Hullabaloo

Saturday, March 12, 2005

 
Under Lenin's banner for the second Five Year Plan!

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.

Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.

Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.


[...]

In interviews, though, press officers for several federal agencies said the president's prohibition did not apply to government-made television news segments, also known as video news releases. They described the segments as factual, politically neutral and useful to viewers. They insisted that there was no similarity to the case of Armstrong Williams, a conservative columnist who promoted the administration's chief education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act, without disclosing $240,000 in payments from the Education Department.

What is more, these officials argued, it is the responsibility of television news directors to inform viewers that a segment about the government was in fact written by the government. "Talk to the television stations that ran it without attribution," said William A. Pierce, spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services. "This is not our problem. We can't be held responsible for their actions."

Yet in three separate opinions in the past year, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."

It is not certain, though, whether the office's pronouncements will have much practical effect. Although a few federal agencies have stopped making television news segments, others continue. And on Friday, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget circulated a memorandum instructing all executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings. The memorandum said the G.A.O. failed to distinguish between covert propaganda and "purely informational" news segments made by the government. Such informational segments are legal, the memorandum said, whether or not an agency's role in producing them is disclosed to viewers.

And Comrade Gonzales serves the Party once more.


.
digby 3/12/2005 09:22:00 PM |

 
Talking Big

Daniel Munz sitting in over at Ezra Klein's place takes issue with Matt Welch's post in which he says:

There's a better and arguably more attractive ideological option than being anti–"pro–free market," and it's sitting right in front of the Democrats' noses. When the party you despise controls most of the levers of government, it's an excellent time to run against government.

Disparate threads of limited-government rhetoric have begun to pop through the seams of the New Old Left unity. In the wake of the gay marriage wipeout and unpopular federal laws concerning the environment and medical marijuana, many Blue Staters are rediscovering the joys of federalism. "Fiscal responsibility" has cemented itself as boilerplate Democratic rhetoric, and not just as an excuse to jack up tax rates: Rising Democratic star Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, has been drawing praise from Cato for slashing his state's income taxes, and pushing his fellow Democratic governors to follow his lead.

Munz disagrees entirely saying:

Unless we're willing to abandon things like Medicare, Social Security, and good public education, we'll never be able to take the argument to its logical conclusion. Opponents will say we're half-assing an ideological commitment because it polls well. And if we adopt any strategy that garners Megadittoes from the guys at Cato, they'll be right. More importantly, it's not who we are. Liberals don't dislike government. To many liberals, Reagan's declaration that "government is the problem" amounted to political hate speech. I still bristle at Clinton's "era of big government" schtick.

Just to make it confusing, I'll agree and disagree with both of them.

I think Muntz is right that any tack to the right on "big government" will just further enable the wingnuts. We've gone as fur as we can go. (Richardson, in my opinion, is further degrading the liberal philosophy with his harping on more tax cuts.) Munz offers "We are the party of Real Solutions That Help Real People," as a slogan. It's not bad but I think liberalism is a lot bigger than that and we can make a much more compelling case.

Liberal beliefs are rooted in a belief in civil liberties and the American ideals of justice, fairness and equality, which offer a bit more inspiration than just saying that government helps people. American liberalism holds that democratic government is the only institution that can guarantee those ideals. Our concept of social justice follows from that. I think it's important that we continuously marry these concepts together so the principles are entwined in people minds along with the practical result. People need to feel that their politics are tied to big ideas, even if it's really just "freedom plus groceries" as Matt Yglesias so prosaically summed it up. And, in fact, liberalism is tied to big principles that we should constantly reinforce in our rhetoric. One of the reasons our politicians sound dull as dishwater is our laundry list style of communication.

In a practical sense, however, I think that Welch is right to say that there are some attractive ideological options presenting themselves but they have nothing to do with the specific issues he discusses. They are interesting in that they come from a slightly different direction than the usual liberal agenda, but they are representative of liberal first principles and give us a fresh opportunity to talk about our beliefs in a bigger sense. (Some of you are aware that I'm intrigued by the idea of forming a privacy/civil liberties coalition within the party to work on splitting off certain western MYOB types from the southern conservative evangelical base of the GOP and I think this might be helful to that end as well.)

This Choice Point scandal, for instance, is just the tip of the iceberg regarding corporate intrusion into people's personal business without their knowledge and then selling the information to anyone who asks for it. This is a huge unregulated business that illustrates once again how dangerous the market can be to the individual when there is no government oversight. This issue represents an opportunity for us to make an affirmative case for regulation and consumer rights, pulling our belief in a personal right to privacy into the argument.

It also dovetails with the Republican assault on the Bill of Rights (the second amendment excepted, of course.) Liberals have a long and illustrious history of fighting for civil liberties. Freedom is not a word that traditionally belongs to conservatives except when it comes to property. As we see them willing to justify shredding the 4th amendment with a sweeping redefinition of executive branch power, I think we have every right to question whether their alleged commitment to liberty as expressed in the Bill of Rights, and the principles they represent, is anything more than an elaborate marketing scheme.

Whether or not there is any practical point in appealing to certain libertarian impulses in the American character is debatable but I think it is incumbent that we bring our big principles into the argument in some way. The bible isn't the only source of "values" symbols and I would argue that liberals actually have a greater claim to the shared American symbols of the founding documents.

Here's a little insight into how the GOP plans to "market" liberty from Frank Luntz:

As you are well aware, communication does not exist solely in our words, either written or spoken. Americans draw upon a shared well of symbols, images that evoke concepts fundamental to our country. As our politics are produced with these concepts in mind — freedom, liberty, opportunity — there are timeless American images that match them. Communicating policies within that context and harnessing these symbols to match their principles is perhaps the most powerful form of communication there is.

When you speak of the 2005 legislative agenda, do not be afraid to wax poetic about this link between American icons of freedom and opportunity and the very legislation that you are discussing. It will not seem trite. It will not appear sordid. Indeed, will resonate with a power that cannot match that of your words and phrases. Language is your base. Symbols knock it out of the park.

He's right. But rather than being cheap and manipulative and trying to finesse words like fairness to mean "equality of opportunity" let's just tell it like it is. I'll give it a stab.

The case for responsive government that provides services to the people and keeps the market functioning in a healthy way springs from the liberal belief in justice, equality and liberty. The bill of rights is the founding document of American liberalism.

We believe that while property rights are fundamental to American law, liberty means more than property rights only. There is a reason that Thomas Jefferson wrote "life liberty and the pursuit of happiness" instead of the more familiar (at the time) "life liberty and property" in the declaration. Even then, America was about more than this cramped view that freedom is nothing more than freedom from taxes. Freedom is also the inherant right of each individual to dominion over his or her identity, body and mind.

We believe in free speech and freedom of religion with almost no exceptions because no individual can be trusted to make such distinctions without prejudice. We believe in the right to a fair trial and we believe that those who represent the government must be held to a very high standard due to the natural temptations the government's awesome judicial and police power can present. We cannot have a free society where government does not adhere to the rule of law.

We have fought for universal suffrage, labor laws, civil rights and the right to privacy among many other things because we believe in fairness, equality and social justice. We believe those principles require a society such as ours to ensure that all people can live a decent and dignified life. We think that democratic government, being directly accountable to the people, is the best institution through which those pinciples can be successfully translated into action. We are always on the side of progress, looking forward, stepping into the future.

The founding fathers were liberals. Our tradition is as American as apple pie.




.
digby 3/12/2005 04:21:00 PM |

Friday, March 11, 2005

 
Talking Ids

The Atlantic features a fascinating article this month about talk radio in which the author goes behind the scenes of a popular radio show here in LA. He examines the entire ethos of the business while focusing on one right wing talk show host named John Zeigler.

A couple of things about the business itself stuck out at me. Evidently, they really do make the case that it isn't right wing politics that make them successful; it's the "stimulating" nature of their format:

KFI management's explanation of "stimulating" is apposite, if a bit slippery. Following is an excerpted transcript of a May 25 Q & A with Ms. Robin Bertolucci, the station's intelligent, highly successful, and sort of hypnotically intimidating Program Director. (The haphazard start is because the interviewing skills behind the Q parts are marginal; the excerpt gets more interesting as it goes along.)
Q: Is there some compact way to describe KFI's programming philosophy?
A: "What we call ourselves is 'More Stimulating Talk Radio.'"
Q: Pretty much got that part already.
A: "That is the slogan that we try to express every minute on the air. Of being stimulating. Being informative, being entertaining, being energetic, being dynamic … The way we do it is a marriage of information and stimulating entertainment."
Q: What exactly is it that makes information entertaining?
A: "It's attitudinal, it's emotional."
Q: Can you explain this attitudinal component?
A: "I think 'stimulating' really sums it up. It's what we really try to do."
Q: [strangled frustration noises]
A: "Look, our station logo is in orange and black, and white—it's a stark, aggressive look. I think that typifies it. The attitude. A little in-your-face. We're not … stodgy."

Ok, she's a bozo, but probably less of a bozo than she sounds. The article doesn't go there, but I strongly suspect that when you have an 800 pound elephant like Rush as your drive time cash cow, you'd better stimulate in a very particular way, if you know what I mean. She just can't say that. This is particularly true in a business that is monopolized by a very few companies:

Radio has become a more lucrative business than most people know. Throughout most of the past decade, the industry's revenues have increased by more than 10 percent a year. The average cash-flow margin for major radio companies is 40 percent, compared with more like 15 percent for large TV networks; and the mean price paid for a radio station has gone from eight to more than thirteen times cash flow. Some of this extreme profitability, and thus the structure of the industry, is due to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allows radio companies to acquire up to eight stations in a given market and to control as much as 35 percent of a market's total ad revenues. The emergence of huge, dominant radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity is a direct consequence of the '96 Act (which the FCC, aided by the very conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, has lately tried to make even more permissive). And these radio conglomerates enjoy not just substantial economies of scale but almost unprecedented degrees of business integration.

Example: Clear Channel Communications Inc. now owns KFI AM-640, plus two other AM stations and five FMs in the Los Angeles market. It also owns Premiere Radio Networks. It also owns the Airwatch subscription news/traffic service. And it designs and manufactures Prophet, KFI's operating system, which is state-of-the-art and much too expensive for most independent stations. All told, Clear Channel currently owns some 1,200 radio stations nationwide.

The article goes on to discuss just how specious the ratings system really is and how much it depends on guesswork to determine who is listening and in what numbers:

An abiding question: Who exactly listens to political talk radio? Arbitron Inc. and some of its satellites can help measure how many are listening for how long and when, and they provide some rough age data and demographic specs. A lot of the rest is guesswork, and Program Directors don't like to talk about it.

These big companies control as much as 35% of a market's total ad revenue and they set the prices for these ads based mostly on "guess work." Deregulation is credited with creating these big companies and enabling the economies of scale that are bringing them such huge profits. And the political view that dominates almost all talk radio station in the nation is Republican, the party that supports deregulation. A coincidence I'm sure.

The article looks closely at this guy John Ziegler who may or may not be typical of right wing radio hosts. His self righteous sense of victimization sounds so typical, however, that I think he may be fairly indicative of what makes people like this get up in the morning. He's certainly a misfit. His main beef (although there are endless beefs) is that political correctness has cost him a decent life. He said something that people called racist and he thinks it was unfair. He said some things that people called sexist he feels put upon. The author of the piece is inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt but I see the problem entirely differently.

He used the word "nigger". Speaking of "the Arab world" he says, "We're not perfect, we suck a lot of the time, but we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than they are, and we need to recognize that, so that we can possibly even begin to deal with the evil that we are facing." And he goes absolutely nuts when people say that he is racist for saying these things.

What wingnuts like him don't understand about this is that when they openly embrace the party of Strom Thurmond and Phyllis Schlaffley and Jesse Helms, they carry their extra baggage and they need to choose their words more carefully than others. The context in which he said those things could show that he wasn't a racist but when you are a card carrying right winger don't be surprised if people jump to conclusions.

They certainly have no trouble applying this standard to members of the party of alleged traitors like Michael Moore when they do not carefully choose their words on the subjects of terrorism and war. For some reason conservatives believe that the scourge of "political correctness" only goes one way when it is clear that they are enforcing speech codes just as rigid as anything seen on an ivy league campus. Instead, when they are called on their insensitive and racist remarks they immediately retreat into a whining mass of self pity (while they sit in the corner sputtering that liberals must disavow Ward Churchill's every utterance.) As Thomas Frank so convincingly proved in "What's The Matter With Kansas" this sense of grievance is simply what makes guys like him tick. In fact, there seems to be an abiding sense of grievance in parts of the American character that has manifested itself successfully in the right wing talk format.

I urge you to read this whole article if you can. It's a fascinating look into a world that is as unglamorous as you can get and still be called media. (Well, except for blogging.) Talk radio is more than entertainment. Way more. It's the conservative id.



.
digby 3/11/2005 05:13:00 PM |

 
High School Confidential

Hudson over at Daily Kos has posted a provocative piece about a Republican tactic he calls "fencing." He accurately describes this process of ritual humiliation that's become a standard part of the Republican playbook over the last few years, the purpose of which is to "fence off" voters from feeling comfortable identifying with the Democrats and candidates who are widely seen as socially marginalized objects of derision --- effeminate geeks. I suspect this tactic works particularly well with certain sub-sets of white males whose identity is wrapped up in machismo and high school jock style social hierarchies ---- and the women who buy into those simple heuristic methods of determining leadership capability.(Old Mudcat pretty much came right out and said it. "It's a macho thing.")

Clearly, this tactic has been used to great effect in the last two presidential elections and I think it plays particularly well into the existing stereotypes of the two parties with respect to national security. Of course, one of the reasons this works so well is that it is partially designed to appeal to the media's puerile sense of bitchy good fun, as well. It would not be nearly as effective if the MSM could resist the immature temptation to side with those they perceive as "real guys" and help them deride Democrats as weirdos and sissies.

Bob Sommerby has meticulously detailed the media's heinous treatment of Al Gore in 2000. Here's just one example:

RNC PRESS RELEASE:

Washington (June 14)—As Al Gore kicks off his presidential campaign on the front porch of his family’s hobby farm near Carthage, Tennessee, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson will lead credentialed reporters on a tour of the real Gore homestead—the 8th floor hotel rooms that used to be the Gore suite of the former Ritz Carlton on Washington’s Embassy Row…

Nicholson will arrive at the hotel (now known as the Westin Fairfax and previously called the Ritz Carlton) in a mule-drawn carriage at 10:30, and will then hold a news conference at the hotel’s “Terrace Room” before giving reporters a tour of the former Gore suite.

Here's how Time magazine dealt with the charming little stunt:

Meet Al-oise

Al Gore's childhood is the stuff of classics. Specifically, the children's classic Eloise, by Kay Thompson. Both Al and Eloise lived in a hotel, both were born in the late '40s, both had busy parents, both have had to wage wars on boredom. And this month, the Eloise licensing campaign heats up with dolls, furniture and collectibles.

I won't bore you with all the reasons that was such a nasty little piece of work but it doesn't take a genius to see that the mention of Gore with dolls, boredom, rich parents and a spoiled little girl was no accident. Suffice to say that the press corps snorted in derisive delight and never looked back.

However, this ritual humiliation goes all the way back to Dukakis, at least, with the tank picture. Clinton was a little more difficult to paint with this stuff because he was a known womanizer and they weren't able to turn him into a sexless geek or a cartoon pansy, even with the allegedly ballbusting wife. In the end they were reduced to calling him a pervert for liking blow jobs which didn't work all that well, for obvious reasons. Kerry, however, was the subject of constant derision along this line. As Hudson points out:

In the Bush-Kerry campaign, "fencing" mostly took the form of playground insults and other humiliations:

Kerry looks French. Kerry spends a fortune on haircuts. Kerry is vain and pompous. Kerry has funny hair. Kerry's voice is funny. Kerry reminds people of Lerch on The Munsters. Kerry wears Lycra--fluorescent-striped Lycra. Kerry rides a fancy European bike. Kerry looks fruity when he windsurfs. Kerry wears expensive suits, ties, sunglasses, shoes and belts. Kerry asks for French mustard when he orders a hot dog...

They didn't exactly make a secret of it.

Karl Rove telegraphs a punch: "the GOP convention will portray Kerry as "an object of humor and calculated derision." Meanwhile, Senator Trent Lott throws a haymaker at a 'French-speaking socialist'

The convention, of course, famously featured those cute little band-aids. Dirty trickster Morton Blackwell took the heat before the press for it, but clearly it was planned at a much higher level. Perversely, this playground bully humor actually plays better if some "grownups" wag their fingers and show their disapproval. Mudcat's macho guys just roar off in their fast cars spraying gravel in everybody's faces while their sycophants cheer wildly on the sidelines. They actually gain currency when people tut-tut their nasty little jokes.

While talk radio is a purely macho power game, I think it's interesting that in the mainstream media so many of the right wing pundits and their allegedly objective colleagues characterize a slightly different version of high school power structure --- the snotty Heathers. Tucker Carlson, Robert Novak and chief dominatrix Ann Coulter personify the nasty tone and rigid hierarchy of the "popular girls." Perhaps it is because guys like Tucker and Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg simply cannot credibly be seen as macho so this is the best they can do. (Coulter is in a class by herself.)But regardless of whether they are the macho jocks in the fast cars or the mean girl Queen Bees, they all smoothly work together to inflict the same adolescent ritual humiliation.

All of this is to say that there has long been a campaign to emasculate Democrats. (I suspect that there is a corollary in the defeminization of Democratic women as well.) This is powerful stuff and we'd best admit that it is going on so that we can formulate a response that actually works. Right now, we either try to out-manly them or we laugh it off, neither of which are working. (The worst advice that Paul Begala ever took was when Tucker Carlson told him to laugh when these kind of insults are hurled. He often sounds like a nervous hyena they come so fast and furiously and it has the effect of making him appear slightly unhinged.)

I think this tactic plays into many people's anxiety about changing social and gender roles in our fast moving society. A lot of folks out there are genuinely freaked out by the rapid pace of change and because of it are very susceptible to rigid stereotypes. They just feel more comfortable on the side of the fence where the macho high school boys and the girls who love them are. It's very hard to even get them to peek over and see what's on the other side.

And all people refuse vote for someone whom they think of as weak. It goes to the very essence of what leadership is. Half the country is obviously able to see past this little high school game and evaluate the strength of a candidates on the basis of something other than image and macho rhetoric. The other half is clearly in thrall to the manufactured Hollywood image of manly leadership.








I'm not entirely sure what to do about this, but I think dealing with it is far more important than any single stand we take on foreign policy. The people who Peter Beinart thinks to reach are not going to be impressed with historical references to faceless "fighting liberals" of the 50's. This aversion to voting for Democrats on the basis of national security is much more primal than that and it needs to be dealt with in the same way.

Any ideas?



.
digby 3/11/2005 11:16:00 AM |

 
Wajda Expect?

Here is the problem when you put a person known as a war criminal back into a war zone in a position of responsibility. When stuff likethis happens it looks really, really, bad.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. troops who mistakenly killed an Italian intelligence agent last week on the road to Baghdad's airport were part of extra security provided by the U.S. Army to protect U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, a U.S. official said Thursday.

Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari was killed March 4 when U.S. troops opened fire on a car carrying him and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been freed from insurgents.


"The mobile patrol was there to enhance security because Ambassador Negroponte was expected through," U.S. Embassy spokesman Robert Callahan said, confirming reports in Italian media. The newspaper La Repubblica reported Wednesday that the checkpoint had been "set up to protect the passage of Ambassador Negroponte."


It was not known if Negroponte, who was nominated last month by President Bush to be the new director of national intelligence, had already passed through the checkpoint.

When you have a guy with a reputation for enabling death squads involved in something like this you tend not to get the benefit of the doubt. Not that we care, apparently. Still, it's just a tad embarrassing for the United States of Spreading Democracy to have to even try to explain to the world why once again John Negroponte is right smack in the middle of another hugely controversial shooting of innocent people. I know democracy is untidy and all, but this is ridiculous.

If this is true it defies belief that the government hasn't known that this was the case since the first day. I wonder why they forgot to mention it?


.
digby 3/11/2005 08:06:00 AM |

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

 
Of The Party,By The Party, For The Party

The next time a wingnut (or anybody) scolds you for being hyperbolic when you call the Republicans undemocratic authoritarians send them here. This report outlines the jackboot tactics of these legislators as they pretty much shut down any form of debate in the congress and govern by one party rule. Their hypocrisy, as always, is astonishing.

For those of you who don't remember the early 90's, there was an incessant whine and beating of breasts about the unfairness of the Democratic leadership and how they were elitists whose terms had to be limited in order to bring back the founders' dream of a citizen legislator who put the people before themselves and the good of all before their party. I think people finally voted them into power in 1994 just to make them shut their mewling gobs as much as anything. And waddaya know? Once in power they are far, far worse than anything the Democrats ever dreamed of. What are the odds?

I realize that the concept of hypocrisy had been retired so there is no point in pursuing this line of thinking. But when you come across the occasional wingnut who says "the Democrats were worse" it would be handy to have read this report in detail so you can slap the supercilious smirk off his face.



.
digby 3/09/2005 05:04:00 PM |

 
Time To Step Up

Ezra has been trying to find a way to accomodate the DLC in this polarized political world, and I appreciate his efforts to think it through. Today, however, he lost all patience with them. And he points out something that is very important. The DLC is always pushing the leadership to defy the shibboleths and toss aside interest groups to prove that they are the not captive of tired old fashioned thinking. Well, the DLC needs to take a page out of its own blueprint and defy the corporate establishment on the bankruptcy bill. It is the most heinous piece of legislation to come out of the republican congress so far and it is a potent symbol of the worst kind of special interest manipulation in that it blatantly hurts middle americans while protecting the interests of the rich and big business. They need to step up and do a little Sistah-Soljah on their ass.

