what police division I was in. I said I was in criminal intelligence.

"The American asked me why we had beaten the prisoners. I said we beat the prisoners because they are all bad people. But I told him we didn't strip them naked, photograph them or fuck them like you did."

We sure could use a big ole whiff 'o that moral clarity right about now.






digby 6/30/2004 11:09:00 PM |

 
The secret history of Anonymous:

The author of Imperial Hubris is unmasked and says he fears for his job at the CIA, not for his life at the hands of Al Qaeda
BY JASON VEST

A Phoenix investigation has discovered that Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all — and that his anonymity is neither enforced nor voluntarily assumed out of fear for his safety, but rather compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience. In the Phoenix’s view, continued deference by the press to a bogus and unwanted standard of secrecy essentially amounts to colluding with the CIA in muzzling a civil servant — a standard made more ridiculous by the ubiquity of Anonymous’s name in both intelligence and journalistic circles.

When asked to confirm or deny his identity in an interview with the Phoenix last week, Anonymous declined to do either, and said, "I’ve given my word I’m not going to tell anyone who I am, as the organization that employs me has bound me by my word." His publisher, Brassey’s, likewise declined to comment. Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics.

digby 6/30/2004 10:46:00 PM |

 
Religiosity Gap

I'm in a bit of a mood today, so why don't I take on the religion issue while I'm at it and piss off everybody I haven't pissed off already?

Atrios takes umbrage with this Slate article that claims Kerry isn't acting Catholic enough and, therefore, will lose the religious vote and the election. The author says, "if Kerry's uncomfortable with religion then he's uncomfortable with Americans...If Kerry's really secular, he's abnormal." He quotes an anonymous Kerry aide telling the Washington Times,"Every time something with religious language got sent up the flagpole, it got sent back down, stripped of religious language."

Uh huh. Certainly, anxious Democrats who anonymously talk to the Washington Times must be telling it just like it is.

This comes on the heels of an earlier article by Amy Sullivan chastising Kerry for not using values language and imagery and thereby alienating religious voters who might vote for him. In the course of her article, and this one in Slate today, it becomes clear that an even more significant problem for the religious left than John Kerry's alleged lack of religiosity, is the aggressive secularism of the activist base of the Democratic party. They are rude to religious people, evidently, and this is seen as a serious threat to Kerry's chances. (Both articles, by the way, mention how David Brooks really "gets it" in this NY Times column. Now, come on kids. David may be a nice guy, but he is not giving the Kerry campaign political advice out of the goodness of his heart. Think about it.)

Before we go any further, we should look at some actual data instead of relying on anecdotal tales of hurt feelings or bad communications. Ruy Tuxeira of Donkey Rising posted on this subject a month or so ago and reported some interesting numbers on the subject:

*Most progressives are religious. For example, in 2000, 81 percent of Gore voters professed a religious affiliation. That’s within shouting distance of the 89 percent of Bush voters who professed a religious affiliation (2000 National Study of Religion and Politics [NSRP]).

*It is true that progressives attend church less than conservatives. In the 2000 VNS exit poll, 33 percent of Gore voters said they attended church once a week or more, compared to 49 percent of Bush voters who said they attended church that often...

But the whole US population is trending toward less observance, not more. For example, in surveys taken over the last thirty years, it is the ranks of those who never or rarely attend church that have grown the most. According to a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study, those who said they never attended church or attended less than once a year went from 18 percent in 1972 to 30 percent in 1998. Confirming this latter figure, the National Election Study found that those who say they never attended was at 33 percent of the citizenry and 27 percent of voters in 2000. That is a group about twice the size of those who identify themselves as members of the religious right, and it is a group that has tended to vigorously support Democrats rather than Republicans.

Indeed, according to the NORC study, if you add to the 30 percent mentioned above those who say they attend church only once or a few times a year, it turns out that about half the US population attends church only a few times a year or less.

* In the 2000 VNS exit poll, it was widely noted that Bush won the support of voters who say they attend church more than weekly by 63 to 36 and voters who say they attend church weekly by 57 to 40 . And these voters make up 43 percent of the electorate. But even according to these unusually high VNS figures, the more observant groups were only a bit over two-fifths of the electorate. Each of the groups in the less observant three-fifths of voters those who said they attended church a few times a month, a few times a year or never--preferred Gore over Bush, with support particularly strong among never-attenders, who gave Gore a 61 to 32 percent margin.

[...]

* Conservatives and the GOP have made aggressive efforts to target Catholics. But there is no evidence that this targeting is actually working. "Traditional" Catholics, to be sure, are strongly supporting Bush (60-30), according to the 2004 NSRP data. But they are only 27 percent of all Catholics. The rest of Catholics -- 73 percent -- are supporting Kerry. The includes the "modernist" group (31 percent of Catholics) who support Kerry by a lop-sided 61-33 and the "centrist" Catholics -- who are both the largest (42 percent) Catholic group and the real swing group among Catholics -- who support him by 45-41.

More broadly, there is little evidence that centrist and modernist Catholics, which is the overwhelming majority of Catholics -- including among Hispanics -- are likely to vote the conservative social positions of the Catholic church on issues like abortion or gay marriage. That is what the GOP has been banking on, but it is highly unlikely to happen. Polling data suggest strongly that these Catholics are far more concerned and moved electorally by other issues, such as the economy, education, health care and so on.

There is also quite a large school of thought that even among those who report regular churchgoing that they "overrepresent," due to social expectations and other pressures. In other words, they lie about how often they go to church. Furthermore, when pollsters ask about religion in specific terms it often turns out that people consider themselves very religious simply because they believe in God, or a Higher Power which actually falls under the secular category, not the religious category. In other words, the idea that there exists a huge monolithic number of highly religious Americans who will reject anyone who isn't explicitly appealing to them in religious terms is probably a crock. Indeed, with the exception of those who "claim" to attend church once a week or more, the Democrats consistently pull even with the Republicans.

As it turns out even that gap has narrowed significantly in this cycle. The religion gap is highly overstated even among the super observant. According to the Pew Research Poll quoted by Tuxeira:

Another intriguing finding is an apparent narrowing of the "religiosity gap"--that is, the tendency for those who attend church more often to vote Republican with far greater frequency than those who attend less often. According to the Pew data, the gap in Bush support between those who say they attend church every week and those who attend seldom or never is now 14 points, compared to 27 points in the 2000 VNS exit poll.

