Hullabaloo

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

 
"Anonymous" Is A Putz

Campaign Desk points out that Joe Klein is pulling things out of the ether:

Finally, there was the boorish and possibly unprecedented hooting of the President by Democrats during the [State of the Union] speech.

"No! No! No!" they shouted, inaccurately, when Bush asserted that the Social Security trust fund would, in a decade or so, start paying out more money than it takes in. If nothing is done, it surely will.

Campaign Desk correctly notes:

Beyond the fact that such "hooting" was far from unprecedented, Klein's short-term memory must be playing tricks on him. Democrats did not start crying out "No! No! No!" when the president asserted that the trust fund would soon start paying out more money than it takes in. Rather, the Democrats accurately started calling out "No! No! No!" when the president inaccurately asserted that "By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt." You can hear for yourself on the White House video of the address (Real Media or Windows Media) -- the moment in question is about 15 minutes into the speech.

You can also hear the boorish boos of Republicans when Clinton said in the 1997 address that we didn't need to change the constitution to balance the budget. (Little did we know then that the 90's GOP balanced budget amendment hobby horse was actually designed to stop themselves from bankrupting the country.)

Here's a nice little reminder from way back in 1999 of what the country was like in the days when our un-boorish representatives practiced civility and decency:

Reps. Robert Schaffer (R-Colo.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) sent a letter to colleagues last week arguing that they should skip the speech because Clinton "is demonstrating his lack of respect for the Congress and its legitimate role."

But Schaffer had few illusions that his absence would be noticed: "What happens tonight is Congress and the president coming together to send a message there's some semblance of normalcy in Washington, and the detestable conduct of the president is somehow tolerated," he said. "The president doesn't care and nobody cares. The theatrical production is going to go on unimpeded."

Klein, no doubt, was sitting in front of a camera somewhere that night, hunched over the desk like a slobbering beast, so intensely focused on Clinton's manly member that he simply didn't hear a thing.






digby 2/08/2005 03:35:00 PM |

 
Whodunnit

salto mortale thinks that the "very ill" Deep Throat might be....



I doubt it. Tools don't talk. But you never know.
digby 2/08/2005 01:20:00 PM |

 
It's Hard Work:

President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, will take on a wider role in developing and coordinating policy in the president's second term, the White House announced on Tuesday.

Rove, who was Bush's top political strategist during his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, will become a deputy White House chief of staff in charge of coordinating policy between the White House Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.

Funny, I thought that's what the president did.




digby 2/08/2005 11:31:00 AM |

Monday, February 07, 2005

 
Institutional Blindness

I hate to bring this up because it's so indelicate and all, but can someone explain to me again why we should rely on religion to restore the moral fabric of our nation and smite the pernicious influences of the kinky sex loving Hollywood liberals? I keep forgetting.




digby 2/07/2005 02:28:00 PM |

 
The Last Temptation

Matthew Yglesias points out the growing Putinization of the Republican Party as it again tries to shut down dissent with legal intimidation. That first amendment sure sticks in the craw of the people who are running our government.

The RNC letter reads:

"The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously makes reference to 'George Bush's planned Social Security benefit cuts of up to 46 percent to pay for private accounts ...' "

In his State of the Union address, the president said that "Social Security will not change in any way" for Americans 55 and older."

Yeah. He said a lot of things. And?

Apparently, at least one of the station owners said he would investigate the ad and if he determined it was false, he would pull it. (The indefatigable Josh Marshall proves that the Move-on ad in question is factually correct and deconstructs the RNC letter to expose the obfuscatory mumbo jumbo that actually proves the case. Jayzuz, these guys never give up.)

Might I suggest that the DNC lawyers send letters to the same stations asking them to issue a disclaimer every time President Bush says that social security is going "bankrupt" or "bust." Otherwise, somebody might get the idea that these media outlets were in the business of falsely and maliciously spreading misinformation about the status of the social security system.

With their usual up-is-downism, these are the same guys who claim that frivolous lawsuits are killing America. Evidently, it's only frivolous if somebody has been disabled for life. It's perfectly acceptable to use the courts to quell dissent.

Matt calls it Putinization. Neiwert calls it psuedo-fascism. I call it Republican totalitarianism. Whatever you call it, it's long past time that we started to speak out clearly about what is really happening here. Interestingly, some of the most pointed criticism of this nature is now coming from the right:

A reader alerted me to this fascinating article from this month's American Conservative in which yet another conservative goes off the reservation and utters the F word.

Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.

Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.

Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”

[...]

But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”

[...]

The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never imagined possible.

Stern is an expert on the rise of fascism in Europe. Here are some of his remarks upon receiving the Leo Baeck medal:

...the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.

We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism—left with that all-consuming, complex question: how could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe?—should remember that even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of future generations. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and they, too, were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.

Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.

Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.

German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

digby 2/07/2005 01:07:00 PM |

 
Jeebus H. Christ

Because the -- all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those -- changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be -- or closer delivered to what has been promised.

'Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the -- like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate -- the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those -- if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.

'Okay, better? I'll keep working on it.'

I'm sure the hand-picked audience broke into rapturous cheers and began drooling and speaking in tongues as they always do when in the presence of Dear Leader. However, those who are not members of the Codpiece Cult might be expected to stay implanted on the reservation if they see this "explanation." If any ads are done, this might be a good little piece of political theatre to show to the non-indoctrinated.

Via Salon.com Politics:




digby 2/07/2005 11:33:00 AM |

 
Believing His Own Hype

I wrote a post a while back musing about Bush's newfound confidence:

This is the big story of the second term. Bush himself is now completely in charge. He did what his old man couldn't do. He has been freed of all constraints, all humility and all sense of proportion. Nobody can run him, not Cheney, not Condi, not Card. He has a sense of his power that he didn't have before. You can see it. From now on nobody can tell him nothin. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn't it?

Today, I ran across a post by Yuval Rubenstein on the Left Coaster who points to this interesting article (via Gilliard) that discusses Bush's determination to destroy SS:

During the 2000 campaign, then-Texas Gov. Bush overruled his horrified political handlers and insisted on pressing for Social Security privatization - particularly when speaking to Florida's millions of geriatric voters.

To this day, Bush adamantly believes the issue was a political plus for him in Florida - a contention considered pollyannaish by many of his closest aides.

Some, in fact, say if he had kept quiet about tinkering with the most sacred of all domestic political cows, Bush would have won the Sunshine State easily, instead of needing the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold his 537-vote victory.

"He still thinks it helped him then," a senior Bush political adviser remembered. "We all still think he's crazy."

Bush keeps reassuring legislators that it's safe for them to vote for privatization because he ran and "won" on the issue. This report explains why he thinks that. He made the call to talk about it in 2000 and he "won" despite his handlers advice that it was dangerous. Therefore, everyone can feel safe (if they can manage to get the Supreme Court to decide the election for them.)

We know that the butterfly ballots would have tipped that election and if Bush was pushing privatization in Palm Beach County Florida, it would have been right and fair if he'd lost it just for that reason. Nothing could be more stupid. Except, perhaps, trying to actually do it.


I had been giving a lot of thought as to why he thought he could get away with destroying social security after two such narrow wins and small majorities in congress. They own the real estate for sure, but they are far from having a mandate for massive change. Even Tom Delay has been reported to be nervous that this will derail their majority.

Certainly, the polls do not show the kind of support that is normally needed to affect such a huge change:

1. Bush receives a 34 percent approval rating on handling Social Security, with 52 percent diapproval. And among independents, his rating is markedly worse: a mere 23 percent approval and 59 percent disapproval.

2. A question on the seriousness of the problems with Social Security yields just 18 percent saying the system needs to be completely rebuilt (12 percent among independents), with 33 percent saying major changes are needed and 43 percent calling for only minor changes.

3. By 61-29 (66-21 among independents), voters say that keeping Social Security as a program with a guaranteed monthly benefit is more important than letting younger workers decide for themselves how some of their Social Security contributions are invested, with varying benefit levels depending on the success of their investments.

4. By 61-24 (66-16 among independents), voters say Bush's November election victory does not mean the American people support his ideas on Social Security.

5. By 54-42 (61-33 among independents), voters say they would not be likely to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market if they were allowed to do so.

6. By 50-33 (53-25 among independents), voters say they "disapprove of proposals to incorporate personal accounts into the Social Security program". (Interestingly, despite the Republicans' now-religious belief that saying "personal accounts" rather than "private accounts" somehow makes these accounts much more attractive, the half-sample that was asked this same question with private accounts substituted for personal accounts actually had a slightly less disapproving reaction.)

Those numbers put an absolute lie to Bush's assertion that he "ran and won" on the SS privatization issue. Clearly, he did not.

But, his natural arrogance and tendency to listen to courtiers who flatter his ego means that he sees his narrow win in 2004 as a mandate to dismantle the New Deal. And it appears that he has completely misinterpreted the lessons of his "win" in 2000. He believes that defying the experts on the social security issue has already proven him to be a man of great courage and political instincts that far surpass those who would advise against it.

I suspect strongly that putting social security at the top of the agenda was Bush's call. He really believes that he "won" on the issue and interprets that to mean that he has the support of the American people no matter what the polls, the experts or even other Republicans say.

Both Napoleon and Hitler thought they could invade Russia in the winter, too.



digby 2/07/2005 10:02:00 AM |

Sunday, February 06, 2005

 
Witnessing History

Kevin Drum nicely deconstructs this tiresome Ward Churchill witch hunt. I realize that we soulless, decaying leftists are supposed to step up and repudiate him (or maybe tie him up and throw him in water to see if he floats) but I'm just too tired. Since I'd never heard of the guy before the right raised him to the status of leftwing icon I don't really feel like I have much of a stake in his allegedly treasonous three year old book. Anyway, I'm still busy disavowing Jane Fonda and and Joseph Stalin, my personal role models.

Kevin ran a lexis search on the story and concludes that it really took off when the NY Times picked up the story after the right wing noise machine had slavered over it like a bunch of Atkins dieters with a big bowl of bacon grease. It has been blazing since January 27th when Drudge first trumpeted the story and the next day when Rush and O'Reilly both held forth on the topic. By the time the NY Times wrote its piece, it was already known and believed by tens of millions of people --- which means they had to write about it; "it was out there!"

Kevin thinks it's fascinating how an obscure story like this finds it's way into the mainstream, but it's much more than fascinating. It's pernicious. This is also how lies and smears are spread and validated and there is almost no way to tell the difference anymore between a valid story and a right wing feeding frenzy. It's supremely ironic that the minute the "liberal" NY Times decides to engage, even if it refutes the allegations and sets the record straight, it helps spreads the story everywhere because of its massive influence. Its mere entry into the discourse helps turn a contrived right wing smear job into a national scandal and puts one more nail in the coffin of truth and objective reality. Once people hear what they want to hear, it doesn't matter if it's been debunked as a total fraud. They'll continue to believe it:

People Believe a 'Fact'That Fits Their Views Even if It's Clearly False


Funny thing, memory. With the second anniversary next month of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it's only natural that supporters as well as opponents of the war will be reliving the many searing moments of those first weeks of battle.

The rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch. U.S. troops firing at a van approaching a Baghdad checkpoint and killing seven women and children. A suicide bomber nearing a Najaf checkpoint and blowing up U.S. soldiers. The execution of coalition POWs by Iraqis. The civilian uprising in Basra against Saddam's Baathist party.

If you remember it well, then we have grist for another verse for Lerner and Loewe ("We met at nine," "We met at eight," "I was on time," "No, you were late." "Ah yes, I remember it well!"). The first three events occurred. The second two were products of the fog of war: After being reported by the media, both were quickly retracted by coalition authorities as erroneous.

Yet retracting a report isn't the same as erasing it from people's memories. According to an international study to be published next month, Americans tend to believe that the last two events occurred -- even when they recall the retraction or correction.[emphasis added] In contrast, Germans and Australians who recall the retraction discount the misinformation. It isn't that Germans and Australians are smarter. Instead, it's further evidence that what we remember depends on what we believe.

"People build mental models," explains Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor at the University of Western Australia, Crawley, who led the study that will be published in Psychological Science. "By the time they receive a retraction, the original misinformation has already become an integral part of that mental model, or world view, and disregarding it would leave the world view a shambles." Therefore, he and his colleagues conclude in their paper, "People continue to rely on misinformation even if they demonstrably remember and understand a subsequent retraction."

[...]

"People who were not suspicious of the motives behind the war continued to rely on misinformation," Prof. Lewandowsky said, "believing in things they know to have been retracted." They held fast to what they had originally heard "because it fits with their mental model," which people seek to retain "whatever it takes."

This is where the right wing noise machine is really powerful. They create the "mental model" and then hammer it home day after day after day. People exposed to this mental model are told that the MSM is biased and that liberals are traitors and cowards. You have respected bloggers like Instapundit saying things like:

There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn't a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

while radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh says:

I mean, if there is a party that's soulless, it's the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals -- by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know?

And then there is something like this coming from a mainstream opinion writer and television pundit Fred Barnes:

At his news conference last week, Bush reacted calmly to their [Democrats] vitriolic attacks, suggesting only a few Democrats are involved. Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what's permissible and what's out of bounds in dissent on Iraq.

These statements are not made on rare occasions. This is the ongoing "mental model" that is being promulgated day after day after day by highly successful opinion makers in media both new and old. Bloggers like Instapundit are considered mainstream and thoughtful, not bomb throwing partisans. He is linked approvingly by many establishment web sites and works for MSBNC. After all, he's not saying anything unusual.

Neither is Limbaugh. MSM media critic Howard Kurtz said, "Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He's so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage."

So when these mainstream voices say that Ward Churchill represents the left with his obscure unknown thesis that the 9/11 victims were complicit in their own deaths, the view that the left is soulless is not difficult to accept. See how that works?

And, of course, the true irony is that all this breast beating and calls for dismissal and censorship comes on the heels of years of braying about political correctness in academia squelching free speech and dissenting points of view. It seems like only yesterday that I was reading conservative intellectuals like Walter Williams saying universities are "the equivalent of the Nazi brownshirt thought-control movement" and Paul Hollander calling it "the most widespread form of institutionalized intolerance in American higher education." (I won't even mention that champion of intellectual diversity David Horowitz.) Well now, it would appear that "political correctness vs academic freedom" comes in all flavors.

And it's always a-ok for mainstream, influential intellectuals like Frank "cakewalk" Gaffney to say things like "The U.N. is a hateful and anti-Semitic mobocracy" or Michael Ledeen to publicly float a theory that 9/11 was the result of a "Franco-German strategy ...based on using Arab and Islamic extremism and terrorism as the weapon of choice, and the United Nations as the straitjacket for blocking a decisive response from the United States." These inflammatory statements at a time of great global unease are not repudiated by anyone. Indeed, such dangerous rabble rousing is completely accepted and in some cases endorsed by the Republican establishment. No one questinos whether such statements might endanger American security or its stated foreign policy. Indeed, one is left to ponder whether it might actually be American foreign policy, considering the fact that those who write these screeds are welcome in the White House.

And that brings us to the crucial difference between Ward Churchill's politically incorrect ravings and Gaffney, Ledeen and Williams' politically incorrect ravings --- the latter are powerful, well known intellectuals in the conservative movement who are on the inside of government policymaking at the highest reaches. Churchill on the other hand is a nobody.

Liberals have nothing to apologise for. Indeed, intellectual honesty requires that we do not. These conservative critics' facts are wrong and their analysis is self-serving. They have concocted a "mental model" that is designed to marginalize and intimidate those who speak out against them. I'm not talking about obscure college professors with eccentric views. I'm talking about average Americans with mainstream views that don't hew exactly to the Republican party line who are now viewed with suspicion as UnAmerican by association with this leftist chimera that sides with terrorists.

There has been some very interesting thinking on this the last week in the blogosphere. If you haven't read it already, I especially recommend Max Sawicky's pithy analysis:

...the Right doesn't cast slurs on people because they are communist, anti-American, or cross some line of non-radical, patriotic acceptability. It casts slurs indiscriminately as a routine task of political warfare. That's why they lump people like Ward Churchill with for god's sakes Teddy Kennedy or Howard Zinn. They're not using a faulty litmus test. They are trying to destroy political criticism.

This is absolutely correct. Someone asked me if I believe that conservatives are acting in good faith when they say things like this:

The Belmont Club: "One could hardly expect that the end of the Cold War, the decline of Europe, the ascendancy of India and China, the collapse of the UN and the advent of terrorism would leave political relations between Left and Right unchanged. But it was the declining vigor of Marxist thought coupled with new conservative ideas that poured the most fuel on the flames. Discourse between Left and Right could only remain civil for so long as Conservatives remained meek or had no counter-pulpit. . . The weakening of the traditional media and the stresses caused by war have created a kind of 'play' in the system which now allow unchained weights to crash about. What has changed is that, with the decline of the MSM, there is nothing which prevents incivility from becoming a two-way street. And I'm not sure either the Left or the total system can contain the stress."

I have no way of knowing if this person sincerely believes that the decline of civil discourse in our politics can be pegged to world events and their supposed galvanizing effect on the right to finally defend itself against a failing Marxist left. I do know that it does not square with the facts or history. The Republicans have been throwing rhetorical nuclear bombs our way and getting away with it for decades. This harsh, no holds barred rhetorical style was ushered into the modern era by Newt Gingrich and other movement conservatives in the 1980's. It was a conscious, tactical decision designed to intimidate.

From a 1989 article about Gingrich in Vanity Fair:

Gingrich, the new face, quickly recognized an opportunity. The House, which limits the length of debate over legislation, has a rule allowing so-called special orders --permission to give lengthy speeches at the end of each legislative day. These have long been a means by which congressman could read into the Congressional Record various matters of importance to their constituents, usually matters of trivia. But Gingrich, concerned less with the Record than with the potential television audience, began to use special orders regularly as his platform for advancing ideas and, especially, for attacking the Democratic majority.

At first, his approach gave the impression that he was a brave young crusader, taking on the opposition in heated floor encounters, but, in truth, most of his diatribes were delivered before a virtually empty House. When, in 1984, he escalated his attack on Democrats to the point of questioning their patriotism-- accusing them of being "blind to Communism" --Speaker O'Neill lost his cool. In a legendary head-to-head encounter on the floor of the House, the Speaker blasted Gingrich : "You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I've ever seen in my thirty-two years in Congress."

That was 21 years ago. These incendiary insults to Democrats' patriotism did not begin on 9/11. Gingrich went on to institutionalize the demonization of liberals as a political tactic with his "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control."

If some people are unaware of that or have salved their consciences by creating a myth that today's harsh political climate was the result of external events, is no excuse. This scorched earth style of politics was quite deliberately put into play for political gain. If these true believers have convinced themselves that the right wing has been meek and mild until it had to bravely step foward and defend the country against terrorists, a little google trip through the 90's would surely cure that misapprehension.

And I frankly do not see why they should be given any consideration for their sincere belief in a toxic political strategy that wants to see people like me silenced and this country changed in ways that will make it unrecognizable. Shame on them for their unwillingness to step in and take responsibility for what they've wrought.

Shame on anyone who says that this is not the history of the last 25 years. I was a witness. I know what happened.







digby 2/06/2005 09:22:00 AM |

Friday, February 04, 2005

 
Cheater

You'd think that the story of a president who cannot appear in a 90 minute debate without the help of an electronic transmitter to feed him his answers would be worthy of reporting in a major newspaper if they had the goods.

What is truly scary about this is that even despite the help, he sounded extremely stupid and unprepared. This is the man with his finger on the button. The NY Times had excellent evidence that he had cheated in the debates and they punted. What would it have taken for the press to feel it was important to reveal this to the public, Bush screaming into his tie "Turd Blossom, I'm dyin' out here?"

Link via Suburban Guerilla




digby 2/04/2005 09:29:00 PM |

 
Star Power

So Dean is going to be chair. Bobo Brooks just said that he was a bit too "secular" and "strident." Oh my goodness, have we made a big mistake in not electing a santimonious wimp? I always get so worried when we don't take the GOP's sincere advice about such things.

Look, one of the biggest problems the Democrats are going to have over the next three years is getting the attention of the media. Media Matters has documented the over representation of Republicans on the cable gasbag shows and it's truly alarming. And the liberals they do invite are often boring and ill prepared compared to the more "strident and religious" Republicans.

This is a huge problem. One of the reasons, I believe, that Bill Clinton was able to succeed was because he had a very high Q rating. (Don't hassle me, readers, about using this obnoxious term. It's relevant whether we like it or not.) He has tremendous personal charisma and he performed a high wire political act that was irresistable to the media. And it helped us get our message out, even when he was taking a lot of heat.

Howard Dean is like that in his own way. He creates a stir; you never know quite what's going to happen. He fascinates the media and they will be paying very close attention. I don't doubt that he will be undisciplined at times and create some trouble, but he will be visible. And every time the media calls on him is another chance for him to pound home our message.