I'm all for the big tent, but there is no excuse for the DLC not to understand how fundamental this kind of corporate racketeering is to average Americans. It goes against everything Democrats believe in. At some point you've got to pick a side. This is one. Social Security is another. These aren't abstractions about the global economy or deregulation. This is about real, red blooded American people who are going to be hurt at the expense of greedy corporations and radical ideology. That is where the line must be drawn. The DLC could do a lot for its credibility with the rank and file if it would acknowledge this and make an effort to distinguish itself from horrors like this bankruptcy legislation. There is no good reason for them not to.



.
digby 3/09/2005 01:29:00 PM |

 
The Vig


Atrios helpfully links to a freeper thread (so I don't have to) in which they just discover that the bankruptcy bill is an abomination. My favorite quote is, "Conservatism must mean something more than simply doing what pleases big business." There's some serious cognitive dissonence going on over there.

Here's the nurse now with a quick Kool-aid injection:

The administration supports the passage of bankruptcy reform because ultimately this will lead to more accessibility to credit for more Americans, particularly lower-income workers," said Trent D. Duffy, a deputy White House spokesman. "The fact that the Senate was able to set aside those issues and move toward passage shows it's another bipartisan accomplishment.

I won't go into why the Senate "Useful Idiot" Club felt they had to enable Dear Leader to once again claim a bipartisan victory. I hope that they will hear from their contituents loud and clear, however. From the reaction in the blogosphere, anyway, there is some serious bipartisan shock and disgust at this bill.

I had thought that this bill was a bit of kabuki to placate the credit card companies. I never bought that the abortion amendment was really enough to keep the bill from passing the house if Tom Delay wanted it to pass. My reasoning was that nobody wanted to shut down the gravy train of consumer spending that was propping up this economy. And I figured that even if they felt they had to pass the bankruptcy provisions this time that they would use the opportunity to set a cap on these interest rates in order to keep the party going for a while. But, as with every other piece of domestic legislation, there isn't even a single thought given anymore to the health of the economy as a whole. It's just ad hoc pay-offs dependent on how much a particular special interest has slipped into the pockets of certain senators.

I certainly hope that anyone running against a Republican in '06 (or incumbent Dem who voted with the pigs yesterday) makes hay out of this, and not just the bankruptcy bill itself, but the way that they enabled the credit card companies to continue charging usury rates of 30-40-50% interest while preventing people from declaring bankruptcy when they get caught in that increasing spiral. Everyday Americans know about credit card bills. Many people are finding out the hard way that if they are late with one bill all their credit card interest rates can very unexpectedly rise to a ridiculous level and compound a reasonable amount of debt into an unaffordable one. Or they are finding that their credit score drops when they take on a certain level of debt for a large purchase or an unexpected emergency like medical bills, thus triggering another huge rise in their interest rates across the board. Average, hard working folks I know in real life have been complaining about suddenly finding that their minimum payment has doubled from one month to the next because of completely unforseen circumstances. That the credit card companies are making record profits at the time they are whining about bankruptcy proves that this is just pure, unadulterated greed. It's a racket and these pigs in congress just put their personal USDA stamp of approval on it. It is an outrage.

We are seeing the outlines of a potent broadside against the Republicans in 2006 if we are only bold enough to take it. Social Security privatization and this bankruptcy bill are full throated attacks on the middle and working class in this country. They are asking working Americans to take on more and more risk in order to enrich and protect big business. They want to cut your taxes by a couple of bucks and then force you to put thousands more into the hands of their friends on wall street and the big banks.

You can tell that the White House is aware of this by their typically orwellian formulation of the bill:

ultimately this will lead to more accessibility to credit for more Americans, particularly lower-income workers.

Has there ever been an administration with more gall? Low income workers already have access to loan sharks. The vig is the same, either way. Maybe next year they'll pass legislation allowing the credit card companies to break your legs if you are unable to pay. It works for Tony Soprano, why not the Republican Mob?

I dearly hope that the Democrats are planning to nationalize these midterms and go after this administration with a fiery populist message.The time is ripe and this hits people right where they live. Even if we do not gain any seats, it's imperative that we begin to make the argument that the Republicans own the government and that they are using their power corruptly. When the shit comes down, and it will, we must have very carefully laid out the case that this abdication of all common sense and concern for average Americans defines this corrupt Republican establishment.



.
digby 3/09/2005 11:47:00 AM |

Monday, March 07, 2005

 
Tears Of A Klein

It turns out that Joe Klein is even thicker that I took him for. Josh Marshall put out a call to find cases where Klein explained his bizarre theory that social security would have to be privatized because we have moved from an industrial age to an information age.

Google has oodles of cites and none of them make any damned sense whatsoever. Here are a couple you might enjoy:

Joe Klein

Oh, it changed dramatically. Welfare, the Welfare Reform Programme, which I was opposed to, I was wrong, it has been a tremendous success and I'll tell you why. Because Clinton had a coherent governing philosophy, which Tony Blair shares to a certain extent, which is that in the Information Age, you don't deliver public services the same way you did in the Industrial Age. You don't rule out huge bureaucracies, what you do is give targeted cash payments. He gave targeted cash payments to the working poor, so that if you were a mother on welfare, after, you know, after eight years of Clinton, you got $5,000 more a year, you kept your health benefit and your children got health benefits. That was no small thing. If you were middle class or below, you got college tuition tax credits, 10 million Americans take advantage of this. This is a social programme on a scale that dwarfs the GI Bill of Rights, which everybody speaks of as one of the great American social triumphs.

Charles Wheeler: Doesn't dwarf the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson does it?

Joe Klein: The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

Oh my, I'll bet that started a clatter of teaspoons in Georgtown, didn't it? What a ballsy, no-nonsense, manly statement, and him a tried and true liberal, don't you know. (And after he wrote that nasty book about Clinton and the black women, too.)

Yet, for some reason I still don't quite understand why exactly in the information age you don't deliver public services the same way you did in the industrial age. If he's talking about automatic deposit and e-filing your taxes, then I guess he's right. But I still don't see what these targeted cash payments or tuition tax credits have to do with the information age or why they are so superior and don't contribute to the social irresponsibility among the darkies ... er ... I mean "those at the very bottom." (And is it even slightly believable that it dwarfs the GI Bill? is he talking about unadjusted 1953 dollars?)

Here he takes another stab at it:

Clinton did come to the presidency with a coherent, long term political philosophy and purpose. To a very great extent--a surprising extent--he lived up to it. I know because I was there and I was one of those who was involved in the formulating of this new philosophy, which has been called The Third Way. There was a general understanding that the Democratic Party had gone off the deep end and needed to come back. Clinton once told me that when he was hoping to be Mario Cuomo's vice president, the job of the next president is going to be to move us from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

Government was, and very much still remains, the last of our major institutions that stuck in the Industrial Age, where the paradigm is top-down, centralized command and control, assembly line, standardization, and one size fits all.

In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that--the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.

The government has to be more like a computer. Bureaucracies have to be more flexible and our social safety net has to reflect that because people have more information so they have to have more choices about where they get their health care and where they put their retirement money. Huh?

I can't find anywhere where Klein actually explains why we need to have all these choices about our safety net or why having more information compels it. Indeed, as Josh Marshall pointed out earlier, it is counterintuitive. In a world in which people are asked to take many more chances in their careers, where pensions really are a relic of the past, where health care can be yanked from beneath you in a moments notice, it seems to me that government guarantees of basic security are more important than ever.

Klein's DLC catechism has all the markings of someone who jumped on a sexy trend when he was younger and hasn't realized the fashion has changed. There is no there, there. He's like one of those e-venture capitalists of the late 90's spewing fast talking bullshit about "new organizational paradigms where knowledge is defined in terms of potential for action as distinguished from information and its more intimate link with performance." In other words, gibberish.

It was fashionable for one brief period to think that turning government into a collection of kewl, outsourced, totally, like, stand alone pods of individualized data collection and service modules, but most people sobered up sometime in early 2000. It was always crap.

Clinton did what he could to survive, reframe the Democratic image and move the country forward while under monumental pressure from the opposition. I do not blame him for doing what he did. But I have never understood that this discredited e-commerce comic book version of government was his vision. If it was, I imagine his enthusiasm has cooled by this time. Crashing stock markets and huge crony capitalist boondoggles generally make intelligent people think twice about utopian capitalist wet dreams. Klein doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.

And, by the way, who knew that Joe Klein was personally involved in formulating the "third way?" Funny, I thought he was just a bad journalist and a worse novelist. I had no idea he was such an open Democratic partisan. Frankly, I think he would have been more helpful to the cause if he'd simply shut his gossiping, moralizing, judgmental trap during the administration.



.
digby 3/07/2005 09:28:00 PM |

 
Do What You Can

Democrats.com has a nice form to e-mail your Senators to filibuster the bankruptcy bill. They are scheduled to vote tomorrow. This is a seriously egregious bill that no Democrat (Joe Biden) should back under any circumstances, but it looks like it will pass this time unless somebody filibusters.

The most amazing thing about this is that while they are drastically reducing the ability of people to get a fresh start and seize more of their assets, they are also going to allow the credit card companies to charge usury rates to these very same people. It's like something out of Dickens.

Click here if you have a few minutes, or make a call if you have more than a few minutes and make your wishes known.

Update: Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged pointed me to No More Mr Nice Blog's interesting insight into Charles "Let 'Em Eat Pancakes" Grassley's view toward Christian charity:

Grassley now:

A national group of Christian lawyers is appealing to church leaders to join them in lobbying against the bankruptcy reform bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.

The lawyers say the legislation runs contrary to the forgiveness of debt and charity required by the Bible....

In response, Grassley said Congress could not be bound by biblical mandates because "the Constitution does not provide for a theocracy."

"I can't listen to Christian lawyers because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population," Grassley said.

--Des Moines Register, 3/4/05

*****

Grassley then:

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY: ... It's odd that one of those -- there has been some condemnation of him because of his religious beliefs. It's a sad commentary that John Ashcroft's Christian religious beliefs can't be considered an asset in the same vein that Joseph Lieberman's religious faith was considered an asset during the last election.

--discussing the pending confirmation of John Ashcroft, PBS NewsHour, 1/18/01

On Friday, June 19, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act, S.1244. The new law will protect tithing and charitable giving under the federal bankruptcy code.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced the legislation last year....

In addition to protecting from federal bankruptcy courts the donations made to a church through tithing or to a tax-exempt charity through an established pattern of giving, the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act also restores the right of debtors to tithe and give charitably after declaring bankruptcy under Chapter 13....

--Grassley press release


On June 12, 1995, the Senate initiated debate on the CDA [Communications Decency Act]...

The entire Senate debate, spearheaded by Senator Exon and Republicans Dan Coats and Charles Grassley, was informed by the sensibilities of the religious right. The Senators read letters from the Christian Coalition and from Bruce Taylor [of the National Law Center for Children and Families] into the record....

--"The Religious Right and Internet Censorship" by Jonathan Wallace

.
digby 3/07/2005 03:36:00 PM |

 
Read This

Garance Franke-Ruta has a wonderful, must read piece up about the ways in which the left and right blogosphere work. When it comes to scalp hunting, the right is (as always) professional and funded. And once again the usual suspects are present:

Scratch the surface and the same names turn up in each scandal, revealing the events of mid-February to have been part of an ongoing and coordinated proxy war by Republican political operatives on the so-called liberal media, conducted through the vast, unmonitored loophole of the Internet.

[...]

But success bred change. Along has come a new group of bloggers who aren’t mere “citizens” at all. On the left side, some of these became deeply enmeshed with political parties, “527s,” and campaign advocacy groups -- and are now a new generation of no-holds-barred partisans and major party fund-raisers, the liberal equivalent of George W. Bush’s “Rangers” and “Pioneers.”

On the right, a number of these bloggers were already political operatives or worked at long-standing movement institutions before taking up residence online. They are, at best, the intellectual heirs of L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and Reed Irvine, who founded the ultraconservative, media-hounding nonprofit organization Accuracy In Media (AIM) in 1969 as part of the first generation of post–Barry Goldwater right-wing institutions. At worst, they're the protégés of conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and dirty-tricks master Morton Blackwell, who has tutored conservative activists since 1965, most recently mocking John Kerry at the Republican national convention by distributing Band-Aids with purple hearts on them.

Which brings us back to Jordan. He was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives. Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon” with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools” designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.”

Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “He advocated that people write from their experience -- and not necessarily as conservatives,” a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told “a conservative firefighter” that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter -- and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. “We’re definitely in serious trouble,” said the Democratic attendee.

The tactics Krempasky promotes are directly descended from those advocated by the late Reed Irvine of AIM, whose major funder was, for the past two decades, Richard Mellon Scaife. “Many bloggers and blog readers might not even know who Reed Irvine was, nor understand the debt we owe him as conservatives,” Krempasky wrote upon Irvine’s passing last year. “But that debt is tremendous.” In the late ’80s, Irvine had started the campaign to “Can Dan” Rather, coining the phrase “Rather Biased.” Last fall, Krempasky was operating the main anti-Rather site, Rathergate.com, and using Irvine’s slogan as a rallying cry to organize a vast letter-writing and e-mailing campaign “to contact CBS and express themselves,” as he put it in an interview with Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA, an activist Web site founded by Texas Republicans and now owned by Bruce Eberle (no relation), the proprietor of a conservative direct-mail firm. “Conservatives have operated through alternative media for 40 years, direct mail being the first one,” Krempasky told me, sitting in the food court of the Ronald Reagan International Building as the CPAC wound down. “As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left.”

Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for -- again, the name pops up -- GOPUSA and has written for AIM about “the Bush-bashing media.” Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, “a Republican community weblog” registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name “Tacitus.” The goal of RedState.org? “[T]o unite … voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism” in service of the “construction of a Republican majority.”

Just read the whole thing. And then come back and we'll get Zephyr Teachout on the horn and get on that blogging ethics thing right away. I feel very confident that the right is going to be very happy to sign on. And then we can all sing Kumbaya and play Yahtzee.

Clearly the right blogosphere is more professional and more sophisticated than the left. They have fully incorporated it into their noise machine and added it to their bag of dirty tricks. We, on the other hand, are becoming adept internet detectives and clearing houses for citizen action. They are top down, we are grassroots. They are party apparatchiks, we are a vibrant political constituency in our own right. I'll put my money on us for the long term. Like their Leninist mentors, their edifice will fall of its own weight.

But in the meantime, I wonder how much more of these phony blogs are out there? Maybe this is a job for DKOS-CSI.



.
digby 3/07/2005 12:32:00 PM |

 
Seinfeld Reruns

I missed Press The Meat yesterday because it was interrupted for the LA marathon, so I didn't have the dubious pleasure of seeing Joe Klein make my point about the DLC being an anachronism --- or have the real pleasure of seeing Paul Krugman agree with me. Not that Klein is necessarily DLC but he represents the ossified views that took hold in the 90's. When he starts using tech boom jargon, you know that he's still lost in a haze of Monica's thong and Pets.com.

MR. JOE KLEIN: Well, it's kind of amazing and somewhat amusing to see the Republicans so much on the defensive on this issue right now. It's an unusual circumstance. I agree with Paul in that private accounts have nothing to do with solvency and solvency is the issue. I disagree with Paul because I think private accounts a terrific policy and that in the information age, you're going to need different kinds of structures in the entitlement area than you had in the industrial age. But it is very hard to do that kind of change under these political circumstances where you have the parties at such loggerheads.

I'd love to know what the logic is for his statement that we should have private accounts because we are in the information age as opposed to the industrial age. What, because we can get our account statements by e-mail? That is nothing but warmed over techno-babble you would have heard at Comdex circa 1997. He's badly in need of an upgrade.

I wrote below about the DLC, but Klein shows that many in the elite media are probably suffering from the same problem. Obviously, Paul Krugman sees the real issue:

MR. KRUGMAN: I think it's just wildly up in the air. I mean, you know, there's enormous turmoil on the Democratic side trying to figure out--there's a lot of unity but there's a lot of turmoil about what the party stands for. And I just don't know. I mean, I can't--I dread the prospect of a Clinton run just because I think that would be--it would be an attempt to recreate the politics of the '90s when you had Bill Clinton, who was a president who managed to sort of triangulate. And I think we ought to have an election that's really about what what kind of country we're going to be and we won't have that if it's Hillary Clinton running.

...

MR. KLEIN: Paul, I have a question for you: What was it about the peace and prosperity of the eight years of the Clinton administration that you didn't like?

MR. KRUGMAN: No, I liked the way the country ran.

MR. KLEIN: I think that he had a real governing philosophy. It wasn't triangulation. It was moving us from the industrial age to the information age, and that's where the Democratic Party is going to have to move...

MR. KRUGMAN: There's a radical right...

MR. KLEIN: ...if it wants to have any role in American politics.

MR. KRUGMAN: There's a radical right challenge to America as we know it that's under way, and I think the Democrats--I mean, maybe Hillary Clinton can do this. I'm actually not opposed to her, right? But they need to make clear that they are going to turn back that tide, not blur it.

MR. KLEIN: The answer to a radical right challenge isn't a reactionary left response.

No the answer is to keep making the same mistakes over and over again, apparently.

This is the essence of the argument within the Democratic Party right now. We either acknowledge the nature of the opposition and gather our courage to fight it with an affirmative defense of our beliefs and a willingness to take the fight to the Republicans or we continue with a constant tweaking of issues and small bore accomodation in the hopes that we can eke out a tiny win election to election, the latter of which I would find a dubious proposition what with the questionable "wins" we keep seeing in states run by Republicans.

Here's the problem. The other side is waging a battle for total political dominance. They are willing to do anything to achieve it from cheating at elections to government propaganda to spending billions on a travelling political spectacle to entertain the folks. We will not defeat them with pocket protector arguments about the information age (although if anyone were qualified to make such an argument it would be Paul Krugman, the quintessential economist geek.) I suspect the fact that Krugman sees the big picture while Klein is still floating on a cloud of Seinfeldian nostalgia speaks more to the fact that Krugman famously does not hob knob with the in crowd while Klein famously lives for it.

As Ari Berman points out in his article in The Nation, the DLC and the allegedly liberal media are one big circle jerk.

Update: Josh Marshall is also curious about Klein's bizarre statement that private accounts are required for this new information age. He's scouting for some evidence that Klein wasn't just blowing smoke because he didn't have a clue about the subject. I'm pretty sure he won't find it.



.
digby 3/07/2005 11:30:00 AM |

 
Our New UN Ambassador

At a 1994 panel discussion sponsored by the World Federalist Association Bolton claimed "there's no such thing as the United Nations," and stated ''if the UN secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference.''

Bolton on China/Taiwan: "...diplomatic recognition of Taiwan would be just the kind of demonstration of U.S. leadership that the region needs and that many of its people hope for. The notion that China would actually respond with force is a fantasy."AEI web site, 8/9/99

Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty: "The Senate vote on the CTBT actually marks the beginning of a new realism on the issue of weapons of mass destruction and their global proliferation... the Senate vote is also an unmistakable signal that America rejects the illusionary protections of unenforceable treaties." The Jerusalem Post, 10/18/99

North Korea: "A sounder U.S. policy would start by making it clear to the North that we are indifferent to whether we ever have "normal" diplomatic relations with it, and that achieving that goal is entirely in their interests, not ours. We should also make clear that diplomatic normalization with the U.S. is only going to come when North Korea becomes a normal country." Los Angeles Times, 09/22/99

Sen. Jesse Helms on John Bolton: "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon." Speech at American Enterprise Institute, 01/11/01

Past Scandals: As a young lawyer Bolton in 1978 Bolton helped Sen. Helms' National Congressional Club form Jefferson Marketing "as a vehicle to supply candidates with such services as advertising and direct mail without having to worry about the federal laws preventing PACs, like the Congressional Club, from contributing more than $5,000 per election to any one candidate's campaign committee" (Legal Times). He later defended the club against charges from the FEC that led to a $10,000 fine in 1986. As a reward for his service Sen. Helms "helped the career of John Bolton" by supporting him for his Department of Justice and State positions (Legal Times).

At the Justice Department, Bolton acted as the Department's "no man" refusing to provide congressional committees documents on Supreme Court nominees William Renquist, Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. He also refused to provide information, including his personal notes regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, and aided congressional Republicans who attempted to stop investigations of Contra drug smuggling.

After leaving the State Department under the first Bush Administration, Bolton headed the National Policy Forum which "reportedly pursued money from overseas" for the RNC (Los Angeles Times). The NPF defaulted on a $1.3 billion loan guaranteed by Hong Kong businessman Ambrous Young, whose lawyer claimed his willingness to absorb the debt was "contingent upon Mr. Young getting something in return," namely "business opportunities." The Taiwanese government "served as an intermediary for a $25,000 contribution" to the NPF(Washington Post). At his confirmation hearing Bolton acknowledged that he had received $30,000 from the Taiwanese government for writing a series of papers.

At his confirmation hearing Bolton defended his ability to separate his personal beliefs from his professional duties: "Of all the different jobs I've had in government, I've never had any allegations that I wasn't following the policies that were set." Actually, Bolton ignored administration policy while in the Reagan Justice Department when he held an unauthorized press conference lashing out at special prosecutors. His comments drew sharp criticism from the White House when spokesman Marlin Fitzwater called Bolton "intemperate and contentious."

I think an intemperate and contentious UN Ambassador (who believes there is no such thing as the UN) is just what the doctor ordered, don't you? Another excellent choice. I'm only sorry that Ted Bundy isn't available to head up the FBI. I understand he was a Republican.



.
digby 3/07/2005 10:31:00 AM |

Sunday, March 06, 2005

 
Crybaby Casey

Kevin Drum takes issue with the assertion that Bob Casey was denied his speaking spot because he refused to endorse the ticket as Atrios and I both posted yesterday. I think he's wrong.

Kevin cites a number of Democrats at the time who vaguely implied that Casey was axed because of his pro-life views, but none (except that clown Bob Beckel) that come out and say so. He concludes that it wasn't because of his pro-life view per se, but because he wanted to deliver a pro-life speech.