There's more here on the fact that Kerry is doing fine with Catholics.

So, what is this all about? Why are we having yet another interparty argument over something that isn't even particularly relevant to our electoral chances?

Here's the thing. This insistence that Democrats are disrespectful to religion is another one of those GOP propaganda ploys that we Democrats keep falling for. They have always claimed that we are godless heathens since back in the McCarthy era --- of course, then it was godless communists. Nobody has ever believed it and from the polling, it doesn't look like they do now. They have their bloc of extremely conservative Christians, but we have no hope of getting those votes even if we have Kerry wear a crown of thorns and flay himself on Meet The Press.

Besides, the entire argument validates this insulting notion that only very religious people can be elected to office in this country. In the Slate article, the author calls this new religious test "shorthand" for character. I think that's exactly the association the Republicans want you to make.

All this infighting is, once again, playing into established GOP talking points to our own detriment. It simply is not true. Democrats are as religiously observant as Republicans and with the exception of the fundamentalists and extreme Christian conservatives, religious people vote with the Democrats as much as with the Republicans. (If we are going for Christian Right votes then might I suggest that we also adopt some racist rhetoric and promise to cut taxes for the rich. Those votes are ours for the taking.)

There has long been tension between the secularists and the religious in this country, but interestingly they have both fared well when they worked together to maintain the separation of church and state --- as when the evangelicals and the secularists (which includes Deists) worked together to ensure the inclusion of the establishment clause in the bill of rights. (At that time evangelicals were a minority religion and in grave danger of being outlawed.) If one were to ask American Muslims and Buddhists today if they felt comfortable with all the religious talk in politics, I would imagine they'd say no. It's all in where you're sitting at the table, isn't it?

I think it's probably true that a lot of non-believers are rude about religion. But people need to grow up about this. The self righteousness of the religious believer has always inspired a certain, shall we say, ascerbic response. You want rude, I'll give you rude --- from two quintessential All-American boys:

"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt."
Mark Twain


"Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world --- a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench'd, holding possession, yet remains (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity." Walt Whitman

Ouch.

So, let's be clear, here. Secularism is most definitely not abnormal. It never has been and it isn't now. It is as American as apple pie and we will take our slice of the body politic, thank you.




Shaun at Upper Left has some instructive comments on this topic, as well.



Update: For an inspiring look at the good people of the religious left, check out this interview with the head of the National Council of Churches by my American Street colleague, Chuck Currie. I'm happy to be on the same political side as this man.



digby 6/30/2004 09:28:00 PM |

 
Credibility Gap

The Political Animal takes bloggers to task for being too hard on the liberal hawks and neocons who are now having second thought about the war. He says we should warmly embrace them to our side. Since I just wrote about this last night, I feel I should answer that complaint.

First of all, it would be a lot easier if they didn't feel it was necessary to insult the millions of people who did make the right call while they are expressing their regrets. That indicates to me that they are not very likely to pay any heed to those voices in the future. But, that's not the real problem.

In order to truly understand what went wrong with this war, you have to look at what was being said and what was being heard before we went into it. I'm not seeing a lot of that from the Mea Culpa singers. Peter Beinert (with whom I regrettably proved Kevin's point by being deliberately snarky) was one of the few to actually examined his prejudices and preconceptions as a way of explaining why he came to the conclusions he did. As far as I know, he is the only one to do that. All the others are based upon misplaced trust in the administration and a shock that they could have been so dishonest/incompetent/incoherent. They have not grappled with the fact that they chose to ignore plenty of evidence prior to the invasion that should have tipped them off. I can think of a handful right off the top of my head, and I'm sure there are plenty more:

First and foremost was the fact that the primary forces agitating for the Iraq invasion had been agitating for it long before 9/11 and for entirely different reasons than those stated at the time. Indeed, those same forces had completely missed the threat of assymetrical terrorism as it grew up in the 90's and essentially just piggy backed their pre-existing goals onto the terrorist threat after the attacks. This was evident even then --- long before Richard Clarke started publicly talking about people's hair on fire. There were people shouting into the wilderness about this absurd neocon notion of the Pax Americana and nobody was listening. There were those who noticed that belligerant unilateralism and the "preemption doctrine" which was supposedly in response to the attacks ("9/11 changed everything") were, in fact, pillars of the neocon philosophy going back to the 70's and had been heavily pushed since the end of the cold war. Someone might have asked if these beliefs were actually relevant or adequate to an entirely new threat paradigm.

Another obvious tip off was our abandonment of Afghanistan. There we had the heart of al Qaeda in our grasp and a democratic revolution and billions of dollars in reconstruction promised and yet once the war drums began pounding for Iraq, we dropped it all like a hot potato. A small, experimental version of the Iraq Democracy Project unfolded in real time, failed spectacularly and nobody noticed.

The fact that the US impeded the inspections process should have made people wonder about our true motives. Saddam let in the inspectors and they reported that he was being quite cooperative (by historical standards) and that they weren't finding anything. Under those circumstances, the US refusing to give the locations of WMD to the inspectors to investigate should have set off some alarm bells.

Powell's presentation to the UN was lame even before 99% of had been disproved. It was thin gruel to anyone who hadn't already made up their mind that we were marching off to war, come what may. The whole thing was based upon his personal reputation and credibility. Big mistake and one that people should really think about going forward. This "trust us" business has been shown (as throughout history)to be a fools game.

The administration refused to discuss the potential costs of the war and publicly argued with the uniformed services about the necessary troop levels. This should have raised eyebrows. There were plenty of people who thought this was odd and questioned whether the administration knew what it was doing. The hawks didn't take these opinions into account.

Most importantly, there were those like Wes Clark and others who warned that invading Iraq would exacerbate the terrorist threat and that we were making a grave mistake in not concentrating everything we had on al Qaeda. If the decision for war had been at all thoughtful on the hawk side there would have been a long and detailed debate about it because this wasn't a hawk vs dove argument, it was a hawk vs hawk argument. That so many refused to listen even to their own kind on such a matter of huge importance to the security of the country is probably the biggest sin they committed.