Right now the biggest danger for Democrats is that we are becoming media ciphers. It's not that we don't have some power in DC. The social security debate shows that we can affect the process if we stand together. But as far as the country is concerned we are becoming invisible and we have to deal with that if we are to compete.

They are going to slam us no matter what we do. Dean, as a fascinating political figure, will be invited to personally respond. And he tends to do it memorably. It's a mistake to underrate that talent.




digby 2/04/2005 07:42:00 PM |

 
Very Slick

Update on the DOD payola scandal from below:

Here's one of the fake news sites:

This is quite amusing:

... media standards are also at stake. The eagerness of some media organisations to repeat sensationalistic rumors without verification has raised serious concerns about journalistic standards at a time when Turkey -- which hopes to receive a date for starting EU membership negotiations at the Union's summit later this month -- is anxious to demonstrate how far it has progressed.

.

Delicious. A DOD front site from "eastern europe" using "media standards" to issue a veiled threat about Turkey's admission to the EU. Awesome.




digby 2/04/2005 02:50:00 PM |

 
Will He Certify That It Is Accurate

Reader W sent in this interesting observation by one of Mark Kleiman's readers:

Did you notice that our esteemed President essentially committed securities fraud in representing that private investment accounts WILL perform better than anything the present system could do? Certainly, no one can honestly make that statement and any stockbroker making such a statement would be violating Rule 10b 5 of the Securities Act of 1934.

To which Kleiman added:

Which reminds me of my favorite snarky policy suggestion: How about applying the Sarbanes-Oxley certification process to budget submissions and other communications from the Executive to Congress or the public? Someone ought to be prepared to say about each submission, "Yes, I understand what's in this document, and certify that it is accurate."

This is another good line of argument. I think it hits a certain common sense chord to say that the president is overselling the market, especially right now. People just went through a very thorough retrenchment with their 401k's and are very well aware that the market does not always go up. We should force the Republicans to explain why people should feel confident that they are guaranteed to make more money in the market as Bush says they will. And after they sputter their bromides about the long term gains in the last 70 years, blah,blah,blah, perhaps the Democratic spokesperson or legislator ought to turn around and say "everyone knows past performance is no guarantor of future returns. It's the most basic and essential disclaimer given by anyone who works with stocks and bonds."

Since we are talking about exposing millions of retirees to the stock market, shouldn't the president be willing to apply the same rules to himself and certify his proposal with the standard Oxley-Sarbanes disclaimer: "Yes, I understand what's in this document, and certify that it is accurate."

It would be an interesting television moment anyway.




digby 2/04/2005 01:56:00 PM |

 
DOD Payola

I think that CNN just reported that the DOD paid hundreds of "writers" to write for fake web sites. We're not sure just who is involved though. (Wanna guess?)

My stars. Can it be true? Our government is using propaganda to influence foreigners? Say it ain't so. Somebody get Jeff Jarvis some smelling salts, stat. He's going to swoon the minute he hears about this...


Here's the story:

Pentagon sites: Journalism or propaganda?

From Barbara Starr and Larry Shaughnessy
CNN


WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. Department of Defense plans to add more sites on the Internet to provide information to a global audience -- but critics question whether the Pentagon is violating President Bush's pledge not to pay journalists to promote his policies.

The Defense Department runs two Web sites overseas, one aimed at people in the Balkan region in Europe, the other for the Maghreb area of North Africa.

It is preparing another site, even as the Pentagon inspector general investigates whether the sites are appropriate.

The Web sites carry stories on subjects such as politics, sports and entertainment.

Information warfare

The sites are run by U.S. military troops trained in "information warfare," a specialty than can include battlefield deception.

Pentagon officials say the goal is to counter "misinformation" about the United States in overseas media.

At first glance, the Web pages appear to be independent news sites. To find out who is actually behind the content, a visitor would have to click on a small link -- at the bottom of the page -- to a disclaimer, which says, in part, that the site is "sponsored by" the U.S. Department of Defense.

"There is an element of deception," said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "The problem," he said, is that it looks like a news site unless a visitor looks at the disclaimer, which is "sort of oblique."

The Pentagon maintains that the information on the sites is true and accurate. But in a recent memo, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz insisted that the Web site contractor should only hire journalists who "will not reflect discredit on the U.S. government."

The Defense Department has hired more than 50 freelance writers for the sites.

Some senior military officers have told CNN the Web sites may clash with President Bush's recent statements. "We will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda," Bush told reporters on January 26. "Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet."

Bush made those comments after it came to light that the administration had paid several commentators to support U.S. policies in the U.S. media.

Many Democrats have called for an end to what they call administration propaganda within the United States.

But many lawmakers view the rules for handling information overseas as a separate issue.

On Thursday, Lawrence Di Rita, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, asked the Pentagon inspector general to examine Defense Department activities, including the Web sites in question, to see that they fall within the guidelines Bush laid out.

Di Rita said the department wanted "to make sure that we are staying well within the lines, and I believe we are."

Rosenstiel said there is a reason why rules exist to separate journalism from government information. "Anytime that the government has to assure you, 'Believe me, take my word for it, I'm telling you nothing but the truth,' you know you should be worried," he said.

According to Powerline, it's CNN who is guilty of propaganda:

When Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, groundlessly slanders the American armed forces by accusing them of "targeting" journalists for assassination, one could reasonably wonder whether he was engaged in journalism or propaganda. Many have also been wondering when the news side at CNN--as opposed to the public relations side--would start reporting on Jordan's incendiary speech in Davos.

A reader pointed out that earlier today, CNN finally did address the issue of journalism vs. propaganda. You might think they've finally broken their silence about Mr. Jordan. But no! It's the Pentagon CNN is accusing of putting out propaganda

[...]

There you have it: CNN spreads misinformation about the American military; but when the military tries to defend itself against misinformation, it's "propaganda." And, while it's perfectly OK for CNN's top newsman to "reflect discredit on the U.S. government," CNN criticizes the Defense Department because DOD prefers not to do the same. This is the topsy-turvy world of the mainstream media.

Hohkay. Except, you know, government propaganda is a slightly different animal, isn't it? The DOD is perfectly within its rights to put up a web site defending against misinformation. But these web sites are designed to look like "news sites" that are giving unbiased information. Call me crazy, but that just doesn't seem like an upfront operation.

And it certainly will be interesting to see who these taxpayer funded "freelance" writers are, won't it?

And whatever stupid thing Eason Jordan said, it doesn't really fit the term "propaganda" very well. I'm sure they'll say (absurdly) that it reflects the hatred of all things military in the liberal media, but unless there is a systematic intention to portray the military as assasinating journalists, then it's really more of an off the cuff remark than actual propaganda. And, you know, it's really hard to take seriously anyone who decries propaganda when Republican mouthpieces like Rush Limbaugh are out there spewing eliminationist rhetoric about liberals to 20 million ditto-heads all day long.




digby 2/04/2005 01:38:00 PM |

 
Modern Scalawags

Let's face facts. The extremely dishonest approach that the Republicans are taking to bring African Americans on board with their privatized personal retirement plan is just downright racist. I'm sure that the creationist right believes that the fact black men don't live as long as whites is God's intention but the truth is that they wouldn't die younger if it weren't for poverty, disease and crime which are immoral reasons in a rich country such as ours. It's bad enough that this is happening today, but the administration is selling the idea as something that will continue for at least the next forty years as a selling point for destroying social security. It's is another case of their outrageous pomo up-is-downism.

Farhad Manjoo has written a definitive piece on this issue for Salon (cute day pass today) in which he points out that the slack jawed media has gulped down the entire meme and is regurgitating it whole:

The idea that blacks are being cheated by Social Security could prove to be a powerful rhetorical weapon for Republicans. Already, the media is falling for the story line. CNN, for example, broadcast a heart-tugging story Thursday that focused on the plight of the dependents of African-Americans who die young. The network interviewed Barbara Haile, a black woman whose husband died of cancer in 1997. He was 50 at the time of his death; through payroll taxes, he'd been contributing to Social Security for about 30 years. But because he hadn't reached retirement age, neither he (nor his dependents) were eligible to receive any money from Social Security.

Under the Bush plan, conservatives say, Haile would have been eligible to receive the money that her husband had been collecting in his "personal account," invested in the stock market. Because blacks (especially black men) have lower average life expectancies than whites (especially white women), the current system is unfair to them, Republicans contend, and private accounts would be a boon for them. Although CNN did interview supporters of the current system, the emotional upshot of its report was clear: Social Security screws poor black people and President Bush wants to help them out.

There's another side to this,too:

Anti-Social Security agitators such as Stephen Moore, who heads the Free Enterprise Fund, have taken to calling Social Security a "massive income redistribution program" that sucks money out of African-Americans' pockets and spits it out to whites.

Agitator is the right word. The African American constituency isn't going to fall for this nonsense. They've been handed this kind of flim-flam many times before and they are much too savvy to trust rich white men who try to dazzle them with BS. This stuff goes back a long, long way. Despite the fact that the history of reconstruction has been rightly revised to show that the "scalawags" of the era were not all despicable opportunists as they had been portrayed by southern apologists, it is true that there were southerners who used the newly freed slaves for their own political and profitable enterprises. Many African Americans may have been naive enough to believe their phony pitch one hundred years ago, but they aren't naive anymore. Stephen Moore is spitting into the wind if he thinks black Americans can't see through his little shuck and jive.

And they also aren't idiots. They know that grandma needs that check:

In a Social Security briefing paper, Shelton declares that "almost 80 percent of African Americans over age 65 depend on Social Security for more than half of their income, and more than half rely on it for 90 percent or more of their income." Basically, he writes, "without the guaranteed Social Security benefits they receive today, the poverty rate among older African Americans would more than double, pushing most African American seniors into squalor and poverty during their most vulnerable years."

But the main problem with the Republicans' argument that private accounts would be better for blacks than the current system is not that it's economically wrong. It's that it's gravely pessimistic. As the president took pains to point out in his State of the Union address, Social Security reform won't affect today's generation of retirees; it will benefit today's young people, who will retire 30 or 40 years from now. By that reasoning, conservatives are conceding that blacks will die young not only now but 40 years from now. Apparently, they aren't concerned about working to ensure that young African-Americans live as long and healthy lives as today's young white people.

Of course, that's because the main purpose of this phony sales pitch isn't really to gain the support of African Americans at all. These modern scalawags hope to gain the support of a few African Americans so that they can use their image to portray their plan as helping poor people.

This is racist on a number of levels, not the least of which is that the Bush administration has made a fetish of portraying themselves as "compassionate" toward the poor with images of adorable black children and high level tokenism. They know very well that the African American community is the most reliably Democratic constituency in the nation. They are not actually making a play for their votes. Their bogus imagery is racist because it has no substance in policy terms and is actually aimed at white suburban voters who mistrust the southern red-neck edge that defines the sound of the modern GOP.

This Social Security marketing campaign, however, takes it to an unprecedented level. The Republicans are trying to convince their suburban white voters that because blacks tend to die young from social causes (which they don't intend to fix,) they will be "helping" poor blacks if they vote for a privatization scheme (that will cut their guaranteed benefits.) It just doesn't get any more cynical than using white Americans' compassion to hurt black Americans --- or perhaps using phony white compassion to excuse hurting black Americans. This is low, even for them.

Here's a little Rovian epistemic relativism for all those staunch Republican southern heritage and new confederacy types to have fun sorting out:

Today's Republicans are modern scalawags who use blacks to get rich northern white votes. And just like the bad old days, you poor white fellas are going to get screwed too. Which side are you on, boys?




digby 2/04/2005 11:57:00 AM |

 
Breathe In A Big Ole Whiff 'O Freedom 'N Liberty

In one hearing that led up to Monday's decision, Judge Green attempted to see how broadly the government viewed its power to hold detainees. Administration lawyers told her, in response to a hypothetical question, that they believed the president would even have the right to lock up "a little old lady from Switzerland" for the duration of the war on terror if she had written checks to a charity that she believed helped orphans, but that actually was a front for Al Qaeda.

digby 2/04/2005 09:18:00 AM |

Thursday, February 03, 2005

 
Mr McBobo

Tom Tomorrow has his number.




digby 2/03/2005 07:16:00 PM |

 
Road Trip

For those of you who are cocooned in the urban conclaves of the Blue state liberal elite, here's an interesting film series on Truthout by talented guerilla filmmaker Chris Hume (who I knew in a former life) called "Red State Roadtrip."

Seeing as the Red States cover a lot of ground, many of you liberal Red Staters might get a kick out of it too. This country is incredibly diverse yet we are all so familiar...




digby 2/03/2005 06:57:00 PM |

 
A Bold New Plan

May I just make one little observation that seems to have escaped those who believe that Democrats should offer an alternative to the Preznit's Personal Privatized Individual Retirement Account Security plan? We already are offering an alternative. It's called Social Security. And we have reams of data about how well it works and how well the experts believe it is going to work in the future.

If the Democrats were as willing as Republicans to present a competing discourse to the public and call it "reality" we would simply take Roosevelts plan with all the added tweaking over the years and present it as our "bold, new" alternative saying that it will cover all retirees AND we will be able to add in death benefits and disability payments too! And you won't have to do anything but let your employer deduct the same amount its already deducting from your check! This is the step forward we've been waiting for! We'll call it... Super Social Security 2.0.

I think our "alternative" is very marketable. After all, we have 45 million customers right now. Let's just let them tell the nation how much they like it and propose that everybody should get the same thing. Our new and improved Super Social Security is the innovation everybody's been waiting for. Order yours today.




digby 2/03/2005 01:43:00 PM |

 
IOKIYAR

This pearl clutching about Bush being booed last night is hilarious. The following incidents don't even discuss the 1998 SOTU when the Republicans were in the midst of their witch trial and a large contingent refused to attend. The president received fellatio and was, therefore, too tainted to be in the presence of the little old lady circle jerk and tatting society known as the GOP. Those who bothered to come booed him.

1999: Republicans Booed Clinton's Entrance Many Republican lawmakers gave him a cool, though not impolite, reception. There were a smattering of boos when Clinton first entered the House chamber, but they were quickly drowned out by applause. Some Republicans barely applauded, or refused at all to clap. House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) and U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) were conspicuously silent. [Boston Herald, 1/20/99]

1998: Republicans Booed Clinton's Medicare Proposal
Clinton's health-care initiatives, chiefly in the form of a medical bill of rights, found support on both sides, especially his attack on managed-care health-care plans. ... Clinton's proposal to expand Medicare to allow Americans as young as 55 to buy into the system drew shouts of "no" and some boos from Republicans during his speech. [Chicago Tribune, 1/28/98]

1997: Republican's Booed Clinton's Opposition to the Balanced Budget Amendment The Republican response was far warmer than perhaps any of Clinton's previous four State of the Union speeches. Time after time, Republicans jumped to their feet to join Democrats in applauding the president. Only once did they unmistakably and collectively show their disapproval--when Clinton spoke disparagingly of a GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment to balance the budget. Many Republicans hissed and some booed. [LA Times,2/5/97]

1995: Republicans Booed Clinton and Walked Out During Speech
The upheaval wrought by the Republican election landslide was visible throughout the president's State of the Union address - from the moment Speaker Newt Gingrich took the gavel to the striking silence that often greeted Clinton from the GOP. At one point, Republicans even booed. About 20 of them left as Clinton went on and on for an hour and 20 minutes. [AP,
1/24/95]

The little Claude Raines act they are pulling right now deserves as much derision as we can possibly muster. The Republicans can either call for the smelling salts every time the Democrats get combative or they can be the biggest swinging dicks in town. We shouldn't let them have it both ways.

When they act like little old ladies we should deride them for being delicate little flowers who can't play hardball. When they act like thugs we should haul out the phony sanctimony and call them on their uncivilized behavior. Two can play at this game.




digby 2/03/2005 01:04:00 PM |

 
Rahther-gate

The Poorman noticed something that struck me as odd, as well. The Preznit kept saying "rahther" rather than "rather" during his speech last night. There were times he sounded like Madonna during her kabuki period. Or maybe he was doing a Shirley Mclain and actually trying to channel FDR instead of just using his rhetoric to destroy his programs.

I realize that Dear Leader is beyond reproach and all, but don't you suppose that an All American Nascar Dad or two had a fleeting moment when they wondered why their straight talking cowpoke had turned into Queen Elizabeth?




digby 2/03/2005 11:36:00 AM |

 
Making It Up

Not that it matters, because the spin is firmly emplanted in the public's mind that the Iraq election turnout was phenomenal, but Editor and Publisher shows that the reports are very likely to have been wildly off the mark. Imagine my surprise.

I'll be delighted if the turnout figure, when it is officially announced, exceeds the dubious numbers already enshrined by much of the media. But don't be surprised if it falls a bit short. The point is: Nobody knows, and reporters and pundits should stop acting like they do know when they say, flatly, that 8 million Iraqis voted and that this represents a turnout rate of about 60%.

Carl Bialik, who writes the Numbers Guy column for Wall Street Journal Online, calls this "a great question ... how the journalists can know these numbers -- when so many of them aren't able to venture out all over that country." Speaking to E&P on Wednesday, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post -- one of the few mainstream journalists to raise questions about the turnout percentage -- referred to the "fuzzy math" at the heart of it.

[...]

"Election officials concede they did not have a reliable baseline on which to calculate turnout," Kurtz concluded.

He also quoted Democratic strategist Robert Weiner as saying: "It's an amazing media error, a huge blunder. I'm sure the Bush administration is thrilled by this spin."

They spun it and the media gladly got spun because it was one of those hallmark card stories that makes Wolf and Kira and Chris just feel so damned good about themselves. Every once in while they need a narrative that allows them to believe that they are part of something gosh darned wonderful.

As I watched the news shows last Sunday, I was struck by the lockstep maudlin sentimentality of the coverage --- a sure sign that it is complete bullshit. Apparently, the word went forth that the tone was to be "proud parents" --- America herself had just birthed the Iraq democracy in the back of a humvee. The purple thumbs evoked a collective "awwww" as if the Iraqi voters were sheet swaddled newborn babes or a big ole pile 'o kittens.

One of the most disturbing (and embarrassing) aspects of this entire enterprise is the air of cultural superiority emanating from Americans as we enlighten the primitives, dahling. This coming from a country that produces a president who says things like:

"We're still being challenged in Iraq and the reason why is a free Iraq will be a major defeat in the cause of freedom." —George W. Bush, Charlotte, N.C., April 5, 2004

Yeah, we're very superior people. And we re-elected him too.

Update: Attaturk is on this one too:

Well, the enablers of the so called liberal media have worked their wonders to make sure that they emoted every ounce of the Bush Administration's ejaculatory load in Iraq...right down to the last little sperm. Judy Miller didn't even ask for a virtual towel as she got each prescious drop down her vacuum powered 10 amp gullet.

awesome




digby 2/03/2005 10:58:00 AM |

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

 
Generational Warfare!


Grooviosity. Reform social security, man, because you can't trust anyone over 30. Cool.

These doughy, briefcase GOP baby boomer geeks have always had a case of arrested development. They started their "revolution" in their 40's. In their 50's they've discovered the "generation gap." The rest of us got over this intergenerational squabbling a couple of decades ago. It's never too late to act like a teen-age ass.

For younger workers, the Social Security system has serious problems that will grow worse with time. Social Security was created decades ago, for a very different era. In those days people didn't live as long, benefits were much lower than they are today, and a half century ago, about 16 workers paid into the system for each person drawing benefits. Our society has changed in ways the founders of Social Security could not have foreseen.

Man, if only those old people would just die younger, or at least take less money, we wouldn't have this problem.

Right now, a set portion of the money you earn is taken out of your paycheck to pay for the Social Security benefits of today's retirees. If you are a younger worker, I believe you should be able to set aside part of that money in your own retirement account, so you can build a nest egg for your own future.

... instead of having to worry about your revolting, diseased parents.

As we fix Social Security, we also have the responsibility to make the system a better deal for younger workers. And the best way to reach that goal is through voluntary personal retirement accounts.

Awesome. A better deal for me!

It is time to extend [the same] security, and choice, and ownership to young Americans.

Listen kids. Here's your choice. Either keep social security as it is or plan to have your parents ---- people my age --- living with you for the last twenty years of our sick, decrepit lives. This will be as you're putting your kids through the privatized school system and saving for medical expenses with your "medical savings account" while putting something aside for your kids' college and your own meager retirement. Good luck with that. That's the "choice" you're getting here.

Bush says nobody over 55 will see any change. I'm 48. Somehow, I don't think I'm one of those "younger workers" who is oging to experience the miracle of the market. I'm not the solution, I'm the problem. There are a huge number of people my age out there. We who were born in the mid 50's are the biggest bulge of the baby boom cohort. And we are the ones who are first in line to get fucked if this social security "reform" is passed.

But the good news is that by that time our children will have these lovely fat portfolios. They'll be happy to take us in if our "personalized social security" doesn't stretch quite as far as George W. Bush says is will. Right?