The truth is that Bob Casey was the biggest crybaby the Party has ever known and he personally perpetuated this story for his own purposes. This story was settled long ago by Michael Crowley who investigated this a lot closer to the time these events actually happened (1996) and put the story to rest. The Republicans have kept it going because it's such a nice example of Democratic intolerance. But it just ain't so.

You'll recall that Casey, a Democrat, was denied a speaking slot at his party's 1992 convention, allegedly, as The New York Times reported as recently as August 25, "because of his opposition to abortion rights." Now, as both parties bid up the stakes in the tolerance wars, the GOP has been using the purported muzzling of Casey to bludgeon the Democrats--and getting a free pass from the news media. "This is not like the Democratic convention in 1992, where the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, one of the biggest states in the nation, was prevented from speaking because he's pro-life," Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour said of his party's tightly controlled show in San Diego.

Since leaving office in 1995, Casey himself has rehearsed the tale ad nauseam. "The raging national debate about tolerance on the issue of abortion was ignited," Casey wrote in the August 23 Wall Street Journal, when "the party denied me ... the right to speak because I am pro-life and planned to say so from the convention podium." In Chicago, Casey delivered an impassioned pro-life speech Monday, railing against his party's imposed conformity.

But the story is not so simple. According to those who actually doled out the 1992 convention speaking slots, Casey was denied a turn for one simple reason: his refusal to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket. "It's just not factual!" stammers James Carville, apoplectic over Casey's claims. "You'd have to be idiotic to give a speaking role to a person who hadn't even endorsed you." "Why are you doing this to me?" moans Paul Begala, who, with Carville, managed two Casey campaigns before joining Clinton's team in 1992. "I love Bob Casey, but my understanding was that the dispute was not about his right-to-life views, it was about the Clinton-Gore ticket."

The man best able to explain the decision was the late Ron Brown. He addressed the topic during a roundtable discussion of Clinton campaign veterans (published as Campaign for President: The Managers Look at '92). He explained:

We decided the convention would be totally geared towards the general election campaign, towards promoting our nominee and that everybody who had the microphone would have endorsed our nominee. That was a rule, everybody understood it, from Jesse Jackson to Jerry Brown.... The press reported incorrectly that Casey was denied access to the microphone because he was not pro-choice. He was denied access to the microphone because he had not endorsed Bill Clinton. I believe that Governor Casey knew that. I had made it clear to everybody. And yet it still got played as if it had to do with some ideological split. It had nothing to do with that.

Indeed, the more one examines the version offered by the Democratic hacks, the more compelling it seems. Casey's claims to a speaking slot were tenuous from the outset. He was about to retire from politics, and convention speeches are usually allotted to those running for re-election. "It wasn't like he was going to be on there and they said, `Well, you're off now,' or something," Carville says. Besides, Casey repeatedly bashed Clinton during the primaries, calling Clinton's success "very tragic." Less than three months before the '92 convention, he urged, "Convention rules provide for the selection of an alternative candidate. Let's pick a winner." Why would Clinton invite him to speak?

Casey doesn't dispute that he refused to endorse Clinton. Instead, he notes that Jerry Brown and his sister, Kathleen, also did not endorse, yet were both allowed to speak. Theirs, however, were special cases: Jerry Brown had won several hundred delegates in the primaries, and under convention rules was allowed to speak because his name was placed in nomination. Kathleen Brown, then a candidate for governor of California, was one of the party's highest-profile women (and, though she didn't endorse Clinton, she didn't endorse her own brother, either). Even a reluctant Jesse Jackson was coaxed into backing Clinton in exchange for his speaking slot. Furthermore, a slew of pro-life Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley Jr., Senators John Breaux and Howell Heflin, and five governors, did address the delegates in 1992. Though the speakers didn't dwell on abortion, party officials say they weren't barred from mentioning the issue.

Casey, for his part, offers little evidence for his version beyond his unswayable conviction that the party is out to get him. "I'm sure they were chagrined that I didn't endorse the ticket," he says. "But the overriding reason was that I was going to go up there and make the pro-life case." As he tells it, on July 2, 1992, he wrote to Ron Brown, then the party chairman, and on July 13 to Ann Richards, the chairwoman of the delegation, asking to give a pro-life speech at the convention. He never heard from either one.

Casey also sought to speak against the platform when it was presented for a vote. This wouldn't have entailed a prime-time speech. But in response all he received was a copy of a letter sent by the convention's general counsel to its parliamentarian, explaining that, according to platform committee rules, his request was "out of order." Casey found the perfunctory dismissal demeaning. He calls it "the kind of letter they might have sent Lyndon LaRouche."

Casey's claim that he fell victim to an orchestrated campaign to silence his pro-life views has never been proven and, based on the available evidence, isn't very persuasive. Its currency stems mostly from his indefatigable promulgation of it. Yet the media have accepted the story at face value. At the very least they should be aware that, in so doing, they are playing into Casey's--and the Republicans'--hands.

Here's what Bill Clinton had to say in "My Life" about the incident:

Governor Bob Casey, whom I admired for his tenacity in running three times before he won, had been very critical of me. He was strongly anti-abortion. As he struggled with his own life-threatening health problems, the issue became more and more important to him and he had a hard time supporting pro-choice candidates.

---

There was [also] a minor flap when Ron brown refused to let governor Bob Casey speak to the convention, not because he wanted to speak against abortion but because he wouldn't agree to endorse me. I was inclined to let Casey talk, because I liked him, respected the convictins of pro-life Democrats, and thought we could get alot of them to vote for us on other issues and on my pledge to make abortion "safe, legal and rare." But Ron was adamant. We could disagree on issues, he said, but no one should get the microphone who whasn't committed to victory in November. I respected the discipline with which he had built the party, and I deferred to his judgment.

It's clear to me that rather than being denied a speaking slot because he wanted to talk about abortion, Bob Casey (Zell Miller Jr) was denied a speaking spot because he refused to endorse a pro-choice candidate for the Democratic nomination. Who is the intolerant one here? And it sounds to me as if Clinton was ready to do a little Sistah Soljah-ing with a Casey speech but since Casey had been extremely unsupportive, Brown decided to pull his chain. I see no reason to disbelieve this. Casey was behaving like a spoiled ass and they decided not to reward him for it. Good for them. It was the most successful convention we ever had.



.
digby 3/06/2005 06:47:00 PM |

 
Just Say No

Atrios wisely points out that all this babble about cutting a deal to pre-fund social security even without the private accounts is nonsense. Holy Joe was on late Edition this morning moaning dolefully about how we must Do Something because, oh my, social security was in terrible trouble. And last night on Chris Matthews everyone very smugly agreed that the Democrats had to eventually come together with Republicans and craft a compromise that Bush (that clever devil) would then take credit for as he, in his awesome shrewd brilliance, always does. Norah O'Donnell was veritably gushing at how perfectly Bush will have played it. (He's so hot!)

I call bullshit on all of this. Atrios also links to Max Sawicky who also calls bullshit by pointing out what should be evident to any sentient being on the planet by now. THERE IS NO MARGIN IN COMPROMISING WITH REPUBLICANS!!! They lie. They cheat. And for everyone but Joementum a big old smooch on the lips isn't going to be enough to cover up the inevitable stab in the back.

I sincerely hope that any talk right now about compromise is merely poker playing because if it isn't we are well and truly screwed. It is key that all of us on the left keep up the pressure. We have to balance out the pressure from the business interests that are going to be putting the big squeeze on these people. Gotta let 'em know which side their bread is buttered on.

Someday, when crazy people aren't in charge, we will revisit the possible social security shortfall in 2042. Right now, we should just shut this bastard down. It's our best chance in decades to take the momentum away from these people and we should not flinch.



.
digby 3/06/2005 04:49:00 PM |

 
Confessions Of An Old New Democrat

Armando over on Kos has an interesting discussion going about the future of the DLC and why we can't just all get along. He cites Ari Berman's article in The Nation in which the DLC is portrayed as an organization that is more than a little bit frayed around the edges --- while the term “New Democrat” still provides some cover in regions that require some distance from "regular" Dems (e.g. latte swilling, volvo driving, NY Times reading assholes like me.) Except that until fairly recently I was a card carrying New Democrat myself.

I think perhaps that people have either blocked from their memories or were too young to remember the impetus for the DLC in the first place. By 1988, it really seemed as if the Democratic Party might not ever gain the presidency again, and it wasn't unreasonable to think so. We had had our asses kicked hugely every election since 1968, with the exception of Jimmy Carter who barely pulled out a win even after Richard Nixon had just been forced to resign in disgrace. And the congress was hardly a bastion of progressivism -- a large number of Senators and congressmen were old school Democrats who were far more in sync with the modern Republicans and many of them stayed with the party after 1968 simply to preserve their seniority and committee assignments. The Democrats had not been functioning as a majority party for quite some time and we were becoming desperate.

The DLC came along and started making interesting sounds about new strategies and market based policies that sounded fresh and interesting. I recall reading various articles in the late 80's in the usual places like TNR that seemed to me to be in the tradition of FDR-like experimentation. I was intrigued by the idea of trying out new ways to achieve our goals. Our rhetoric was stale and ineffective and I was longing for something different. The energy was all on the other side and I was willing to entertain new thinking to try to keep the Republicans from doing .... what they have done anyway. I thought the DLC was devilishly clever to do an end run around the Republicans and I was very interested in the prospect of co-opting their rhetoric and turning their own solutions back on them. I never bought their tactic of “distancing” themselves from Democratic interest groups but it was never very explicit in those days. It’s only recently that I’ve heard them making Stalinesque purge noises.

Mostly though, I resigned myself to continuing to lose for the foreseeable future. When a colleague said to me in 1991 that he thought Bush was out, I literally laughed in his face. It was unimaginable. If we were gong to lose anyway, I thought we might as well try to move in a new direction.

And then along came Clinton and the deck got scrambled big time. First and foremost, I think Democrats were simply dazzled to see a candidate garner such excitement after years and years of dull technocratic candidacies. We baby boomer Democrats had been waiting for our Jack Kennedy our whole lives, you see, and when they showed that film at the Democratic convention we couldn’t resist the supernatural thrill of seeing Jack reach out his hand from the past and anoint Bill. The unbelievable possibility that he might be able to unseat an incumbent Republican made everybody set aside all their differences and just enjoy the moment.

And Clinton was a bit of a Democratic Rorschach test. His history and baby boomer status led liberals to believe he was one of them and his openness to centrist and market based ideas made moderates think he was one of them. He had been president of the DLC but he had a way with African American voters and his wife was a feminist and on and on. In many ways he represented the whole baby boomer enchilada. We all saw in him what we wanted to see.

I saw him as an innovative, modern thinker who was willing to try new things. I bought into the DLC line that we could move toward the center of gravity and that would force the Republicans to move to the center as well. Indeed, the DLC strategy depended upon the Republicans acting in good will, out of principle and back in the day, they used to. Even in 1990 a deal to raise taxes was forged between centrist Dems and moderate Republicans. It wasn't exactly the Great Society, but it showed that some positive bipartisan action could be taken and I was willing to believe that a new coalition of moderates could work together to forge some positive programs. I thought it was a way to bring ourselves back from the brink.

Clinton survived an unprecedented onslaught of character assassination and managed to govern effectively under the circumstances. But he also exposed the great weakness in the DLC strategy. The modern Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, saw any accommodation for weakness and went for the jugular. They had no use for bi-partisanship and for every step we took toward the middle they simply moved the goalposts. They had declared political war and we still thought we were having a friendly intramural game. It took me much too long to understand the way the game was now being played and I was so distracted by the scandal mongering that I failed to see that governance and results were now beside the point. (I also mistook Clinton hating for the fact that the GOP base had finally coalesced into an angry anti-democratic tribe of talk radio-fed liberal haters) I'm embarrassed to have been so naive. It took me until the stolen election --- even after the bogus impeachment! --- to fully understand that we were in an entirely new ballgame and any lessons we learned from the 1980's were no longer relevant. This was a new era.

The DLC, however, seems to have over learned the lessons of the Reagan era and simply slept through the 90's. While they were consolidating their status as DC kingmakers and building their fabulous rolodexes, they forgot to do the basic job that we liberal empiricists are supposed to do and check to see whether their experiment actually worked. The results are not so good.

First, it failed the party. People are more reluctant to identify themselves as liberals or propgressives than they wre in 1988 and one of the reasons is that people like Al From and his boys helped the Republicans degrade the label to such an extent that people don't want to be associated with it. It is one thing to criticize your brothers; it's another to sully the family name. They continue to do this by talking about purging Michael Moore and Move-On and generally showing such a lack of respect for the grassroots that you wonder why they don't just call us all filthy rabble and tell us to eat cake. The lesson here is to never employ GOP rhetoric about the Democratic Party, ever. This is one thing that simply has got to stop.

Second, their strategy failed. With the modern GOP, blurring the lines is deadly, both as a matter of rhetoric and tactics. What I once thought was a clever way to muddy the waters in our favor has been a disaster. Clinton may have temporarily dispelled the myth that Democrats are nothing but tax and spenders but it doesn't matter if the Republicans run these scorched earth campaigns in which they can get away with saying that black is white and up is down. If domestic policy ever becomes the basis of another presidential campaign, and that is questionable, there is no doubt in my mind that nothing Clinton ever did on that score will accrue to any Democrat's benefit.

Third, their policies have never really evolved into exciting "third-way" approaches, as promised. Instead, they've simply softened standard GOP market wet-dreams. And as I've watched this process over the last twenty years I finally realized that this was just business school flim-flam. You either believe in an enlightened liberal democratic government or you don't. There has been enough history to show us that left to their own devices the purveyors of market ideology will make things worse for more people. It's just the way it works. The only institution that can even the playing field in a large, diverse society such as ours is government. And only government, bureaucratic as it may sometimes be, can deliver the basic services that guarantee a decent life for its citizens. We can argue about what services are needed to do that and we can argue about who should get them and how to deliver them, but never again should Democrats promote the idea that market competition is a substitute for democratic government action. We'll get screwed every time.

But that does not mean that the DLC or its less committed adherents were all wrong to try what they tried. Liberalism cares as much about scientific speculation, experimentation, innovation and reform as it cares about the welfare of citizens, civil liberties and social progress. There is always tension between government and the market and that is as it should be. It’s not surprising at all that Democrats would look in new directions for solutions to problems because that is basic to our ideology. But, we must also be willing to admit when our hypothesis has been disproved.

In this instance, the DLC banked on the idea that consensus politics of the old school could be recreated in a Republican era. They were wrong. The Republicans desire total political hegemony. And any innovation they propose must now be clearly seen for what it is --- the radical ideologues want to dismantle the New Deal and create a Randian paradise and the politicos want to further enrich their wealthy contributors. The rest of the rubes think that if the Republicans win they’ll get rich and go to heaven and the hated liberals will be vanquished from this earth. We cannot compromise with people like this. We must defeat them head on.

And we can do it. We shouldn’t throw out all common sense and run Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney in ’08. But we got very close this last time with a Massachusetts liberal up against a vicious smear machine and a wartime GOP incumbent. All this talk about white males and moral values and repositioning ourselves on abortion is outmoded political thinking in my view. This has come down to a classic philosophical fight between the two parties across the entire spectrum of issues. I don't think that the condition exists anymore for splitting the difference. And I think we'll win if we consistently talk about what we believe in instead of outlining a list of positions. In this era I think that's what people are looking for.


But then again, I've been wrong before, haven't I? :)



.
digby 3/06/2005 01:07:00 PM |

Saturday, March 05, 2005

 
The Big Argument

Ezra Klein has written a rousing defense of liberalism and wonders why the Democrats aren't using this social security battle to help illustrate our philosophy of government:

Now that Republicans are reeling from running into the brick wall of the foundational Democratic program, wouldn't it make sense to toss their ideology an anvil? Half our number seems to think we need to close the Social Security battle now while the other half wants to draw it out and win it closer to midterms. What about widening our attack so the counteroffensive takes some time and does larger damage? How about using the "crisis" language and the fact that Bush's Medicare pperversion is a much larger economic fiasco to propose fight for changes that'd make it more cost-effective, more progressive, and force Bush's promised veto? How about forcing Bush to roll back his tax cuts to fix Social Security's shortfall, and demand that he not starve government to satisfy his radical ideology?

I'm all for using this rhetoric, but needless to say we can't actually force Bush to roll back tax cuts and we can't actually force him to veto anything because we can't pass anything. As the minority party we are certainly in the position, however, to take some chances and at least start setting the terms of the debate in our favor.

I think this deserves some real discussion in Democratic circles. It is past time for a passionate defense of liberalism for liberalism's sake. That is to say its philosophy and meaning as it applies to both our opposition to the Republicans and the affirmative case for progressive policy. For instance, I was very disappointed that we didn't draw the philosophical parallel between social security privatization and this bankruptcy bill. Essentially, the Republicans are saying in both cases that people must assume all the risk in their lives and that there are no second chances. (Interestingly, these are the same people who constantly screw up and claim that they have been redeemed by a belief in God. See Gannon, James and Bush, George W.) They are actively using the power of the government to make average people's lives more insecure. That we aren't standing fully in the path of legislating usury into law, especially in the current climate where people are clinging to the side of a mountain of debt with their fingernails, is just stupid. If we were smart at all we would have been talking about that right along with the social security mess at our all-star town meetings. It's all part of the same thing.

I realize that there has been a full generation of brainwashing about how the government is always bad and that everyone will get rich, rich, rich if the government just gets off their backs. But I have a sense that the force of this argument is getting stale. The assault on social security may just be the thing that opens people's minds to what their philosophy really means. And it may just open a window to allow the idea back in to the minds of the citizens that government programs can be an affirmative good. Social Security works. It's more efficient, more fair and more inexpensive than any of the alternatives. People apparently instinctively know this. Since the Republicans decided to bring this to the forefront we should take credit for it and piggyback our new progressive ideas on its back. It's been so long since anyone had the nerve to do it, that it sounds downright fresh.

Ezra quotes FDR in 1936 as an example of full throated liberalism at its peak. We aren't struggling through the Great Depression and we aren't in power, but the political argument still stands. The more things change and all that:

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace...business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me --- and I welcome their hatred.

...

But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.

When the Republicans said that future congresses would steal the reserves, they were simply stating what they intended to do. And yes, attacking the honor and integrity of the US Government is always a winner as long as it's a Republican who is attacking it. If a Democrat deigns to attack even a Republican administration, it's treason. (I am reminded again that throughout the 90's it was considered perfectly acceptable for GOP representatives to call the FBI "jack-booted thugs.")

Clearly, they have never really believed in American democratic government. They cover their belief with bromides about "the market" selling it to the public like a magic pill, when it's clear that the market is insufficient to do anything but efficiently allocate goods and services. Despite what that jittery romance novelist Ayn Rand told Uncle Alan Greenspan and a whole host of breast heaving, dewy eyed privateers, there is no morality intrinsic to capitalism. It's an economic system, nothing more and nothing less. Anyone who believes in the words of our Declaration of Independence must also realize that government's purpose is not just to protect property and defend the nation against its enemies. It also exists to level the playing field, keep the powerful from gaining more advantage than they already have and mitigate the harsh effects of the market so that we can live in a decent and moral society.

Just as in the 1930's the Republicans of today simply don't believe in the idea of a moral and decent society. Their policy is to align themselves with powerful moneyed forces to tilt the playing field in their favor and let everybody else fend for themselves. That's the essence of the argument and one that I think we can win if we care to wage it.


Update: I received an e-mail admonishing me for not acknowledging the part of liberalism that defends civil rights. I hereby issue a full disclaimer that every argument I make along this line does not mean to be inclusive of every policy and position of the democratic party. However,let the word go forth that I am a huge proponent of civil rights and civil liberties (including privacy) and there is an analagous argument that can and must be made that a moral and decent society depends upon our commitment to upholding those things as well. Indeed, the civil liberties argument is, in my mind, sorely underappreciated as a liberal issue.

Update II: Check out Kevin Drum's analysis of the Bankruptcy Bill.





.
digby 3/05/2005 01:03:00 PM |

 
Notes:

1.) It has come to my attention that I have been given credit for the term "Manchurian Beefcake" and while I admit to having the excellent taste to use it repeatedly, sadly I did not come up with it myself. That little morsel of descriptive genius came from God, aka James Wolcott. Long may he reign.

2) I have upgraded the haloscan account so you should all be able to pontificate at length from now on. Just remember that all rhetorical brilliance is owned by this site and yours will be stolen and recyled often.

3) Go give some change to David Neiwert for his fundraising drive. His insights are more necessary by the day.



.
digby 3/05/2005 12:25:00 PM |

 
Mr Positive

"I like doing this, by the way - I like going around the country, saying, 'Folks, we have got a problem.'"

One proposal in circulation would allow individuals to invest in personal retirement accounts on top of their current payroll taxes, as an "add-on," rather than diverting payments from the existing system. Mr. Bush has been cool to the "add-on," approach, but he used that very phrase on Friday to describe his vision for the plan. Under his proposal, Mr. Bush said, income from a private account "goes to supplement the Social Security check that you're going to get from the federal government."

"See, personal accounts is an add-on to that which the government is going to pay you," he said. "It doesn't replace the Social Security system."

In fact, the personal accounts would offset a portion of the existing Social Security benefit and, its proponents argue, enhance it. Mr. Bush has proposed letting younger workers divert up to 4 percent of their taxable income into personal accounts - a move that detractors say would cost trillions in transition costs and ruin the underpinnings of the system.

Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said Mr. Bush was not embracing the alternate plan, which he said would amount to creating an entirely new program outside Social Security. Instead, Mr. Duffy said the president used the term "add-on" to describe his own proposal. "Social Security is facing its own problems and the president's mission is to save Social Security," Mr. Duffy said.