As I wrote earlier, I think this invasion was mostly an emotional response to the attacks. And I would be remiss if I didn't chide the prime mover behind the hysteria (aside from the admnistration, of course) which was the media. (Unbelievably, it was this hysteria that bush blamed for the flat economy a few months ago. Chutzpah, thy name is Junior)

9/11 was the story of a lifetime. It made overnight stars out of nobodies and gave huge amounts of face time to journalists. Indeed, it glamorized them in a way that hadn't been seen since the days of Woodward and Bernstein. In the run up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration made the smartest decision they've made in their entire administration. The media were already primed for "9/11: The Invasion of Iraq" but as the administration made its case for war, they simultaneously began the process of training the reporters for their embedded assignments. They sent them to "camp" and brought them into their confidence and gave them a personal stake in the outcome of the war debate. (Read all about it, right here.) Imagine the disappointment if they'd had to turn in their khaki safari jackets and go back to reporting dull stories about medicare.

Many in the media itself admitted at the time that they were quite shocked at the numbers of people showing up to protest the war around the world. They didn't even cover the story in the beginning. Yet, the polls consistently showed a large number of people even here in the US who were against the invasion and many more who wanted the administration to go much more slowly. This story was virtually ignored, and when it was covered, it was as if it was some sort of a sideshow.(Read this condescending piece of garbage, if you need a reminder --- it's about 3/4 of the way into the transcript.) From the moment the drums began in the summer of 2002 --- certainly from the time that Cheney made his speech in late August --- the war was treated as an inevitability by the media.

I realize how difficult it was to swim against that tide. It was exciting and difficult to resist, even for people like me. We were living history. But, at some point you had to step back and look at the magnitude of what we were contemplating --- particularly the huge step away from our post war consensus against wars of aggression --- and see that this thing was being rushed into production without adequate debate or planning. Saddam had been sitting there for a long, long time. There was no reason to believe that he couldn't have sat there for a few more months until we exhausted all other options. The fact that Bush and Cheney refused to do that should have been the deal breaker.

It's never easy to admit you were wrong. But, it is almost more important to realize why you were wrong than to admit it in the first place. If we could all wait to see how things turn out and then just say "whoops, sorry" and all would be well, then life would be pretty easy.

The fact is that the liberal hawks, especially, made the invasion palatable and acceptable to many people who trusted them. That is a heavy burden. I'm glad they've seen their error, but it doesn't mean we're on the same team, as Kevin seems to think. So far, I've seen little reason to believe they won't do exactly the same thing again if their blood gets up and they decide the opposition consists of people they don't wish to be associated with. I hope I'm wrong.




digby 6/30/2004 11:01:00 AM |

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

 
Waddo We Do Now???

Detainees May Be Moved Off Cuba Base

As attorneys for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, began preparing the first of hundreds of expected lawsuits demanding that the government justify the detentions, senior administration officials acknowledged that they were unprepared for a rebuke in two landmark Supreme Court decisions that rejected the military's treatment of prisoners in the war on terrorism.

[...]

"They didn't really have a specific plan for what to do, case-by-case, if we lost," a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. "The Justice Department didn't have a plan. State didn't have a plan. This wasn't a unilateral mistake on DOD's part. It's astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan."

Apparently, this was because they were convinced they were going to win.

An internal Justice Department memo reviewed Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times outlining communications plans in response to high court rulings on the issue listed two pages of talking points to be used "in case of win," and a page of talking points to be used "in case of win if some sort of process is required" -- a partial victory. Yet, there was no category for action in the event of a broad defeat in the memo, titled "Supreme Court Decision Communications Plan."

Few lawyers inside or outside the government doubted that the high court would allow the government the right to detain combatants during wartime, as has been allowed in every major war for two centuries. That option was upheld.

But the memo wrongly predicted an outright win in the case Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, involving Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana-born man of Saudi descent captured in Afghanistan.

"The DOD/DOJ position on the detention of Hamdi will be decided in our favor as a clear-cut POW case," the memo said, although Hamdi was not held as a prisoner of war.

The memo predicted a 5-4 vote in favor of the government in Rasul vs. Bush and Al Odah vs. United States. Justices in that case, involving 16 Guantanamo detainees seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan, found in the reverse, voting 6-3 that military prisoners who are not U.S. citizens cannot be held without access to American courts.

I'm not enough of a court watcher to decipher why they thought this when virtually everything I read in the last month indicated that the court was very likely to rule against the administration. (I do wonder what, if anything, this all has to do with Ted "Nasty, Brutish and Short" Olsen's somewhat unexpected departure.)

Faith based justice sure isn't what it used to be, is it?




digby 6/29/2004 10:33:00 PM |

 
Bush Urges All Autocrats to Yield Now to Democracy

Or Else.




digby 6/29/2004 10:06:00 PM |

 
The Mea Culpa Singers

If I might just add to Tim's great post at the road to surfdom as well as DeLong's here and Atrios's ongoing frustration with the sorry warhawks' excuses, I have to agree that this sad complaint that nobody could have known the Bushies would screw up Iraq this badly is total bullshit.

I am no psychic and I have no special insight that others don't have. Yet somehow, I was able to see that the Bush administration was very likely to screw this up badly and so were millions of other people. (For one thing, at the time we were going into Iraq the abdication of our responsibilities in Afghanistan was already well under way.)

Back in my pre-blogging days, on the night the Senate passed the Iraq resolution Atrios published this:

Digby says, in Matthew Yglesias's comments, in response to Yglesias saying "But if I don't get what I want and it does come to war, you won't see me out on the streets rallying for a Hussein victory either":

I don't think the pro-Saddam rally will be well attended.

But, there will be prayer vigils and sleepless nights on the part of those of us who hope that this incompetent administration doesn't fuck it up so much that all hell breaks loose in the region, including the real possibility of nuclear war and many american and arab casualties. And we'll be wishing fervently that terrorism on US soil doesn't become something we'll have to learn to live with because we just can't seem to kill all the people who hate our guts and multiply exponentially with every aggressive action that we take. And we'll sure hope that we can get some cooperation from the unstable regimes that finance them without having to invade and depose their leaders, too.

And, if everything works out, let's keep our fingers crossed that we can turn the mideast into a democratic paradise quickly because judging from our experience in Afghanistan, our President meant it when he said he "wasn't into nation building." We really don't need to fight this war again.