Oh, and by the way, kids. You'll be the ones stuck with the gazillions of dollars in debtthis whole useless scam is going to cost. Don't be fools.


Update: Josh speaks to this as well:

the president is now saying -- and saying emphatically and militantly, with an eye on his critics -- that if you're 55 you're home free, nothing to worry about when it comes to phasing out Social Security.

One might observe that this is a rather unfortunate dividing in half of the country. If you're 50 today, you spent most of your highest earning years not only paying into Social Security, but advance-paying even more, under the 1983 Social Security Commission which put in the extra level of tax to build up the Trust Fund. Now you're hosed. Too bad.

The important point though is that this is simply not true. And the defenders of Social Security would be straight-up fools to let the president get away with a guarantee as obviously bogus as that one.

Maybe they can try to finesse those older than 55 into believing him with a direct, straight up lie, but he's not even trying to finesse those of us who are just slightly younger than that. And we are a huge demographic cohort. The transition costs, which the Preznit doesn't address at all, are going to hit this bulge of the baby boom right between the eyes because most of us are under 55. And ALL of us have been paying "extra" since Uncle Alan Greenspan told us to in 1983.




I think we need to start talking to people my age. We are following this closely because retirement issues in general are beginning to get our attention. We are the biggest single age group in the country and we are about to get fucked.

Update, Update:

Ooooh. I see that we are talking about "benefit offsets" which just means that any "extra" money you make in your "personal" account goes into the pot. No ownership, no guarantee, no nothing.

This is more and more ideological by the day. It's just about tearing up the new deal and destroying people's trust in government, period.





digby 2/02/2005 06:01:00 PM |

 
Surviving The Speech

For those who cannot drink during your SOTU house party, and therefore will not be able to participate in the "freedom 'n liberty drinking game", our good friend South Knox Bubba has another approach. Good works.

Personally, I plan to do both, and maybe a little drunk blogging as well. There's no way in hell I can get through that mush without a little help from Demon Rum.

Here's something to think about, however. This is the first speech done by Bush's new speechwriter William McGurn. David Kushnet wrote about him in TNR recently:

As president Bush begins his second term, he's likely to sound less affable and more argumentative, reflecting the rhetoric of a new chief speechwriter who has constantly criticized the American Catholic clergy for being too tough on capitalism and too soft on abortion.

[...]

Gerson made Bush sound like a preacher, but McGurn made his name as a polemicist. He's a Catholic conservative, with a distinctive intellectual pedigree. Liberal Catholics such as E. J. Dionne and even some conservative Catholics such as Pat Buchanan have criticized capitalism's excesses for weakening families and communities. But McGurn favors free trade, opposes even the most basic regulations of corporate conduct, and has harsh words for an American labor movement that the Catholic Church has historically supported. McGurn's allies appear to be the late Treasury Secretary William Simon and the theologian Michael Novak, both of whom thought the U.S. Catholic Bishops were too favorably disposed toward the government's role in regulating the economy and assisting the poor.

When he writes under his own byline, McGurn's views on economics are just as conservative as, and even more quirky than, The Wall Street Journal's unsigned editorials. In 2003, he and liberal economist Rebecca Blank coauthored a debate titled, Is the Market Moral?, which was published by the Brookings Institution. In the book, McGurn compares the thriving free-market economy of Hong Kong, where he once worked as a reporter, with the regimentation of old-style Chinese Communism. He contends that capitalism not only creates wealth but also rewards good behavior because it "depends on virtues--self-restraint, honesty, courage, diligence, the willingness to defer gratification." Presenting himself as both an economic realist and a conservative moralist, McGurn concludes that the best way to make sure that the economy advances social goals is not through government regulation but rather by changing corporate culture. He suggests that moral suasion can discourage executives from cooking their books, exploiting their workers, or despoiling the environment.

Bring it on, baby. We'll run Elliot Spitzer against Ken Lay.

Displaying talents that will serve him well as a presidential speechwriter, McGurn's style is eloquent, simple--and slippery. He makes the case against communism, socialism, and the most heavy-handed forms of government regulation in this country; but he also criticizes programs that have existed since the New Deal and have been accepted by Republican as well as Democratic presidents: the minimum wage, job safety standards, environmental protection, and American opposition to child labor overseas. He explains his skepticism about public institutions by citing three of the least popular: welfare as we used to know it, the post office, and urban public schools. While acknowledging that his views contradict many Catholic social teachings, he repeatedly refers to Pope John Paul II to support his arguments, even though the Pope seems to support a much more regulated kind of capitalism than McGurn. And McGurn has also published pieces differing with the Pope's opposition to the war in Iraq and criticizing Archbishop Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice, for saying that there is no such thing as a just war anymore.

[...]

Like Gerson, McGurn is a graceful writer, capable of crafting clear and original prose. But unlike Gerson, McGurn is also a brawler who loves to take hard shots at his adversaries and even his allies. He attacked Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu for opposing school vouchers but sending her own kids to private schools. He told the Denver Archdiocese, "On the great issue of life, the bishops failed America's unborn children at about the same time they were failing the living American children molested by the priests under their charge."

So while Gerson's rhetoric soothed, McGurn's will singe. Writing in The Wall Street Journal five years ago, John Fund credited McGurn with this "iron law of politics": "Conservatives win by clarifying issues, liberals by fudging them." Maybe so, but George W. Bush--and Ronald Reagan before him--made warm-hearted arguments for policies that Americans might otherwise have rejected as hard-hearted. Bush couldn't ask for a writer who's less likely to fudge distinctions than McGurn. Now let's see if Bush benefits from clarity.

"Conservatives win by clarifying issues, liberals by fudging them."

Yeah. Tell it to Frank Luntz. That's why we are going to hear all about "personalizing" your retirement tonight instead of privatizing social security. They're "clarifying" the issue.

This could be good. If McGurn has Bush coming out swinging this term it could end up being the Newt Gingrich Story, Part II. Without all those nice little sermons, George W. Bush is a pinched, mean man and it shows. I have a feeling that McGurn may just bring out the real him.




digby 2/02/2005 11:52:00 AM |

 
Award Mania

Wampum has all the Koufax semi-final nominations up. I highly recommend that you check out the category for best post. I just spent an hour over there reading the best of the blogosphere over the last year and it was awe inspiring. There are some very, very fine writers in the left blogosphere. (And Hugh Hewitt can kiss my ass*)

Once again, toss some coin to Wampum for doing this thing. It's a labor of love but nobody should have to pay for the privilege.




* Hewitt claims in his little roll of toilet paper called "Blog" that the only good writers are on the right which I suppose would be true if you consider smug circle jerking and squealing Bush pompom shaking actual writing. Heh. Indeed.


digby 2/02/2005 10:45:00 AM |

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

 
They Never Quit

Here's a new site that serves as a handy primer about the Oil For Food wingnut feeding frenzy called Oil-for-Food Facts.org

If anyone wonders what this ridiculous obsession is really all about, this article by Joe Conason spells it out. It's the Same Old ... Stuff:

If American conservatism is truly the fount of "new ideas," as its publicists incessantly assure us, why do conservatives constantly promote the stale old ideas that obsessed them in 1962?

Back then, the extremists of the ultra-right regarded the United Nations as the advance guard of the international communist conspiracy. "Get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.!" blared the bumper-sticker slogan of the John Birch Society, while the National Review called for the U.N. to be "liquidated."

Today, although the rhetoric is not quite so shrill, the Birch Society's ideological descendants still feel the same way. With the U.N. beset by scandal, the right can't resist the opportunity to sever American ties with the world organization. Heedless as always of damaging traditional alliances and America's global reputation, they have opened a campaign to undermine and ultimately destroy the U.N. It is a peculiar crusade for Americans to undertake just when the U.S. government is counting on the U.N. to help legitimize the Iraqi elections -- the kind of multilateral mission that is becoming even more essential on a planet where failed states threaten the security of everyone.

[...]

For the Bush administration and its conservative allies, the U.N. represents embarrassment and obstruction. Seeing no value in debating and discussing world problems with lesser nations, they regard the U.N. as nothing but an unworthy obstacle to the exercise of American power. To them, the world body symbolizes all that they hate about multilateralism and diplomacy.

Certain starry-eyed neoconservatives broach the idea of a new global organzation that would only admit "legitimate" democratic governments (as defined, perhaps, by the Heritage Foundation or the Wall Street Journal editorial board). In the neocon scenario, the U.N. would be hollowed into a meaningless, impoverished shell, and left to such pariahs as Kim Jong Il and the Iranian mullahs.

As fantasy, this explains much about the mind-set of the neoconservative right in the aftermath of the Iraq debacle. They need somebody to blame, other than themselves, and Annan provides a most convenient target. As policy, however, the abandonment of the U.N. is just as crazy as when the John Birch Society printed its first bumper sticker -- as the neocons might acknowledge if they listened to our closest allies.

These guys have an list and they're checking each item off one at a time. If circumstance change they just find a new rationale and plow on.

The Birchers wanted to destroy both social security and the UN back in 1962. They think their time has come. It's just that simple.




digby 2/01/2005 09:24:00 PM |

 
Honor Role

Kidding On The Square is talking about honor, something our culture seems to have thrown out by mistake when it packed off hats and slavery. This is a very thought provoking post about American heroes, faux and authentic, old and new. Some people are human and they are also leaders. Some people are neither.




digby 2/01/2005 08:55:00 PM |

 
My War Is Bigger Than Your War

As I listen to Teddy Kennedy challenge Gonzales' "I was out of the loop" defense on the torture memos, it probably pays to remember what those memos actually said. Here's a good article by the authors of the new book "The Torture Papers."

The chronology of the memoranda also demonstrates the increasing rationalization and strained analysis as the objectives grew more aggressive and the position more indefensible--in effect, rationalizing progressively more serious conduct to defend the initial decisions and objectives, to the point where, by the time the first images of Abu Ghraib emerged in public, the government's slide into its moral morass, as reflected in the series of memos published in this volume, was akin to a criminal covering up a parking violation by incrementally more serious conduct culminating in murder.

[...]

Nor does any claim of a "new paradigm" provide any excuse, or even a viable explanation. The contention, set forth with great emphasis in these memoranda, that al Qaeda, as a fanatic, violent, and capable international organization, represented some unprecedented enemy justifying abandonment of our principles is simply not borne out by historical comparison. The Nazi party's dominance of the Third Reich is not distinguishable in practical terms from al Qaeda's influence on the Taliban government as described in these memos.

Al Qaeda's record of destruction, September 11th notwithstanding--and as a New Yorker who lived, and still lives, in the shadow of the Twin Towers, which cast a long shadow over lower Manhattan even in their absence, I am fully cognizant of the impact of that day--pales before the death machine assembled and operated by the Nazis. Yet we managed to eradicate Nazism as a significant threat without wholesale repudiation of the law of war, or a categorical departure from international norms, even though National Socialism, with its fascist cousins, was certainly a violent and dangerous international movement--even with a vibrant chapter here in the United States.

No kidding. The idea that al Qaeda is some unique form of evil that requires we cast out all norms of civilization is simply mind boggling (Indeed, I get the feeling that it illustrates nothing more than ego run amuck --- some kind of competitiveness with the Greatest Generation.)

The biggest threat we face is from nuclear weapons in the wrong hands. But we need to remember that this is not a new problem. Nuclear weapons have been in the hands of America's mortal enemies for more than 50 years and while they may not have been as nihilistic as these terrorists, they were certainly as prone to accident and misjudgment as any group of humans. The stakes were unimaginable. These were not "suitcase bombs" or "dirty bombs", as awful as those may be, they were ICBM's aimed at every American city and if they were launched, the result was likely to be annihilation of the planet. That's the threat we lived with for almost 50 years. We can handle this terrorist threat without completely losing our values, our wits or our moral authority.

But, the administration is listening to ideologues like Robert J. Delahunty and John C. Yoo, who should be cast into the farthest reaches of academia or think tankery where their hysterical ideas can cause no harm to real people:

When the Senate considers Alberto R. Gonzales' nomination for attorney general this week, his critics will repeat the accusation that he opened the door to the abuse of Al Qaeda, Afghan and Iraqi prisoners. As Justice Department attorneys in January 2002, we wrote the memos advising that the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war did not apply to the war against Al Qaeda, and that the Taliban lost POW privileges by violating the laws of war. Later that month, Gonzales similarly advised (and President Bush ordered) that terrorists and fighters captured in Afghanistan receive humane treatment, but not legal status as POWs.

"Human rights" advocates have resorted to hyperbole and distortion to attack the administration's policy. One writer on this page even went so far as to compare it to Nazi atrocities. Such absurd claims betray the real weaknesses in the position taken by Gonzales' critics. They obscure a basic and immediate question facing the United States: how to adapt to the decline of nation-states as the primary enemy in war.

[...]

Shortly after World War II, nations ratified the Geneva Convention in order to mitigate the cruelty and horror of wars between the large mechanized armies that had laid waste to Europe. Now, the main challenges to peace do not arise from the threat of conflict between large national armies, but from terrorist organizations and rogue nations.

To believe that the Geneva Convention should apply jot-and-tittle to such enemies reminds us of the first generals of the Civil War, who thought that the niceties that were ideals of Napoleonic warfare could be applied to battles fought by massive armies, armed with ever more advanced weapons and aided by civilian-run mass-production factories and industry. War changes, and the laws of war must change with them.

[...]

Unfortunately, multinational terrorist groups have joined nations on the stage of war. They operate without regard to borders and observe no distinction between combatants and civilians. Our weapons for controlling hostile states don't work well against decentralized networks of suicidal operatives, with no citizens or borders to defend.

There is another name that fits these terrorists a little bit better than an "unprecedented, non-nation state decentralized threat that operates without regard to borders and observes no distinction between combatants and civilians." They're called "criminals." These international criminals do not represent a "nation" but what might be called a gang or a syndicate or a "family." They can be brought to heel the same way criminal gangs can always be brought to heel. One of the ways that you do it is by enlisting the help of other nations in the manhunts with cooperative police and international quasi military investigations.

The fact is that this isn't a "war" by any reasonable definition. However, the powers that be have deemed it so, in which case they should not be able to change the rules of warfare to accomodate what isn't a war in the first place. If it's a war, then it's a war, which means that quaint little treaties like the GC cannot just be tossed at will. If it isn't a war then we should follow the criminal model and use the laws and rules that have been established to to deal with this. This is a bullshit flim-flam that should have been nipped in the bud at the very begining, but because the leadership and opinion makers of this country (including you Andy --- and you too Tom) decided that this was a good opportunity wallow in their own self righteous bloodlust instead of using their heads, we are stuck in this ridiculous position where we have elevated a bunch of criminal thugs to the status of warrior kings --- exactly where they want to be.

And we are further digging ourselves into a hole by endorsing the use of police interrogation methods that experts throughout the world know don't work. And because we have denied any use of due process there is no corrective mechanism for the mistakes that are being made by the soldiers in far off lands who, with limited understanding of the culture are "capturing" people who have little or no connection to the criminal enterprise, coercing confessions and holding them indefinitely on that evidence. I just don't know how we could do this any more ineptly.


But Woo and Delahunty aren't just talking about terrorists when they say the Geneva Conventions are no longer applicable. They go further and claim that "psuedo-states" are also exempt.

The problem of terrorist groups has been compounded by the emergence of pseudo-states. Pseudo-states often have neither the will nor the means to obey the Geneva Convention. Somalia and Afghanistan were arguably pseudo-states; Iraq under Saddam Hussein was another.

Pseudo-states control areas and populations subject to personal, clan or tribal rule. A leader supported by a small clique (like Hussein and his associates from Tikrit) or a tribal faction (like the Pashtuns in Afghanistan) rule. Political institutions are weak or nonexistent. Loyalties depend on personal relationships with tribal chiefs, sheiks or warlords, rather than allegiance to the nation.

Quasi-political bodies such as the Iraqi Baathist Party, the Taliban or even the Saudi royal family exercise government power. Defeat of the "national" leader or clique typically results in the complete disintegration of the regime.

Well, that definition of psuedo state says that any established non-democratic state is no longer a real state. Iraq, you see, was a psuedo state, so when we invaded it wasn't a typical war of aggression or choice, we were just toppling a "national" leader, which isn't the same thing at all. (I hate to bring this up, but Hitler claimed that sovereign borders weren't sovereign for a bunch of bullshit reasons, too. That's why the whole blanket condemnation of wars of aggression thing came up in the first place. You say Czechoslovakia, I say Sudetenland.)

Multinational terrorist groups and pseudo-states pose a deep problem for treaty-based warfare. Terrorists thrive on killing civilians and flouting conventional rules of war. Leaders like Hussein and the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar ignore the fates of their captured soldiers. They have nothing riding on the humane treatment of American prisoners.

A treaty like the Geneva Convention makes perfect sense when it binds genuine nations that can reciprocate humane treatment of prisoners. Its existence and its benefits even argue for the kind of nation-building that uses U.S. troops and other kinds of pressures in places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq; more nation-states make all of us safer. But the Geneva Convention makes little sense when applied to a terrorist group or a pseudo-state. If we must fight these kinds of enemies, we must create a new set of rules.

Please. The Bataan death march, the holocaust, the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fresh memories when the Geneva Conventions were signed. The people who conceived them had intimate and personal knowledge of the kind of inhumane actions against millions of prisoners, civilians and soldiers the horrors of war can bring. Please don't say that attacking civilians is unprecedented. It's just ridiculous. Ill treatment of prisoners? Jesus. Inhumanity wasn't invented on 9/11 for christs sake.

The reason for the conventions was to establish written civilized norms. There were no illusions about the "binding" of a future Hitler or a future bin Laden, but they sure as hell thought it would bind the United States of America! The idea that 9/11 is something so unique and the hatred of our enemies so threatening that we must discard all the rules that we created in the wake of the most horrifying conflagration in human history is intellectual bankruptcy of the highest order.

Nobody disputes that it was a terrible day or that we had to respond. But this wholesale redefinition of what constitutes torture and what constitutes a nation state in order to accomodate an allegedly unprecedented threat appears more and more like a self-serving excuse to broaden the executive's power. Re-writing the rules of warfare as necessary to fight this unique threat can then be seen as an extension of that power grab. All the subsequent hemming and hawing is a cover-up of that essential extra-constitutional action.

There are people who have the kind of temperament that is drawn to authoritarian modes of governance. People like John Woo and George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales. These are people who saw 9/11 as a reason to do what they always do when given the opportunity --- make their own rules.

The terrorism that people like these are arguing requires a wholesale rejection of all the norms and rules that have brought us to this point in human history is another of the phony crises, like WMD in Iraq and Social Security solvency that they have perpetuated since George W. Bush took office. Al Qaeda is a serious threat. But it is not so serious that WWI and WWII pale in comparison or that we face an unprecedented existential threat. It's absurd to put it in those terms and it's a misunderstanding of the problem on such a vast scale that we are actively making the threat worse instead of better.

We are being led by a man who has been convinced that "his" war is bigger than the big one and anything goes. Yet, the single most searing image of our warrior leadership is the president with a bullhorn leading a cheer. I think that says it all.




digby 2/01/2005 01:03:00 PM |

 
Enforcing The Rules Of Integrity

What used to be called conflict of interest is now called synergy --- Jack Grubman

In response to my post on framing below, reader Sara pointed me to Eliot Spitzer's speech at the National Press Club yesterday for a great example of re-framing the Democratic argument, and it is a really good one.

I urge you to listen to the whole thing because Spitzer is such a great example of the "fighting liberal" we need more of. He points out that the rules of integrity that we all agree and understand must be enforced to keep the system running efficiently can only be done by government. Business cannot be relied upon to self-regulate because those who reject the practices of their competitors is almost always at a disadvantage. It's a race to the bottom in which each enterprise excuses its behavior by saying it is not quite as bad as the other guy.

(I was struck at how this frames the issue of "the market" in terms that recognize Democrats as the "enforcers of the rules" while casting the Republican business elite as the out of control party boys who can't be relied upon to police their own behavior. As I was listening I had a picture of a kid saying that they'd love to join in the binge drinking and drag racing fun, but their father is a tough cop and they'd better not. Strict father gives the kids a way to avoid peer pressure.)

He also discusses how much the laissez faire philosophy of deregulation and protections for cronies and contributors has led to loss of shareholder value and misallocation of capital to losing enterprises due to their dishonesty and lack of transparency. It's bad for the economy and the current administration is exacerbating it by protecting the status quo to the detriment of the nation as a whole.

As an example, after the disclosure that the makers of Paxil had withheld from the public information that clearly showed that there was a high risk of suicide in teen-agers who used the drug, he quotes the WSJ editorial page as saying "the system is working exactly as it should."

He discusses "values" in the context that only government can "enforce" business behavior that recognises our cultural values such as anti-discrimination or minimum wage. He says, "the marketplace alone can't get us there." "Democrats believe in the market and we understand the market, but it will not survive if we do not understand it's flaws and government does not enforce the rules of integrity."