Is there some reason that the NY Times can't just make it clear that the president and his spokeman are outright misrepresenting their plan? Unless there is a plan in place that says you get to keep all the same scheduled benefits on top of your new "private account" makes, then this is not an "add-on" it is a "replace." Indeed, that is the whole point.

I think real add-on savings plans are fine. Since big business has abdicated its traditional responsibility to provide pensions (and people are forced to change jobs frequently), we are now reduced to encouraging people to save for a liveable retirement with various market based plans. But, it should be noted that one of the things that makes it possible for middle and working class people to take the risk of putting their retirement savings into the stock market is knowing that they have a guaranteed floor that they can count on --- backed by the full faith and credit of the US government --- in case something goes wrong.

But if Bush is going to pretend that his privatization plan is actually an add-on that will "save" social security then we should scrap the idea of any new add-ons, for now. If the allegedly liberal press is unwilling to state in clear and unambiguous language that the president is outright lying about this, then we will end up twisting ourselves into a pretzel trying to untangle the different meanings of "add-on" and "personal" and some fainthearted Democrats are going to get rolled.

I still maintain that whenever somebody says that we must present an alternative, we should say "We have presented the alternative. It's called "Social Security". It works very, very well and Democrats are damned proud to have created it."

I also think it might be useful for Democrats to say, "the president likes to say that he enjoys going around the country and saying 'Folks, we have got a problem.' But this problem, if it even is a problem, won't become evident for another 40 years. Meanwhile we've got a lot of problems right now in this country that the president doesn't want to talk about like ...."

I think one of the things that is hurting Bush is the fact that he's putting so much energy into something so abstract and far away. He's supposed to be the dude who deals with bad guys, not some social engineer who's trying to fix some complicated future problem that isn't evidently broken. It's weird. It doesn't fit. We should go on the offensive and accuse him of ignoring real problems while he holds useless town meetings trying to convince people to fix a problem that won't even present itself for forty years, if at all. I think people already kind of feel this and we need to articulate it for them. With all the problems we have in this world, does it make sense that the Republicans are so weirdly fixated on this?



.
digby 3/05/2005 11:39:00 AM |

 
Listening To Liberals

Atrios links to Peter Beinart's comment in this liberal roundtable in the NY Times in which he says:

I think one of the great problems in the debates about abortion and gay rights is the perception that liberals are illiberal and nondemocratic. It's remarkable to me how many people still mention the fact that [the anti-abortion Pennsylvania governor] Bob Casey was denied the right to speak at the 1992 Democratic convention. That was an illiberal thing the party did. And there is an important debate for liberals to have about the role of the courts in pushing social change. Finally, I don't think you can separate these questions from people's larger concerns about the culture. Liberals should believe in free speech, of course, but there is no reason that liberals need to believe that everything that comes out of an unregulated free market is good culturally.

Atrios rightly points out that Beinert is helpfully pushing Republican talking points here, as so many Democrats do, and specifically corrects the record as to Casey, who was not allowed to speak because he refused to endorse the Democratic ticket, not because he was anti-choice.

And here is one liberal who doesn't believe that everything that comes out of the unregulated free market is good culturally. For instance, I think that right wing talk radio is the biggest cultural pollutant in our society. I can't conceive of anything more pernicious than hours and hours of eliminationist rhetoric, lies and propaganda being pumped into people's cars, offices and homes throughout the country. Somehow, I just can't get as worked up about fictional cable television shows that feature nudity and profanity when real live Americans spend the day listening to people talk about me in ways that sound an awful lot like they'd like to kill me.

Now, I would imagine that "conservatives" would scream bloody murder if I were to suggest that these voices be silenced. And I wouldn't suggest it. But if Beinert asks me if I think that there are culturally dangerous examples of free speech going on today, I'd have to say I think Limbaugh and Savage will take this country down a helluva lot faster than some obscure college professor, MTV or Janet Jackson's nipple.

Sadly, Beinert wasn't the only liberal in this conversation who sounds like the right wing noise machine has replaced a part of his brain. Michael Tomasky is parroting right wing talking points, too:

TOMASKY. First, terrorism is a threat. It threatened our shores more directly than the Soviet Union ever did. And it must be the focus of a foreign policy. We need alliances, yes. But alliances are a means. The end is the isolation of terrorists and the states that harbor them. The end is the control of nuclear proliferation, an extremely serious issue that the Bush administration sort of ignores. And the end is bringing liberty to the places of the world where it doesn't exist.

Yes, terrorism is a threat. But if blowing up a couple of buildings is more threatening than aiming thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons at every citizen of the United States and then waiting decades for someone to blink, then my sense of existential danger is sadly confused.

Here's the scenario under which we lived for more than 40 years:

The idea that any nuclear conflict would eventually escalate into MAD was a challenge for military strategists. This challenge was particularly severe for the United States and its NATO allies because it was believed until the 1970s that a Soviet tank invasion of Western Europe would quickly overwhelm NATO conventional forces, leading to the necessity of escalating to theater nuclear weapons.

A number of interesting concepts were developed. Early ICBMs were inaccurate which led to the concept of counter-city strikes -- attacks directly on the enemy population leading to a collapse of the enemy's will to fight, although it appears that this was the American interpretation of the Soviet stance while the Soviet strategy was never clearly anti-population. During the Cold War the USSR invested in extensive protected civilian infrastructure such as large nuclear proof bunkers and non-perishable food stores. In the US, by comparison, little to no preparations were made for civilians at all, except for the occasional backyard fallout shelter built by private individuals. This was part of a deliberate strategy on the Americans' part that stressed the difference between first and second strike strategies. By leaving their population largely exposed, this gave the impression that the US had no intention of launching a first strike nuclear war, as their cities would clearly be decimated in the retaliation.

The US also made a point during this period of targeting their missiles on Russian population centers rather than military targets. This was intended to reinforce the second strike pose. If the Soviets attacked first, then there would be no point in destroying empty missile silos that had already launched; the only thing left to hit would be cities. By contrast, if America had gone to great lengths to protect their citizens and targeted the enemy's silos, that might have led the Russians to believe the US was planning a first strike, where they would eliminate Soviet missiles while still in their silos and be able to survive a weakened counter attack in their reinforced bunkers. In this way, both sides were (theoretically) assured that the other would not strike first, and a war without a first strike will not occur.

This strategy had one major and very possibly critical flaw, soon realised by military analysts but highly underplayed by the US military: Conventional NATO forces in the European theatre of war were considered to be outnumbered by similar Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces, and while the western countries invested heavily in high-tech conventional weapons to counter this (partly perceived) imbalance, it was assumed that in case of a major Soviet attack (commonly perceived as the 'red tanks rolling towards the North Sea' scenario) that NATO, in the face of conventional defeat, would soon have no other choice but to resort to tactical nuclear weapons. Most analysts agreed that once the first nuclear exchange had occurred, escalation to global nuclear war would become almost inevitable.

So, while official US policy was a clearly stated 'non first-use policy', never to strike first with nuclear weapons, the reality was that the lack of strength of conventional NATO forces would force the US to either abandon Western Europe or use nuclear weapons in its defense. Even though after Soviet collapse investigations by historians and military analysts revealed that the effectiveness of Warsaw Pact forces was rated far higher than they really were, official NATO doctrine had been critically flawed from the onset and global thermonuclear war would have been a very real possibility had actual conflict occurred.

I guess because we all went about our lives and lived as if the threat didn't exist that it wasn't a direct threat. Or something. But all it would have taken was one miscalculation --- and it almost happened in 1962. The threat was clear and we managed, through a foreign policy that was realistic and vigilant, to get through it and come out victorious. Part of what kept us from blowing ourselves and half the planet up was that we didn't listen to crazy people on the subject who insisted that we invade Russia, many of whom are now in charge of American foreign policy.

Liberals are in a bind on this, as we always are, because unless we strike the proper pose of panicked bellicosity we are called treasonous and cowardly. And to be fair, Tomasky does hold the threat of nuclear proliferation as the number one threat, which is correct. However, I still think it behooves liberals to be precise in our language and not enable the other side with loose talk about what kind of threat we are facing with "terrorism" and Islamic fundamentalism. It may be that this country gets off on the idea that we are under seige by some Satanic force, but somebody's got to keep their heads.

(And if we all now have to pay lip service to Bush's little fantasy that the US is "bringing freedom" all around the world --- well, to the oil producing world anyway --- then I give up. It's bad enough having to listen to sanctimonious Republican phonies pretend to be morally superior, but if everyone now has to fall over themselves to proclaim that the United States is on a worldwide freedom crusade then we have truly entered the twilight zone.)

Finally, I don't know why we should listen to anyone who says something like this:

BEINART. I think that the base needs to be engaged, absolutely, and I certainly think that Washington and Washington political consultants should not be the only people who set the direction for the party. But I also think it's important to remember the base was enormously engaged in this election. The Democratic Party still lost. The party has to have a listening tour within its own base but also a listening tour among swing constituencies that are moving away: Hispanics, Jews, the military in particular. The Democratic Party needs a strategy with military voters not simply because of their numbers, but because military voters will give the Democratic Party credibility with nonmilitary voters who are concerned the Democratic Party is not tough enough. One cannot forget the central fact that the Democratic Party has lost every election since the 9/11 era, in which national security has been predominant. That is an enormous, enormous problem.

Sigh. 9/11 happened in 2001. We had a midterm election in 2002 in which the senate would have remained in Democratic hands if 100,000 votes had moved the other way. The president, who was hailed as a conquering hero throughout the country, at that time stood at a 70+ approval rating and campaigned vigorously. In 2004 that president won by 60,001 votes in a state that hasn't voted Democratic in decades. This has all happened in a period of 3 short years after the country was attacked and we have launched two wars. The Republican party, long seen as the party of national security, came extremely close to losing.

It's a fucking miracle we weren't creamed and it's a testament to the tenacity of the base of the Democratic Party which valiantly resisted the temptation to join in the the war party. George W. Bush barely won the last election (outside his base in the South it was nip and tuck) and it was largely a result of the natural advantage of GOP incumbency during wartime that got him under the wire.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Democrats have a lot of work to do, but we are most definitely not in the wilderness. "Reaching out" to military families and swing voters is a very nice idea and I think we should do it. But it is sheer naivete to think that doing so will balance the effect of Rush Limbaugh and his pals on the psyche of those who are inclined to listen and absorb his message. We are in a period of hand to hand political combat now, up close and personal, and the key is the willingness of Democrats to articulate their vision clearly and without apology and to fight like hell when the other side goes after us.

Beinert and the DLC boys are anachronisms. They continue to believe that we are out of step with the country, as we all thought was true back in the 80's when we were losing big. But times have changed. The truth is that we are out of step with half the country.

But that means the Republicans are too.


Correction: Clinton won Ohio in both 92 and 96. It's probably worth noting, however, that Perot got 21% in Ohio in 1992 and almost 11% in 1996.



.
digby 3/05/2005 09:17:00 AM |

Thursday, March 03, 2005

 
Kill Chill

Via Ezra Klein I see that we have uncovered another hideous atrocity from Afghanistan, from yet another of our infamous "prisons":

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.

The Afghan guards -- paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit -- dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.

As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic -- "hypothermia" was listed as the cause of death -- the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive's family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a "ghost detainee," the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.

[...]

The Afghan detainee had been captured in Pakistan along with a group of other Afghans. His connection to al Qaeda or the value of his intelligence was never established before he died. "He was probably associated with people who were associated with al Qaeda," one U.S. government official said.

[...]

The fact that the Salt Pit case has remained secret for more than two years reflects how little is known about the CIA's treatment of detainees and its handling of allegations of abuse. The public airing of abuse at Abu Ghraib prompted the Pentagon to undertake and release scathing reports about conduct by military personnel, to revise rules for handling prisoners, and to prosecute soldiers accused of wrongdoing. There has been no comparable public scrutiny of the CIA, whose operations and briefings to Congress are kept classified by the administration.

Ho Hum. War is hell and all that, what?

This story reminds me that we've never gotten to the bottom of yet another purported war crime (scroll down) in the early days of the Afghanistan invasion:

Nobody knows exactly how many Taliban prisoners were secretly interred in this mass grave, a short distance from the main road. But there is now substantial evidence that the worst atrocity of last year's war in Afghanistan took place here; most controversially, during an operation masterminded by US special forces.

A 10-minute drive away is Shiberghan prison, where about 800 Taliban fighters who surrendered late last November at the town of Kunduz are held. The Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum controls the prison; his mansion is nearby.

It was his commanders who transported the Taliban captives to Shiberghan. "It was awful. They crammed us into sealed shipping containers," a 24-year-old survivor, Irfan Azgar Ali, told the Guardian. "We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot.

"There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Shiberghan, only 10 of us were still alive."

The prisoners still in Shiberghan - half of them Afghans, and half Pakistanis - estimate that about 400 people suffocated to death during the journey. Other sources say the figure is between 900 and 1,000. The Physicians for Human Rights group from Boston, which identified the mass grave earlier this year and later sent out a forensic scientist to carry out further tests, suggests that 2,000-3,000 of the 8,000 prisoners taken to Shiberghan died on the way.

[...]

Some of the first Taliban fighters to surrender made the initial part of the journey in open lorries, their faces caked with dust. When they reached Mazar-i-Sharif, 90 miles from Kunduz, they were taken to Qala Zaini, a mud-walled fortified compound on the outskirts of the city. There Gen Dostum's soldiers crammed them into shipping containers. When they protested that they could not breathe, the soldiers told them to duck down, then fired several Kalashnikov rounds into the containers.

"I saw blood coming out of the holes," an eyewitness who refuses to be identified said.

A driver who made four trips to Dasht-i-Leili said not all the prisoners in his lorry were dead when they arrived: some were merely unconscious or gravely injured. The guards laid the dead and the still living out on the desert. "They raked them all with bullets to make sure they were dead," the driver said. "Then they buried them."

[...]

The Pentagon said last week that the US troops had reported that they were unaware what had happened to the prisoners. But the evidence suggests that they were so close to Gen Dostum's soldiers that they may have been informed.

The general has been on the US payroll for nearly a year. According to Newsweek magazine, an elite team from the Fifth Special Forces Group first met up with Gen Dostum last October, when its members were dropped by Chinook helicopter at his mountain base.

They coordinated the Northern Alliance's dramatic assault on Mazar-i-Sharif, which fell on November 6, and then pursued the Taliban's northern army to Kunduz, where it remained trapped for more than two weeks. During this bloody period the US special forces unit, the 595 A-team, paid repeated visits to Shiberghan prison - plucking the American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh, for example, from his cell hours after his detention.

I admit that I've always been intrigued by this little bit of information that nobody has ever bothered to follow up. From my post on this subject last May:

These ODA 595 Special Forces guys freely admitted being very close to General Dostum and his troops. But, they had to leave right after the massacre at Mazer al Sharif:

Yeah we eh, we were ordered out quite rapidly and without General Dostum's knowledge. He was out of town and we got word that we were to be quickly ex-filled, to brief Mr. Rumsfeld.

Quite the honor, I'm sure.

It may be that our troops were unaware of this massacre, but it doesn't seem likely. Our guys were right there and Dostum was our man. It is more and more clear as time goes on that we hit Afghanistan and just went nuts.

There are many, many questionable deaths and not in the field of battle. Junior's ill advised edict to "take the gloves off" resulted in unknown numbers of innocent or only mariginally involved people being killed, tortured and imprisoned. It seems that every day new evidence emerges that troops were ordered to behave like animals in the pursuit of this enemy and for no real purpose except indulging a barbaric bloodlust.

That's ok, apparently, because according to writers like Andrew Mccarthy,(and the entire keyboarder brigade) we are facing an enemy like no enemy the world has ever known and absolutely anything is justified as a result:

Today’s marketplace of ideas, for example, has been notably reluctant to engage even the subject of Islamofascism and the threat it poses to our institutions and our liberties. Nor does that marketplace strike one as a very effective weapon for bringing suicide murderers to heel, let alone for militating against electronically beamed fatwas capable of unleashing weapons of untold destructive power before other ideas have a meaningful opportunity to compete and persuade.

His piece was aimed at limiting the first amendment, but the overarching theme of abject panic at the threat of "Islamofascism" applies to all aspects of the Republican approach to the "GWOT."

From the minute the WTC was attacked their immediate response was to say that this threat is completely unprecedented. Therefore there are absolutely no limits to how much pain and suffering we are allowed to inflict and no limit to the freedoms we are allowed to restrict because this is the worst thing that ever happened to any nation or people in the history of the world. And anyone who doesn't agree is nothing more than a treasonous girly man.

The only problem is, it just isn't true. These guys were nothing but quivering hysterical panic artists. Why they are considered to be such tough guys, I will never know. Grace under pressure certainly isn't their strong suit, that's for sure.

The damage they have done to this country's sense of itself as a moral force for good, however, cannot be papered over with soaring speeches about freedom and liberty. Leaving that naked prisoner (so many naked prisoners!) to die of the cold that night is just one of the many ways in which these puerile egotists sold this country down the river one simple minded atrocity at a time.



.
digby 3/03/2005 09:47:00 PM |

 
Huntin' Immagrants

Burnt Orange Report reports on the lovely little game those funloving scamps down in Texas have come up with:

Numerous NT students exchanged heated arguments Wednesday during the "Capture the Illegal Immigrant Game," put on by NT's chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas. The purpose of the game was to show the organization's opposition to President Bush's temporary worker plan

Yes those crazy kids are just full 'o wacky hijinks, aren't they? But, it's not just the kids. There is a rather large group of adults preparing to play the game for real:

Civilians from all walks of life - patrolling the border day and night -- even with the threat of violence. It's called the Minuteman Project. Their goal is stop the flow of illegal immigration through the Arizona-Mexico border.

With nearly 500 volunteers from across the nation these self-proclaimed "guardian vigilantes" are preparing to head south.

From his Orange County home, Jim Gilchrist is planning a mission. His tools are a computer, an atlas and an army of volunteers.

"I struck the mother load of nationalism. I thought I would be lucky to get 12 volunteers. In six months, I've gotten almost 500," Gilchrist told NBC4.

[...]

According to authorities, violence along the Tucson sector has climbed to an all-time high. "Bringing untrained civilians into this border environment is a recipe for disaster," Adame told NBC4.

But that has not deterred many of the volunteers.

"It's absolutely a good idea," said a man who plans to volunteer as a pilot for the Minuteman Project. When asked why he thought is was a good idea, Adame[sic] told NBC4, "Because I've spent my whole life just about in the military to keep somebody from coming into this country so why not keep it up?"

He's part of what's known as the Minuteman Air Force, both plane and pilot, many of which are well past retirement. They actually plan to use about two dozen aircraft. The typical plane they intend to use down on the border is a small private three-seater aircraft. "I feel it's time the American people stood up and said enough is enough," one of the pilots told NBC4.

It's that mentality that the Minutemen hope will have government officials taking notice.

"This is a chess game. They move and we move and spot and report, and border patrol intercepts and apprehends," Gilchrist told NBC4.

But Gilchrist, who says he wants to work with border patrol, has yet to contact them. "They know what we are doing and I don't feel I have to ask permission to express myself under the first amendment," Gilchrist told NBC4.

Here we have people talking about silencing political bloggers while vigilantes strafing illegal immigrants from an airplane is just expressing yourself under the first amendment.

Is this a great country or what?



.
digby 3/03/2005 07:56:00 PM |

 
Finding The Consensus


There has been an interesting ongoing conversation on several excellent blogs about Rick Perlstein’s great book “Before The Storm” in which everyone is discussing whether the American consensus still holds. The American consensus was the mainstream majority belief in liberalism that held that the government should actively expand “to new frontiers” to promote the welfare of its citizens. Perlstein's new book, which is supposed to come out next year, is apparently a further examination of how this consensus was unmade. I look forward to reading it because this is key to understanding why we liberals continue to be so gobsmacked by the success of the right wing.

I understood this consensus in a very simple and personal way. In 1964, back before whatever happened to Kansas happened, we lived in Wichita. My grade school had the parents all dress their children as Goldwater or Johnson kids on election day. I was the only Goldwater kid in the third grade. This surprised me a great deal because in my home Barry Goldwater was a God. That was the first time I realized that my family was outside the mainstream. Goldwater represented a kind of “conservatism” that was radically different than what a large majority of Americans believed, Republican and Democrat alike. I happened to be from a family that had long adhered to right wing politics, but most people didn’t.

Perlstein sees the unmaking of the consensus beginning that year when Barry Goldwater ran his quixotic campaign against Lyndon Johnson --- a campaign in which he also managed to get tens of thousands of people to pay admission to his speeches, where he filled Dodger Stadium with swooning, adoring crowds a la Dubya, and which created a strong base of grassroots conservatives who began to lay the groundwork for long term political action.

The blogospheric argument seems to hinge on the idea that because Goldwater was soundly defeated and his ideas didn’t result in immediate repudiation of liberalism that the consensus still holds. But political movements are not armed revolutions. The country doesn’t turn on a dime and a consensus doesn’t completely unravel overnight. When an attractive alternative presents itself and enough people become interested it can gain currency over time until it eventually becomes mainstream itself.

Here is the kind of talk that was considered so radical and beyond the pale in 1964 that Barry Goldwater was defeated 61 to 38 percent in the popular vote:

[Some] have long since seen through the spurious suggestion that federal aid comes "free." They know that the money comes out of their own pockets, and that it is returned to them minus a broker's fee taken by the federal bureaucracy. They know, too, that the power to decide how that money shall be spent is withdrawn from them and exercised by some planning board deep in the caverns of one of the federal agencies. They understand this represents a great and perhaps irreparable loss--not only in their wealth, but in their priceless liberty.

[...]

The Constitution is what its authors intended it to be and said it was--not what the Supreme Court says it is. If we condone the practice of substituting our own intentions for those of the Constitution's framers, we reject, in effect, the principle of Constitutional Government: we endorse a rule of men, not of laws.
In order to achieve the widest possible distribution of political power, financial contributions to political campaigns should be made by individuals and individuals alone. I see no reason for labor unions--or corporations--to participate in politics. Both were created for economic purposes and their activities should be restricted accordingly.