And I know that a lot of us will probably get together around the dinner table and water coolers to talk about the enormous sums of money remaking the mideast is costing and will continue to cost for years to come, while we worry about whether we'll have jobs or health care or a chance of a comfortable retirement.

So, rather than attending pro-Saddam rallies, people who are against this war being waged by someone in whom they have no faith will be instead gathering together to fervently pray that his adventure goes perfectly every step of the way.

Those prayers were far from answered. In fact, I would say that my fears were downright prescient, including the ongoing and completely unresolved threat of terrorists and Islamic states with nuclear capability.

It wasn't just me. Look at these poll results from that same week:

The public overwhelmingly wants to get the United Nations' weapons inspectors back into Iraq and allied support before taking any military action. Americans also want a congressional vote before acting - and think members of Congress should be asking more questions about the implications of war with Iraq.

Americans are concerned about the wider implications of war with Iraq. They believe such a war will result in a long and costly military involvement; they believe it will lead to a wider war in the Middle East with other Arab nations and Israel; and that it could further undermine the U.S. economy.

Americans are also cool to the doctrine of pre-emption. They believe countries should not be able to attack each other unless attacked first - and less than half of Americans think the U.S., in particular, has the right to make pre-emptive strikes against nations it thinks may attack in the future.

This was just a year after 9/11. The public was far from convinced that Bush was doing the right thing. The press and the punditocrisy, on the other hand, just kept pushing and pushing and creating this sense of inevitablility about the war --- much of it promoted by these hawks, both liberal and neocon, who insisted that we had no choice but to invade Iraq at the earliest possible time.

There really is no excuse but war fever. People chose to support that war, not because there was good evidence backing up the need for urgency. Indeed, there was plenty of evidence that we should be very cautious before we opened a front in the WOT right in the middle of the muslim holy land. But, the blood was pumping --- people wanted a fight and the media wanted a show.

It's really that simple. There was never any truly compelling reason to take on Saddam at just that moment and it didn't take a genius (I'm certainly not one) to predict that Bush would make a hash out of it. I am tired of reading these mea culpas that are filled with invective toward those of us who were correct in our assessment of the motives and the competence of the administration. We weren't a bunch of starry eyed hippies sitting around singing kumbaya --- there was ample evidence and analysis that they simply chose to ignore.

In fact, it was the the neocons and the liberal hawks who decided that democracy is a matter of faith rather than reason and believed that if they just wanted it hard enough it would magically happen. The naive kumbaya chorus wasn't on our side. It was the AEI and New Republic "Up With Democracy" singers who were the fools.




digby 6/29/2004 08:18:00 PM |

 
What Gaul:

U.S. President George W. Bush has repeated a call for the European Union to admit Turkey, despite criticism by France's President Jacques Chirac that he was meddling in EU affairs. Bush said Tuesday that Turkey belongs in the EU and that Europe is 'not the exclusive club of a single religion' in what amounted to a rebuff to the French leader.

[...]

He said that Turkish EU membership would be a "crucial advance" in relations between the Muslim world and the West because Turkey was part of both.

The main message in the U.S. President's speech was a bid to mend relations between Muslims and Americans that were left tattered by the Iraq war.

"We must strengthen the ties and trust and good will between ourselves and the peoples of the Middle East," he said.

Bush held up Turkey as an example of a Muslim democracy.

"Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the 'clash of civilizations' as a passing myth of history," Bush said.

Somebody needs to get Bush's people some time off because they obviously can't take the stress. Publicly lecturing Europe about religious pluralism is about as obnoxious as an American president can get. And to use Europe as his whipping boy to mend fences with muslims (a totally incomprehensible strategy) is to basically say, "those Europeans make much better targets than we do, Osama. They hate yer muslim guts. Have at it."

Who the hell do these people think they are? It's not that we have no right to politely advocate for Turkey being admitted into the EU if we choose. It's that we don't do it by publicly insulting the EU for our own purposes. Where did these people learn their manners, Attica?

Chirac was, unsurprisingly, pissed:

"If President Bush really said that in the way that I read, then not only did he go too far, but he went into territory that isn't his," Chirac said of a remark Bush made over the weekend.

"It is is not his purpose and his goal to give any advice to the EU, and in this area it was a bit as if I were to tell Americans how they should handle their relationship with Mexico.

Oh, we won't mind. That's what we call the new "go fuck yourself" diplomacy. You'll feel better, too.




digby 6/29/2004 03:04:00 PM |

 
Action, Reaction

Yglesias finds another dead fish wrapped in The Weakly Standard today. Apparently, we liberals had better get control of those violent thugs over at Move-On because the conservatives just can't be responsible for what might happen if somebody "not so nice" came into power and felt like he had to teach us a lesson. (Matt takes them down quite handily.)

But, the article is also interesting for another reason. Here's the passage that Matt highlights:

You can file the of Mussolini's rise under "H" for Hegel, the idea that extreme movements always beget extreme counter forces. It was the far left, by relentlessly chipping away at the foundations of Italian life, that gave birth and power to the far right--as it did a decade on when Hitler rode nearly the same path under similar circumstances.

This is what seems most pertinent today, as "activist" groups like Moveon.org and demagogues like Michael Moore and angry men like Al Gore and George Soros rail so irrationally against both the president (comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini in a variety of contexts) and the structures of daily American life, including the legally adjudicated Supreme Court decision that ultimately decided the 43rd presidency in advance of a tedious recount that would've yielded the same outcome.

... Either this November or in four years, George W. Bush is going to be turned out of office; even the judge agrees with that. Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left's constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won't go quite so easily.

Once again, we see the right's blindness to its own actions over the last 15 years. I don't disagree with their analysis of what contributed to the rise of fascism. The left was extreme and led to a counter response in equally radical terms. Ye olde pendulum swing.

They are perfectly right that the same exact thing may very well be happening here. But, apparently it doesn't occur to these believers in civil discourse that their eliminationist right wing rhetoric of the last decade and a half --- and a president who literally tells us to go fuck ourselves --- is what has spawned this reaction from the left. (Not that I agree that Moore or Move-On say anything close to even a normal day's Limbaugh/Savage blather, but in the interest of making my point I will stipulate that the left is mighty riled up.) They believe they've just been sitting around being polite and restrained and out of the blue the left has come out swinging.