With regard to the social security debate, he said that the Democrats are the ones who built the middle class, protected their investments and created the ownership society that already is America. The Republicans, contrary to the popular view, are "cloaking themselves in the language of the market, but speaking for the ossified status quo."

This is an elegant way of framing our position. Democrats are the reformers --- by being the enforcers. In this political climate those are powerful words. Fighting liberal reformers battling to enforce the rules that maximise the efficiency of the market and promote our values.

Who's your (strict) daddy, now?



digby 2/01/2005 10:49:00 AM |

Monday, January 31, 2005

 
Faithless

If you read one thing today, read this article by Robert Wright(if you haven't already.)

There was a time, lo these many years ago (back in the 90's) when most people understood that globalization was a huge transition with lots of unintended consequences we need to be aware of and deal with, but it was inevitable and also held out a huge promise of progress for freedom, liberty and deomcracy and all that gooey good stuff our Preznit loves to talk about. The thinking went that capitalism held the keys to liberation and that while we were embarking on a somewhat unknown track, we had faith that our economic and political systems would win out as long as we were engaged.

Then along came 9/11 and "changed everything." The PNAC neocon crowd, who had always dissented from that argument, held sway with their belief that the US had to expand its influence through the use of hard power and force the gooey good stuff because otherwise it wouldn't happen.

They did not understand that it's our "idea" that is the compelling thing, not our awesome military and economic might, which exists not to spread freedom but to protect it. They have faith in their own ideology and their own power, but they have no faith in what this country stands for. Their reliance on things like torture bears that out. That is the fundamental error.




digby 1/31/2005 03:24:00 PM |

 
The Framers

Along with Mark Schmitt, I'm not a big fan of Lakoff's new book. As I've written many times, I think his analysis of the art and science of framing is right on the money, but I think his actual frames are just terrible. He's an idea man, not a political strategist. I'll repeat what I've said before. The mere fact that he frames the Democrats as "nurturant parents (mommies)" disqualifies him from political action. That frame is exactly what's killing us. It may be sexism or it may just be the times in which we live, but we should drop it like a hot potato.

The Republicans have an economic framing model that's very successful and we can learn from it. They sell an optimistic, simple philosophy of "if only the government would get out of the way you can be successful." This means that if you aren't successful it's the government's fault. (And Democrats believe in government so they are actively working to keep you down.) Their frame is always, entirely, the frame of self reliance and self interest. They preach it as a moral good no matter what the situation. This is a notion that has a very long history in American culture and it's one that appeals to a very basic aspect of human nature. It has become the dominant strain in political discourse over the last thirty years.

However, they know that Americans are not that simple minded about their own personal self interest. Even if they sign on to the philosophy of self interest it doesn't mean that they don't understand that they have much to gain with a generous redistributional government. (Hence the "lucky ducky" strategy.) Americans like certain things the government provides. So, the Republicans hire guys like Frank Luntz and spend millions of dollars polling and focus grouping to find out how to market this "you're on your own" philosophy to make it sound as if they will be guaranteed a better result if they do it the GOP way. They choose words and phrases that denigrate government, make Democrats appear to be corrupt and enslaved by "special" interests and make it sound as if people will be giving nothing up and gaining much by signing on to the Republican philosophy.

But, even with all that they have not been able to completely destroy the liberal consensus. Therefore, they are forced to do things like sell social security destruction on two tracks. They are simultaneously trying to "save" something that poeple obviously value while at the same time convincing people that they will benefit far more if they sign on to the privatization bandwagon. But we have recently found out that after all this time they can't use the word "privatization" because people aren't buying it. People know enough to know "privatization" means they might lose money.

This is very telling It says that while the Republicans have been able to move self interest to the front and center of political discourse, displacing the values of community and altruism as things people feel they ought to say when quizzed about such things. But they haven't managed to make people believe that government is their personal enemy or that it is in their self interest to reject all redistribution of wealth so that they might have more "opportunity." Self-interested people aren't ideologues. They'll take the best deal from wherever it comes.

Therefore, I would submit that our rhetorical frames should begin to speak to the fact that properly run government is a good deal. Social Security is a guaranteed check that is always on time and comes every single month no matter how long you live. That's a good deal.

And I think that we have to acknowledge that the altruistic, moral case for government is (temporarily, hopefully) on the decline and we need to argue in a way that accomodates that. On a separate track we must enlist the liberal clergy and others to begin to build the progressive values arguments back up, just as the Republicans continue to build their case for laissez-faire. But in the meantime, we need to realize that we are in an era of marketing to people's individual wants and desires and needs. This is how they view the world.

I don't think we need to be dishonest, but I fear that we are going to be bulldozed over and over again, even if we win the battle for social security, if we try to hang our hats on the moral case for good government. Someday, perhaps, we can get there. But today I think that the singular success of the Republican era is persuading people that selfishness is a positive good. Little Aynnie Rand must be popping a Dexie and lighting a cig with satisfaction down in the third circle right now.




digby 1/31/2005 03:20:00 PM |

 
If It Ain't broke Don't Fix It

There Is No Crisis is putting together a fun and informative way to deal with the Preznit's State of the Union Destroy Social Security speech. Throw a house party and tune into a conference call afterward in which someone will interpret the soaring gibberish into English and educate your party about the nightmarish future Republicans intend for you to have in your old age.

(You can even incorporate my favorite, the Dubya Drinking game, points corresponding to how many times he says freedom, liberty, ownership and "personal accounts." But serve half shots or the party will be passed out before the conference call.)

"There Is No Crisis" is the response to Bush's repeated assertions that he is trying to "save social security." It's a bold way of framing it and it puts the onus on President Inarticulate to explain a complicated policy issue. (Even when they write a good speech, he's much more believable on the "you're either with us or you're with the terrorists" kind of Hollywood dialog than making a complicated case for a particular policy.) This is good politics. The other side is on the defensive.

The key to arguing this issue is to recognize their various arguments and make them explain them. When you do that, they begin to see the outlines of a basically dishonest scheme. Here are a few ideas about handling this:

"The system is going broke"

When you're standing around the water cooler and somebody says that the system has to be fixed because it's going broke, ask them to explain why the date that the trust fund "runs out" keeps going up, from 2029 to 2042 and maybe higher even though the baby boomer retirement ages have been known for 50 years now. When they sputter, as they will, adopt the world weary derisive tone usually reserved for war hawks and law and order types and say, "Yeah, whatever. It sounds like a scam to me There's no crisis."

"Private accounts give a better return on investment"

Ask them if they agree that every portfolio needs some part of their retirement savings that isn't subject to being Enroned. And don't they think that having at least a minimal defined benefit plan is what allows people to take on more risk with their 401K's and IRA's and other investments? A prudent investor knows that everybody needs a very conservative portion of their portfolio to fall back on if they have a bad break. Isn't that really what social security is?

"The trust fund is a bunch of worthless IOU's"

Do they realize that those "worthless "IOU's" are government bonds? Those bonds are backed by the most reliable contract in the world "the full faith and credit of the Treasury of the United States of America." If government bonds are worthless then social security is the least of our problems. In fact, we should probably start burying gold in the back yard and laying in the canned goods.

"The baby boomer retirees are going to outnumber the workers and that's why the system is going broke"

Then how come Ronald Reagan signed the legislation back in 1983 that made all workers (and especially boomers in their top earning years) pay "extra" in order to pay for the baby boomer's retirements? What happened to that plan?

Then there is the big question that come back at you. It's not easy to explain, but you can do it if they'll let you finish a sentence.

"Why do they want to do this now?"

A variety of reasons, but the most important is that this is the first time since its inception that the Republicans have had the institutional power to dismantle social security. They have been against it since the day the legislation was signed and have been building this case for privatization since at least the fifties. Now that they are in power, the modern Republican party is conducting a radical economic (and foreign policy) experiment based upon their belief in laissez faire capitalism and world military domination but they have not been honest with the American people about what they are doing. We are by nature a cautious people when it comes to radical change and they know it. So they are creating "problems" and "crises" that don't exist (like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and social security going broke) in order to persuade people that that the old ways don't work anymore and that "modern" solutions are needed.

Privatizing Social Security is a very bold step back to the future. There was once a time when Americans closing in on the end of their lives either worked until they dropped dead or lived their final years in grinding poverty if they had not been able to save enough money during their earning years. There are an infinite number of reasons why this might be so. It could happen to anyone. Social Security was a recognition that everybody needs something to fall back on in life if things don't go well. Paying into it over the course of your earning years is a small price to pay for the peace of mind in knowing that even if your 401K or your IRA or your house doesn't appreciate the way you hope, there will at least be something that will keep the wolves at bay. There is only one entity on the face of this earth that can make a guarantee like that--- the government of the richest most powerful nation on earth. We can afford to guarantee that the elderly live their final years in a dignified, decent manner. We've managed to do that for the last seventy years and there's no reason that we shouldn't be able to continue. There is no crisis. Let's move on to dealing with real problems.

If that doesn't work, give them this article by George Will. Will makes the honest Republican argument:

The president says Social Security should be reformed because it is in "crisis." That is an exaggeration. Democrats say it should not be reformed because there is no crisis. That is a non sequitur. Social Security should be reformed not because there is a crisis but because there is an opportunity.

[...]

Voluntary personal accounts will allow competing fund managers, rather than a government monopoly on income transfers from workers to retirees, to allocate a large pool of money. This will enhance the economic dynamism conducive to an open society. Personal accounts will respect individuals' autonomy and competence and will narrow the wealth gap by facilitating the accumulation of wealth -- bequeathable wealth -- by people of modest incomes.

There you have it. If you want to trust the "competing fund managers" who backed Ken Lay and Bernie Ebbers with every penny of your retirement instead of leaving a modest portion with the most reliable guarantor on earth, the United States of America, then you'll love social security privatization. It'll make your elderly years very exciting and unpredictable.


Click over to There is No Crisis and sign up for a house party. I swear it's the only way to get through what is going to be the most unctuous and shockingly dishonest SOTU that's ever been given. Peggy will crawl her way back up William Kristol's keister and proclaim it a home run. Steve Forbes will probably be anchoring the CNN coverage in a Chicken Little costume. You are going to need normal people around you.


Oh, and click over to this cool Move-On ad, soon to be seen in wavering districts throughout the country.






digby 1/31/2005 11:11:00 AM |

Sunday, January 30, 2005

 
Look Who's Talking

This interesting article on the long term plan for SS privatization in today's LA Times contains a shocking, shocking revelation!

"It could be many years before the conditions are such that a radical reform of Social Security is possible," wrote Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis, Heritage Foundation analysts, in a 1983 article in the Cato Journal. "But then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform."

...analysts Butler and Germanis argued in their prescient 1983 article — provocatively titled "Achieving a 'Leninist' Strategy" — that privatizing Social Security required a calculated, long-term campaign to transform the political environment.

Now that's odd. It seems like just a minute ago that I read a scathing take down of "the left" that seemed to indicate that such imagery wasn't exactly, well .... patriotic:

And this review of Steve Earle's concert in Knoxville -- in which he performed before a hammer and sickle -- observes:

The Soviet imagery might have seemed corny five years ago, but in the current right-leaning climate, a left-wing backlash is inevitable. Expect to see more of it.

If Kerry had won, would it be understandable for Republican artists to perform in front of swastikas? And how seriously should we take people who wish we had lost the Cold War, and who want us to lose this one?

Well, there aren't any Republican artists so that point is moot. There are, however, VMI cadets who think that dressing up in nazi gear and blackface is training for future leadership and anyone who doesn't like it should just STFU:

Numerous VMI supporters defended the students' right to enjoy themselves during a break from their rigorous training program and attacked what they perceive as political correctness run amok.

"You have no idea what we go through here at VMI, and if the cadets and rats choose to have fun on Halloween, you should not have anything to say about it," a VMI cadet wrote. "Just remember, we are the future leaders of America, and we will be the ones defending your rights."

I wonder which party that young man belongs to?

You would think that those on the right would find it a bit alarming that right wing analysts were openly apeing communist revolutionary tactics even before the cold war was "won," too, but apparently there's nothing wrong with a little sincere flattery.

When it comes to obscure left wing professors who nobody has ever heard of, though, the buck has come to a full stop at the door of us decaying immoral liberals who must be held accountable for every word he said.

And they are right. This kind of nutty talk shouldn't be allowed to pollute the discourse without somebody standing up and saying no. So I'll tell you what, fellas. I'll disavow this joker from Nowhere University when you guys disavow the vomitous spew with which your millionaire pundits and "entertainers" disgrace this nation's airwaves every single day to tens of millions of listeners, ok?

Here's a little sample of the fetid swill that passes for political discourse on the right in this country:

LIMBAUGH: We killed his sons. We took his country. We put him in jail. He is still calmer and more rational than Howard Dean after he lost Iowa. He's calmer and more rational than Gore after he lost his mind. He's calmer and more rational than George Soros is.


LIMBAUGH: I mean, if there is a party that's soulless, it's the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals -- by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know? No. No. You can't go there.

LIMBAUGH: Women still make up an average of only 13 percent of police officers... They're never happy. And I don't mean women. I'm talking about the activists. Don't lose your cookies out there. This is according to the National Center for Women and Policing, which is a division of the Feminist Majority Foundation of American, which is the feminazis. This is exactly what I'm talking about. So what's the reaction to this? Well, here's my reaction, in the typical Rush fashion: If we've got four new female police chiefs out there, then I guess we can watch out for some naked pyramids among prisoners in these new jailhouses that these women ran, because we had a woman running the prison in Abu [Algore pronunciation] Grab. That's how you do it.



VESTER: You say you'd rather not talk to liberals at all?

COULTER: I think a baseball bat is the most effective way these days. [FOX News Channel, DaySide with Linda Vester, 10/6]


"My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie-chick pie wagons they call "women" at the Democratic National Convention."


SAVAGE: And we have all of the leaders -- we have Obergrupenführer Clinton; we have Grupenführer Carter; we have Brigadeführer Daschle. ... There are only a few rotten führers on the bottom of the corporals; they're the ones wearing the little funny green costumes down there. But they're all there. That's how I see them.

Instapundit: There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn't a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

This particular type of rhetoric using violent imagery, nazi and terrorist comparisons, revolting physical descriptions,and characterizations as irrational, soulless, fragrant, hirsute, rotten, far gone can only be described as eliminationist. Its tone is so derisive and so relentlessly contemptuous that it becomes difficult for people who listen to this stuff everyday to even think of liberals or "the left" or Democrats as even human much less fellow Americans.

There was a time when I thought that someone like Instapundit was a cut above this type of thing, but no more. It's no longer just right wing talk show hosts ostensibly "entertaining" the folks. It's law professors and Claremont fellows publicly accusing "the left" of being terrorist sympathizers.

Some people need to get out of the right wing echo chamber and breathe some fresh air. They have lost the capacity to see and hear what they and their allies are really saying. This is a very destructive genie they have let out of bottle.




Update: Now this is just funny. Instapundit quotes Ed Driscoll writing:

In the 1950s, Bill Buckley was able to create a new conservatism by casting out the John Birchers and their anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories. Now it's the left's turn to try to do much the same.

Uh huh. That's a nice story. It's true that William Buckley chastized the birchers for accusing Eisenhower of being a communist. But cast them out? Nah.

From the Columbia Encyclopedia:

"...the society was founded to fight subversive Communism within the United States. Its other objectives have included the abolition of the graduated income tax, the repeal of social security legislation, the impeachment of various high government officials, the end to busing for the purpose of school integration, the end to U.S. membership in the United Nations, and the nullification of the treaty that turned over the Panama Canal to Panama."

Now where have I heard that agenda before? Give me a minute....


Replace "communist" with "liberal" (when they even bother with the distinction) and there is very little difference between what you hear coming out of the mouths of modern conservatives and the John Birchers. As far as conspiracies go, there is nothing like the myth of the liberal media to keep those paranoid juices flowing. They weren't cast out, they were simply asked to be loyal Republicans.




digby 1/30/2005 07:02:00 PM |

 
Who's Counting The Votes?

Following up on my post below, Matthews just reiterated the apeculation that Ahmad Chalabi is likely to be part of this new government. Pat Lang, the intelligence expert said that he hoped that Chalabi won't be given the Ministry of Interior because he would be in charge of the police. No shit.

Is it at all possible that Ahmad Chalabi is going to be "elected" under American occupation and be allowed to take an active role? It sure seems like a funny way to establish the legitimacy of this election.

I guess they can get away with absolutely anything. After all, they got away with Florida, they can certainly install every neocon's favorite Iraqi if they damn well please. Legitimacy is for losers.








digby 1/30/2005 04:53:00 PM |

 
Let Freedom Ring: Second Verse Same As The First


James Wolcott writes:

Yesterday on one of the Fox financial shows, James Rogers, author of Investment Biker, commodities guru, and neighbor-down-the-block (an utterly irrelevant detail I thought I'd toss in to make this blog sound more "personal"), was asked by host Neil Cavuto whether the elections in Iraq would be successful. Rogers said, "They'll be successful because the media will say they're successful," adding impishly, "Fox News probably already has the results."

And I think they got them from CNN. I haven't seen this much gushing since Asheigh Banfield threw on a little black burka and hitched a camel ride to Kabul.

Clearly, the media loves these trumped up Iraq milestones. They sent Anderson and Campbell over to hang out in the Green Zone and get "the feel" for the place while they patch up their pancake blush and admire each other's groovy winter desert wear in the bar.

They all agree that there was an excellent turn-out. 72%! (But I hear that Warren Mitofsky may have screwed up the exit polling, so don't hold your breath. This number is subject to change.) It's bigger than most people predicted, only rivaled by the phenomenal 98% turn-out for Saddam in the last election thus proving that Iraqis have always been big on voting. You can't blame them. Abu Ghraib is murder this time of year.

I agree, of course, that democracy is the bestest thing in the whole wide world (except the Bible) and that we have a responsibility to spread it and layer it and smooth it and sprinkle coconut on it it wherever there are people who don't have it. Nobody argues with that. (Praise democracy. Praise freedom. Praise liberty. Praise God. Praise George W. Bush. Amen. nowletmego.)

The counting is sure to be transparent to all. That's how we do these things in Murikin democracy. Needless to say, no Iraqi will ever have cause to believe that the vote was rigged in favor of American interests. Why, I'm pretty sure that Lil' Judy Miller just told Chris Matthews that Ahmad Chalabis "list" looks to be doing very well. She's quite the reporter. Always has the big scoop. She knows which lists have done well already. Matthews posits that Chalabi ends up as oil minister.

But, whaterver. This is a great day for Americademocracylibertyandfreedom. As Judy just reminded us, the president is on a roll. "He" has just had three free elections --- Afghanistan, Palestine and now Iraq. She didn't mention the US.







digby 1/30/2005 02:47:00 PM |

Friday, January 28, 2005

 
Oh Maggie, I Wish I'd Never Seen Your Face

Thanks again to Kathy G, here's some more from traditional morals maven, Maggie Gallagher:

(Via Lexis-Nexis) August 10, 1998, Monday
AN UNWED TEEN MOM'S DILEMMA
BY: MAGGIE GALLAGHER


SUPPOSE you're an intelligent 17-year-old single girl who has just had a baby. Suppose you're even smart enough to know that, as one such young unwed mom named Chasity told The New York Times, "I made a mistake ... I'm not recommending this." Now suppose your local school's chapter of the National Honor Society, worried about sending a message that an unwed teen parent is a good role model, turns you down for membership, despite your high G.P.A.

What do you do?

If you are Chasity Glass, or her friend Somer Chipman, two 17-year- old students at Grant County High School in Kentucky, you agree to become poster girls for a new national legal campaign by the ACLU to establish unwed motherhood as the right of minor children everywhere.

Not that I blame Somer and Chasity so much. They're teen-agers after all, and teens are notoriously obsessed with their own feelings and rights. That's one of the reasons that youngsters shouldn't be parents, especially outside of marriage. But what's the ACLU's excuse?

Gender equality, intones ACLU lawyer Sara Mandelbaum self-righteously, as if the natural first step to raising women's status is to confer on teen-age girls a right to have babies. There is no social attitude or law on the books that is as big an obstacle to career achievement for women as having babies outside of wedlock, especially before adulthood.

And, incidentally, research shows that becoming an unwed mom is an equally large obstacle to eventually building a successful marriage; not only is it harder to find a good mate, but having a child with a man who is not your husband makes divorce more likely. All the way around these two girls have taken a step that may injure their own and, more important, their babies' chances in life for years to come. I wish them luck.

Yeah, a mother fighting for the right to an honor that she already earned because screeching moralists like Maggie Gallagher are worried "the message" it sends is sure to harm their babies' chances in life for years to come. I'm just sure of it. it must be true. She's an expert.

Maggie waited until she was 21 before she got knocked up by her kid's father whom she didn't bother to marry. By her own standards she was too selfish to marry for the next ten years. But she always finds others to castigate for their immorality and selfishness, rarely copping to what she would call a decadent lifestyle if another woman lived it. Her story remains vague and unknown to most people who read her material. Her close friends, the right wing think tankers and pundits in Manhattan and DC don't see anything amiss, however. (Falafels and strip poker anyone?)