[...]

And let us, by all means, remember the nation's interest in reducing taxes and spending. The need for "economic growth" that we hear so much about these days will be achieved, not by the government harnessing the nation's economic forces, but by emancipating them. By reducing taxes and spending we will not only return to the individual the means with which he can assert his freedom and dignity, but also guarantee to the nation the economic strength that will always be its ultimate defense against foreign foes.

[...]

A man may not immediately, or ever, comprehend the harm thus done to his character. Indeed, this is one of the great evils of Welfarism--that it transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it. There is no avoiding this damage to character under the Welfare State. Welfare programs cannot help but promote the idea that the government owes the benefits it confers on the individual.

[...]

No nation at war, employing an exclusively defensive strategy, can hope to survive for long. Like the boxer who refuses to throw a punch, the defense-bound nation will be cut down sooner or later. As long as every encounter with the enemy is fought on his initiative, on grounds of his choosing and with weapons of his choosing, we shall keep on losing the Cold War.

[...]

Is the perpetuation of an international debating forum, for its own sake, the primary objective of American policy? If so, there is much to be said for our past record of subordinating our national interest to that of the United Nations. If, on the other hand, our primary objective is victory over Communism, we will, as a matter of course, view such organizations as the UN as a possible means to that end. Once the question is asked--Does America's participation in the United Nations help or hinder her struggle against world Communism?--it becomes clear that our present commitment to the UN deserves re-examination.

[...]

We must realize that the captive peoples are our friends and potential allies-not their rulers. A truly offensive-minded strategy would recognize that the captive peoples are our strongest weapon in the war against Communism, and would encourage them to overthrow their captors.

There can be no doubt that Goldwater’s ideas are now mainstream. And there can be no doubt that what was once a national consensus that the government’s purpose was to deliver for its citizens is no longer operative. Instead we have a puny incrementalism that passes for liberalism, like the useless and expensive pharmaceutical company hand-out bill for which Democrats get “credit” merely because it is an expansion of government. If giving old people something that is considered a standard part of any insurance plan is considered to be a big liberal achievement then I think we can safely say that liberalism has lost its vision.

(Please don’t write me e-mails telling me all about how Bush is a fiscal disaster and that he’s expanded the government. I know he is. And I realize that Goldwater himself is turning in his grave. He did, at least, have integrity. I’m talking about what people believe not what the addicted-to-bullshit Republicans are actually doing.)

Like many of my generation, I adopted the politics of many of my peers and became a typical 70’s liberal. I thought for many years that my father’s politics were so completely out of fashion that they were entirely irrelevant. Even Reagan seemed to me to be an anomaly. As a Californian I understood his appeal and attributed it to personality and fame, counting on what I assumed to be the American consensus to mitigate the worst of his excesses until we could get a real president again.

I finally relinquished that illusion somewhere around 1990 when I had a discussion with a bright young woman who hated her job and liked to while away a few minutes chatting at the water cooler. She said that she’d been watching the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour the night before and had heard an economist who really seemed to get it. I asked what she meant by that and she said that his explanations had the ring of common sense to her, that he just sounded right. The economist was Milton Friedman.

I realized then that the default view had changed. Milton Friedman "just had the ring of common sense" to this woman not because she was a dyed in the wool conservative (she was a Democrat) but because Friedman’s views had become easily recognized as mainstream to those who weren’t conversant with the academic economic arguments. The American consensus had been in every way the opposite of Milton Friedman’s economic theories. He is a free market evangelist in the most extreme sense and yet this liberal Democrat thought he was talking sense.

So, here we are today with a re-elected Republican president, a radical Republican congress, a moderate to flaming right wing Supreme Court and we are actually trying to pretend that the American liberal consensus still exists. I have made this error myself. I clung to the idea that it exists because the Republicans are forced to use phony rhetoric to convince people that they really care about the average American and because people don’t want to lose what they already have. But I should have realized that the day the music finally died was the day that a Democratic president with a Democratic congress proposed a market based national health care plan.

The difference between Republicans and Democrats isn't about who cares more for the people. All politicians say they care about the people and the people are always justifiably skeptical. The difference between us is how we believe the good of the people is best achieved and liberals have a fundamentally different philosophy than the Republicans. Government is our preferred method to advance progressive ideals. Capitalism cannot substitute for a democratic government that answers to all the people. The invisible hand doesn’t give a shit if children starve or old people have to work until they are eighty or if half the country has to work at slave wages to support the other half. Only government can guarantee its citizens the equal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We believe that progress toward that end requires that the government be active and engaged in delivering those things.

We are at parity, politically speaking, but liberalism is clinging by its fingernails to a vague definition of itself as a collection of policies favoring light regulation, balanced budgets, the last vestiges of the New Deal and certain individual rights. The American conservative consensus is not far away if we continue to abdicate our responsibility to forcefully articulate the role of government in a meaningful and understandable way and convey in no uncertain terms the danger to average Americans when they put their faith in free market evangelism and phony appeals to patriotism and religion. Laundry lists cannot substitute for inspiration.

There is no consensus right now about anything. In fact, we are engaged in a bloodless civil war. But the terms of the debate are being set by people who were not so long ago considered so outside the mainstream that they were nuts. We need to get back in the game with big ideas. I suspect that the ghost of the American consensus still wanders the country and that it won’t take much to bring it back to life. It is, after all, the consensus that oversaw the greatest period of economic and social progress in this country’s history.



.
digby 3/03/2005 02:31:00 PM |

Sunday, February 27, 2005

 
Southern Man

Kevin Drum features an interview with political strategist David “Mudcat” Saunders:

SouthNow: Why did the Democrats lose in 2004?

Mudcat: They can’t f***’n count. That’s the Democrats’ problem. You don’t get in the football game and punt on first down. You concede nothing. We condeded 20 states at first and then six more by Labor Day. That’s 227 electoral votes. Bush only needed 18 percent of the remaining electoral votes to win.

SouthNow: What’s the prescription for Democrats?

Mudcat: There’s only one precription and that’s tolerance. I’m a white, southern male who hunts. I’m a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has two black members, by the way. I don’t know how many northern Democrats who have tolerance for my kind.

SouthNow: What’s your strategy for Southern progress?

Mudcat: We need to quit all this tap dancin’ around the truth....We need to stop tap dancin’ around the issues of guns, gays and God....We’ve lost the white male. We need to get ‘em back. We need to get through the cultural wall. It’s a wall of straw. Inside every rural Republican is a Democrat trying to get out.

Saunders, who has worked on the campaigns of Mark Warner, John Edwards, and Bob Graham, thinks that if Democrats ease up on the culture stuff they can win in the South: "We’ve got an affection for big guns and fast cars. It’s a macho thing. I’ve not seen any attempt by the Democrats to get into that culture."

Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter were all southern white males, and we blue staters voted for them without a second thought. Before that, Lyndon Johnson won the blue states in a landslide. As I recall, we rather rather liked their southern roots. Let's just get this one thing straight. The theory that non-southerners are intolerant of "his kind" is undisputably wrong. We have happily voted for southern white males many times. It's southerners who refuse to vote for anyone who comes from anywhere else.

But, just being happy to vote for southern white males isn't good enough, is it? We don't properly get into macho, good ole boy culture. Ok. Let's try that. I have absolutely no problem with a born again, cowboy hat wearing president from a southern state who hunts and drives fast cars and even, dare I say it, engages in the most macho sport of all --- clearing brush. He can tie on a six gun and practice quick drawing in the rose garden for all I care. I am not offended by any of those things.

But again, that's the problem, isn't it? It is not enough to be tolerant. We must adopt both their style and their policies before they are happy. Everyone must be a NASCAR fan. If you are not, they will take it to mean that you disrespect their love of NASCAR. Everyone must hunt. If you don't, then you are being intolerant of their love of hunting. If you don't talk about religion the way they talk about it, you are not properly religious. Rappers must wear cowboy boots, hispanics must speak English, we all have to drive American trucks with confederate flags on the back and drink Jack and be exactly like these macho, southern white men before they will feel secure enough to vote with us.

And let's not pretend that we will not also have to tell the various constituencies in the party who find their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to be contingent on being allowed to control their own bodies, marry whom they choose and practice or not practice the religion of their choice that they are shit out of luck. That's part of the deal.

Let's face facts here. The answer to this problem is that in order to get the macho white southern male vote we all must become macho white southern males and that is just not humanly possible. We can certainly try to engage them with an attitude of intense interest in their culture if that's what it takes. But, I doubt it will make much of a difference.

Mudcat may look at a white southern male Republican and see a Democrat trying to get out, but I just see a bunch of insecure white guys who think everybody else ought to be just like them. And if you look at the leadership of the Republican party they've got exactly what they want. Why would they change?




.
digby 2/27/2005 10:50:00 AM |

Saturday, February 26, 2005

 
Kabuki Ethics

Perhaps I'm being obtuse. I had some dental work this week that was quite unpleasant so perhaps I accidentally spit my higher brain function down that cute little sink next to the torture chair. Am I reading correctly that the funniest man in the universe is obliquely scolding himself and the rest of us for flogging the Jeff Gannon story? Why yes, I believe he is and now that I think about it, it's a darned good idea.

He admits how difficult it is to resist the urge to giggle incessantly and point out every word in a Gannon piece that his inner Beavis finds suggestive, but he concludes that pursuing this story is the work of the devil and oh is he ever right. The Poorman isn't the only sharp guy to make the point that the Gannon story is somehow wrong, though. As this article in TAPPED points out, the major lefty magazines, with the exception of Salon (a bunch of "San Francisco liberals" ) have all tip-toed around this story very delicately. David Corn has wrestled with his demons in public however and gives un an insight into the problem:

Should the White House have handed a daily press pass to a reporter who turned tricks on the side? Was it hypocritical of the Bush White House to have done so? Was it a security lapse to let a pseudonymous fellow and possible felon close to the president? Gannon/Guckert and Talon ought to have been vetted more closely regarding their journalistic credentials. But I will not gripe if the White House press office decides it is not its job to investigate the personal lives and websites of those who apply for access to the press room. Some of Gannon/Guckert's critics have suggested that he was allowed into the White House due to some sort of gay connection. One site has used the Gannon/Guckert affair to float unsubstantiated rumors about the sex life of Scott McClellan. This is fair game--but only for journalistic investigation, not for throw-it-and-see-if-it-sticks postings. If there is evidence that McClellan is a gay GOP hypocrite or that Gannon/Guckert had an advantage because he was literally in bed with a White House official, that's a news story. Otherwise, it's smear-by-blogging. Last year, I spent months talking to a professional dominatrix who claimed she had been hired several times by a prominent Republican who does the family-values shtick. I examined her allegations the best I could. But I could not substantiate her claim, which I found credible. I had nothing to publish, nothing specific to blog.

It's certainly embarrassing to the Bush White House that its press operation accepted a reporter who was an actual or wannabe prostitute. But this is not the same as paying columnists to shill for the administration, producing pro-administration propaganda packaged as news reports, mounting fake town meetings, or restricting the number of press conferences. And to date there is no compelling evidence that the White House recruited or deployed Gannon/Guckert as a plant. It really had little cause to do so. Both Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan have demonstrated they can duck questions ably on their own.

This is what responsible journalism and ethical blogging are all about. We wouldn't want people to hear unsubstantiated gossip. That's why he writes that he refused to report or blog about the credible dominatrix who couldn't provide proof of her allegations that "she had been hired several times by a prominent Republican who does the family-values shtick." I would imagine that a certain "Virtues Czar” has been quaking in his leather chaps over this story and is mightily relieved that Corn has decided not to blog about it. I'm sure everyone will take Corn's ethical lead and refuse to give this story another moment's consideration. It wouldn't be right and I simply do not want to participate in such activity. I do plan to write a lot about this kind of good journalism, however, the kind where you don't report on stories about credible dominatrixes and disgraced moralizing gamblers without proof.

I think the press should continue to wring its collective hands about this story in just this way, over and over again. They should discuss its various ins and outs (hello, beavis) in great detail, just as Corn does.

Just how can it be that somebody would hire a male prostitute with no journalism experience to work for a vanity GOP web site who then lobbed softballs in the White House press room and transcribed press releases? Yet it happened. Should we cover that?

I think they should explore in great depth whether this reaches the level of scandal that the Armstrong Williams scandal does. They should compare them, calling attention to the fact that Williams was paid $250k in taxpayer money. Perhaps they should also publicly ponder whether they should cover the fact that Williams was sued for sexual harassment by a male employee and settled for an undisclosed sum.


Is that relevant? I just don't know. Let's discuss.

Is the fact that Gannon appears to have been only paid a "stipend" enough to wonder how he was getting paid all those months and should we follow up on why GOPUSA is taking down its web-site, scrubbing it's articles and appears to be funded with nothing but air?

Is that really a story? Gosh I'm so conflicted.

And I think it would be very therapeutic for the pundit class to publicly ponder whether the fact that the GOP has made a fetish (shut up beavis) out of subtly gay bashing the entire Democratic Party for a generation leaves them open to more questions than usual when it turns out that they are paying conservative gay columnists who also bash gays with taxpayer money and allowing fake marine male hookers into the White House under unusual circumstances.

Is this a legitimate rap on the Republicans or not? I think a nice long New York Times magazine piece is in order don't you? Just to try to sort out the ethics involved.

And as far as Democratic political operatives are concerned, I would think they need to talk to anyone and everyone about their angst over exploiting this issue. Is it right for the Democrats to point out that the family values Republican elite are hob knobbing with gay hookers?

Gosh, I just don't know if it's right to point out that the very religious administration of George W. Bush doesn't practice what it preaches. Is that really ethical?

Yes, I think there is a serious ethical dilemma that must be worked out before we can proceed with this story. It's time for an open, cleansing dialog about whether the story of the male hooker/GOP activist/ White House reporter with the very graphic naked pictures he posted all over the internet should be pursued. I'd hate for the press to do something unethical with this.


Update: There was an excellent article back in January in the NYRB by Mark Danner called "Why Bush Really Won." I wrote a couple of posts about it at the time. Here are some letters to the editor regarding that piece that I think are very relevant to this GannonGuckert issue. I urge you to read the whole thing. One can certainly understand the moral dilemma of the press corps when you consider something like this:

On March 5, for example, The New York Times published a piece headlined "Bush Campaigns Amid a Furor over Ads," about a supposed controversy over the campaign's first television ads, which offered a glimpse of a dead fireman being carried out of the World Trade Center site. In the article the Times reporters revealed that the campaign was "scrambling to counter criticism that his first television commercials crassly politicized the tragedy of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." Indeed, the controversy was so serious, according to the Times, that it had "complicated efforts by Republicans to seize the initiative after months in which Mr. Bush has often been on the defensive." Newsweek, for its part, in an article headlined "A 'Shocking' Stumble," reported that the ad controversy "threw campaign officials on the defensive—and raised questions about the Bush team's ability to effectively spend its massive $150 million war chest, some GOP insiders say."

Seven months later, and two weeks after the election, Newsweek published another and very different "inside account," this one based on exclusive access to the campaigns which was granted on the understanding that nothing from this reporting would be published until after the election.[*] Here is what Newsweek's writers now told us about what "two Bush strategists" really thought of their campaign's "shocking stumble":

McKinnon and Dowd were ecstatic. At a strategy meeting the next day—the same morning the Times headline appeared—they joked about how they could fan the flames. Controversy sells, they said. It meant lots of "free media"; the ads were shown over and over again on news shows, particularly on cable TV. The "visual" of the rubble at the World Trade Center was a powerful reminder of the nation's darkest hour—and Bush's finest, when he climbed on the rock pile with a bullhorn. What's more, the story eclipsed some grim economic news....

At that Saturday's Breakfast Club, they were still laughing about the ad flap.... Dowd told the group they had received $6 million to $7 million worth of free ad coverage. "Unfortunately, we've been talking about 9/11 and our ads for five days," Dowd deadpanned at a senior staff meeting. "We're going to try to pivot back to the economy as soon as we can."

There were chuckles all around.

So much for the "inside story." As so often in journalism, the source offered the reporter access and the scoop; in exchange, the reporter in effect granted the source— in this case, the Bush strategist—the power to shape the storyline. The reporter thus publishes a supposed "inside story" about "scrambling" within the campaign that is in effect a kind of "false bottom" constructed by the campaign itself and intended to "fan the flames" of what is in fact a largely bogus story. The deeper reality—in this case, the determination to focus relentlessly on September 11 and the President's "leadership" role in it ("the nation's darkest hour and Bush's finest") and thus to emphasize the "masculine" values of steadiness, forthrightness, and strength that this role exemplified—may have been plain to those political professionals who were looking closely but it was much less clear to voters relying on the press for the supposed "inside story" of the campaign. The Bush campaign's "shocking stumble" was, in Daniel Boorstin's term, a "pseudo-event"; indeed, our political campaigns are built largely of such pseudo-events and rely fundamentally on the press and the commentariat to play their necessary part in constructing them and conveying them to the public. Both sides are immersed in this language, of course, and it is hard to see, given the terms of the game, how Democrats could "challenge the Republican story directly"—or even what "directly," in this context, might actually mean.

One can certainly understand, after reading that, why so many in the press are worried about violating journalistic ethics by reporting about Gannon. It's not a real story.



.
digby 2/26/2005 11:10:00 AM |

Friday, February 25, 2005

 
The Resentment Tribe

The other day I rhetorically asked, "Why are they so angry?" and Matt Stoller replies :

As long as individuals can stand up outside of the tribe and claim Americanism as their own, the right is revealed as weak, because it is their own lies about themselves that they cannot stand. Proof in the form of our existence is enough to make them angry. This is why, as Digby wonders, they keep getting madder as they keep gaining power. They are not really after a conservative agenda in terms of policy; they are not even after power, really. They are after a complete and utter subjugation of the American consciousness to their tribal mentality. And they will not stop until they get it. Hence, the culture wars. And now, the real wars. And unfortunately, I don't think they are done.

They are far from done. In fact, it's so old and so familiar that we might as well prop open our eyelids with toothpicks and turn on "I Love Lucy" re-runs.

I wrote about this tribal divide sometime back and I agree with Matt’s analysis. This has its genesis in the original sin of slavery and is best illustrated by the fact that as the country has divides itself distinctly between the parties in a 50/50 fashion, the dividing line continues to fall along the same lines of the old confederacy. Once again, the best way to understand this is to go right to the heart of the beast and quote the first Republican president (who hailed from one of the bluest of blue states) Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Union in New York in 1860:

And now, if they would listen - as I suppose they will not - I would address a few words to the Southern people.

I would say to them: - You consider yourselves a reasonable and a just people; and I consider that in the general qualities of reason and justice you are not inferior to any other people. Still, when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us a reptiles, or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite - license, so to speak - among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

[...]

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.

Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it. We know we hold to no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not held to and made by "our fathers who framed the Government under which we live." You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair. When it occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections. The elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled. Every Republican man knew that, as to himself at least, your charge was a slander, and he was not much inclined by it to cast his vote in your favor ... In your political contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood and thunder among the slaves.

[…]

Your purpose, then, plainly stated, is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.

This, plainly stated, is your language. Perhaps you will say the Supreme Court has decided the disputed Constitutional question in your favor. Not quite so. But waiving the lawyer's distinction between dictum and decision, the Court have decided the question for you in a sort of way. The Court have substantially said, it is your Constitutional right to take slaves into the federal territories, and to hold them there as property. When I say the decision was made in a sort of way, I mean it was made in a divided Court, by a bare majority of the Judges, and they not quite agreeing with one another in the reasons for making it; that it is so made as that its avowed supporters disagree with one another about its meaning, and that it was mainly based upon a mistaken statement of fact - the statement in the opinion that "the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution."

[…]

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action?

But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!"

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me - my money - was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

A few words now to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Confederacy shall be at peace, and in harmony, one with another...Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Lincoln had a keen understanding of the problem and he logically framed it in moral terms regarding the subject at hand, slavery. As it turns out this was not simply about slavery. It was about a deep and abiding tribal divide in the country that was originally defined by slavery but metatisized into something far beyond it, even then. Southern “exceptionalism” was always justified by its culture, which was assumed to be unique and unprecedented.

You can apply Lincoln’s arguments to any number of current issues and come out the same. There is an incoherence of principle that we see in every section of the republican party, the willingness to call to State’s Rights (their old rallying cry) when it suits them and a complete abdication of the principle once they hold federal power --- while still insisting that they believe in limited government! They blatantly misconstrue the plain meaning of long standing constitutional principles and federal policies (such as Brit Hume’s abject intellectual whorishness in the matter of FDR’s beliefs about social security privatization) and show irrational, rabid anger at any disagreement. They see Democrats as “traitors” fighting for the other side, just as the Southerners of the 1850’s accused the “Black Republicans” of fomenting slave revolts. They brook no compromise and instead repay those who would reach out to them with furious perfidy unless they show absolute fealty to every facet of the program. It is loyalty to “the cause”, however it is defined and however it changes in principle from day to day, that matters.

It’s clear to me that during the first 70 years of the country’s existence, the old South and the slave territories that came later (as defined in that famous map from 1860) created a culture based largely on their sense of the rest of the country’s, and the world’s, disapprobation. Within it grew what Michael Lind describes as its “cavalier” culture, which created an outsized sense of masculine ego and “fighting” mentality (along with an exaggerated caricature of male and female social roles.) Resentment was a foundation of the culture as slavery was hotly debated from the very inception and the division was based on what was always perceived by many as a moral issue. The character and morality of the south had always had to be defended. Hence a defensive culture was born.

The civil war and Jim Crow deepened it and the Lost Cause mythology romanticized it. The civil rights movement crystallized it. A two hundred year old resentment has created a permanent cultural divide.