This after we moved the party way to the center, gave them a successful moderate republican president for two terms who they then impeached and after they completely disregarded the disputed election returns and governed as if they had a mandate. I mean, I know we Democrats are the mommy party and all, but push mommy far enough and she becomes a screaming bitch on wheels. What did they expect?

Republicans seem to have a very serious problem seeing themselves as they appear to others. Perhaps this might give a clue to how we reached the point where liberals are fighting back with everything we have.

Language: A Key Mechanism of Control

Newt Gingrich's 1996 GOPAC memo

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that "language matters." In the video "We are a Majority," Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: "I wish I could speak like Newt."

That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

[...]

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

abuse of power
anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
betray
bizarre
bosses
bureaucracy
cheat
coercion
"compassion" is not enough
collapse(ing)
consequences
corrupt
corruption
criminal rights
crisis
cynicism
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
devour
disgrace
endanger
excuses
failure (fail)
greed
hypocrisy
ideological
impose
incompetent
insecure
insensitive
intolerant
liberal
lie
limit(s)
machine
mandate(s)
obsolete
pathetic
patronage
permissive attitude
pessimistic
punish (poor ...)
radical
red tape
self-serving
selfish
sensationalists
shallow
shame
sick
spend(ing)
stagnation
status quo
steal
taxes
they/them
threaten
traitors
unionized
urgent (cy)
waste
welfare

Duck. The pendulum's about to hit you in the face, assholes.






digby 6/29/2004 01:39:00 PM |

 
It's Ring, you Moron

I hate to be pedantic, but this "let freedom reign" thing bugs the hell out of me.

The common phrase is "let freedom ring" not "let freedom reign."

A Google search turns up 2,090 references to "let freedom reign" one of the top links coming from a white supremacy web site called "Panzerfaust Records" that features a bunch of racist lyrics. "My Country Tis of Thee" is not amongst them, as you might imagine.

On the other hand, "let freedom ring" turns up 72,700 references, number one being Sean Hannity's dull as dishwater anti-liberal screed. (You'd think he'd be pissed that he lost the opportunity for such a nice cross-promotion.)

Of course, aside from the song lyric that every American schoolchild learns when he or she is about six years old, ("....from eh-everee-eey mountainside... le-et freedom ring,") we have one of the most moving speeches ever made by anyone, anywhere, which is Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech:

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Now that would have been worth evoking in the moment that Iraq was allegedly given back its sovereignty. Instead, our illiterate president, or an illiterate member of his staff, evoked a phrase that sort of sounds like that one, but isn't. Just like everything else with this godforsaken war, they screwed it up --- even down to the note Junior wrote for posterity.







digby 6/29/2004 12:42:00 PM |

 
You Aren't My Friend

Apparently, some of Rush's callers weren't all that happy about Big Time's new "if it feels good, go fuck yourself" philosophy. They think it might not be the best message to send to their kids.

Rush tried to explain it but wasn't quite coherent because the drugs do tend to make you hallucinate. In his case, he had a vision that the Democrats were actually Republicans. It's very interesting:

RUSH: ...Look, I just want to say. I'm going to repeat what I said at the beginning of the program when I talked about this because I think there's a bit of a double standard here when people are expressing outrage about this. Don't misunderstand. I am not for the word becoming part of the common, everyday vernacular, but it still is. You cannot turn on television today without hearing the word. You cannot go to the movies without hearing the word -- unless you go to a kids' movie, a G movie -- and it is what it is and we can sit here and lament it and wring our hands all we want.

What we can do is have our own private conduct of standards and abide by them with our friends and people that we deal with and refuse to fall prey and join those in the gutter who are using the word in a guttural sense. I don't think Cheney was using it in a guttural sense.

The point to me is this. The Democrats have wanted it two ways, both ways for the longest time. They want to be perceived by the vast majority of people as decent and calm and refined, and they're the ones who have all the compassion and care. They're out there every day, Senator Leahy among them, accusing Vice President Cheney of corruption, of actually getting Halliburton a gig in Iraq for his own personal gain. They are claiming that he and Bush started this war -- when it wasn'necessary -- for their own personal gain, that they are in cahoots with all of this prison abuse, doing it personally because that's a kind of people they are. They are saying some of the most...

What is being said about Bush and Cheney by people like Senator Leahy from committees, on television, is far worse than Cheney using the F-word back to Leahy, because these people are into character and personal assassination.These people are trying to destroy George W. Bush, his reputation and his life, just as they are trying to do Vice President Cheney's.

(Creepy, isn't it? One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the modern Republican bully is his overarching sense of victimization. Combined with this very, very sick projection problem, you can see why he needs the little blue babies.)

Now, all you children out there listen up. This is how the grown-up Republicans behave:

Yet when Cheney shows up at the Senate, here's Pat Leahy who wants to be all buddy-buddy and put his arm around him and get in the photo-op and act like they're good buds, and Cheney -- and this has been going on for far too long -- and Cheney finally said F-you. You aren't my friend.

What he was saying: You're not my friend; I don't want you in my company, and I'm not going to smile when I'm around you, because you don't deserve my friendship. You haven't earned my friendship. You are my enemy, and I'm not going to come here and put on a show, phony baloney show, that says like you and that we are convivial and that we are colleagues and all we do is disagree in the daytime but at night we go out and have a beer. F-you. I don't want to have a beer with you. I don't want to be anywhere near you. I don't like you. You do not deserve my friendship, and don't act like we're friends here. Point made.

Amen. Hubba hubba. Home run, exclamation point. It's about time this started happening because the Democrats are getting away with this two-faced behavior of theirs for way, way, way too many years.

That's what they mean when they say they are "changing the tone," kids. If Democrats say something bad about Republicans, they are bad. If Republicans something bad about Democrats, they are telling the truth. If Democrats have disagreements with you but still try to be friendly, they are being two-faced. You should tell them to go fuck themselves. That's what grown-ups call "civility." And you will feel so much better after you do it, too.

If that doesn't work and you still feel bad, try one of these little blue babies. Uncle Rush and Uncle Dick are what we call "Republican role models." We believe that if it feels good, do it. That's what being a grown-up Republican is all about.