The timeline suggests, although I don't have proof, that she may have been in a delicate condition while she was at Yale. I wonder what kind of message Maggie would think it sends for a pregnant college student to be allowed to receive a diploma when she is unwed. But, we needn't worry about that. If Maggie (being the paragon of honesty that she is) were pregnant at the time of her graduation from college she undoubtedly would have stayed home from the ceremony because it would set such a bad example for others.

You have to give her credit, though. She became a hypocritical wingnut harpy lecturing others about their mistakes right out of the box. That's the way it's done girls. Get with the "do as I say, not as I do" party and make some big bucks. Even an "illegitimate" child and really bad haircut won't hold you back.

Here are some more of those anti-feminist traditional values that sell so well:

...amazingly, deep within the bowels Title IX regulations (mostly used
heretofore to encourage women's sports), the federal government does define unwed pregnancy as a young girl's gender rights.

The intentions of Title IX were no doubt good: encouraging pregnant teens to stay in school. But time has proved even a high school diploma does not magically eliminate the enormous hardship that out-of-wedlock childbearing imposes. The ACLU's misguided campaign will not advance women's equality; it will no doubt encourage at least a few more immature teens to think about motherhood in terms of their own desires rather than their child's needs.

Like a lying apple cheeked Yalie mom who forgot to get married for ten years while she created a "career" as a "marriage expert."

But perhaps they might take a cue from another single young woman from Chasity and Somer's high school, who had a child a few years back. She too had good grades and she too was denied entry into the National Honor Society. But unlike Somer and Chasity, Krissy Ford decided it was not worth making a federal case of it: "I had no hard feelings at all," Krissy Ford told the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader last May. "It's something that's not worth dragging your school down. ... It's a mistake I made."

Krissy respects the decision the two younger unwed moms made, but recalls, "My focus was on my child."

If only the rest of us could be so mature.

Oh my yes. There is no doubt in my mind that the world would be a better place if Maggie had been mature enough to "focus" on her child instead of helping to create a multi-million dollar industry devoted to indoctrinating "the people" in backward bourgeois values (at which they themselves scoff) for political gain and financial profit.

In light of Maggie's love-child, I wonder how all of her fellow up-tighty righties explain the strange advice to fellow travellers (from February 1999) such as "If you are going on the moral attack, wash your own hands first," and "those of us who see clearly the connection between the privatization of morality(especially sexual morality) and the public squalor we must all live in have to be in the business not of rallying troops but of making conversions," in light of the fact that she stands accused of not only greed, avarice and mendacity in taking payola from the government, but she's also obviously someone who lived a secret life as an elitist libertine while making a living chastizing young girls for being as immoral as she is?

(Oh, what am I saying? They will resort to their usual sophistry and say that Gallagher never explicitly condemned unwed motherhood for dark haired women who graduated from Yale and besides keeping it a quasi secret is the right thing to do because she was trying to set an example. Next?)

Maggie Gallagher believes that unwed motherhood is the scourge of modern American life. In one of the self-serving screeds in which she failed to disclose that she was on the take from the Bush administration, she wrote:

But $300 million is a tiny fraction of what we spend to deal with the social problems created by high rates of illegitimacy and divorce. You know what really costs big bucks? Having one-third of our babies born outside of marriage. These children, through no fault of their own, are more likely to be poor,
welfare-dependent, to need special education, to get physically ill (Medicaid
dollars), to become substance abusers, experience mental illness, commit acts of
juvenile delinquency and become adult criminals, drop out of high school, be
held back a grade, and to go onto become young unwed mothers and fathers
themselves, perpetuating an expensive cycle of downward mobility.

Well, yes. Unless one is a high paid GOP shill who works as a "marriage expert" in no less than three of the bogus GOP propaganda front groups that call themselves "think tanks." Then you can fuck to your hearts content, get knocked up, stay unmarried for ten years while you pursue your elitist career as a "scholor" and "columnist" and still be able to hector the rest of the country about traditional morality.

Man, oh man, The right is really where the money is. I'm beginning to feel a little bit foolish for not taking advantage of it. If you can cast off all personal integrity and can bear to kiss the asses of people like James Dobson, they don't care what kind of a freak you are. What a great scam.


Update: Media Matters has all the data of the GOP front groups our gal Maggie has been sucking from for her entire "career" as a "marriage expert." (I was going to say "who do you have to blow to get some of that action" and then I realized...ohmydeargawd)



Correction: I misspelled Kathy G's name. It has been fixed in this post and the one below.
digby 1/28/2005 01:13:00 PM |

 
Charles Pierce

Did I just hear Richard Perle on Nightline say that the biggest mistake we made in Iraq was not handing the country over to Ahmad Chalabi three years ago? Yes, and the biggest flaw in our national economy is that we haven't turned the Federal Reserve over to Ken Lay. Yes, and the biggest mistake I am likely to make in trying to understand this Festival of Fruitcakes is failing to have laid in enough mushrooms to get me through the State of the Union. To be fair, Perle tap-danced all around the name until Koppel finally brought it up, and then he said "Ahmad Chalabi" the way most people say, "trichinosis." Still, sweet storebought Jeebus.

What do you suppose it would take to get Pierce to write these pithy gems more often than once a week?




digby 1/28/2005 10:40:00 AM |

 
Maggie Was A Bad Girl

Commenting on Eschaton yesterday, reader Kathy G let Maggie's cat out of the bag:

Gallagher just looooves to rant about "family values" and how important it is that "elites" set an example (presumably so the lower orders remain properly deferential).

By any definition, Gallagher herself must be considered a member of the elite class - she went to Yale, after all. And her explanation about why she never went public about taking taxpayer money to ho for Bush - that she "forgot" about the $20,000 - kind of speaks for itself. Man, I sure as hell wish *I* could "forget" about $20,000.

Which brings us to this: Gallagher is yet another member of the wingnut "do as I say, not as I do" family values crowd. It turns out that, once upon a time, Ms. Gallagher was - gasp! horrors! - an UNWED MOTHER.

Apparently, as a young and lusty college-age lass, Maggie enjoyed her fun a little too much, and got knocked up. (Undoubtedly, the dastardly perpetrator of this deed was one of them Ivy League libruls, who did it solely with the plan of crediting our virtuous heroine).

How do I know this? Gallagher has written about it - though only in the context of a pious wingnut column about the horrors of abortion.

Anyway, she had the kid but, to my knowledge, did NOT marry the father. She didn't meet and marry the present Mr. Gallagher (or whoever) until later.

I wish I had access to Lexis-Nexis right now, because I'm sure I could pin this story down if her old columns for the NY Post are up there. Hopefully Atrios or one of you other Eschatons can find it and broadcast it throughout the land. Maggie, you shameless hussy, you!

Of course, NOW Gallagher is unctuously, properly remorseful about her "sin." But that didn't prevent her from having her fun when she wanted it. It never does with these guys and gals. They want to be able to do anything they damn please, but then they turn around and with hell's own fury castigate anyone else who wants to do the same.

Especially if, you know, they're "not the right class, dear." Or are the wrong color.

Frankly, I'm shocked. How unlike a wingnut to be so hypocritical.

Now, I know all of you Maggie defenders out there will probably say this is just some kind of Desperate Housewives catfight. Mags would never mislead her readers this way. But, you would be wrong. Maggie herself has written about it, rarely to be sure, and mostly a long time ago, but it's not a complete secret. Just a little something she doesn't advertise.

Maggie has been telling everyone who will listen, ad nauseum, that she has been a "marriage expert" for twenty years. But for ten of those years, fully half of her career, she was an unwed mother. That's quite a CV.


Kathy Grier was kind enough to send along some links to a few of the rare Maggie writings in which she admits to her little moral boo-boo.
Here's the evidence. (I know it's early in the day, but you should pour yourself a stiff drink before you read it. You're going to need it. Wow.)

And here's an interview with the hedonistic San Francisco liberal mag, Salon, in which she says "I was an unwed mother for ten years."

Let's just say that there isn't a paper trail showing that quote amongst her voluminous writings for right wing publications. She certainly doesn't mention it when she's hectoring girls about sex out of wedlock or decrying the husbandless home.

One can understand how difficult it is to find a mate and all, but if you believe so strongly that children should not be raised without both parents, ten years seems like quite a long time to wait to find a father for your child. There are matchmaking services on the Right that could have found Maggie a nice Christian man from Ardmore,Oklahoma who needed a mother for his five children. Maggie believes that any father is better than no father (unless he's gay, of course) so the proper thing to have done would be for her to sacrifice her "career" as a "marriage expert" and you know, actually get married to any man who would have her in order to provide a proper home for her son. Otherwise she's just another liberal feminazi putting her own need to live where she wanted and put her education to work and find a man she loved before the needs of her child. What will we tell the children?

This is an epidemic on the right. Gallagher reminds me of Susan Carpenter McMillan anti-abortion zealot (and Paula Jones stylist) who was revealed to have had two abortions to which she had never admitted.

I'm beginning to feel sorry for the poor sincere red state schmucks who believe in all this traditional values stuff. A bunch of slick, elitist, wingnut hucksters are taking them to the cleaners.

Calling Hollywood. Time for a remake of "Elmer Gantry."







digby 1/28/2005 09:23:00 AM |

Thursday, January 27, 2005

 
Spongebob Goes To Church

Via Amy at Political Animal, I see that it is possible for church leaders to have a sense of humor. This is funny.

You have to give it to the UCC. They are taking action. I like 'em.




digby 1/27/2005 09:01:00 PM |

 
High Level Diplomacy

I'm awfully glad that taxpayers are paying for the highest caliber of diplomats --- intelligent, restrained, sophisticated. And with a wit that is just breathtaking. People who write things like this:

A friend of The Diplomad has provided us this letter which he "swears it's real." Of course, he also thought PanAm was a good investment . . . but, we can dream, eh?

Dear Concerned Citizen:

Thank you for your recent letter roundly criticizing our treatment of the Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Our administration takes these matters seriously, and your opinion was heard loud and clear in Washington.You'll be pleased to learn that thanks to concerned citizens like you, we are creating a new division of the Terrorist Retraining Program, to be called the "Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers" program, or LARK for short. In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided to place one terrorist under your personal care.

[...]

Although Ahmed is sociopathic and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his "attitudinal problem" will help him overcome these character flaws.

Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. He will bite you, given the chance. We understand that you plan to offer counseling and home schooling. Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We do not suggest that you ask him to demonstrate these skills at your next yoga group He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless (in your opinion) this might offend him.

Ahmed will not wish to interact with your wife or daughters (except sexually) since he views females as a subhuman form of property. This is a particularly sensitive subject for him, and he has been known to show violent tendencies around women who fail to comply with the new dress code that Ahmed will recommend as more appropriate attire. I'm sure the women in your household will come to enjoy the anonymity offered by the bhurka - over time. Just remind them that it is all part of "respecting his culture and his religious beliefs" - wasn't that how you put it?

Thanks again for your letter. We truly appreciate it when folks like you, who know so much, keep us informed of the proper way to do our job.

You take good care of Ahmed - and remember...we'll be watching. Good luck!

Cordially...

Your Buddy,
Don Rumsfeld



How many of you vote that the first LARK letter go to Teddy Kennedy followed by one to Michael Moore? Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, has certainly earned himself the right to participate in LARK, too.

Man is that some hilarious material, or what? I'm proud to pay his salary, I can tell you that. Especially in light of this:

Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

[...]

In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an April 2003 incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform top, exposed her brown T-shirt, ran her fingers through a detainee's hair and sat on his lap. That session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.

In another incident, the military reported that in early 2003 a different female interrogator "wiped dye from red magic marker on detainees' shirt after detainee spit (cq) on her," telling the detainee it was blood. She was verbally reprimanded, the military said.

Sexual tactics used by female interrogators have been criticized by the FBI (news - web sites), which complained in a letter obtained by AP last month that U.S. defense officials hadn't acted on complaints by FBI observers of "highly aggressive" interrogation techniques, including one in which a female interrogator grabbed a detainee's genitals.

Yeah, it's some kind of a wonderful free society when female interrogators are used as dominatrix whores to humiliate a bunch of unlucky putzes who were sold for 5 grand by an Afghan warlord who's still laughing his ass off at how easy it was to get rid of his hated brother-in-law.

I'm awfully impressed with all these kinky sexual interrogation techniques they are using against Muslim males. Clearly, this stuff wasn't thought up by a single group of fucked up prison guards from West Virginia. In fact, we know where it came from --- the fascinatingly stupid neocon bible called "The Arab Mind", a cartoon anthropological guidebook that says things like "the Arab view [is] that masturbation is far more shameful than visiting prostitutes".

The frightening thing is that presumably smart people actually believed that hard core terrorists would be so upset by masturbation and sexual humiliation that they'd crack like little bitty babies. The men and women in charge of our security are obviously puerile adolescents who think that "arabs" are so fundamentally different from us that they are a lesser species.

I think we might actually lose this thing. Thong panties and menstrual blood interrogation is so disturbingly on the wrong track that I think more Americans are going to die. These people are just too stupid, racist and deluded to understand what it's going to take to win.




digby 1/27/2005 07:43:00 PM |

 
DNC Dance

For what it's worth (which is nothing) I endorsed Dean for DNC chair many months ago. I felt that it was very important that Dean's followers join the Democratic party with their full hearts because I thought the party needed them. I have long believed that the constant harping about hating the DNC and Democratic politicians by those of us on the left is doing almost as much harm to the party as what the Republicans have done. Indeed, it seems to me that those two forces have worked together in some ways to make it very difficult for some swing voters to vote for us. I believed that Dean as DNC chair might give people a reason to strongly defend the party for a change.

I have to say, however, that I'd be just as happy with Simon Rosenberg. His Plan sounds right on the money to me. If he does not become the chair, I certainly hope that he will remain influential in the party. These ideas are very thoughtful, forward looking and innovative. Whoever wins, I hope that this kind of thinking will lead the way.




digby 1/27/2005 06:28:00 PM |

 
Popular Kulturkampf

I missed this yesterday, but apparently the little mice in The Corner believe that lefties should be as dumb as the wingnuts who are embarrassing themselves with nonsensical cries of "liberal bias" because "The Passion" didn't get nominated for Best Picture. The fact is that people who follow politics and popular culture (and don't live in a right wing prayer group telephone tree) know how these things work and don't pitch fits when the world works in thoroughly predictable ways.

For instance, people who read know that Michael Moore declined to submit "F9/11" for the "Best Documentary" category (in which he was the odds on favorite to win another Oscar) back in September because he was hoping to get a TV airing prior to the presidential election. The rules specify that you can't air a documentary within nine months of it's theatrical release to contend for a Best Documentary Oscar. Therefore, the only category for which his film could qualify was Best Picture, an extreme long shot.

The Academy can vote en masse for documentaries and it's highly unlikely that the highest grossing documentary of all time would have been overlooked in that category. It is highly likely that he would have won that award. Therefore, it was actually quite a sacrifice on Moore's part. Winning Oscars is no small thing and any filmmaker would love to have a couple of them on his mantle. He gave up what he knew was his best shot at winning --- and getting a chance to make a big speech that would be heard around the world --- in order to try to get his film seen by more people before the election.

He certainly has my gratitude for doing that, and for all he did during the campaign. I believe that he and many other representatives of popular culture helped our turn out. And for those who think we should distance ourselves from Hollywood, I can only laugh. Popular culture is our single most potent weapon in the post modern political world in which we live. It continues to prove day in and day out that the liberal consensus still exists in this country and that the way people actually live (as opposed to how they think they are supposed to say they live) is tolerant, progressive and as far from the cramped, hypocritical Republican worldview as can be.

But, we've barely scratched the surface of how to use it for partisan purposes. Any thoughts that we should leave Democratic politics completely in the hands of dry, boring wonks and political junkies is about the most obvious recipe for ongoing disaster I can see. In a world of millions of competing voices, we'd better find a better more hueristic way of translating the liberal consensus into political action or before we know it, the other side will have completely cowed the public into believed that up is down and wrong is right.

The other side has created its own blatantly partisan politico-entertainment sector with talk radio and FOX News. But they are a bunch of angry, ugly wankers. We can do much better than that if we put our minds to it. In fact, we must.

Do the Democrats have guys like these working for them? Do they think in these terms?

Mr. Schriefer said he and a team of White House big shots transformed Madison Square Garden into a giant TV studio, "stealing" elements from network TV newsmagazines, awards shows, David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. Mr. Bush's intimate podium-in-the-round was designed by Joe Stewart, who has created set pieces for magician David Copperfield and Comedy Central's The Man Show. The giant movie screen used for broadcasting video shorts and Reagan requiems was ripped directly from the Academy Awards. "We realized the big screen actually became a character in the whole thing," said Mr. Schriefer.

[...]

"We live in a time when there's a real cross-pollination between politics and pop culture," he said. "As Republicans, we're often thought of as behind the curve in popular culture, and we don't have to be, and we can certainly compete on that level just as well as the Democrats can."

[...]

"If you think about what images you have in your head from the Kennedy years, it's really not video -- except one awful piece of video," he continued. "It's stills. They deliberately modeled the West Wing intro after that; they've modeled it after these famous photos of Kennedy, standing by the window and stuff like that. They clearly studied this. These are the images you have of the Presidency. So in that sense, if you're trying to elicit an emotion more than tell a linear narrative, stills can work -- with great words."

The movie also used "rotoscoping," the technique used in the Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, that allows moving 3-D elements to be added to still photos. For instance, in the images from Yankee Stadium, they made the flash bulbs flash. They also used natural sound, "like a radio play," said Mr. Stevens, "like an NPR story, so you'd hear these live sounds. You hear their breath and their footsteps. We wanted to get the other voices of the people in there -- the firefighter. Those are obviously their real voices."

Sure, Spielberg comes in and makes a nice film for Kerry, but he isn't devoting his entire life to putting on the Democratic Show like these guys are. He doesn't create a seamless road show from lighting to backdrop to sound to music that follows the campaign everywhere it goes that fellows like Stuart Stevens do. We are all aware of how they compose the shot to make Bush look more presidential and how they put the words they want people to absorb in a backdrop, but did anyone ever notice how they compress the sound at a Bush rally to sound as if the roar of approval builds to a frenzy? They are into all these details of presentation that we just seem to overlook. Our campaigns look old fashioned and ragged by comparison. Our TV pundits are tired and haplessly unprepared. We have no sense of drama as a party, as a movement. (This was, in my opinion, one of Clinton's great gifts. For better or for worse, he was interesting.)

I'm hearing a little rumbling though that sounds promising and its coming from our own little corner of the political world. When an establishment expert like Stuart Rothenberg feels that it's worth making derisive comments about you by calling you "clueless" and having an "exaggerated sense of your own importance," you know that an upstart revolution is taking place.

Somebody isn't being boring and that's an excellent step in the right direction. Right now the left blogosphere is a nascent rag tag grassroots reform story that shows incredible energy and some long needed idealism. If Dean (or Rosenberg for that matter) becomes the chairman of the DNC, that's the image this party is most likely to have going forward. I'd love to see a Democratic Stuart Stevens start working with this right now to market that energy and idealism to the public. We're using media in a new way that's fresh and exciting and it's making the old guard nervous. Now that's something we can work with. There's a new revolutionary narrative emerging and if the Democrats are smart enough to see it, they'll begin to build a popular culture presence right now to go with the substance of the reformation of the party. That's how smart politics are played these days; you work on several different levels --- it's all part of the same thing.

And while Michael Moore is a flame throwing polemicist who serves a very particular function in this whole thing, he's probably got some very good contacts in Hollywood who'd be more than interested in helping with this project. I would hope that any part of the Democratic establishment, new or old, that gets approached by people who know something about this stuff will listen. It's one of the keys to our future.



Here's another interesting article about how the two parties handle advertising. Very illuminating.


Update: To those who have written to me complaining that I have mischaracterized Michael Moore's withholding his admission to the Academy Awards, here are the rules for submission to the Best Documentary Awards.

And as for your complaints that "F911" would not qualify as a documentary because it is not factual, bite me.




digby 1/27/2005 03:01:00 PM |

 
With Friends Like These


Nathan Newman and Atrios point to today's NY Times analysis of Chile's privatization scheme. It's a very interesting article and one that will come as a huge surprise to anyone who was listening to NPR's "The World" with Lisa Mullins on Monday afternoon and heard the glowing report on Chile's program which then segued into an interview with an analyst/scholor Matt Moore from the "non-partisan" National Center For Policy Analysis who proceeded to say that privatization was working wonderfully well in the countries where it's been tried. They provide some excellent lessons to be learned about how to properly privatize our system.