This explains why the dependence on hyper-religiosity (and the cloak of social protection it provides) along with the fervent embrace of "moral values" is so important despite the obvious fact that Republicans are no more "moral" in any sense of the word than any other group of humans. It explains the utopian martial nationalism. And although that map shows that the regional divide is still quite relevant (and why the slave states fought for the Electoral College at the convention) it explains why this culture has now manifested itself as a matter of political identity throughout much of the country. Wherever resentment resides in the human character it can find a home in the Republican Party. This anger and frustration stems from a long nurtured sense of cultural besiegement, which they are finding can never be dealt with through the attainment of power alone. They seek approval.

Lincoln concluded the speech at the Cooper Union with this and I think it's relevant today to those of us who believe that our side is, as Lincoln thought then, the side of enlightened, moral progress:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

This fight for the soul of America has been going on since the very beginning and it isn’t over yet. We can take heart in the fact that in every great battle thus far, the forces of equality and moral progress have won the day. It's never been easy.



.
digby 2/25/2005 09:03:00 AM |

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

 
Where's my Swag?

Thanks to all of you who voted for me. It's ridiculous, of course. The people who I allegedly "beat" are blogospheric godhead and I am quite disturbed that your standards have fallen so low. I worry about you people.

The Koufax awards are very dear to my heart. I won one for best commenter back in 2002 and it made me finally decide to go for it and get into this blogging thing on my own. (In those days everybody and his Jack Russell terrier didn't have a blog. It seemed like something serious then.) The Koufaxes were a nice little community affair that represented our commitment to each other and the cause in a sea of libertarian and conservative ranting and chestbeating after 9/11 and the '02 elections. It's true that our community may have grown exponentially, but it still has a nice feel of down home solidarity even though we have become much more than a rag tag bunch of bloggers and blog readers. We are a gen-you-ine political constituency, now. They talk about us on the teevee and everything.

Blogging is becoming its own literary form. People have always written diary entries, pamphlets, letters or simple observations and essays. But never before could you publish and within minutes have direct criticism on what you've just written by dozens of readers and fellow writers. As a writer, it's quite wonderful (and sometimes depressing) to know what your audience thinks right away. You aren't stuck waiting for some literary snob or political critic to make you or break you; your validation or rejection is immediate and obvious. So, it's really not the writer but the readership that makes this new format so innovative. They are as much a part of the piece as you are, critiquing, adding information, fine tuning the argument, helping you all along the way. In that sense, blogging is a collaborative writing medium which is very rare and very sweet. I appreciate "all four of my readers" more than you know.

Congrats to all the winners. If you haven't checked out all the blogs and posts that were nominated, do yourself a favor and read them. It will blow your mind. Send a little more scratch over to Wampum while you are at it. It was a big burden to do this project and they are really good people for doing it.

Check them out here.



.
digby 2/23/2005 09:32:00 PM |

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

 
It's Irresponsible Not To

WOODRUFF: As we reported a little while ago in our blog segment, the Internet is abuzz with reaction to comments by New York Democratic Congressman Maurice Hinchey. The congressman over the weekend shared his views about the now disputed CBS News report about President Bush's Air National Guard service. Representative Maurice Hinchey is with me now, he joins us from Albany, New York.

Congressman Hinchey, what exactly did you say on Saturday at this town meeting in Ithaca?

REP. MAURICE HINCHEY (D), NEW YORK: Well, Judy, what I said came in response to a question from one of my constituents. There were about 100 people there. And they asked some questions about media manipulation. They were concerned about the issue of Armstrong Williams, for example, people being hired by this administration to pretend that they were giving objective news and information but were really putting forth the point of view of the administration rather than doing it objectively. And also the issue with Mr. Gannon, who was admitted to the White House press corps but who was not a legitimate press person, and was there just to throw softballs to the president.

And then the issue of the CBS Dan Rather event came up, and I said that there were false documents or documents which were falsified and presented as being accurate and there was a question as to where those documents came from. And in the context of the discussion I suggested that -- my theory was that I wouldn't be surprised if it came from the White House political operation, headed up by Karl Rove.

WOODRUFF: Well, I'm reading here a transcript of what you said, you said: "I have my own beliefs about how that happened. It originated with Karl Rove in my belief in the White House." What do you know that you base that on?

HINCHEY: Well, I think there's a great deal of circumstantial information and factual information. Mr. Rove, for example, has been involved in a host of political dirty tricks that are traceable back -- all the way back to the 1970s, '80s, '90s, right on up to the present. The way in which he treated Senator McCain, for example, in the context of the 2000 election.

So it doesn't take an awful lot of imagination if you're thinking about who it is that might have produced these false documents to try to mislead people in this very cynical way. It would take someone very brilliant, very cynical, very Machiavellian, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to come up with the name of Karl Rove as a possibility of having done that.

WOODRUFF: But, at this point, it is just imagination, is that correct?

HINCHEY: It's a possibility, yes. It's a possibility based upon circumstantial evidence and the history of his behavior over the course of several decades. WOODRUFF: Well, you know, there was an independent panel that CBS asked to look into this -- you know, to look into how CBS got these documents, what went wrong with the story that appears on "60 MINUTES." They were not able to conclude where these documents came from. They said, finally, they weren't even able to determine whether these documents were authentic or whether they were forged. So my question is, how are you in a position to know more than they or others who have investigated this now?

HINCHEY: Well, Judy, no one has come to any conclusions and that's the unfortunate thing. We need to get to the bottom of this. We need to get to the bottom of the whole business of manipulating the media that has gone on in the context of this administration.

I think that that's critically important. The essence of this democracy is really at stake. If people sitting back in their living rooms can't rely upon the information they're getting over the news channel or over the radio, then very important aspects of this Democratic system become eroded.

So, we need to get to the bottom of it, that's the point here. I'm quite surprised, frankly, that this has gotten all the attention that it has, but in a way I'm grateful that it has because it's important for us to be concerned about these things. Manipulating the media in this kind of a cynical way is antithetical to what we stand for as a nation, we need to find out who did it.

WOODRUFF: But some would say, listening to what you said and hearing your acknowledgment that you don't have any proof, that it's irresponsible or -- let me ask you, do you think it's responsible for you to say this without evidence?

HINCHEY: I think it's very responsible of me to speculate about where this manipulation is coming from. Yes. I think it's important to speculate about it, I think it's important to discuss it and I think it's important to try to stimulate the investigative agencies to look into this.

Unfortunately, the Congress is not doing its job. There are -- this is something that ought to be investigated by the Congress of the United States. But this Congress is not doing its job. It's not standing up for the American people the way it should. And, as a consequence, there is a certain amount of frustration out there and that frustration was voiced by the people who attended the meeting that I held last Saturday.

WOODRUFF: We're going to have to leave it there, Congressman Maurice Hinchey. And again, we did try to reach the White House to get their comment on all of this, we were not able to get a comment from them.

As Peggy Noonan so memorably wrote about the "little Elian" drama:

Was Mr. Clinton being blackmailed? The Starr report tells us of what the president said to Monica Lewinsky about their telephone sex: that there was reason to believe that they were monitored by a foreign intelligence service. Naturally the service would have taped the calls, to use in the blackmail of the president. Maybe it was Mr. Castro’s intelligence service, or that of a Castro friend.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

We're playing by Clinton rules now. Sit back and enjoy it, fellas.



.
digby 2/22/2005 08:55:00 PM |

Monday, February 21, 2005

 
Swiftboat Liars Part II

I've been awfully impressed today with how the cosmopolitan MSM believes that the Preznit has been shown in these tapes to be such a truly decent guy on the gay rights issue.(Oooh. And he smoked pot, too!)

William Kristol on Fox news posited that he thought it must have been a Rove operation because it is so favorable to the president. The roundtable giggled and smirked delightedly.

One wonders what our tolerant moderate president will have to say about what his Swift Boat Scumbag friends are doing:





Look for the administration to launch into its Butterfly McQueen routine any day now, bemoaning these independent groups over which they have no control.

But, elderly people aren't stupid. What in the world does the AARP have to do with Iraq and gay marriage? It seems to me that they've got all the Dear Leader cultists on board already. Is there an additional group of elderly people out there who can be convinced that social security should be privatized or gay's will be allowed to marry? This seems like a reach.

One thing is crystal clear. If any of the fainthearted faction think that they will be able to buy a permanent get out of jail free card from the Republicans they are idiots. The AARP sold their members down the river with that ridiculous drug company giveaway last year and look what it bought them. Gay bashing and treason. There is ZERO margin in cooperation.


Our old friend hesiod reminded me by e-mail today that the man spearheading this son of swiftboat smear, Charles Jarvis, quit Gary Bauer's campaign because Bauer was allegedly behaving in a way that gave the appearance of impropriety. Gary Bauer.

The core idea of this rumor campaign is that I have violated the vows I made to my wife 27 years ago," Bauer said. "These rumors and character assassination are disgusting, outrageous, evil and sick. They are trash-can politics at its worst. . . . I have not violated my vows."

Bill Dal Col, Forbes's manager, denied the suggestion that the Forbes campaign was spreading rumors and said he would fire anyone who promoted allegations of sexual impropriety.

Instead of putting the issue to rest, Bauer's news conference prompted Jarvis and McDonald to go public with their concerns. In addition, sources said the boards of two organizations with strong ties to Bauer, the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, both warned the candidate that he should stop having extended closed-door meetings with his staff member and should not travel alone with her.

[...]

"As a pro-family and pro-life leader, Gary is held to a higher standard. Meeting hour after hour alone [with the deputy manager], as a married man, candidate and as a pro-family pro-life leader, he has no business creating that kind of appearance of impropriety," Jarvis said in a telephone interview.

Jarvis doesn't seem to have a problem with gay hookers plastering their naked erections all over the internet and hanging out in the white house with god knows who, though, does he? Apparently, that doesn't create the appearance of impropriety at all.

It is long past time that somebody got Bauer and Dobson on the record about this.


.
digby 2/21/2005 04:13:00 PM |

 
Poisonous Fruit

It is no wonder that the media thinks bloggers are a threat. When you hear TIME magazine's "Blogger of the year" Hinderocket say things like this you can't blame them:

By "the left" I'm including almost the entire Democratic Party, you can count the exceptions on your fingers, you can name them, Zell Miller, Joe Lieberman...The whole mainstream of the party is engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America, what they care about is not winning the war on terror...I don't think they care about the danger to us as Americans or the danger to people in other countries. They care about power.

Via Kos, here's the video of the very calm and reasonable sounding Hinderocket speaking the words of a paranoid totalitarian. It's quite chilling.

I do not think that the majority of Republicans have partaken of this poisonous fruit. They do not believe that the Democratic Party is "engaged in an effort that is a betrayal of America." Clearly, they do not think this in the US Congress, even though the comity that once reigned has been snuffed. They know that the people they see every day are not traitors even if they hate their politics. They understand that the Democratic party disagrees with the Republicans as a matter of policy and philosophy but that we are all Americans and under the constitution dissent is protected in order to have a thriving, open democracy.

But the right wing echo chamber is increasingly made up of voices that sound both this "reasonable" and this crazy. The more people listen to talk radio and watch FoxNews and read wingnut blogs exclusively the more they are going to see the world this way. It's extremely dangerous.

What continues to fascinate me is that this sense of frustration seems to be growing despite the fact that the Democrats have less power than they've ever had before. TBOGG links to Hinderocket responding to a home state blogger's rather benign questioning on the Gannon matter with this:

You dumb shit, he didn't get access using a fake name, he used his real name. You lefties' concern for White House security is really touching, but you know what, you stupid asshole, I think the Secret Service has it covered. Go crawl back into your hole, you stupid left-wing shithead. And don't bother us anymore. You have to have an IQ over 50 to correspond with us. You don't qualify, you stupid shit.

Like I said before, there is something very strange going on in rightwingland. The more power they have the madder they get. Any psychologists out there care to weigh in on this strange psychosis?


Update: Orcinus has the definitive response to Powerline's silly notion that Jimmy Carter is "on the other side."

I don't mean to harp on this stuff, but I think that blogs need to publicize the fact that some of these alleged "mainstream" bloggers on the right are quite far out on the fringe. They will respond furiously that Atrios and Kos and others are America haters or "barking moonbats" but their own words speak for themselves. It's important that people see them, especially the mainstream media who are just beginnning to pay attention. They need to understand that Powerline is not just some nice lawyers and bankers who write about politics. They represent what Richard Hofsteder calls the paranoid strain in American politics. It's important that people begin to make distinctions.



.
digby 2/21/2005 10:06:00 AM |

 
Homewreckers Need Not Apply

If this is true, the White House has gone completely nuts:

GEORGE Bush has banned Camilla Parker Bowles from the White House - because she is a divorcee.

The unprecedented snub has effectively sabotaged Charles's plan to take his bride on a Royal tour of America later this year.

The trip would have been the pair's first official tour as a married couple.

But the US President - a notoriously right-wing Christian and reformed alcoholic - told aides it was "inappropriate" for him to be playing host to the newly-weds, who are both divorcees.

The decision was made even though the late President Ronald Reagan was divorced.

The trip would have been the pair's first official tour as a married couple.

But the US President - a notoriously right-wing Christian and reformed alcoholic - told aides it was "inappropriate" for him to be playing host to the newly-weds, who are both divorcees.

The decision was made even though the late President Ronald Reagan was divorced.

A Government insider said: "It was relayed to us from Washington that Mrs Parker Bowles would not be welcome at the White House.

"The Americans are aware that the visit will be subject to a lot of media attent ion and did not want the President drawn into what they view to be a public relations exercise.

"It's now uncertain if the visit will even go ahead."

Insiders point out that hosting a lavish Royal dinner for Charles and Camilla would be bad PR for President Bush because while Princess Diana is still much loved by many Americans, her ex-husband is seen and dull and aloof - and bothhe and Camilla are widely blamed for the break-up of his marriage.

The trip, which has been planned for three years, was being portrayed as a "trade mission" and Charles and Camilla were expected to dine with Mr Bush and his wife Laura at the White House.

I wonder if Charles would have been allowed if he came with a Talon News correspondent.

This has to be bunk. I suspect that they cancelled it because of the media circus, but it would be interesting to know if some dope actually did use the divorce angle as one of the reasons.

Are there no divorcees in the Bush White House? I can't believe there aren't.



.
digby 2/21/2005 09:03:00 AM |

Sunday, February 20, 2005

 
Rest In Peace You Brilliant Goddamned Beast


For some of us of a certain age, Hunter S. Thompson was our muse, our godfather, our Shakespeare. He spoke for us in a wierd sort of exaggerated drug addled way that defined the world. For some of us of a certain age who follow politics, his view of the game informs us in ways that we will never wholly shake off. "Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail" remains the seminal work of baby boomer campaign journalism. He took the genre, shot it up with mescaline and invited us all along for the ride.

I was just re-reading his collection of essays "Generation of Swine" about the political scene in the 1980's a couple of months ago. He saw it all then--- the bizarre up-is-downism, the hallucinatory nature of the modern media, the craziness of America in its days of dominance. I was struck, however, at how deeply uncynical he really was, how strangely hopeful and secure that the American people were simply too solid to be completely taken in by these people. The state of politics today must have made him feel like he was on a bad trip that would never end.

Skinner called from Washington last week and warned me that I was dangerously wrong and ignorant about George Bush. “I know you won’t want to hear this,” he said ‘but George is an utterly different person from the one he appears to be --- from the one you’ve been whipping on, for that matter. I thought you should know…”

I put him on hold and said I would call him back after the Kentucky Maryland game. I had given 5 points and Kentucky was ahead by 7 with 18 seconds to go…George Bush meant nothing to me at that moment. The whole campaign was like the sound of some radio far up the street.

But Skinner persisted, for some reason….He was trying to tell me something. He was saying that Bush was not what he seemed to be --- that somewhere inside him were the seeds of a genuine philosopher king.

“He is smarter that Thomas Jefferson., “Skinner said. “he has the potential to stand taller in history than both of the Roosevelts put together.”

I was shocked. “You lying swine,” I said. “Who paid you to say these things? Why are you calling me?”

“It’s for your own good,” he said. “I’m just trying to help you.” …. He took a call on one of his other lines, then came back to me in a blaze of disconnected gibberish.

“Listen to me,” he was saying. “I was with him last night, all alone. We sat in front of his fireplace and burned big logs and listened to music and drank whiskey and he got a little weepy, but I told him not to worry about it, and he said he was the only living voice of Bobby Kennedy in American politics today.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t tell me that swill, it’s too horrible. I depend on you for more than that.”

I laughed. It was crazy. Here was Gene Skinner --- one of the meanest and most cynical hit men in politics --- telling me that he’d spent the last two night arguing with George Bush about the true meaning of Plato’s Republic and the Parable of the Caves, smoking Dharum cigarettes and weeping distractedly while they kept playing and replaying old Leonard Cohen tunes on his old Nakamichi tape machine.

“Yeah,” Skinner said, “”he still carries that 250 with the Hallibuton case, the one he’s carried for years … he loves music, really high rock’n roll. He has tapes of Alice Stuart that he made himself on the Nak.”

Ye Gods, I thought. They’ve finally turned him; he’s gone belly up. How did he get my phone number?

“You hideous punk! Don’t call me anymore!” I yelled at him. “I’m moving to Hawaii next week. I know where you’ve been for the last two years. Stay away from me!”

“You fool!” he shouted. “Where were you when we were looking for you in New Orleans last week? We hung around for three days. George wanted to hook up with the Neville brothers. We were traveling incognito”…and now he was telling me that Bush --- half mad on cheap gin and hubris, with 16 states already locked up on Super Tuesday --- showed up at the New Orleans airport on Sunday night with only one bodyguard and a black 928 Porsche with smoked windows and Argentine license plates…

I felt sick and said nothing. Skinner rambled on; drifted from one demented story to another like he was talking to the Maharishi. It made no sense at all.

None of it did, for that matter. George Bush was a mean crook from Texas. He had no friends and nobody in Washington wanted to be seen with him on the streets at night. There was something queasy about him, they said --- a sense of something grown back unto itself, like a dead animal … it was impossible that he could be roaming about Washington or New Orleans at night jabbering about Dylan Thomas and picking up dead cats.

Yes there was something wrong about it, deeply wrong, even queer … yet Skinner seemed to believe these things and he wanted me to believe them.

Why? It was like hearing that Ivan Boesky had written “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or that Ed Meese wakes up every morning and hurls a $100 bill across the Potomac.

I hung up the phone and felt crazy. Then I walked back to the hotel in the rain.

March 21, 1988

He had it nailed. This world is a lonelier place without him in it.



.
digby 2/20/2005 11:39:00 PM |

 
TBOGG Understands How This game Is Played

While all of the other bloggers are relishing the idea of the Eight Inch Bulldog being deposed on his connections to the White House, I'm much more interested in hearing about his full-time job as an Escort with Benefits in the DC area. In particular, a "client" list or little black book.

Do click the link for the most disturbing metaphor I think I've ever read.

But while we're on on the rare and untrod subject of JimJeff "GG" Gannon, the loose cannon, I'm curious if anyone has talked to this guy about the GG matter? He is described by the Washington Post as "deputy director of the Office of Public Liaison, one of four White House political departments run by uberstrategist Karl Rove." He was also appeared in his official capacity at both the 2003 and 2004 GOPUSA conferences in DC.

John F. Kennedy created the concept of a public liaison, Nixon institutionalized the office and Republicans say Bush has perfected it. Few, if any, have been as effective at using the taxpayer-funded staff to keep the base of the party happy and involved in the policymaking process. Rove's intimate involvement in the office enhances its influence not only inside the White House but also outside with the scores of activist groups Bush relies on to help sell his agenda.

Most mornings at 8:30, Rove huddles with about eight White House aides from the four political offices to plot strategy. These offices are public liaison, intergovernmental affairs, political affairs and strategic initiatives.

This is where Rove, Goeglein and others share thoughts on synthesizing the president's ideas, enlisting outside assistance to sell them and heading off potential fights with or among supporters on the outside. When the meeting lets out, Goeglein operates as an ambassador of sorts for Bush and Rove.

In Republican politics, a person's conservative fervor is often judged by the people he worked for or with. In the eyes of many conservatives, Goeglein's credentials are unassailable.

A product of Indiana from the era of Democratic Sen. Birch Bayh's reign, Goeglein learned politics from the two conservative Dans of the Hoosier State -- Coats in the Senate and later Quayle, when he was vice president.

After spending his first year out of college in broadcast media, Goeglein, a native of Fort Wayne, often found himself handling communications strategy for the two Indiana Republicans during the 1990s. In the 2000 campaign, he signed on as spokesman not for Bush, but for Gary Bauer, who ran as the most conservative conservative in the Republican primary.

Shortly after Bauer dropped out, Karen Hughes, one of Bush's closest advisers, recruited Goeglein to help shop Bush's message to voters and activists. Goeglein packed up his wife and two young sons and headed to a cramped apartment in Austin.

He assumed he was headed to the White House press shop after the election. But, he said, Rove phoned with an unexpected message: "I am calling to change your life." A few minutes later, Goeglein was Rove's right-hand man dealing with the political right. Goeglein plans to assume the same role in the second term. "I love people. I love policy, and I love politics."

This fellow is both intimately familiar with GOPUSA and walks in the highest corridors of power in the White House. It would be quite interesting to know if he had any comment on how a GOPUSA "correspondent" got into the White House press room. He certainly seems like a guy with enough juice to make it happen.

Check out the links to the GOPUSA conferences. G. Gordon Liddy is referred to as a "former presidential advisor." LOL.



Mega props to CSI dKos for gathering an amazing amount of information.


.
digby 2/20/2005 07:17:00 PM |

 
Going Too Far

Americans Want an Opposition Party

"Americans want Democrats to stand up to Bush," the Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire reports. "Fully 60%, including one-fourth of Republicans, say Democrats in Congress should make sure Bush and his party 'don't go too far.' Just 34% want Democrats to 'work in a bipartisan way' to help pass the president's priorities."