Thanks to kevin for the Catch.







digby 6/29/2004 10:48:00 AM |

 
More Cuttin' 'n Runnin'

Tristero links to Rhandi Rhodes saying that it is unconscionable that Bremer would cut 'n run while a US marine was still being held by the evul terrists. The troops must be awfully pleased to see their Preznit now behaving as if he no longer has anything to do with what's going on in Iraq. Some support for our boys, eh? Sneak outta town in the dead of night and leave them there to face the music.

Let freedom rain. Or is it, let freedom rein? Let freedom wring? I forget. Condi?


digby 6/29/2004 10:11:00 AM |

 
Michael Kinsley's Editorial Page Is In Da House

It's Called Democracy

What gives the government the right to arrest you and imprison you indefinitely without offering a reason or opportunity to appeal? The answer, in the United States, is: Nothing gives the government that right. It is hard to see what is left of American freedom if the government has the authority to make anyone on its soil — citizen or noncitizen — disappear and then rule that no one can do anything about it.

Or so we once thought. But the Bush administration — whose convoluted memos on defining torture now rank with Bill Clinton's definition of sex — says Congress gave it exactly this power. And when was that? Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, Congress passed a two-line resolution authorizing the use of military force against "nations, organizations or persons" engaged in terrorism. We would like to hear from any member who intended by this vote to repeal the Bill of Rights.

[...]

President Bush and his administration say: Look, there's a war on. And anyway, the United States is not some Latin American dictatorship of the 1970s; we can trust our government not to abuse the extraordinary power it claims. But this administration's record of incompetence and callousness does not inspire us to lightly kiss away our constitutional protections.

[...]

The whole point of the substantive freedoms and due process guarantees in the Bill of Rights is that freedom should not rest on any government's claims of benevolence. Now that the Guantanamo detainees have been given the right to a hearing, Americans will learn a bit more about what has happened there. As with the abuses at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, it's likely that the more they learn, the less they'll like it.

Read the whole thing. It sizzles.




digby 6/29/2004 09:23:00 AM |

Monday, June 28, 2004

 
The Cut And Run Administration

Juan Cole reveals what this little transfer of authority pageant is really all about:

This entire exercise is a publicity stunt and has almost no substance to it. Gwen Ifill said on US television on Sunday that she had talked to Condaleeza Rice, and that her hope was that when something went wrong in Iraq, the journalists would now grill Allawi about it rather than the Bush administration. (Or words to that effect). Ifill seems to me to have given away the whole Bush show. That's what this whole thing is about. It is Public Relations and manipulation of journalists. Let's see if they fall for it.

It's the only thing that makes sense. I will bet real money that we are going to hear Susan's friend Flounder McClellan reply to every question about Iraq, "you'll have to ask the Iraqis about that, Helen. We transferred authority to them back on June 28th so the 35 coordinated car bombs and the beheadings of all members of the justice ministry yesterday will have to be dealt with by the Iraqi authorities. It's their country."

It's likely that the press will fall for this because they think the Iraq story is so, like totally boring. And just as with Afghanistan they will lose interest if they are distracted with a shiny new storyline. Therefore, I propose that Democrats take the gloves off immediately and accuse the Bushies of cutting and running the first time they try this crap.

The transfer is bullshit, of course. We own that place and every problem in it for gawd knows how long. So what? Nothing's going to change that reality no matter what the miserable failure does. We're going to have to clean up his mess.

So I say, make the case that little George is a snivelling coward who is running from his responsibilities (like he has all his life.) Call them the Cut 'n Run Administration. Start asking "Who lost Iraq?" Use their patented baiting techniques against them. Let's see if we can push Cheney and his sock puppet over the edge --- preferably on national TV.


Update: Ask and ye shall receive. Paul Krugman asks, "Who Lost Iraq?"





digby 6/28/2004 09:15:00 PM |

 
Studio Games

Via Salon I see that Disney has teamed up with the GOP front group protesting F911.

MOVE OVER MICHAEL MOORE

Disney & Move America Forward
Team Up to Show a Brighter Side of America

(SACRAMENTO) -- Move America Forward is teaming up with Walt Disney Pictures to present an exclusive screening of Disney's 'America's Heart & Soul' on Monday, June 28, 2004 at the Crest Theater in Sacramento, California. The private screening takes place at 1:00 PM and members of the news media are invited to attend. 'Americas Heart & Soul' opens in theaters nationwide on Friday, July 2nd.

Unlike the negative and misleading storyline of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," Disney's "America's Heart & Soul" features a collection of upbeat storylines of real life Americans who pursue their passions in a way that underscores what makes America a great nation.

I feel the need to express just the tiniest bit of skepticism about this little association.

Bob and Harvey Weinstein are two of Disney's most treasured assets, right up there with Minnie and Mickey. I don't know what their deal to buy the rights to F911 was, but I have little doubt that it was a well coordinated and happy acquisition for both sides. Let's just say that Bob and Harvey are masters at creating and then milking a controversy.

Methinks the wingnuts are being played.




digby 6/28/2004 08:08:00 PM |

 
Cookies Full Of Arsenic

Alterman says:

How interesting for SCLM fans that the alleged inaccuracies in Moore's movie (which I've not yet seen) appear to be considerably more upsetting to the mainstream than say, those in the president's State of the Union messages, press conferences and requests to Congress for the power to go to war with Iraq.

This isn't all that surprising, really. Mainstream pundits and journalists are creatures of show business more than anything else. Therefore, they are only really personally engaged when popular culture speaks to a topic.

The usual political debates are also part of show business, but they are more akin to sporting events, not straight entertainment, which is what provides that which pundits and journalists truly aspire to --- stardom. They observe and comment on the political sporting events, and sometimes they overtly identify with one team or another. But, for the most part they are personally competitive on the basis of celebrity and clout, not the substance of the debate. (Tim Russert appearing on Don Imus illustrates this point well, I think.)

Michael Moore is a succesful, award winning popular performer who crosses all the boundries of journalism, visual media, politics and fame that they consider their rightful turf. Worse, he takes the their show outside the stultifying environs of Sunday morning gasbaggery into date night at the multiplex. This is very threatening to them.

They are upset with Moore not because of the alleged inaccuracies about Bush and 9/11. Clearly, they do not care about such trifles. They are upset with Moore because he is more famous than they are.




Be sure to read Charles Pierce's review of the film at the same link. It's priceless.