I, like most Americans, am not an expert on social security privatization schemes around the world and were it not for the fact that this is a hot topic on blogs and liberal news sites, I would not know that the benign sounding National Center For Policy Analysis was a group devoted to private sector solutions to everything under the sun. I urge you to check out it's web site, particularly the social security page,linked above. This think tank's spiel is one of the most dishonest I've yet come across in the Right Wing Noise Machine. It goes out of its way to advertise itself as being devoted to debating both sides of the issue and then it proceeds to egregiously propagandize for Republican policies.

Apparently, the leftist socialist NPR (and BBC) didn't bother to investigate what their neutral non-partisan guest has ever written, because he was presented as a neutral policy analyst and his views went completely unchallenged. (He does sound like such a nice boy.)

Here's the link to the program (scroll down to the "Other Models Interview 5:00").

This is the type of thing that's going to kill us if we don't deal with it. This guy sounded completely reasonable. The lead in story about Chile's wonderful privatization scheme sounded completely reasonable. But, it was completely bullshit and it was on NPR, not Limbaugh or Fox. We should scream bloody murder that they would use this obviously agenda driven think tank for "non-partisan" analysis.

We are all agog at the Maggie Gallagher and Armstrong Williams payola scandals. And it is outrageous (but not surprising) that the Republicans have become so greedy that they are dipping into taxpayer funds to propagandize. It's not like they don't have enough millionaire GOP money floating around for just that purpose.

But the idea that these pundits' failure to disclose is the real problem is to swat ineffectually at flies. The real problem is that guys like this Matt Moore routinely fail to disclose that they are working for a Republican Policy Shop and that the so called liberal media is either too stupid or too lazy or too sympathtic to disclose it themselves. All you have to do is google the name of the think tank and you come up with this from the People For The American Way, which should at least make a journalist sit up and do some investigating if nothing else:

National Center for Policy Analysis
12655 North Central Expressway, Suite 720
Dallas, TX 75243-1739
www.ncpa.org

Established: 1983
President/Executive Director: John C. Goodman
Finances: $5,237,217 (total expenditures in 2001)
Employees: 22
Affiliations: NCPA is a member of the State Policy Network, a network of national and local right-wing think tanks, and of townhall.com, a right-wing internet portal created by the Heritage Foundation.
Publications: NCPA sponsors two of its own syndicated columnists: Pete du Pont (Scripps Howard) and Bruce Bartlett (Creators Syndicate). Bartlett's column appears under contract twice a week in the Washington Times and in the Detroit News.

NCPA’s Principal Issues:

# A right wing think tank with programs devoted to privatization in the following issue areas: taxes, Social Security and Medicare, health care, criminal justice, environment, education, and welfare.

# NCPA describes its close working relationship with Congress, saying it “has managed to have more than a dozen studies released by members of Congress – a rare event for a think tank – and frequently members of Congress appear at the NCPA's Capitol Hill briefings for congressional aides.”

# Right-wing foundations funding includes: Bradley, Scaife, Koch, Olin, Earhart, Castle Rock, and JM Foundations

# In the early 90s, NCPA created the Center for Tax Studies. NCPA’s website describes the inspiration for the Center: “Very few think tank studies are released by members of Congress.”

Does that sound non-partisan to anyone? Are these "studies" considered to be non-partisan?

This is happening all over television and radio. Those of us who are sophisticated in these matters know how to peg guys like this Moore based upon his pitch. But if you are average Joe Democrat last Monday afternoon listening on NPR, your trusted source of non-right wing news, you would have no way of knowing that this guy was completely in the tank.

This is our problem folks. This crap is seeping out of the right wing echo chamber and it's infecting people who don't believe in their philosophy. That's the percentage we are losing in these close elections.

I suppose the miracle is that we are able to keep 49% in this environment. It's a testimony to the tenacity and intelligence of busy American liberals that they continue to be able to sort through this mess. But, we have got to start cleaning it up. This bought and paid for right wing media and their dishonest shills are the single most dangerous thing we face going forward.




digby 1/27/2005 10:39:00 AM |

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

 
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Just in case there's anyone out there who holds with the ridiculous notion that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was anything other than an incoherent, self-serving (drunken) twit in his later years as the Lion of The Senate, read this.

He gave more aid and comfort to the enemy over the years than Joementum could ever dream of giving. It's not surprising that they would exhume him now to serve his usual role as facilitator of GOP criminal ravishment. It's what he specialized in.




digby 1/26/2005 08:22:00 PM |

 
Bizarre Reaction

James Wolcott points out that Chatty Kathy Lopez at The Corner thought Junior was in an especially good mood today. I agree. He seemed downright jovial. Wolcott also notes that this joviality was just a tad inappropriate since it was only hours since we'd heard that 31 American soldiers had been killed in a helicopter crash. (But then, Bush has always had a macabre bent. After all, he thought mocking Karla Faye Tucker was a real laugh riot.)

Wolcott notices something about Bush that I haven't seen anyone else mention and it's something that drives me completely nuts.

When Bush did address the soldiers' deaths, he said that we "weep and mourn" when Americans die, but as he was saying it his hand was flatly smacking downwards for emphasis, as if he were pounding the table during the business meeting, refusing to pay a lot for a muffler. The steady beat of his hand was at odds with the sentiments he was expressing--he didn't look or sound the least bit mournful or sombre.

Somebody, somewhere (Karen?) told Junior that he would sound authoritative if he said...each...word...in....a...sentence...with...equal...emphasis. Unfortunately, he does it all the time and it makes him look like a halfwit with a wierd anger management problem. Actually, now that I think about it, it's probably the way he talks naturally.

And listen, the story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people. I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life. And -- but it is the long-term objective that is vital, and that is to spread freedom. Otherwise, the Middle East will be -- will continue to be a cauldron of resentment and hate, a recruiting ground for those who have this vision of the world that is the exact opposite of ours.

Hand slapping on podium for emphasis, words clipped and distinct, pissed demeanor, impatient tone. "Have you got that you little bastards? Now go clean your rooms."

He's the Dad who is always mad. So when the press brought up the fact that today had the highest single daily death toll in Iraq thus far, he was irritated. He told America to stop that crying or he'd give them something to cry about, damn it.

He was in a good mood all right. If he could have kicked the dog he would have been walking on air.




digby 1/26/2005 07:29:00 PM |

 
Ezra's new (Type)Pad

It appears that Ezra Klein of Pandagon has taken up residence at a new address. He and Jesse were probably getting a little old for roommates anyway. And from what I can tell, Jesse's doing just fine carrying on on his own. Man, that youthful energy is just amazing.

When I look at these guys' output I wonder what in the hell I did with my time when I was their age? Well, I was awfully busy. It was the 70's sexual revolution and all that.

(Who'm I kidding? But weed was cheap...)

In my humble opinion, Ezra's one of the best bloggers around. He's a very smart writer, but what I really like about him is that he's a moderate with a heart. You don't find those around Ye Olde Blogopheyre too often. There are plenty of moderates, of course, but they tend to be technocrats and wonks. Ezra's politics combine centrist instincts with emotional exhiliration and idealism. I find that very intriguing. Check it out.




digby 1/26/2005 03:18:00 PM |

 
PoMo Politics

Matthew Yglesias understands how the game needs to be played. I hope that the Democrats in Washington are listening because this is very important. Regarding this clumsy "reframing" that Luntz and his fellow propagandists are doing with "personal accounts" it should be clear by now to all Democrats that relying on the media to "see though" these gambits if only we present them with the facts is a fools game. This is postmodern media we're dealing with here. We must present an alternate reality, which they can then use as our version of the truth. Only then they can be manipulated into using the correct frame-up:

This calls, basically, for someone at the DNC (or DSCC or AFL-CIO or MoveOn or wherever) to hire someone to do some focus groups and come up with a serviceable term that focus groups even worse than private accounts. Then you send around a memo getting all Democrats to start calling them "X accounts" while the White House calls them "personal accounts." Then "private accounts" will look like a decent compromise and it may well get back in the stories.

It's insane, yes, that the very term invented by proponents of private accounts is now considered to be off-limits. But that's the game. If you want to work the refs, you've got to work the refs. "Forced savings accounts" strikes me intuitively as something that focus groups won't like, but actual research should be done.

I'm sorry it has to be this way. But I'm even sorrier that we still don't seem to get that we have to modernize our strategy in this fundamental way.

It doesn't really matter if the The New York Times understands that the Republicans are changing their marketing slogans. I'm sure it's very edifying to know that some smart people in the press are not impervious to
reason at least some of the time. What really matters, however, is that they use the marketing slogans we want them use.

Once again, the Republicans left us a very useful blueprint for how to derail a major initiative like this. The Clinton Health Care Plan. Their frame was "government run health care", "they want to choose your doctor" "they'll make going to the doctor like going to the DMV or the post office." The took their favorite boogeyman and used it to completely distort the plan in a simple, creepy way.

Is there any reason that we shouldn't use similar scare tactics about taking your guaranteed retirement money and letting Wall Street to play with it? Nope. And once we do that, the press will be obliged by its he said/she said "objectivity" to not only choose the term "private accounts" to split the difference between what the two parties want, they will also be obliged to report our demagoguery along side Bush's demagoguery. Let the best scare tactic win.

Reason, logic and objectivity are required for good governance. In the current environment they are antithetical to good politics. They take up too much time. They lack the sensation and visceral knee jerk identification that's needed to capture the public's attention. We need to be able to explain our positions but we have to be operating on other more subjective levels if we expect to win these things.

Social Security seems to be going our way but I am far from sanguine that we've got it in the bag. Rove is very good at pushing past people's instincts and creating a new reality. He does it by manipulating the media with relentless pressure and exerting a masterful command over the presentation. He succeeds by wearing down both the media and his opponents and tying them up in knots with a cacophany of noise while competing and illogical assumptions are set forth with visual clarity. He knows his optics.

Yesterday he composed a ridiculous but compelling tableau in which Bush was seen showing his compasionate conservatism by illustrating that private accounts would benefit African Americans because they have shorter life spans. Now, anybody with a brain knows that this life span data is based upon the fact that blacks have higher infant mortality and young deaths due to violent causes. In fact, African Americans who reach 65 can be expected to live very close to the same life span as whites. But, who's going to listen to that except a bunch of political junkies who are already convinced? All that mattered was that there was a big picture in the Times this morning showing Bush sitting at a table with a group of black leaders talking about social security. He's reaching out to "the other side."

But it's not blacks he's trying to reach. It's whites who like the idea that privatization is good for poor people but haven't quite found a good argument that supports it. This pitch allows Bush supporters to hoist liberals with their own petard by saying they are racists who want to keep blacks from getting their fair share. This kind of sophisticated obfuscation comes as second nature to Republicans these days. We are seeing it in both the Gonzales and Rice debates on Capital Hill right now.

Dave Johnson wrote a fascinating must read piece today called "How Republicans Win" that addresses some of this:

The Republicans win because the modern Right has developed around the core idea of persuading people to support their ideology, which then leads to support for their issues and candidates. In other words: marketing. The Right developed this persuasion capability in reaction to the dominance of the existing "liberal establishment." Because of this, most of their organizations are designed as advocacy and communications organizations, with the mission of reaching the general public and explaining what right-wing ideas are and why they are better for people. Today's Progressives, on the other hand, think there already is a public consensus supporting their ideals and values, so they have not developed a culture that is oriented around persuading people, and their organizations are not designed at their core to persuade the public to support them.

For example, everyone used to think that it is moral to help the poor or protect the environment, so there are organizations that are designed to do that. Then along comes the right, funding organizations designed to convince people it is wrong to do these things. The result today is that on one side you have organizations trying to help the poor, protect the environment, etc. On the other you have organizations telling people what those organizations are doing is wrong. But now you have no one explaining to people that it is GOOD to help the poor and protect the environment so over time support for helping the poor obviously will erode and eventually the organizations that help the poor will be in trouble and have little public support.

I agree that this is the process and the end result, but I would argue that the right has done this not by persuading people to their ideology but by persuading them that Republican ideology is the one they already have.

They tell people that they are helping the poor more by bleeding government programs. (Remember, faith based programs arebetter at helping those in need because they offer the spiritual dimension.) They call their anti-environmental programs "healthy skies" and they refuse to do more than literally phone in bromides about a "culture of life" to their anti-choice base. This was a lesson they learned during the Gingrich years when they precipitously lost favor when they were honest about their agenda. With Bush, they learned the lesson that they needed to couch their ideas in liberal rhetoric in order to win. I believe this is born out by the fact that the polls show not only that Republican voters have a completely different set of priorities than the president for whom they voted, but they actually believe that the president holds their views even though he clearly doesn't.

The most recent PIPA poll confirms this:

Bush supporters also have numerous misperceptions about Bush's international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues--the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%)--and for addressing the problem of global warming: 51% incorrectly assume he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still 53% continue to believe that he favors it. An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these cases, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush. Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues.

That takes nothing away from Johnson's larger point about the Republican success at marketing. In fact, it confirms it. The Republicans are so good at this that they've been able to convince large numbers of people that they are something they're not, even in the face of absolute facts that refute it.

This is a masterful use of marketing and it's one that we need to recognise and begin to use ourselves. The good news is that the liberal consensus remains intact (if somewhat tattered) and if we are smart enough to expose the other side for the hucksters they are and reaffirm our committment to the values we and most of the country hold dear it shouldn't be too hard a sell.

We'll have to get past the media, however, and takes us back to Yglesias' point. We won't get there by refusing to play the game. We have to get better at manipulating the press and that means understanding the pressure they are under from the right and giving them something to use as a counterpoint so they can say they are "objective."

Personal Accounts vs Mandatory Gambling = privatization.




digby 1/26/2005 11:45:00 AM |

 
Hello, Hello, I'm At A Place Called Vertigo

Thanks to all who wrote in concerned about my 10 day hiatus, but all is well. A slight glitch in the real life, nothing terribly serious, just time consuming. I'll be back in force just as soon as I catch up with the blogdrama of the day.

Until then, can we all agree that Commander Codpiece's Sermon on The Steps was just a teensy weensy bit silly? I occurs to me that the neocons are a lethal combination of the worst traits of both sides of the political spectrum --- starry-eyed kumbaya idealists who think the best way to make the world see things their way is by kicking the shit out of it. It figures. The original neocons were a bunch of embarrassed ex-communists who eventually left the Democratic party because the party refused to start WWIII so they could prove their manhood. Now, in their dotage, they are getting their wish. They shoudda had a Viagra.




digby 1/26/2005 10:43:00 AM |

Monday, January 17, 2005

 
Flyboy


I'm given to understand that Junior wears these silly costumes as a courtesy because they are the uniforms of individual military units and they inscribe them with "Commander In Chief" and the presidential seal and all kinds of filligreed decorations over which he has absolutely no control (being only the commander in chief and all.) It's kind of like that "Mission Accomplished" sign. The troops just get overzealous and embarrass the president over and over again with their devotion.

So, does the flight crew of Air Force One also have a special uniform that somebody in the crew (maybe the flight attendant?) designed especially for the president?




Or is it possible that Karen Hughes sewed this one up her very own self? I'd be curious to know.




digby 1/17/2005 01:41:00 PM |

 
The Heart Of The Democratic Party

I posted this speech once before but I think it's worth a rerun. In the summer of 1998 Bill Clinton was slowly being assassinated by the death of a thousand cuts. The press was as bloodthirsty as I've ever seen it. It's hard to remember now, but the feeding frenzy was overwhelming. I can still see the looks on their faces as night after night the media held their witchburning tribunal, cackling madly as they picked over the "evidence" with prurient delight. It was a very sick time.

On the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have A Dream Speech" Bill Clinton gave the following unprepared speech. It was the most heartfelt speech I ever heard him give.

August 28, 1998

The summer of 1963 was a very eventful one for me: the summer I turned 17.

What most people know about it now is the famous picture of me shaking hands with President Kennedy in July. It was a great moment. But I think the moment we commemorate today, a moment I experienced all alone, had a more profound impact on my life.

Most of us who are old enough remember exactly where we were on Aug. 28, 1963. I was in my living room in Hot Springs, Ark.

I remember the chair I was sitting in. I remember exactly where it was in the room. I remember exactly the position of the chair when I sat and watched on national television the great March on Washington unfold.

I remember weeping uncontrollably during Martin Luther King's speech. And I remember thinking, when it was over, my country would never be the same and neither would I.

There are people all across this country who made a more intense commitment to the idea of racial equality and justice that day than they had ever made before. And so in very personal ways, all of us became better and bigger because of the work of those who brought that great day about. There are millions of people who John Lewis will never meet who are better and bigger because of what that day meant.

And the words continue to echo down to the present day, spoken to us today by children who were not even alive then. And, God willing, their grandchildren will also be inspired and moved and become better and bigger because of what happened on that increasingly distant summer day.

What I'd like to ask you to think about a little today, and to share with you -- and I'll try to do it without taking my spectacles out, but I don't write very well and I don't read too well as I get older -- is what I think this means for us today. I was trying to think about what John and Dr. King and others did and how they did it, and how it informs what I do and how I think about other things today.

And I want to ask, you all need to think about three things . . . .

No. 1, Dr. King used to speak about how we were all bound together in a web of mutuality, which was an elegant way of saying, whether we like it or not, we're all in this life together. We are interdependent. Well, what does that mean? Well, let me give you a specific example: We had some good news today. Incomes in America went up 5 percent last year. That's a big bump in a year. We have got the best economy in a generation. That's the good news.

But we are mutually interdependent with people far beyond our borders. Yesterday, there was some more news that was troubling out of Russia, some rumor, some fact about the decline in the economy. Our stock market dropped over 350 points. And in Latin America, our most fast-growing market for American exports, all the markets went down even though, as far as we know, most of those countries are doing everything right. Why? Because we're in a tighter and tighter and tighter web of mutuality.

Asia has these economic troubles. So even though we have got the best economy in a generation, our farm exports to Asia are down 30 percent from last year. And we have states in this country where farmers, the hardest-working people in this country, can't make their mortgage payments because of things that happened half a world away they didn't have any direct influence on at all. This world is being bound together more closely.

So what is the lesson from that? Well, I should go to Russia because, as John said, anybody can come see you when you're doing well. I should go there.

And we should tell them that if they'll be strong and do the disciplined, hard things they have to do to reform their country, their economy, and get through this dark night, that we'll stick with them. . . .

The second thing.

Even if you're not a pacifist, whenever possible, peace and nonviolence is always the right thing to do.

I remember so vividly in 1994 . . .I was trying to pass this crime bill, and all of the opposition to the crime bill that was in the newspapers, all the intense opposition was coming from the N.R.A. and the others that did not want us to ban assault weapons, didn't believe that we ought to have more community policemen walking the streets, and conservatives who thought we should just punish people more and not spend more money trying to keep kids out of trouble in the first place. And it was a huge fight.

And so they came to see me, and he said, "Well, John Lewis is not going to vote for this bill." And I said, "Why?" and they said, "Because it increases the number of crimes subject to the Federal death penalty and he's not for it. And he's not in bed with all those other people, he thinks they're wrong, but he can't vote for it." And I said, "Well, let him alone. There's no point in calling him" because he's lived a lifetime dedicated to an idea and while I may not be a pacifist, whenever possible, it's always the right thing to do to try to be peaceable and nonviolent.

What does that mean for today? Well, there's a lot of good news. It's like the economy: the crime rate's at a 25-year low, juvenile crime's finally coming down. . . .

Half a world away, terrorists trying to hurt Americans blow up two embassies in Africa, and they killed some of our people, some of our best people -- of, I might add, very many different racial and ethnic backgrounds, American citizens, including a distinguished career African-American diplomat and his son -- but they also killed almost 300 Africans and wounded 5,000 others.

We see their pictures in the morning paper, two of them who did that. We were bringing them home. And they look like active, confident young people. What happened inside them that made them feel so much hatred toward us that they could justify not only an act of violence against innocent diplomats and other public servants, but the collateral consequences to Africans whom they would never know? They had children, too.

So it is always best to remember that we have to try to work for peace in the Middle East, for peace in Northern Ireland, for an end to terrorism, for protections against biological and chemical weapons being used in the first place.

The night before we took action against the terrorist operations in Afghanistan and Sudan, I was here on this island up till 2:30 in the morning trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift. I believed I had to take the action I did, but I didn't want some person who was a nobody to me, but who may have a family to feed and a life to live, and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there, to die needlessly. I learned that, and it's another reason we ought to pay our debt to the United Nations, because if we can work together, together we can find more peaceful solutions. Now I didn't learn that when I became President; I learned it from John Lewis and the civil rights movement a long time ago.

And the last thing I learned from them on which all these other things depend, without which we cannot build a world of peace or one America in an increasingly peaceful world bound together in this web of mutuality, is that you can't get there unless you're willing to forgive your enemies. I never will forget one of the most -- I don't think I have ever spoken about this in public before -- but one of the most meaningful personal moments I have had as President was a conversation I had with Nelson Mandela.

And I said to him -- I said: "You know, I have read your book, and I have heard you speak.