We all know that the Republicans have spent may years damning our party for being weak, traitorous and cowardly. This seems like a very good opportunity to begin to turn that around. People want the Democrats to obstruct the excesses of the GOP --- even a quarter of the GOP itself.

Perhaps the best way to put this is simply to say it exactly as the question is worded. "We are keeping the Republicans from going too far." There's a certain common sense ring to that that I think a lot of people understand instinctively. This may be the key to why the public hasn't rallied around the social security privatization phase out plan. They can feel that the Republicans are just going too far.

Update: Let me clarify that I am not advocating this as a campaign slogan or a Democratic rallying cry. I'm talking about a public legislative strategy, which is what I think was being addressed in this poll. We are in the minority and the American people have assigned us a role to play. We should play it, take the credit and position outselves as the voices of sanity against a radical right wing bunch of nuts --- which happens to be true. One of the ways that we convey this is by standing together, not cutting deals and consistently portraying the other side as out of control --- which also happens to be true.

This isn't a capitulation. It's framing us as the regular people and them as the crazies for a change --- something that 60% of the American people seem to agree is at least a possibility. This is a good things folks. We can work with it.



.
digby 2/20/2005 12:57:00 PM |

 
Another Cagey Interview

Thanks to Liberal Avenger we can hear another interview with JimJeff Gannon on WBUR from last week. Here's what he said about Plame:

Q: We began by asking about the highly classified Plame documents which in the past Gannon boasted about having access to.

G: That's not something I'm able to discuss.

Q: You discussed it on your web site

G: Let me just say this about this memo that's being discussed. When I say accessible I am talking about information contained therein.

Q: As you well know, two New York Times reporters are facing jail sentences for not revealing their sources regarding the name Valerie Plame and they didn't even comment or print anything about this

G: Yes that's terrible. That's unfortunate.

Q: Well has anyone from the Plame investigation contacted you?

G: Uh, yes

Q: And?

G: I really can't speak to that. As a journalist it would be wrong to do that.

[...]

Q: Can you understand why some would say you've only written for two years, for a Republican backed blog, you've had no previous reporting experiences, why were you shown sensitive material regarding CIA material?

G: I can understand how somebody would ask that question but one had nothing to do with the other. I did good work. I pursued a story. I got a great interview with Ambassador Wilson. I should get an award for that.

Listen to the whole interview here.

I continue to be confused as to why Gannon didn't just say, "I read about it in the Wall Street Journal like everybody else," if that's what happened. The question would just go away.

Update:

People continue to miss the point so I will spell it out. Yes, it is likely that GG just lifted the WSJ article. That's what he calls journalism. However, he told people that he got the info from somewhere else and he has continued to be less than forthcoming about it. It is always possible that somebody told him about it AND he lifted the story from the WSJ.

My personal opionion is that he may have lied to the FBI and is afraid to admit that he had no "confidential source." If that's the case, Fitzgerald has a reason to squeeze this guy and who knows where that could lead? They are about to send two reporters to jail over this stuff.

But it could just as easily be that he still doesn't realize what deep shit he's in and thinks that he may someday work as a "journalist" again so he is afraid to admit that he was full of shit when he was bragging all over Free Republic. He doesn't seem very bright.

But guys, it doesn't matter. It's this kind of thing that keeps this story alive. Connection to the Plame controversy is one of the hooks that the major media have to hang on to. As long as GG behaves in this way, it gives reporters another reason to keep digging. Capiche?


.

.
digby 2/20/2005 11:08:00 AM |

Saturday, February 19, 2005

 
Pass The Parsing

Could the next reporter who gets JimJeff in his crosshairs please pin him down on this Plame memo issue? This is ridiculous. He has never really answered the question properly.

Here's the passage from the February 11th interview with E&P

Although he hinted that he had not seen a classified CIA document after all, he added, "I am not going to speak to that. It goes to something of a nature I do not want to discuss."

He said nothing about the Wall Street Journal.


Here's from his interview with Wolf Blitzer on February 14

GANNON: And the FBI did come to interview me. They were interested in where -- how I knew or received a copy of a confidential CIA memo that said that Valerie Plame suggested that Joe Wilson be sent on this mission, something that everybody -- they have all vigorously denied but is, in effect, true.

BLITZER: So they didn't make you go testify before the grand jury?

GANNON: No.

BLITZER: Do you have to reveal how you got that memo?

GANNON: No.

BLITZER: They didn't ask you?

GANNON: Well, the FBI kept asking. I said, well, look, I'm a journalist, I can't --

BLITZER: You didn't tell them?

GANNON: Yes. Can't divulge that. And they accepted that, and I've never been asked again.

Again he didn't mention the WSJ article.

Here's an excerpt from Anderson Cooper's interview on Friday

GANNON: I didn't do that at all. I didn't do that at all. If you read the question, and I provided -- my article was actually a transcript of my conversation with Ambassador Wilson -- I made reference to a memo. And this...

COOPER: How did you know about that memo?

GANNON: Well, this memo was referred to in a "Wall Street Journal" article a week earlier.

COOPER: So that wasn't based on any information that you had been given by the White House?

GANNON: I was given no special information by the White House or by anybody else, for that matter.

Suddenly he's pointing out that the memo was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal but he doesn't say explicitly that he read it there.

Here's what the NY Times reported today:

"What I said was no more than what was reported in The Wall Street Journal a week before," he said.

In none of those statements does he simply say, "I got the information from the WSJ story." Look how he dances around it. No "special" information. "What I said was no more that what was reported." He has been coached to answer this way.

There is enough evidence now to indicate that he is not being straightforward on this question. Did he get the information from the WSJ article or not and if not, where else did he hear about it?

The question was who was spreading this bogus state department memo. From the Washington Post at the time:

"Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.

"CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting."

Now maybe Gannon did just read about this in the Wall Street Journal. But if he did he sure has acted strangely about it, even as recently as yesterday when talking to the NY Times. It's possible that he played games with the FBI when they came knocking and pretended that he had a confidential source when he didn't. That, of course, would be against the law. A law that when broken can cost you a lot of money and possible jail time. You cannot lie to the FBI. That is why Martha Stewart is in jail and it's why Henry Cisneros spent almost a decade in the dock of a special prosecutor ---- he didn't tell them the exact amount of money he paid his ex-lover.

I don't know if that's what happened, but something did. I do know that Gannon could end all the speculation by simply saying "I never saw the memo, I read about it in the paper and pretended that I did." The question is why doesn't he?



Update: Justin Raimindo has been on this angle for some time.



.
digby 2/19/2005 08:41:00 PM |

 
Charlie Brown's Slumber Party

Did anyone happen to catch the happy little hen party on Chris Matthews week-end show tonight in which Chris, Clarence Page, Kathleen Parker, Andrew Sullivan and Gloria Borger ripped Hillary for being a "castrating Bitch" and "Nurse Ratchet" replete with a full-on harpy imitation by Borger? I've never seen anything like this (at least where Ann Coulter and Nancy Grace weren't involved.) Then they sharpened their claws on Martha Stewart, Gloria saying that people will find her interesting because the less they see of her the more they like her. Everyone cackled wickedly as she went on to mock her potential good works on behalf of women prisoners. Andy snorted delicately.

Then they all pitched in on the Stalinists at PCU who are allegedly persecuting Larry Summers. Clarence tried valiently to make an argument but both Andy and Gloria were eyerolling and smirking to such a degree that Chris couldn't really keep a straight face. He told Gloria he liked the fact that she turned up her nose at this "PC nonsense." She lowered her eyes flirtatiosly, batted her lashes and veritably glowed with his praise.

I'm not exaggerating about the castrating bitch line either. Borger said that as the jews gave Joe Lieberman a lot of trouble so will the women give Hillary problems. (I don't remember the jewish community's Lieberman rebellion, do you?) And Chris agreed that the men sitting in their chairs watching television are all thinking "I'll never vote for this woman." He does admit, though, that women become less threatening when they get old.

What in the hell is wrong with these people? Are they regularly appearing on television drunk now? It was like watching a sketch on The Daily Show. Can we get Soros or somebody to pitch in and just pay them to stop? I'll donate.



Update: It appears they aren't alone in meanspirited douchbaggery this week-end. Kevin Drum excerpts Susan Estrich's latest little bit of nasty in her ongoing pursuit of being the most unlikeable person in the world as she battles wits with Michael Kinsley, editorial editor of the LA Times and Parkinson's sufferer:

Far from being "pissed off," I believe I have conducted myself with admirable restraint because of our past relationship and my honest concerns for your health.

....My suggestion that your publishing [my letter] would be better (for you too) than my having to go outside somehow constitutes me blackmailing you is so outlandish that it underscores the question I've been asked repeatedly in recent days, and that does worry me, and should worry you: people are beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your judgment, and your ability to do this job.

For those who aren't following this story (scroll down), Estrich is pissed off that Kinsley hasn't been featuring more women, specifically her, on the op-ed pages of the LA Times. I cannot speculate about why there aren't more women on the op-ed pages of the LA Times, but it's my observation that Susan is no longer very coherent most of the time. She has become Fox's Pat Cadell. I seem to recall that she was reportedly a bit tipsy in New Hampshire during the primary last year telling anyone who would listen, "they jussht pay us so mush moooney!!!"

Now we find out that she is simply a douchebag. Buh bye.




.
digby 2/19/2005 06:53:00 PM |

 
Get Well Soon

Best wishes to Mrs Instapundit for a speedy recovery.

I'm very glad that she is fortunate enough to have access to good health care. Think how awful it is to be in that position without it.



.
digby 2/19/2005 05:06:00 PM |

 
Dr Dobson's Dark Suspicions

Before Junior ran for president he had some conversations with evangelical friend Doug Wead. He wasn't quite sure how to handle the religious right. Wead taped the conversations.

Mr. Bush, who has acknowledged a drinking problem years ago, told Mr. Wead on the tapes that he could withstand scrutiny of his past. He said it involved nothing more than "just, you know, wild behavior." He worried, though, that allegations of cocaine use would surface in the campaign, and he blamed his opponents for stirring rumors. "If nobody shows up, there's no story," he told Mr. Wead, "and if somebody shows up, it is going to be made up." But when Mr. Wead said that Mr. Bush had in the past publicly denied using cocaine, Mr. Bush replied, "I haven't denied anything."

That "if nobody shows up" line sounds like something out of the Sopranos. He later says that his whole "young and immature" thing was "his schtick." This comment makes me really believe, for the first time, that JH Hatfield was set up.

What is really revealing about these conversations is Bush's attitude toward gays and the extent to which he kissed James Dobson's ass.

In September 1998, Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead that he was getting ready for his first meeting with James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, an evangelical self-help group. Dr. Dobson, probably the most influential evangelical conservative, wanted to examine the candidate's Christian credentials.

"He said he would like to meet me, you know, he had heard some nice things, you know, well, 'I don't know if he is a true believer' kind of attitude," Mr. Bush said.

[...]

By the end of the primary, Mr. Bush alluded to Dr. Dobson's strong views on abortion again, apparently ruling out potential vice presidents including Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Gen. Colin L. Powell, who favored abortion rights. Picking any of them could turn conservative Christians away from the ticket, Mr. Bush said.

"They are not going to like it anyway, boy," Mr. Bush said. "Dobson made it clear."

Early on, though, Mr. Bush appeared most worried that Christian conservatives would object to his determination not to criticize gay people. "I think he wants me to attack homosexuals," Mr. Bush said after meeting James Robison, a prominent evangelical minister in Texas.

But Mr. Bush said he did not intend to change his position. He said he told Mr. Robison: "Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?"

Later, he read aloud an aide's report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political group: "This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It's hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however."

"This is an issue I have been trying to downplay," Mr. Bush said. "I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays."

Told that one conservative supporter was saying Mr. Bush had pledged not to hire gay people, Mr. Bush said sharply: "No, what I said was, I wouldn't fire gays."

I don't pretend to know what animates Junior so much on the issue of gays, but something does. Clearly he's very uncomfortable with the intolerance so many in his party show on the issue. Indeed, these conversations show him to be more liberal on this issue than any other I can think of. And it's quite out of character.

But what does it matter when the asshole turned around and just ran a stealth campaign based entirely on homophobia? I doubt very seriously that he privately shared his tolerance for gays with that sadistic dog abuser James Dobson. (I would suspect that Dobson and his followers are going to be more than a bit miffed by these revelations.) In fact, Bush and his party had no problem gay baiting the entire Democratic party, particularly John Kerry, with their nasty frat boy innuendoes --- as they have for the last thirty years. It isn't, after all, just the Christian conservatives who so enjoy that towel slapping hyper-masculine swagger that Junior affects with such panache. There are plenty of good ole boys who trade in this form of macho posing as well. All this Bushian tolerance toward gays would have sorely tested that heroic manly red state image, wouldn't it?

So he did what the Bushes always do. He played dirty. Speaking of Gore, not Kerry (but it makes no difference) he said "I may have to get a little rough for a while," he told Mr. Wead, "but that is what the old man had to do with Dukakis, remember?"

This man who pretends to feel such empathy for gays is the same man who ran on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, told James Byrd's family to take a hike, signed off on 150 plus executions without looking up from his gameboy and now claims that the constitution gives him the total power to order torture and execution in the name of the War On Terror.

This goes beyond hypocrisy. It's downright pathological. The Republican coalition consists of a racists, homophobes, dupes and the rich selfish bastards who tell them whatever they want to hear in order to get elected. I hope their religion is real because if it is they are all going to spend eternity in the ninth circle of hell.



.
digby 2/19/2005 04:06:00 PM |

 
Are You Proud Of Yourself Condi?

Many have written about this moving and sad post at Riverbend and I hope that many people will read it and pass it on.

This Iraqi woman has not been liberated. She is being slowly imprisoned, probably for the rest of her life, by a male dominated fundamentalist (that's a redundancy) religious political system that is going to ruin her life. You can feel it in her words. It's one of the saddest things I've read in the long trail of horrors that this Iraq misadventure has wrought.

I nodded and handed over the bags to be weighed. “Well… they’re going to turn us into another Iran. You know list 169 means we might turn into Iran.” Abu Ammar pondered this a moment as he put the bags on the old brass scale and adjusted the weights.

“And is Iran so bad?” He finally asked. Well no, Abu Ammar, I wanted to answer, it’s not bad for *you* - you’re a man… if anything your right to several temporary marriages, a few permanent ones and the right to subdue females will increase. Why should it be so bad? Instead I was silent. It’s not a good thing to criticize Iran these days. I numbly reached for the bags he handed me, trying to rise out of that sinking feeling that overwhelmed me when the results were first made public.

It’s not about a Sunni government or a Shia government- it’s about the possibility of an Iranian-modeled Iraq. Many Shia are also appalled with the results of the elections. There’s talk of Sunnis being marginalized by the elections but that isn’t the situation. It’s not just Sunnis- it’s moderate Shia and secular people in general who have been marginalized.

The list is frightening- Da’awa, SCIRI, Chalabi, Hussein Shahristani and a whole collection of pro-Iran political figures and clerics. They are going to have a primary role in writing the new constitution. There’s talk of Shari’a, or Islamic law, having a very primary role in the new constitution. The problem is, whose Shari’a? Shari’a for many Shia differs from that of Sunni Shari’a. And what about all the other religions? What about Christians and Mendiyeen?

Is anyone surprised that the same people who came along with the Americans – the same puppets who all had a go at the presidency last year – are the ones who came out on top in the elections? Jaffari, Talbani, Barazani, Hakim, Allawi, Chalabi… exiles, convicted criminals and war lords. Welcome to the new Iraq.

[...]

It’s also not about covering the hair. I have many relatives and friends who wore a hijab before the war. It’s the principle. It’s having so little freedom that even your wardrobe is dictated. And wardrobe is just the tip of the iceberg. There are clerics and men who believe women shouldn’t be able to work or that they shouldn’t be allowed to do certain jobs or study in specific fields. Something that disturbed me about the election forms was that it indicated whether the voter was ‘male’ or ‘female’- why should that matter? Could it be because in Shari’a, a women’s vote or voice counts for half of that of a man? Will they implement that in the future?

Baghdad is once more shrouded in black. The buildings and even some of the houses have large black pieces of cloth hanging upon them, as if the whole city is mourning the election results. It’s because of “Ashoura” or the ten days marking the beginning of the Islamic New Year but also marking the death of the Prophet’s family 1400+ years ago in what is now known as Karbala. That means there are droves of religious Shia dressed in black from head to foot (sometimes with a touch of green or red) walking in the streets and beating themselves with special devices designed for this occasion.

We’ve been staying at home most of the time because it’s not a good idea to leave the house during these ten days. It took us an hour and 20 minutes to get to my aunt’s house yesterday because so many streets were closed with masses of men chanting and beating themselves. To say it is frightening is an understatement. Some of the men are even bleeding and they wear white to emphasize all the blood flowing down backs and foreheads. It’s painful to see small children wearing black clothes and carrying miniature chains that really don’t hurt, but look so bizarre.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

Despite what the right wing would have everyone believe, one of the primary reasons liberals supported the invasion of Afghanistan was to end the documented horrors that women suffered under the Taliban. Long before the Bush admnistration was negotiating with the Taliban or Republican congressmen were holding privatre meetings with Mullah Omar's lieutenants trying to make deals for pipelines, Hollywood liberals like Mavis Leno were spearheading the despised Feminist Majority Foundation's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan. Everything about the Taliban was anathema to people like us who value freedom and equality. When that religious fundamentalist government enabled the direct attack on the United States there was every reason on both moral and national security grounds to support the invasion of that country. Life could not be much worse than it was under the Taliban.

Iraq was always much more complicated. Many of us were extremely suspicious of the evidence that Saddam posed a threat to the United States and as horrible as his regime was, there was always the liklihood that the country would eventually fall into civil war and itself become a fundamentalist theocracy --- thus making daily life for a full fifty percent of the population many degrees worse than it was under Saddam. It was never a pretty calculation but it was realistic. We knew all this going in and it is one of the reasons why it was never easy to simply wave the flag and proclaim ourselves liberators. Unless everything went exactly as envisioned by the starry eyed neocons, there was every chance that we would actually make many people less free by our actions.

It appears that this is happening. Not that anyone cares, mind you. If half of the Iraqi population sees a substantial loss of personal freedom from our liberation, it isn't really a problem. They are, after all, only women.

We on the left are being chastized daily for being terrorist sympathizers. Former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are said to be on the other side. Any criticism of the government is Unamerican. And all of this is based upon the idea that liberals are rejecting Western values and putting ourselves in league with Islamic fundamentalists. This is literally nonsensical.

In point of fact, the argument could much more easily be made that it is the other way around. It grows more and more likely that the right, who wholeheartedly supported the war and are currently supporting the political handling of the occupation, deposed a totalitarian dictator to install a repressive fundamentalist theocracy in its place. I fail to see how that advances the cause of our country or western civilization. Indeed, it is a betrayal of everything we stand for.

Who are the real traitors to western enlightenment values --- those of us who find both totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism abominations or those who topple dictators to install theocracy? I'd ask the women of Iraq in about five years what they think. Of course, they won't be allowed to speak freely, so we'll probably never know.



.
digby 2/19/2005 12:37:00 PM |

 
Rushing To Retch

The lewd side to the Manchurian Beefcake scandal hasn't really fazed me. The world is full of porn. But this woke me up last night, churning and screaming from nightmares of a sick and revolting nature. Is there no decency left in this world?

Agency for International Development Administrator Andrew S. Natsios may be heading to Dubai and Afghanistan next week, taking along a small press contingent: Rush Limbaugh and, briefly, CNN anchor Daryn Kagan -- they are a famous item these days -- along with Mary Matalin, who is going as an ex officio White House adviser.

Of course, I'm not surprised that Rush is anxious to see Afghanistan. It is, after all, the opium capital of the world. (Maybe he and Kagan have a Sid and Nancy thing going on.) But dear merciful God, the mere idea of the three of them....((((shudder))))



.
digby 2/19/2005 09:39:00 AM |

Friday, February 18, 2005

 
The Other Reality

It's a good thing I went to the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Otherwise I never would have known that, despite the findings of the authoritative David Kay report and every reputable media outlet on earth, the United States actually discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, vindicating all of George W. Bush's pre-war predictions. The revelation came not from some crank at Free Republic or hustler from Talon News, but from a congressman surrounded by men from the highest echelons of American government. No wonder the attendees all seemed to believe him.

The crowd at CPAC's Thursday night banquet, held at D.C.'s Ronald Reagan Building, was full of right-wing stars. Among those seated at the long presidential table at the head of the room were Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, Dore Gold, foreign policy advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and NRA president Kayne Robinson. Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.


"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

This is not surprising, really. These people have grown quite accustomed to the "you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes" political leadership and actually seem to prefer it. It makes everything so nice and simple.

That article reminds me of this this op-ed by Tony Blankley in which he fantasized that Larry David, the biggest liberal in Hollywood was actually a conservative if only he realized it:

But if he is anything like his character, he is, at heart, a conservative: He refuses to put up with nonsense; he's remorselessly politically incorrect, and he is fundamentally sensible. If he'll just listen, I'll expose his mind to the sensible conservative explanations for the great issues of the day. He'll be my first convert deep in the belly of the liberal Hollywood beast.

My father used to think that Archie Bunker was funny. He laughed and laughed at his jokes. He had no clue that the rest of us in the family were laughing because he was Archie Bunker. Just that way, Blankley has no idea that Larry David's character is a disgusting person. Indeed, he's verging on the insane. Yes, he is funny. But he's funny because Larry David knows very well that his character is, like Blankley, a total jerk.

I guess this just proves once again that the conservative movement is "completely divorced from reality."



.
digby 2/18/2005 07:44:00 PM |

 
Starting Over

The Poorman invites everyone to enroll in The Jeff Gannon New Beginnings Career School.

The testimonials will make you cry.