Update: Brad DeLong has posted an incredibly interesting and in-depth analysis on the subject of the mighty presscorps that you all must read. Indeed, there is one passage that I believe makes my small point (much less rudely, of course.)

And by the end of the process of reporter-molding our reporter finds it bizarre and inexplicable that anybody actually cares about the substance of the issues. As one sentence from what Weisman wrote to me put it: "for someone who got the longest quote in my [Glenn] Hubbard profile, you mercilessly slammed me really good..." For Weisman, my annoyance at the fact that Weisman's Glenn Hubbard profile was substantively wrong is inexplicable and bizarre. I should, Weisman thinks, be friendly and grateful to him, for I "got the longest quote" in his article. And what sources really want is to be quoted at length in the Washington Post, right?

The idea that I would want the story to inform Americans about economic policy is simply not on his screen at all.

That's because these people aren't about journalism. They are about the sweet smell of success.




digby 6/28/2004 02:24:00 PM |

 
Where Do Those Terrorists Get Their Crazy Ideas?

The Saudi government beheaded 52 men and one woman last year for crimes including murder, homosexuality, armed robbery and drug trafficking. But Saudis say that while Islam condones the punishment in one context, it condemns militants who decapitated hostages here and in Iraq.

Islam permits the death penalty for certain crimes, but few mainstream Muslim scholars and observers believe beheadings are sanctioned by Sharia, or Islamic law.

The Saudi government says the punishment is sanctioned by Islamic tradition. State-ordered beheadings are performed in courtyards outside crowded mosques in major cities after weekly Friday prayer services.

A condemned convict is brought into the courtyard, hands tied, and forced to bow before an executioner, who swings a huge sword amid cries from onlookers of ''Allahu Akbar!'' Arabic for ''God is great.''

----


The grainy video, on an Islamist website linked to the al-Qaeda terror network, showed Berg being decapitated with a large knife by a group of masked men.

After the killing, shouts of "Allahu akbar" (God is great) are heard and the masked men then hold the head up to the camera. Berg's remains were found on Saturday by US troops along a road near Baghdad.

----

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States condemned as “criminal and inhuman” the decapitation in Iraq of American Nicholas Berg.

Speaking in Arabic on Wednesday to the Saudi media in Jiddah, the Saudi summer capital, Prince Bandar said the al-Zarqawi group, which took responsibility for the execution, was “a criminal, deviant and un-Islamic group allied with (Osama) bin Laden and the criminals of al-Qaida.”

Bandar said the group had also killed Muslims and Arabs for no reason.

“It is not out of character for them to commit acts that violate the teachings of Islam, a noble religion that deplores such acts,” Bandar said in response to questions from the Saudi media.

digby 6/28/2004 01:39:00 PM |

 
Burn That Weenie

Via Julia, weremensch informs us that when Republicans tell us to eat shit and die, they mean it quite literally:

It is a truth barely appreciated that government not only matters, but it is a matter of life and death that the right people run it. Lest you think that this is hyperbole, mosey on over to the USDA website and read their official release on the safety of deli meats and sausages. Yes, that's right; it is official government policy that ready to eat meat products, hot dogs, and etc are not fit for human consumption unless they are thoroughly cooked again. Listeria can kill you, and the USDA no longer stops companies from shipping products tainted with it.

[...]


How did these products get contaminated? By the simple action of allowing animal shit to contaminate the food after it was cooked. Yes, a plant so badly run that this is a reasonable possibility is perfectly acceptable under Bush and the GOP. You see, Reagan and Bush I slashed inspection procedures so badly that such undetected contamination was possible. Under Clinton, a rules change was pushed through (against absolute Republican opposition in Congress) to stop it. Uncooked animal shit was no longer going to be legal in school lunches (one of the main recipients of lunch meats, under a USDA program). Happily for the meat processing companies, the Republicans slowed the process so successfully that Congress was able to kill the new rules outright when Bush II took office (they hadn't been in the Federal Register long enough).

digby 6/28/2004 12:56:00 PM |

 
America Inc. Downgraded

Please tell me again why capitalists support Republicans? It has been shown time and again that the markets do better under Democrats. And, it's clear that Democratic administrations create a more broad based recovery from the inevitable downturns, which supports a stable, thriving middle class --- also good for the economy.

And with globalization being an unstoppable force, it's also logical that America's image is important to our ability to conduct business internationally. The most powerful nation on earth behaving like a petulant bully does not inspire confidence:

After 14 years of regular travel to Brazil, Andrew Odell was thunderstruck by what he found there on a trip last month. "I have never run into such a consensus view on US politics," says the contract negotiator and partner at Bryan Cave, a New York law firm. "People condemn the US [for its Middle East policy], and are frightened by the US."

[...]

I would say it creates a backlash for everybody in an interdependent world," says Bruce Patton, deputy director of the Harvard Negotiation Project in Cambridge, Mass. "If you're a really big kid and you don't lean over backward not to be coercive, people think you're a bully.... If you get what you want just because you can, they hate you for it."

That's what appears to be happening with America's image abroad. For example, only 15 percent of Indonesians felt somewhat favorable or very favorable toward the US, down from 61 percent a year earlier. The Roper survey of 30,000 people in 30 countries also found declines in non-Muslim countries: Russia, down 25 percentage points; France, down 20 points; Italy, down 10.

"Overseas, they perceive Americans as being aggressive and uncompromising," says Sheida Hodge, managing director of the cross-cultural division for Berlitz International in Princeton, N.J. Ms. Hodge spent the last half of 2003 on the road. "Everywhere I went I heard the same thing: 'Americans want to have their way.' The Japanese tell you; the Chinese tell you; the French tell you.

How that political concern translates to the bottom line is debatable. For the first time since RoperASW began tracking it in 1998, America's declining reputation was beginning to affect the appeal of US brands, its survey found.

The article indicates that the problem is still small and that most overseas consumers have not indicated any hostility to American brands. But, the problem does seem to be growing.

Unbelievably, there are some who believe that the neoconservative unilateralist bullying technique should work in business as well. This one's from Florida --- a Bush supporter, no doubt:

Instead of a softer stance, one emerging school of negotiating calls for tougher tactics. According to this view, the US is losing business because its win-win approach fails overseas.