And you spent time with my wife and daughter, and you have talked about inviting your jailers to your inauguration." And I said, "It's very moving." And I said: "You're a shrewd as well as a great man. But come on now, how did you really do that? You can't make me believe you didn't hate those people who did that to you for 27 years?"

He said, "I did hate them for quite a long time. After all, they abused me physically and emotionally. They separated me from my wife, and it eventually broke my family up. They kept me from seeing my children grow up." He said, "For quite a long time, I hated them."

And then he said: "I realized one day, breaking rocks, that they could take everything away from me, everything, but my mind and heart. Now, those things I would have to give away, and I simply decided I would not give them away."

So as you look around the world, you see -- how do you explain these three children who were killed in Ireland or all the people who were killed in the square when the people were told to leave the City Hall, there was a bomb there, and then they walked out toward the bomb?

What about all those families in Africa? I don't know. I can't pick up the telephone and call them and say, "I am so sorry this happened." How do we find that spirit?

All of you know I'm having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness. And I ----. It gets a little easier the more you do it. And if you have a family, an Administration, a Congress and a whole country to ask, you're going to get a lot of practice.

But I have to tell that in these last days it has come home to me again, something I first learned as President, but it wasn't burned in my bones -- and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing to give it. And all of us -- the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you -- they harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self-inflicted wounds.

And so it is important that we are able to forgive those we believe have wronged us, even as we ask for forgiveness from people we have wronged.

And I heard that first -- first -- in the civil rights movement. "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

I never doubted Clinton's sincere committment to racial justice, but that speech illuminated something for me that I'd never quite understood before. The Democratic party is dysfunctional in so many ways, and it makes me crazy with its lack of discipline. (Just as Clinton did.) But, considering this country's sordid racial history, being the party of African Americans is the heart of what we stand for. It's what gives us our soul.

We like to think that we are about reason and rationality while the other side is all hot emotionality. But, we are all humans blesssed with the full spectrum of human attributes. The difference, it seems to me, is which human qualities lead us and where they take us.

The civil rights movement gives us the perfect window. Democrats led with their hearts on that issue. Although they knew it was politically dangerous they did it anyway because they were moved as human beings to do the right thing against their own political best interests. Immediately, the Republicans coolly and methodically set out to take advantage of the opening. The party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had no personal stake in the issue of racial justice. The Republican party had, since Lincoln, been the African Americans' home. Both of those men were from California, so they also had no regional attachment to the "southern culture" that would have made them nostalgic for the old ways. Their Southern Strategy was pure, cold political calculation and it served them very well. A look at the 2004 electoral map confirms it.

We led with our hearts on civil rights and they led with their heads. And we were right. I believed Bill Clinton when he said that he'd cried when he heard the "I have A Dream Speech." Many, many people did. That moment symbolized the crucible of American culture. It challenged us to rise above the original sin of slavery and do the right thing. The people who heard that call were the people who formed the heart of the Modern Democratic Party.

And when we hear some of our own complain about the Congressional Black Caucus "mau-mauing" somebody or say derisively that the African American constituency should be less race based and more class based, we need to remember that the congressional black caucus is also the fighting liberal caucus. (They were the first and loudest to protest the bogus impeachment, a fact which Clinton knew that day very well.) They are Democrats because the Democratic Party invited them in and asked them to sit at the table when it was politically difficult to do. They knew that Bill Clinton, for all his foibles, understood that and appreciated what that meant. And they stood by him when he was being persecuted by the other side. If there is today a more reliable constituency of authentic courageous liberal Democrats, I don't know what it is.

Martin Luther King was murdered before his dream could be realized. But it's getting better slowly but surely. There will be no going back. It's an enormous achievement for a screwed up country like ours that we've finally managed to make progress in spite of the huge cultural obstacles that were virtually built into our political system from the very beginning.

Democrats led the way on that and paid a huge political price. For all the talk of spinelessness and weakness that you hear out there, when the chips were down, the Democratic Party showed that it would stand up for what was right. There is no doubt which party Martin Luther King would choose today.

I'm not evolved enough, I'm afraid, to be forgiving for what the Republicans have done to this country these last few years. I'll need some time to come to that. But, I appreciate the notion that we can't let them sour us and turn inward. Nothing will ever change if we do that. And I figure as long as African Americans are in our party fighting the good fight, the least I can do is stand beside them.




digby 1/17/2005 09:42:00 AM |

Sunday, January 16, 2005

 
A Long Time Coming

Frank Rich writes one of his typically interesting pieces today on the Armstrong Williams scandal and illustrates one of the reasons we are in such poor shape in the media wars.

[T]he Jan. 7 edition of CNN's signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything that might resemble the truth.

[...]

That he[Novak] and Mr. Begala would be allowed to lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on a show produced by television's self-proclaimed "most trusted" news network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation of "news" metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism. But the ugly bigger picture reaches well beyond "Crossfire" and CNN.

[...]

[P]erhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all "journalists," was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced "cheap shot journalism" in which "the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective."

This is a scenario out of "The Manchurian Candidate." Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel's "Nightline" recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, "Stolen Honor," under the rubric of "news" in prime time just before Election Day. (After fierce criticism, Sinclair retreated from that plan.) Thus the Williams interview with the vice president, implicitly presented as an example of the kind of "objective" news Mr. Cheney endorses, was in reality a completely subjective, bought-and-paid-for fake news event for a broadcast company that barely bothers to fake objectivity and both of whose chief executives were major contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The Soviets couldn't have constructed a more ingenious or insidious plot to bamboozle the citizenry.

The Leninists of the conservative movement morphed into Stalinists sometime during the Clinton administration and have been becoming more and more open about their totalitarian bent. But this has been brewing for a long, long time. In fact, it was the red-baiter of red-baiters, Richard Nixon, who set the whole thing in motion. That should serve as a vivid reminder that those who preach the gospel with the most evangelical fervor are the ones most likely to be sinners. The most zealous anti-communists developed a very inhealthy appetite for the tactics of their enemies. (Or maybe it was that fascination rather than any real philosophical objection that led them to become obsessed in the first place.)

As we live here in America, basking in the golden glow of conservatism's apotheosis, Dan Rather's "retirement" represents the completion of another piece of the American Soviet project.

This is just sad:

According to a Broadcasting & Cable source in Washington, D.C., CBS News president Andrew Heyward, along with Washington bureau chief Janet Leissner, recently met with White House communications director Dan Bartlett, in part to repair chilly relations with the Bush administration.

CBS News’ popularity at the White House-never high to begin with-plunged further in the wake of Dan Rather’s discredited 60 Minutes story on George Bush’s National Guard service.

An incentive for making nice is the impending report from the two-member panel investigating CBS's use of now-infamous documents for the 60 Minutes piece.

Heyward was -working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,- our source says, - and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced. - CBS declined to comment.

That had to have been a sweet victory. Seeing CBS tugging its metaphorical forelock in deference to the Republican White House was the culmination of more than thirty years of cultural indoctrination into Nixon's dark paranoid fantasy of the liberal media. But then the modern GOP is nothing if not the party of Richard Nixon.

From "The President and the Press" by David Wise in the Atlantic (sorry, subscription req'd):

In April of 1971, John Ehrlichman, the President's chief assistant for domestic affairs, complained in person to Richard S. Salant, the president of CBS News, about Dan Rather, the network's White House correspondent. Ehrlichman was in New York to appear on the CBS Morning News with correspondent John Hart. Afterwards Hart and Ehrlichman adjourned for breakfast at the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, where they were joined by Salant. The President's assistant brought up the subject of CBS's White House reporter.

"Rather has been jobbing us," Ehrlichman said. Salant, seeking to inject a lighter note into the conversation, told how Rather had been hired by CBS in 1962 after he had saved the life of a horse, an act of heroism that resulted in considerable publicity and brought him to the attention of the network. It was then that Rather went to work for CBS News as chief of its Southwest bureau in Dallas. When President Kennedy was assassinated in that city, Rather went on the air for the network, and his cool, poised coverage of the tragedy gained him national recognition. After Dallas, Salant explained to Ehrlichman, CBS brought Rather to Washington, in part because the new President, Lyndon Johnson, was a fellow Texan.

"Aren't you going to open a bureau in Austin where Dan could have a job?" Ehrlichman asked Salant. He then accused Rather of never coming to see him in the White House, and he suggested it might be beneficial if Rather took a year's vacation.

[...]

Walter Cronkite believes the Nixon Administration attacked the news media "to raise the credibility of the Administration. It's like a first-year physics experiment with two tubes of water--you put pressure on one side and it makes the other side go up or down." He added: "I have charged that this is a 'conspiracy.' I don't regret my use of that word."

By applying constant pressure, in ways seen and unseen, the leaders of the government have attempted to shape the news to resemble the images seen through the prism of their own power. The Administration's attacks, Richard Salant acknowledged, have "made us all edgy. We've thought about things we shouldn't think about."

That article was written in 1973. And it was before they set the second part of their plan in motion. While diligently working the refs for the last 30 years they were simultaneously building an alternative media to push from the competitive side and drive the discourse to the right.

Today, that dream of control is fully realized. Republicans routinely bully any reporter or organization that doesn't play ball while they feed lots of juicy propaganda to their bought and paid for media like FOX, Rush, Drudge and The NY Post knowing that the story will work its way into the mainstream anyway. They created an entertainment model for news in which entertainment values superceded civic values and it attracted a different kind of person to the field. Over time, fewer and fewer reporters wouldn't play ball because those that refused were weeded out in a form of (un)natural selection. In the end, the survivors don't even know they are biased. They are so enmeshed in this system of celebrity punishment and rewards that their own self esteem is now drawn from their acceptability to the (Republican) establishment. And each and every day the partisan right wing media pushes the discourse a few inches further to the right.

So just this week we find out that Armstrong Williams is being paid by the taxpayers to promote the President's political agenda and the social security administration employees are being required to disseminate Republican talking points to the public during a major policy battle. There are undoubtedly many more examples of the literal merging of state and party.

But the media has long since been corrupted by a far more sophisticated, legal system of payola and influence peddling. It makes little difference now whether there are more Armstrong Williamses because there are many, many people who will happily perform his function while taking a check from a right wing foundation or think tank.
The right wing noise machine works like a single organism, relentlessly attacking any threat to the Republican party, unquestioningly advancing anything their leadership directs. It's just plain greed that led them to use taxpayer money when there is so much special interest money to be used for the exact same purpose.

In a just world this Armstrong Williams scandal would get at least the exposure the "selling" of the Lincoln Bedroom tale got in the Clinton administration. At the time there were endless stories about abusing the public trust and and forcing the taxpayers to foot the bill for partisan activity. There were months of handwringing and hankie clutching and "how will we ever sleep again knowing that political activity took place in the People's House!"

Anybody want to lay a bet that tthis scandal produces anything like that? Are any Democrats prepared to go on television and perform a soap opera prosecution featuring phony pathos and crocodile tears about "sending a message to the children?" Are we prepared to boost ratings and give the media reason to defy the White House and the right wing message behemoth with a show they can't resist? (Certainly, when given the chance our hard boiled political operative Paul Begala didn't even nick Armstrong with a ball point pen, much less stick the shiv in as Novak would have been so delighted to do if the shoe were on the other foot.)

I'm not holding my breath. The fact that no WMD in Iraq is causing nary a peep from anybody tells me that even body bags and billions can't shake the machine. I'm not sure anything will except total economic meltdown. Sadly, we may just get our wish.








digby 1/16/2005 01:23:00 PM |

Saturday, January 15, 2005

 
Innocent As A Newborn Babe

Political campaigns and consultants are becoming increasingly skillful at manipulating the mainstream press by planting stories in the blogosphere. Despite this, the mainstream press remains credulous about blogging. During South Dakota's U.S. Senate race between Tom Daschle and John Thune, the Thune campaign put two local political bloggers on its payroll. One got $27,000, the other $8,000. Their anti-Daschle reports trickled up into South Dakota newspapers.

The lesson for a campaign is obvious: Got a story you can't convince a mainstream reporter to run? Leak it anonymously to a blog on your payroll. Then get a local reporter to write a story on the controversial, gossipy, local political blog. Soon everyone in town will be talking about the story you leaked to the blog. Voila! Eventually a mainstream news organization will run a story on the rumor that "everyone is talking about." Or they'll do a "what people are buzzing about on the Internet" piece. And no one will know that the blog post was a paid placement until after the election.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Whew! Excuse me, I have to dry my eyes. That was a good one.

Uh, Chris Suellentrop. I'd like to introduce you to a guy named Matt Drudge? I don't know if anyone's ever mentioned it to you, but Matt's been known to slip an item or two into the mainstream on behalf of Republicans in just the way you outline for almost a decade now. (It's pretty clear that he's slipped in an item or two on behalf of the mainstream media, too, hasn't he, Chris? It makes it so much easier to "report" these delicious gossipy lies once they're "out there.")

He doesn't get paid directly by the Republican national committee or any specific candidate for this so he doesn't have to disclose anything. Instead, Republicans launder great piles of cash through speaking fees and book deals and radio shows and "fellowships" to give them a couple of degreees of separation from Drudge's slime machine. They've been "feeding" stories to the mainstream press through him for almost eight years this way. He invented the practise. I'm very surprised you just noticed. Welcome to the world, little guy.

And here's a news flash for you. In this election they expanded that operation throughout the internets with stories like this:

It was amazing Thursday to watch the documents story go from FreeRepublic.com, a bastion of right-wing lunacy, to Drudge to the mainstream media in less than 12 hours," said Jim Jordan, a strategist for independent Democratic groups opposed to Bush.

"That's not to say the documents didn't deserve examination. But apparently the entire thing was cooked up by a couple of amateurs on Free Republic. The speed with which it moved was breathtaking."

By Friday, articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other news outlets were quoting some analysts raising questions about the CBS documents, and others saying it was impossible to judge the memos' authenticity without seeing the originals.

Yes indeed. It was "cooked up by an amateur" who was later revealed to be involved at very high levels in the GOP legal infrastructure. Let's talk about transparency some more, shall we?

At other times you had that unctuous twit Hugh Hewitt exhorting the same Freepers on his radio show and on his blog to flog the Christmas In Cambodia story --- a flaky wingnut obsession that never really took off, but kept the Swift Boat story in the right wing news way after the credibility of O'Neill and Corsi had been completely destroyed.

The New York Post hired the Powerline guys (and Claremont "fellows") along with Captain Ed at Captain's Quarters to write a smear on Kerry's Vietnam record for the op-ed page at the behst, apparently, of John Podhoretz and Deborah Orin. One does wonder why they didn't want to get their hands dirty with such a story themselves.

There are endless examples of the Republican Noise Machine working in concert with the blogosphere --- how directly is anybody's guess. But, it's clear that they did it and regardless of who signs the checks, the money is coming from the same source. Please spare me the lectures about integrity. On the right side of the aisle there hasn't been any sign of it in eons.

Yet, just last night we saw the perfect examples of two of these upstanding rightwing Scaife/Regnery/Murdoch whore suck-ups looking down their patrician noses at the left bloggers who openly supported Democratic politicians and disclosed that they were consulting for them:

HUGH HEWITT [AUTHOR]: No, Bill. In fact, the idea of payola is very dangerous. Bloggers on the take are very bad for the business of blogging. Blogging of real journalists, and people like Power Line and like InstaPundit and myself, we don't like it when Daily Kos shows up on the take of the Howard Dean campaign. Now Daily Kos says, this is one of the bloggers from the left, says he disclosed it, but not to the satisfaction of anyone who watches him. I didn't know.

O'REILLY: Aw, this is bunk. This is bull. Nobody knew about this.

HEWITT: That's right.

What a fetid, pietistic pile of nonsense.

The only effect of this controversy is to make it impossible for Democratic bloggers to make money writing about politics unless they are employed by one of the three or four liberal magazines.

The major right wing bloggers, meanwhile, will always be well compensated for backing Republican politicians, never worry. They have an entire institutional machine set up to do just that. Kos and other entrepreneurial activist Dems, on the other hand, will be be emasculated with cramped rules and codes and a requirement for purity (as opposed to transparency) while the other side continues to stealthily professionalize their online operation and use it to dominate the discourse.

Suellentrop's take on this shows once again that just as the Right Wing Noise Machine is the Democrats' enemy, the SCLM is our enemy too. Indeed, they are mutually dependent. They play ball to get their stories and their gossip and their access (and their promotions from their Republican bosses.) They are not looking out for our best interests and we should not get defensive about our honesty or our integrity. After all, look at how well they've protected the political system from being polluted with years and years of Republican lies and propaganda.

It just makes me laugh to see them get high and mighty about the blogosphere being shills for politicans. At least we aren't willing, credulous tools who play court jester for the Republicans as they insult and berate us for doing exactly what they want us to do. That would be something to be ashamed of.




Update to the post below:

I've received about 30 pieces of e-mail on this subject from dean supporters who think that I'm playing into the right wing's hands for taking Zephyr Teachout's word that they hired Jerome and Kos in the hope that they'd stay on the team. I didn't realize that Teachout had been consigned to the ninth circle of hell long before this and that her characterization of what happened simply doesn't square with any reality as we know it. I take it all back, I didn't know what I was talking about. I'm an idiot. I wish I hadn't written about the implications within the Dean campaign at all because it obscured the real point I wanted to make about this little tempest. It never pays to get Dean supporters upset unless you have a really good reason.

I don't want to make more out of this than necessary, but with the "blogging and ethics" conference in which they invited no partisan lefty bloggers (unless Teachout was suposed to fill that role, god help us), the handwringing in the press and the phony sanctimony I'm seeing on the right, I think this actually adds up to more than just a convenient equivalence argument for the Williams payola scandal. I think that at a time when Democratic politicians are just becoming cognisant of the power of the internet (beyond fundraising) this trumped up controversy about "blogger ethics" could set us back quite seriously.

Update II: Crooks and Liars has the video of the High Priest of Blogging and his little dog Bill slandering Kos last night. (Scroll down.)




digby 1/15/2005 09:49:00 AM |

Friday, January 14, 2005

 
Those Who Can, Blog; Those Who Can't, Teachout

Well now, it appears that "Zonkette" is causing quite a brouhaha. Atrios and others have more than adequately explained the fact that Jerome and Kos disclosed everything they needed to disclose and any comparison with Armstrong Williams accepting a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars under the table is some kind of cosmic joke. But the damage is done.

Here we are in the midst of a huge ethical scandal in the right wing noise machine, and out marches Zephyr Teachout, goddess of the left blogosphere, with a salvo virtually designed to provide the SCLM with one of their patented false equivalence arguments. And, lucky for us, it serves to marginalize the left blogosphere at the very moment that the righties are being feted like princes in the salons of the Mighty Wurlitzer as right wing heroes! What excellent timing.

However, I think that the most disappointing thing about her post is the fact that the Dean campaign thought they were buying Jerome and Kos' loyalty by signing them on. The Dean campaign was supposed to be the new paradigm of grassroots activism being brought into the process on a national level and working for the common good instead of their own tired careerist aims. (Indeed, I thought this was actually the raison d'etre of the campaign and why Dean was running for DNC chair.) I don't know Kos or Jerome personally, but I certainly know their writings quite intimately and I would stake my life that they were deeply and personally committed to the Dean candidacy and would have walked on hot coals to get him elected regardless of any renumeration. But, if they had had a serious disagreement with the campaign, I would also bet my life that any contract they signed for technical advice would not have stopped them from leaving. It's called personal integrity and I thought that's what the Dean campaign was supposed to be all about.

The idea that the insiders quietly thought that could keep them in line with a few bucks is so seriously insulting that I'm having to reevaluate my endorsement of Dean for DNC. It shows absolutely no understanding of how the netroots works and if they actually used this crass Republican-style formula to deal with sincere activists like Kos and Jerome then there is zero hope that they can reform the party when faced with jaded lifetime political careerists in DC.

The larger question of blogger ethics in and of itself is a red herring. It's suddenly a "concern" of the SCLM and by extension the halls of academe, because they are taking heat from us --- and people are listening --- and they don't like it. Sadly, the only bloggers who are going to be restrained by these concerns are on the left. The right wing bloggers are now a fully accepted part of the Right Wing Noise Machine --- positioned in the dumb mainstream media's collective lizard brain as fearless wild west mavericks defying the establishment. Their "ethics" are the same as any other right wing media --- non-existent.

So the left blogosphere will be the focus of this crusade for online ethics. We don't have institutions like the Claremont Institute who can hire us on as "fellows" --- and launder Republican money through it to pay us. We aren't going to get our marching orders and talking points through the coordinated "left wing" media because there is no coordinated left wing media. We are out here on our own, and when or if we say or do something controversial, there is no institutional defense of us because there is no institution. Certainly, we aren't going to get paid big bucks to be a member of the team.

So fuck a "code of ethics." It will only serve to marginalize us.

All we really have, and ever had, is our credibility with our readers as opinion writers and committed activists. We shall have to measure all of our decisions based upon personal integrity and issue a blanket call of caveat emptor. It's all there is. And, frankly it's all we need. Because despite what some people seem to believe, there is no code of ethics to explain Judith Miller or Lisa Myers. The PR Flack "professional" organization stood up for Armstrong Williams. Even such things as the military code of honor has been stood on its head by aging Naval Officers and deviant interrogators just this past year.

Please tell me what these "codes of ethics" really mean because I've got to tell you, the minute I see one these days, I have to laugh out loud.

Update: It seems that my remarks about the Dean campaign have stirred the troops in defense. I just got three e-mails saying that I was a fool to abandon Dean for DNC because of this. Some commenters have said something like it as well.

This is why I endorsed Dean in the first place (last June!) for DNC. The loyalty he inspires among the grassroots is a powerful force for good in the party. So, ok, as if it matters at all, I am still for him. However, I would certainly hope that his devoted followers hold his feet to the fire on these matters. I don't hold him personally responsible for Teachout's apostasy, but he should be aware that this kind of attitude is a killer in the netroots. Bloggers aren't whores, they're partisans. It's a huge difference.


Update II: Responding to a commenter, my comment about the "PR Flack" organization standing up for Williams was wrong. The PR Agency organization stood up for Ketchum, the agency that paid Williams under the table. A different PR organization thoroughly condemned Armstrong. Here's the story, from the NY Times:

Yesterday, in a rare rebuke, Judith T. Phair, the president and chief executive of the Public Relations Society of America for 2005, condemned the decision by Mr. Williams to, as she put it, promote the law "without revealing that his comments were paid for by a public relations agency under contract to the government."

"As public relations professionals, we are disheartened by this type of tactic," Ms. Phair said in a statement on the Web site of the organization (www.prsa.org), which represents 20,000 people working in public relations, public affairs and corporate communications.

"Any paid endorsement that is not fully disclosed as such and is presented as objective news coverage," Ms. Phair said, is a violation of the group's code of ethics, "which requires that public relations professionals engage in open, honest communications and fully disclose sponsors or financial interests involved in any paid communications activities."

[...]

The group's members are individuals who work in public relations and related fields rather than the agencies themselves.

The agencies' trade association, the Council of Public Relations Firms in New York, also has an ethics code, but Ketchum did not violate it, the council president, Kathy Cripps, said.

"Public relations needs to express total accuracy and truthfulness," Ms. Cripps said. However, she added, referring to Mr. Williams, "it was the spokesperson's responsibility to disclose the affiliation" rather than Ketchum's.

digby 1/14/2005 09:34:00 AM |

Monday, January 10, 2005

 
When He's Right He's Right

Moral Clarity, Courage Needed, Bush Aide Says:

President Bush's chief political adviser told graduates of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University on Saturday to judge leaders on the basis of character.

America needs people who have "the moral clarity and courage to do what's right, regardless of consequence, fashion or fad,'"Karl Rove said.

"You either have values ingrained in your heart and soul that will not change with the wind, or you don't," he said.

He's right. This is their message and it's on the money. Of course they are faking it in every possible way with their vacuous brand name in a suit prancing around on aircraft carriers and such. But that's because they only pretend to have "values" when what they really have are political instincts. They are not the same thing.

If either party could give them the real thing instead of an ersatz, superficial rendering of smarmy religiosity, they would gain the support of a large majority of this country. You have to give Rove credit. He has done a lot with what he has to work with. Sexual priggishness, vengeance and racism are very difficult concepts upon which to build a positice values argument, but they've managed to create the illusion that they have "moral clarity" by garbing their narrow vision in religious and patriotic terms --- and because we have failed to stand up for our universal values of liberty, justice and equality. They win by default.




digby 1/10/2005 08:29:00 AM |

Sunday, January 09, 2005

 
Under The Radar

John at STF says something I think is very interesting about the role of the blogosphere and why the SCLM is so hostile to it:

Two things are happening here. First, there is no middle any more. This is mostly because the hard right is trying to take over the country by any means necessary, and destroying moderates (including Republican moderates) is part of their game. They have many plants in the media itself -- especially at the relatively-anonymous high levels, including ownership – and rightwing activists outside the media have learned that if they complain all the time about everything, often they’ll get their way. (This accounts for a supposed paradox: why do both liberals and conservatives hate the media? It’s because the conservatives are faking it. They know as well as liberals do that Dan Rather wasn’t really a liberal, but they can win by lying and smearing, so they do it.)

This has actually been well documented.

"William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America today, has come clean on this issue. "I admit it," he told a reporter. "The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.

There is no liberal media. There is a partisan Republican media and an establishment media and since the establishment is conservative there is only conservative media.

John continues:

The second thing is more positive. Faceless copyeditors and other behind-the-scenes pros try to control the spin of news by highlighting some stories, downplaying others, and hardening or softening the main point. Various tricks can be used to suppress a story: putting it on page 16 with a small, misleading headline and burying the point of the story in the 9th paragraph sum up the most common ones.

With the internet, this arbiter function is lost. Every man can be his own I.F. Stone now. Stone used to say that you could always find the truth in the newspapers, but it would often be in a short paragraph on page sixteen. Most of the damage that bloggers do to the established media doesn’t come from independent reporting, but from displacing the copy editors by highlighting stories the editors wanted to downplay.

This is quite correct, but it really only applies to our side. We on the left are sorting out the political spin and trying to get the establishment media to focus on issues and stories we think are important. And we don't get especially good results. Our success has been with grassroots organizing, not message pushing. This can be attributed to the political and media establishment's reluctance to deal with us (as we can see with the "liberal" media and the "liberal" academia represented at this conference.)We are out there, hundreds of thousand readers are reading us and yet we exist under the radar of all the liberal institutions while the right wing bloggers are "handled" by rightwing PR outfits and pushed into rightwing media and eventually into the mainstream.

On the right, the blogosphere has been incorporated into their message machine. (Indeed, the political blogosphere was really invented by a guy named Drudge, wasn't it?) They feed and are fed, without explicit direction. They know what they are supposed to say and it filters up down and around talk radio, cable news and into the mainstream. We all know how it works. This is why only a right wing freelance political blogger was invited to the conference --- the mainstream of both political parties are really only aware of the bloggers who have been pushed to the forefront by the Mighty Wurlitzer. Just as they are only aware of ... so many things that have been pushed to the forefront by the Mighty Wurlitzer. It's the essence of our political weakness.

Corrected to reflect John Emerson as the poster on STF.




digby 1/09/2005 08:53:00 PM |

 
Why Don't They Like Us, Heinrich?



David Low

A veteran interrogator at Guantánamo told The New York Times in a recent interview that it became clear over time that most of the detainees had little useful to say and that "they were just swept up" during the Afghanistan war with little evidence they played any significant role.

"These people had technical knowledge that expired very quickly after they were brought here," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Most of the emphasis was on quantity, not quality," the interrogator said, adding that the number of pages generated from an interrogation was an important standard.

Well, say hallelujah! The truth shall set us free. This has been known for at least a year, but who's counting? In January of 2004, David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair:

According to General Miller, Gitmo's importance is growing with amazing rapidity:"Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I'm talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world."

Unsurprisingly, the same nonsense took place at Abu Ghraib

"...they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors - Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast - to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. "It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up," he said. Pappas was seen as demanding - waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information - but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes."

I wrote back in June about this absurdity.

Daily success or failure in guerilla wars is notoriously difficult to assess. Unlike a war for territory you cannot say that you took a certain hill or town. Political types are always looking for some measurement, some sign that they are succeeding (or failing.)

Billmon noted this back in October in an interesting post on Rumsfeld's angst at being unable to assess success or failure in the WOT:

Above all, Rumsfeld cries out for "metrics" that can be used to measure progress in such a war:

"Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," he wrote. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Billmon makes the obvious comparison between Rummy and the most recent war criminal sec-def, Robert McNamara, concluding:

The same mindset also spawned McNamara's preferred metric: the infamous "body count." In that earlier, more naive, era, it hadn't yet occurred to management theorists that numeric targets can quickly become bureaucratic substitutes for real objectives, such as winning wars. So McNamara (and the military) had to learn it the hard way, as industrious field officers dispatched soldiers to count graves in Vietnamese civilian cemetaries in order to hit their weekly numbers.

Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they [Rumsfeld et al] decided that they would guage success or failure --- certainly they would report to the White House success or failure --- based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.

This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, "look at how much intelligence we're getting. We're really getting somewhere."

McNamara quotes TS Eliot at the end of "The Fog Of War":

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Well, not everybody apparently. Thirty years after the hell of Vietnam, it's the same shit, different fools. Lyndon Johnson is laughing his ass off in hell.

Actually, Johnson is probably only in the 8th circle. The 9th will be reserved for the Bush administration because they wilfully ignored the experience of their own lives.

Now we find that in addition to a bunch of false intelligence gained through torture and other means, we are going to lock up a lot of these guys at Gitmo forever. Sadly, we can't give them any kind of due process because we don't have enough evidence. And that's because many of them were innocent of any affiliation with the Taliban or al Qaeda and many others were very low level grunts. But they've known this for years. From the January 2004 VF article:

In late summer 2002, a senior C.I.A. analyst with extensive experience in the Middle East spent about a week at the prison camp observing and interviewing dozens of detainees, said officials who read his detailed memorandum.

While the survey was anecdotal, those officials said the document, which contained about 15 pages, concluded that a substantial number of the detainees appeared to be low-level militants, aspiring holy warriors who had rushed to Afghanistan to defend the Taliban, or simply innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Senior military officials now readily acknowledge that many members of the intelligence team initially sent to Guantánamo were poorly prepared to sort through the captives. During the first half of 2002, they said, almost none of the Army interrogators had any substantial background in terrorism, Al Qaeda or other relevant subjects.

It gets worse, though. Since we kidnapped these innocent men and threw them into a hellish gulag they have, unsurprisingly, become radicalized.

American and foreign officials have also grown increasingly concerned about the prospect that detainees who arrived at Guantánamo representing little threat to the United States may have since been radicalized by the conditions of their imprisonment and others held with them.

''Guantánamo is a huge problem for Americans,'' a senior Arab intelligence official familiar with its operations said. ''Even those who were not hard-core extremists have now been indoctrinated by the true believers. Like any other prison, they have been taught to hate. If they let these people go, these people will make trouble.''

They now hate our fucking guts and will work until their last breaths to kill as many of us as they can. Perhaps this is one good reason why:

During late 2002, FBI Special Agent [blank] was present in an observation room at Gtmo and observed [blank] conducting an interrogation of an unknown detainee, [blank] was present to observe the interrogation occurring in a different interrogation room)[blank] entered the observation and complained that curtain movement at the observation window was distracting the detainee, although no movement had occirred. She directed a marine to duct tape a curtain over the two-way mirror between the interrogation room and the observation room [blank] characterized this action as an attempt to probinit those in the observation room from witnessing her interaction with the detainee. Through the surveillance camera monitor [blank] then observed [blank] position herself between the detainee and the surveillance camera. the detaiunee was shackled and his hands were cuffed to his waist. [blank] observed [blank] apparently whispering in the detainee's ear and caressing and appluying lotion to his arms (this was during Ramadan when physical contact with a woman would have been particularly offensive to a moslem male.) On more than one occasion the detainees appeared to be grimacing in pain and [blank] hands appeared to be making some contact with the detainee. Although [blank] could not see her hands at all times. He saw them moving toward the detainee's lap. He also observed the detainee pulling away and against the restraints. Subsequently, the marine who previously taped the curtain and had been in the interrogation room with [blank] during the interrogartion re-entered the observation room. [blank] asked what had happened to cause the detainee to grimace in pain. The marine said [blank] had grabbed the detainee's thumbs and bent them backwards and indicated that she also grabbed his genitals. The marine also implied that her treatment of the detainee was less harsh than her treatment of others by indicating that he had seen her treatment of other detainees result in detainees curling into a fetal position on the floor and crying in pain.

One wonders if they had become "dehydrated" and had been forced to have one of those therapeutic enemas against their will.

Yes, they hate us. The ones who have been locked up and the ones who haven't. And it's you and me and your kids who they hate now, not just the leadership or the troops. They hate us personally. And they hate us because we don't seem too worked up about this disgusting breach of human rights. In fact, a majority apparently think it's just dandy, including the most powerful leaders in the land who continue to support the war criminals who concieved this disasterous blunder, even this week elevating one of them to the highest law enforcement office in the land.

So let's have another lecture on morality and values. I really need to hear one. Let's hear some more talk about how liberals are leading this country down the path to perdition with our lack of restraint and our inability to draw lines between right and wrong and good and evil. I need to bask in the glow of republican righteousness and beg for forgiveness for sinfully indulging gays in their quest to form families and cleanse myself of the shame of forgiving a man for committing adultery. God help me, I need some moral clarity and I need it damned quickly because I'm really wondering just who in the hell is evil in this war on terror and who isn't. It's getting hard to tell the difference here. It's getting really hard.




digby 1/09/2005 03:54:00 PM |

 
Doomsday For The Democrats

Via DAOU I see that Adam Yoshida is prognisticating about 2008:

If I were going to guess, the Republican primaries in 2008 may well end up looking a great deal like the Democratic ones in 2004. We'll have a slew of major establishment players running simply because it's 'their time to run.' One of them (early guess: Bill Frist) will emerge as a shallow front-runner, holding 20% in the polls versus 10% or so for other candidates. The race will be thrown into disarray when a candidate who connects to the Republican Party's conservative base catches on fire. I've also got a suggestion as to who that candidate may be: former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.

Oh, I fervently hope not. Why, if Judge Roy Moore emerges as a powerful spokesman for the Christian Right (who feel betrayed by the rampant liberalism of George W. Bush) it will be just terrible for us. I get scared just thinking about it. We should publicly beg the Republicans every chance we get not to let Moore run for president. Maybe they will listen to us. They so often do.




digby 1/09/2005 01:44:00 PM |

 
Shameless

If anyone in history has ever emitted a bigger pile of oozing, sanctimonious, unctuous, fetid, perfidious, malodorous offal than this, I'd like to know what it could possibly be:


CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — HOUSE H121
January 6, 2005

Mr. DELAY. Mr. Speaker, I rise to
claim the remainder of the time.


The SPEAKER. In the tradition of
the House, the gentleman from Texas
is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. DELAY. Mr. Speaker, what is happening here today is amazing but not surprising. Mr. Speaker, what we are witnessing here today is a shame. A shame. The issues at stake in this petition are gravely, gravely serious. This is not just having a debate. But the specific charges, as any objective observer must acknowledge, are not.

That is because the purpose of this petition is not justice but noise.

It is a warning to Democrats across the country, now in the midst of soul searching after their historic losses in November, not to moderate their party’s message.

It is just the second day of the 109th Congress and the first chance of the Democrat congressional leadership to show the American people what they have learned since President Bush’s historic reelection, and they can show that, but they have turned to what might be called the ‘‘X-Files Wing’’ of the Democrat Party to make their first
impression.

Rather than substantive debate, Democrat leaders are still adhering to a failed strategy of spite, obstruction, and conspiracy theories. They accuse the President, who we are told is apparently a closet computer nerd, of personally overseeing the development of vote-stealing software.

We are told, without any evidence, that unknown Republican agents stole the Ohio election and that its electoral votes should be awarded to the winner of an exit poll instead.

Many observers will discard today’s petition as a partisan waste of time, but it is much worse than that. It is an assault against the institutions of our representative democracy. It is a threat to the very ideals it ostensibly defends. No one is served by this petition, not in the long run. And in the short term, its only beneficiaries are its proponents themselves.

Democrats around the country have asked since Election Day, and will no doubt ask again today, how it came to this. The Democrat Party, the party that was once an idealistic, forward- looking, policy colossus. The New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the Great Society, the space program, civil rights. And yet today one is hard pressed to find a single positive substantive idea coming from the left.

Instead, the Democrats have replaced statecraft with stagecraft, substance with style, and not a very fashionable style at that. The petitioners claim that they act on behalf of disenfranchised voters, but no such voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004 and for that matter the election of 2000.

Everybody knows it. The voters know it, the candidates know it, the courts know it, and the evidence proves it.

We are not here to debate evidence, but to act our roles in some scripted, insincere morality play.

Now, just remember: pre-election memos revealed that Democrat campaign operatives around the country were encouraged by their high command in Washington to charge voter fraud and intimidation regardless of whether any of it occurred.

Remember,neither of the Democrat candidates supposedly robbed in Ohio endorse this petition. It is a crime against the dignity of American democracy, and that crime is not victimless.

The Democrat leadership came down to the floor and said this is a good debate;we ought to be having a debate on this issue.

This is not a normal debate. This is a direct attack to undermine our democracy by using a procedure to undermine the constitutional election that was just held.

If, as now appears likely, Democrats cry fraud and corruption every election regardless of the evidence, what will happen when one day voters are routinely intimidated, rights are denied, or, God forbid, an election is robbed?

What will happen? What will happen when, God forbid, this quadrennial crying wolf so poisons our democratic processes that a similarly frivolous petition in a close election in the future is actually successful, and the American people are denied their constitutional right to choose their own President?

Mr. Speaker, Democrats must find a way to rise above this self-destructive and, yes, plain destructive theory of politics for its own sake. A dangerous precedent is being set here today, and it needs to be curbed, because Democrat leaders are not just hurting themselves.

By their irresponsible tactics, they hurt the House, they hurt the Nation, and they hurt rank-and-file Democrats at kitchen tables all around this country.

The American people, and their ancestors who invented our miraculous system of government, deserve better than this. This petition is beneath us, Mr. Speaker; but, more importantly, it is beneath the men and women that we serve.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues, both Democrat and Republican, to do the right thing. Vote ‘‘no,’’ and let us get back to the real work that the American people hired us to do.

Yes, by all means, let the House get back to the work the American people hired it to do --- payoffs, character assassination, political intimidation, stealing elections and impeaching for blowjobs.

Really, we should listen to Monsieur Delay's deeply sincere analysis of what is wrong with our party. After all, nobody knows more (except maybe Governor Schwarzenegger) about launching "attack[s] to undermine our democracy by using a procedure to undermine the constitutional election." And there is not an American alive who is a greater expert on employing a "strategy of spite, obstruction, and conspiracy theories" or staging a "scripted, insincere morality play". Lord knows he virtually invented the "destructive theory of politics for its own sake." And well, I think we already know the answer to "what will happen when one day voters are routinely intimidated, rights are denied, or, God forbid, an election is robbed" don't we?

Most importantly, when he says, "what will happen when, God forbid, this quadrennial crying wolf so poisons our democratic processes that a similarly frivolous petition in a close election in the future is actually successful, and the American people are denied their constitutional right to choose their own President?" I think it's pretty clear that he's issuing a threat not a prediction.

I have said many times that Democrats have been stupid by not seriously focusing attention on Rove, Delay and Rush. This crooked triad forms the head of republican power. We should have been working much harder to decapitate it. It won't solve the problem, but it would go a long way toward crushing its effectiveness. Support the DA's who have the cojones to go after these crooked bastards. Gawd knows the media isn't interested.

In other GOP megalomaniac news, it looks like Newties back!
Garlic won't work with these people. It takes a stake to the heart.




Thanks to Pandora at BCF




digby 1/09/2005 10:26:00 AM |

 
What A Surprise

Some of us predicted this the minute John Negroponte was named as ambassador.

Newsweek has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported 'nationalist' forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success-despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

[...]

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government-the Defense department or CIA-would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld's Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. (In "covert" activity, U.S. personnel operate under cover and the U.S. government will not confirm that it instigated or ordered them into action if they are captured or killed.)

Well now, this certainly explains the ongoing need for that pesky finding that the president can ignore any laws he chooses, doesn't it? And good old Porter is certainly unlikely to have any qualms about doing it.

The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option. Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq's National Intelligence Service, may have been laying the groundwork for the idea with a series of interviews during the past ten days.

[...]

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, "are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them." He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won't turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.

Yeah, "shock and awe" just needs to be fully unleashed. Surely, if we just scare them enough they'll learn to love us.

If there has been a worse idea, I don't know what it is. If anyone thinks in this day and age in a country like Iraq that ongoing "covert" operations will stay covert, they are dreaming. The details of the operations will emerge replete with pictures and testimony. It will naturally make us even more hated and even more vulnerable to terrorism.

On the other hand, it's also true that the Pentagon has run out of options. We don't have the troops to quell this insurgency with any humanity and even if we did, it's probably too late. The civil war that everybody from Scowcroft and Bush Sr to Joseph Cirincione predicted is already in full swing. The US is in the middle of it, universally mistrusted and widely hated with all the predictable results. It's a cock-up of historic proportions and it gets worse with every passing day. I'm not sure we can do anything but withdraw and institute immediate energy conservation on a scale previously unheard of. It may not have been the only reason we invaded in the first place, but losing, which we are, means that Iraq's oil fields are now a battlefield. It's time to trade in those SUV's folks.




digby 1/09/2005 09:17:00 AM |