"So often, especially where culture is used as a barrier, the excuse is that 'Well, it's our culture, so you have to give us something. It's our culture, so in order for you to do business here, you're going to have to compromise,' " says Jim Camp, a negotiating coach in Vero Beach, Fla., and author of the contrarian new book "Start with No."

Mr. Camp, who has worked with nearly 200 public- and private-sector clients, cites a major American supplier to the photographic-instruments industry. The firm ships large, expensive machines abroad to firms that rely on them to operate. That ought to provide some leverage, Camp says, but it doesn't.

"That American supplier has not had one year of profitability in the past nine years," he says. "They've had a win-win mind-set, and they've compromised away their margins of profit." The company, he says, has stayed in business by firing employees and outsourcing jobs.

Camp calls this a widespread syndrome. "It's shocking to me the number of people who won't even ask what the other side requires," he says. "Instead, they'll compromise before they even find out. They'll cut their price trying to get someone to like them.

Was it Deming who said, "negotiating is for pussies?" I can't remember.

I'm sure there is a nugget of truth in what he says. I have no doubt that some American businesses don't negotiate very well. But, the condescending attitude expressed in his comment about culture says it all. He's got the same disease as Cheney and Rumsfeld --- hubris.

I think we have plenty of evidence of how well this negotiating style works from the Republicans in congress. It's the Dick Cheney business model based upon the "go fuck yourself" principle. Very effective. Nothing is better for business than having your partners and customers hate you. After all, if they don't want to buy our crap we'll just invade their countries, kill their leaders and take everything they have. Simple.

Of course, if you aren't in a position to do that, your overseas customers might just decide to do business with a bunch of freedom-fries munchers in Old Europe. Or maybe even those smiling backstabbers in Asia.

But other dealmakers aren't panicked. Experts say that it's still about individual relationships built on mutual respect and trust. And anecdotes suggest that America may still have some goodwill to draw upon

[...]

"People can separate what they feel about the current administration's politics from their desire to do a deal," says Keffer.

For now. If the American people validate this administration by sending it back for another four years, those furriners may decide that Americans aren't the kind of people they want to do business with. If we elect politicians who don't honor treaties, agreements and alliances, why should anyone think we'd honor a contract?




digby 6/28/2004 12:10:00 PM |

Sunday, June 27, 2004

 
May I Have Some More Please?

Apparently, the NY Times just got its reporters brand new calculators/vanity mirrors because they seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time doing price checks on the Kerry campaign expenditures, barely able to contain their disgust at such conspicuous consumption:

John Kerry may be only a candidate for president, but he and his entourage travel like kings. A month ago, his campaign began chartering a gleaming 757, packed with first-class seats, fine food, sleeping accommodations - even a stand-up bar. They hardly shy away from fancy hotels, like the Four Seasons in Palm Beach and the St. Regis in Los Angeles.

Strangely, they weren't so appalled back in 2000 when the Bush campaign feted them in high style on the Enron jet. In fact, as Bob Sommerby incomparably pointed out, Margaret Carlson wrote in her book that it was the gorging on imported chocolates and expensive entres (as compared to the cold box lunches provided by that lying Philistine Al Gore) that created the positive brown nosing that passed for coverage of candidate Bush:

“There were Dove bars and designer water on demand,” she recalls, “and a bathroom stocked like Martha Stewart’s guest suite. Dinner at seven featured lobster ravioli.”

[...]

Gore wanted the snacks to be environmentally and nutritionally correct, but somehow granola bars ended up giving way to Fruit Roll-Ups and the sandwiches came wrapped and looked long past their sell-by date. On a lucky day, someone would remember to buy supermarket doughnuts. By contrast, a typical day of food on Air Bush…consisted of five meals with access to a sixth, if you count grazing at a cocktail bar. Breakfast one was French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon…

Memo to the Kerry campaign. Be sure to throw the animals some of those $36.00 sand dabs. They get much more pliable if you buy them off with expensive food and toiletries. They are, after all, whores.

But, don't kid yourselves. It will undoubtedly do only a tiny bit of good, if that. There's something about the special taste of Republican largesse that really turns them on. Perhaps it's the fact that they are required to take a little spanking with their lobster ravioli. (Imagine the revelry they could have enjoyed if multimillionaire Jack Ryan had ever run for president --- truffles 'n Dove bars 'n handcuffs, oh my! Another dream shattered.)

Whatever it is, don't expect too much from these people. As far as the media are concerned, rich or poor, northern or southern, Democratic candidates are lying, hypocritical scam artists and Republicans are hardworking, salt of the earth He-men. I doubt they are capable of changing that view no matter how much bearnaise sauce they have dripping from their chins.




digby 6/27/2004 12:12:00 PM |

 
Smackdown

In Today's LA Times, the new editorial page editor outlines (in devastating terms) The Disaster of Failed Policy:

In its scale and intent, President Bush's war against Iraq was something new and radical: a premeditated decision to invade, occupy and topple the government of a country that was no imminent threat to the United States. This was not a handful of GIs sent to overthrow Panamanian thug Manuel Noriega or to oust a new Marxist government in tiny Grenada. It was the dispatch of more than 100,000 U.S. troops to implement Bush's post-Sept. 11 doctrine of preemption, one whose dangers President John Quincy Adams understood when he said the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy."

[...]

The current president outlined a far more aggressive policy in a speech to the West Point graduating class in 2002, declaring that in the war on terror "we must take the battle to the enemy" and confront threats before they emerge. The Iraq war was intended as a monument to his new Bush Doctrine, which also posited that the U.S. would take what help was available from allies but would not be held back by them. It now stands as a monument to folly.

[...]

Two iconic pictures from Iraq balance the good and the dreadful — the toppling of Hussein's statue and a prisoner crawling on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison with a leash around his neck. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to a hero's welcome and a banner declaring "Mission Accomplished."

A year later, more than 90% of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave their country. The president boasted in July that if Iraqi resistance fighters thought they could attack U.S. forces, "bring them on." Since then, more than 400 personnel have been killed by hostile fire.

[...]

The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation's unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm's length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire.

It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world's most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans' memory banks.

Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.

Please read the whole thing, print it out and give it to anyone who dares tell you that the Empty Codpiece Doctrine should be used as anything but cat box filler.

Welcome To LA, Mr Kinsley.




digby 6/27/2004 09:32:00 AM |