.
digby 2/18/2005 11:57:00 AM |

 
Who Are They Kidding?

Raw Story asked people on the hill why the Democrats and the press seems so reluctant to cover the Manchurian Beefcake scandal and got some interesting rationales, none of which are the least bit believable.

First:

“The reason that people don’t want to talk about the sex angle in the story is that we all know that the mainstream media will not pick up the story,” the aide said.

The aide said reporters from varying print and television outlets expressed to him that they had felt duped after the sex scandals hyped around former President Bill Clinton.

“I think that you have a different culture with the mainstream media than you did than you did during the Clinton scandal,” he remarked. “I think in some ways that they’ve learned their lesson from that incident and many reporters feel that they were duped during that scandal into the kind of coverage that they were by the salacious nature, and I think there’s a resistance by the mainstream media to go down that road again.”

That would be the liberal media who were duped by Republicans into cruelly exposing to the entire world the sex life of a White House intern whose only crime was talking to that shrieking harpy Linda Tripp. They have learned their lesson and now feel squeamish about exposing the sex life of a gay Republican prostitute who widely advertised his services on the internet and somehow gained unprecedented access to the family values White House in spite of having no credentials whatsoever.

It's good to know that they've finally got their priorities straight. Monica Lewinsky must feel awfully relieved about that.

And as far as the Democrats are concerned, I'm wondering how they can pass a drivers test if this is how fucking dumb they are:

A Democratic Senate aide noted that Republicans had lost their bid to impeach Clinton, and said that Democrats were just being careful.

“The one piece of the Clinton sex scandal that everyone always forgets is that they lost,” the aide said. “Clinton was never impeached.”

Yeah. That whole thing really worked out badly for them didn't it? I'd sure hate to be in their shoes today!

And what I love about this is that it is utter rubbish. I don't know how many hits Americablog got to "that post" but I would bet that it was huge and that a very significant number came from DC insiders and journalists. Please don't tell me that they aren't interested. Not only is it about militarystuds.com it's about them, the press corps.

So far, they haven't had to investigate anything. The blogs are doing that for them. This guy is an internet creation and the internet leaves trails all over the place. But every day new questions are being raised and old mysteries are being solved. Who knows where it will lead? One thing I can guarantee is that if somebody finds it they will eventually find a way to report it. That is how the Lewinsky scandal broke through, after all. They fed the news to Drudge who then broke the story so the mainstream press had a hook. Don't kid yourselves. The rules haven't changed. "It's Out There" hasn't been retired.

I've got a couple of questions that I haven't seen addressed but would seem to be relevant. How was Gannon being paid? Eberle of GOPUSA stipulated that Gannon was paid a stipend equal to half of his income, according to the congressional press office. Was that true or was he actually a "volunteer" as some have stated? If so, where was he getting the other half?

And isn't it interesting that the other main character in the White House payola scandal, Armstrong Williams, was sued by his male assistant for sexual harrassment and settled it for an undisclosed sum. (One of the sweeter aspects of that settlement was that the plaintiff was given a nice sinecure at Oliver Stone's media outfit. Semper Fi, baby.)

It certainly does seem as if the Bush White House is pretty darned tolerant for an administration that mined millions of votes in the evangelical community by being against gay rights. And the Dems and the mainstream press know very well that this is a problem for the Republicans.

George W. Bush's carefully crafted mystique is built entirely on his manufactured masculinity. In fact, the Republican Party has based its whole image upon the idea that they are the party of macho straight men and the fawning traditonal women who love them. They have spent the last 35 years impugning the manhood of every male Democrat and portraying every Democratic feminist as a manhating bitch --- and winning the national security issue pretty much on the basis of what that implied to their bigoted neanderthal base. It never ends. Back in the day it was "I can't tell if you're a boy or a girl with all that hair." Just last year they spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing a large number of people that a documented war hero (and killer) was a mincing, vacillating "Frenchman." What do you think that that was all about?

I've always believed that one of the main reasons Clinton frustrated them so much was that his womanizing protected him from the ongoing gay-baiting subtext of the Republican appeal. It took one of their most potent arrows out of the quiver. The best they could do was call Hillary a dyke.

Every time the Republicans are called upon to squeal "don't ask don't tell" when asked about JimJeff Gannon, it puts another hairline crack in their coalition. Don't ever think that this does not affect them. It goes to the very essence of who they portray themselves to be.



Update: The above many be the subtext, but here's the hook.



.
digby 2/18/2005 07:14:00 AM |

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

 
Modo Rides The Zeitgeist

There once was a time when our manly preznit was the favorite sex object of bored Manhattanite housewives who love a man in an ill fitting costume. Remember this?

I had the most astonishing thought last Thursday. After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking--how to put it?--really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly "hot," as in virile, sexy and powerful.

[...]

I know that I am not the only one who entertained these untoward thoughts. The American media were fully aware of how stunning the president looked last week. And they chose to defuse it by referring endlessly to the "photo-oppiness" of the event. The man uses overwhelming military force to vanquish a truly evil foe, facing down balking former "allies," and he is not taken seriously as a foreign-policy president. He out top-guns the Hollywood version, and all the media can talk about is the impending campaign commercial...Newsweek called it a photo-op but gave the president what can only be called a centerfold.

Sadly, as the JimJeff scandal unfolds, it's looking like this might be one more Ricky Martin heartbreak for these ladies. Today as they ponder their favorite sex and the single gal's probing questions, their hearts are sinking:

How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com, get to question the president of the United States?

Who knew that a hotmilitarystud wanting to meetlocalmen could so easily get to be face2face with the commander in chief?

Who indeed?






.
digby 2/16/2005 11:53:00 PM |

 
Wedgies

Two links to Kevin in one day, but he's on a roll and has some very good advice here, riffing on Noam Schieber's post today on the abortion/birth control wedge issue:

We need more issues like this. Republicans have used the culture wars to divide liberals and moderates for decades, and we need issues of our own that divide conservatives and moderates. In the end, the best way to win the culture wars is probably to switch gears and force conservatives to fight on an entirely different set of subjects. After all, time is on our side on most culture war issues anyway, and putting conservatives on the defensive in other areas may be a better way to win than a headlong assault.

I actually think this is part of the culture war, but that is neither here nor there. His point is still correct. Republicans have been masters of wedge politics for years, but this tactic goes both ways and there are many openings in a party that has been holding its coalition together with a strange amalgam of nationalism, tax cuts/big spending, rapacious capitalism and religious traditionalism. There are dozens of conflicts within those factions that have been successfully covered over up to now. With power comes the constituencies who expect to be satisfied and they cannot satisfy all of them.

The birth control issue is an excellent example. I would imagine that most of those pro-life married women who voted for Bush are in favor of women having easy access to birth control. Indeed, I would expect that they have no idea that the pro-life movement us run on the institutional level by people who think that birth control is a form of infanticide in some cases and an invitation to female promiscuity in others. They would be very surprised to learn that under all the high flown pro-life rhetoric about abortion there lies a movement that is based upon a belief that it is wrong for women to control their reproductive capabilities. Back in the day, people understood this but it's been lost in all the pearl clutching about partial birth abortion and the like. It's never really been about reducing the number of abortions. It's always been about feminism.

This country is not as conservative as the base of the Republican party. That's why both of Junior's cowboy hat 'n boot campaigns have been as phony as JimJeff Gannon. It's time to pull down the flap on their big tent and introduce the Republicans to each other up close and personal.



.
digby 2/16/2005 04:27:00 PM |

 
I Warned Him

I tried to spare him the mind-numbing, soul destroying seige that is Hugh Hewitt's "Blog", but Ezra insisted on reading it anyway. He'll recover eventually. Drinking heavily is probably required.



.
digby 2/16/2005 02:25:00 PM |

 
Dumb Things People Said After 9/11


Statement One:

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America... I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.I do believe, as a theologian, based upon many Scriptures and particularly Proverbs 14:23, which says "living by God's principles promotes a nation to greatness, violating those principles brings a nation to shame"... I therefore believe that that created an environment which possibly has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812."

Statement 2:

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break...More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Guess which one is hosting Crossfire today?

Doggone that liberal media.



.
digby 2/16/2005 01:35:00 PM |

 
Freeper Spat

Atrios points to a funny Freeper thread that is up in arms because Sean Hannity apparently dissed them today on his radio show. Hannity said that he hadn't signed on in two years and that it's been taken over by the fringe.

That's interesting. He may not have signed on, but he was the recipient of scoops from a well loved freeper named "Jeff Gannon." Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Update: Hannity was apparently very enthusiastic about Gannon's talents. Media Matters has the tape.







.
digby 2/16/2005 01:18:00 PM |

 
The Company You Keep

Neither Kevin Drum or Matt Yglesias can be considered among the bombthrowing partisans on our side and yet they are both obviously getting a bit alarmed at the increasing frequency of these traitor-talk temper tantrums coming from the right.

I wrote about this last week, wondering "why all the anger?" If it is as Lincoln said, that they cannot feel they have won unless we are "avowedly with them" then we truly are dealing with people who are undemocratic. Evidently, they believe that if they control the institutions of power in Washington that the other side is required to say "Uncle" and disappear, which strikes me as a case of believing your own hype. Just because Rush finds it useful to play to the rubes with the "Democrats are wimps" theme it doesn't mean we would never wake up and realize that we were being played. In our system of government there is no provision for surrender. You can pass legislation by strict party line majority or you can compromise and try to find common ground with the other side. When you use scorched earth tactics such as comparing your opponents to terrorists don't be surprised when they get fed up and decide that there's no margin in cooperation. You'd better be prepared to do what you want to do with no cover from the other side and plenty of criticism.

For those who think that this intemperate liberal baiting is confined to the internets or talk radio, however, it might be worthwhile to pay attention to the CPAC conference that begins today. This is the real Republican convention where the good folks on the right really let their hair down. If past conferences are any guide, this one shouldn't disappoint even the staunchest eliminationist.

Here's a report from 2003:

Before Vice President Dick Cheney gave the opening address at the Conservative Political Action Conference, a three-day gathering of the right-wing faithful outside of Washington, D.C., organizers asked vendor Gene McDonald to put away his "No Muslims = No Terrorists" bumper stickers.

McDonald complied, and for the rest of the conference the jolly white-haired Floridian peddled his popular anti-Islam wares from under a table. As the leading lights of conservatism, including some of the most powerful figures in the Republican Party, gave speeches to a packed house, McDonald did a brisk trade, despite official condemnation by CPAC staff. He offered T-shirts with the words "Islam: Religion of Peace" surrounding a photo of a bomb with the word "Allah" on its timer. A towering linebacker of a man attending the conference with his elderly parents bought a mug saying "Islam" in red Nazi-style block lettering, with the "S" replaced by a black swastika. "They're going to love me at work," he chortled.

[...]

The conference was packed with events devoted to denouncing the perfidious left. There were panels titled "Modern Feminism: The Bilking of the Taxpayer," "Real Stories of Real Liberal Bias on Real College Campuses," "NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus and other Professional Victims" and "Myths, Lies & Terror: The Growing Threat Of Radical Environmentalism." Dan Flynn, author of "Why the Left Hates America," was on hand to sign his book. Ann Coulter, there to push her own book, was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation, after which she ripped into the "treason lobby" -- the Democratic Party -- whose platform "consists in breaking every one of the 10 commandments."

[...]

Of course, CPACers are ebullient about the Bush presidency, and they have no doubt that Bush will do their bidding. Their understanding of Bush is very similar to the conventional wisdom on the left: He's seen as a man whose language and image pander to moderates while his actions serve the far right. Tim Weigel, who was manning the Free Republic booth, described compassionate conservative initiatives like Bush's plan to address AIDS in Africa as, "throwaways, put out there to keep the left quiet while he takes care of Iraq." Behind him hung a picture of Hillary Clinton's head Photoshopped onto the body of a pig.

[...]

...Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn't out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged "open warfare" against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called "Tip a Troll," in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, "The Homosexual Agenda," "Roe V. Wade" and "The Liberal Media."

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn't letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it's time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled "2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?" Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn't be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. "One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball," he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more "bare-knuckle" tactics. The next day, Frank Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, told a rapt crowd about the "well-financed media campaign against the Bush White House."

The rise of Fox News and talk radio has done little to assuage right-wing resentment toward the supposedly liberal media. "It's amazing conservatives ever win any victories at all with the left's hegemonic domination of the media," Coulter told her listeners. She spent most of her talk mocking antiwar arguments ("Why not go to war just for oil? We need oil") and antiwar protesters. "Scott Ritter, that's a liberal for you," began one bit. "Cleans up, cuts his hair and it turns out that it's to get underage girls." Bada-BOOM.

For speakers like Coulter, who performs her act as a kind of stand-up routine, much of this stuff just seems like cynical hyperbole, but among the rank and file, liberal-phobia is real and deep. Virgil Beato, a 25-year-old graduate student at American University, spoke of the "mean-spiritedness" of the left, much of which he'd learned about from David Horowitz (the former Salon columnist). "David Horowitz knows how the left thinks," Beato proclaimed. "He's trying to send out the message that sometimes we need to play hardball. That's the message we're getting from here."

Here's the program for this year and it looks to be just as exciting. They will be giving a special award to honor the non-partisan Swift Boat Veterans for Truth on Friday night. The Vice President will once again be speaking along with such luminaries as Ken Mehlman, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Senators Rick Santorum, Jeff Sessions, John Sununu, Tom Coburn, Sam Brownback and John Cornyn among many other members of the Republican establishment. Well, except for a few notable exceptions. Schwarzennegger, Pataki, Giuliani, Whitman. But that's not surprising is it? This event isn't televised.

I wonder if Instapundit and others would find it the least bit necessary for these elected leaders to disavow the outrageous "fun" described in the article above as they thundered that the left should do with regard to Ward Churchill and Michael Moore. If I were Dick Cheney I might actually be concerned that some of my own followers were handing out bumper stickers that say "No Muslims = No Terrorists" because, you know, that kind of thing isn't exactly Bush boilerplate and people might just get confused about what our foreign policy is. The Iraqis we just "liberated" are Muslims last I heard. And I surely would worry that someone might take it the wrong way when the most powerful members of the Republican party appear on the same bill as a woman who says liberals should be beaten over the head with a baseball bat.

In our party we have top opinion leaders actively repudiating the flamethrowers of our party because they fear being tainted by their alleged intemperate partisanship. The Republicans, on the other hand, hold a convention where the highest most exalted members of the party mingle shoulder to shoulder with those who think that liberals should be killed. It's an interesting juxtaposition isn't it?



.
digby 2/16/2005 12:05:00 PM |

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

 
Help Our Friends

Julia of Sisyphus Shrugged tells us that Wampum, the wonderful hosts of our Koufax awards have not received enough contributions to pay for the extra bandwidth they've needed these last few weeks and so their ISP pulled the plug.

Julia has their paypal code on her site so everybody head over there immediately and cough up a few bucks. It wouldn't take long to get them what they need.

These are truly good people, whose least laudable good deed is hosting the Koufaxes. If we don't take care of our own we really aren't worth a damn.

Go now.



.
digby 2/15/2005 07:32:00 PM |

 
Moral Hazards

As I sit here listening to two congressmen on Inside Politics drone on about how we must restore civility to politics (now that the GOP controls all branches of government) I'm experiencing one of those rare times when I truly understand why people become Republicans. It's because they have political instincts and we don't. If you are a political animal that is a very compelling trait.

Here is a pretty good example of how the right blogosphere is treating the Manchurian Beefcake story --- from Jonah Goldberg :

Until Jordan quit on Friday, the lefty bloggers were dancing around the victory fire chanting in triumph over bagging this Jeff Gannon guy from Talon News. I'm extending this metaphor too far, I'm sure, but their celebration makes me wonder how so many brave warriors can eat their fill off the carcass of a chipmunk. I confess that at first I thought this sounded like a real story. But it's turned out to be more than a little sad.

Paraphrasing a comment I read somewhere yesterday (apologies to the author) "pay no attention to the naked gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values white house living room." Goldberg affects a jocular dismissiveness for a reason. He knows what a real story is and he knows how they work. And he is trivializing this one because it is actually quite dangerous.

Meanwhile, on the left we have much handwringing by commenters over this not being a "gay" story and how we should concentrate on the national security angle and how it's really about access etc, etc. We too are ignoring the naked, gay conservative prostitute in the midde of the family values white house living room. And this is where they get us.

Perhaps it would be instructive to take another little trip down memory lane. Jonah knows very well what a real story is because he was up to his ears in one of the biggest political sex scandals in history. From Michael Isifkoff's award winning MSM articles on the Lewinsky affair:

There was another guest at Jonah Goldberg's house in the Adams Morgan section of Washington that day. For some months, Newsweek's Isikoff had been in touch with Tripp – "hounding" her, Goldberg claims. Aware that Isikoff knew of rumors that Clinton was having an affair with a former White House staffer, Goldberg suggested to Tripp that she play the tapes for Isikoff. Uncomfortable with the whole taping process, Isikoff declined to listen and left Goldberg's house.

In their many phone conversations that fall, Lewinsky complained to Tripp that she was being neglected by the president... By the fall of 1997, Lewinsky was complaining that Clinton's ardor for her seemed to be cooling. He wasn't calling her much, and he rarely returned her increasingly frantic calls. Lewinsky was restless and bored at the Defense Department.

Isikoff listened later, needless to say. So did the entire country. That little meeting at Jonah's house led to the impeachment of the President of the United States. They came this close to forcing him from office. Goldberg and the entire GOP establishment knew without doubt that they had a story and they were not afraid to lead the media to it by the nose. And just look at what an oozing chunk of soap opera tabloid offal it was.

Fast forward seven short years. We have a man whose biggest cheers on the campaign trail in 2000 were when he would solemnly swear that he would "bring honor and integrity back to the White House" --- and everybody knew very well that he was talking about fellatio in the oval office. After his recent reelection in 2004, stories abounded about how the issues of moral values, the impact of evangelical Christians and, most importantly, the movement to allow gays to marry had tipped the balance in what was a very close election. Now we find out that a conservative gay male prostitute was given highly unusual access to that same family values white house. There isn't a story there?

I hear endless braying about how the Democrats have to "fight back." And yet... we just don't seem to to have the heart to play the raw political game they play.

A Republican's political instincts would tell them instantly that this Manchurian Beefcake story presents an amazingly fertile opportunity to take the Bush White House off message in a way that they clearly despise, sow dissension within the GOP coalition, mitigate a growing moral hazard and most of all, make Republicans around the country examine once again whether their attitudes about gays are really what they think they are.

Number one, it is always a good thing to knock a white house off its message. To do it when the press secretary himself is involved, or seems to be, is even better. In shark infested political waters life doesn't get any better than making phony family values hucksters endlessly repeat phrases like "we didn't know he was a prostitute." First rule --- make them talk about stuff they don't want to talk about. It's very difficult to get them started, but if you get the media lemmings running in the right direction they'll do it.

Second, didn't the religious right just threaten Bush with witholding its support if he backed down on gay marriage? And didn't the president then dutifully put it in the SOTU? Clearly, after Bush declared his support for civil unions and backed off the FMA after the election, the Christian Right is a little bit nervous about his bona fides on the issue. When Kerry and Edwards mentioned that Mary Cheney was a lesbian, a widely known fact, they were attacked in the most bizarre campaign kabuki in memory because the Republicans know that there is a huge chasm in their party developing on this issue. Lynn and Dick are like a lot of Republicans out there --- they have gay family members. And only the most hard core authoritarians like Alan Keyes are willing to disown them for it. (Listen to Lynn Cheney twist herself into a pretzel and then get angry when she's pressed on it here.)

This is an issue that threatens the GOP.The cosmopolitan conservatives and libertarians don't have a problem with gays and yet The Christian Right is building a homophobic crusade. A lot of people in the middle don't know what to think. A party with political instincts would exploit that. It's not a new concept I'm advocating here. It's called "divide and conquor." The Right blogosphere sounds like a bunch of San Francisco ACLU liberals when the issue of Gannon comes up and the smart thing for the left to do is ask the Christian right if they agree with their fellow "conservatives." (I believe that Aravosis has already discussed this.)

It wouldn't be nice and wingnuts will call us hypocrites. (It's a good thing hypocrisy was retired from the political dialog somewhere around the time Virtues "Czar" Big Bill Bennett was laying it all on red, Dave Drier was "dating" Doro Bush and Limbaugh was popping a fistfull of hillbilly heroin or we might have something to worry about.) When the wingnuts complain about how we hate gays, just say "No I don't. And clearly, neither do you. But James Dobson does. Let's go have a chat with him, ok?"

It might just force some of these chickenshit libertarians and GOP urbanites to show their true colors and get some GOP parents and siblings of gay people to face up to what they are doing. Can anyone believe that there is no value in showing the country that many of the highest level Republicans in the Bush Administration are actually quite tolerant of gays? Doesn't that move our agenda forward?

I don't believe that we advance the cause of gay rights by allowing the right to have it both ways, which they clearly do. We have a tittilating tabloid story, replete with nude pictures and prostitution, that illustrates the fact that they are merely pandering to the religious right on this issue. It would be too bad if we are too squeamish to pursue it because that is exactly what the other side is counting on.

Finally, the biggest reason to pursue this story is because we are creating a terrible moral hazard if we don't. The Republicans have no incentive to stop the politics of personal destruction if we don't hold them to their own standards and they continue to be rewarded. Pitchers, batters and Republicans understand this instinctively. So should we.


When I read things like this, I just despair. Folks we can put on a better show than this, we really can.


Update: And if anybody wants to know why this really, really matters beyond partisan politics and jockeying for power, I think Rude Pundit gets it right.



.
digby 2/15/2005 03:05:00 PM |

 
You Like Me, You Really Like Me

Kevin Drum and Eugene Volokh wonder why actors can't play smarter political activists. Kevin thinks they are lazy and cites the fact that they can't be bothered to memorize and believably deliver the five or six lines they are given in an Academy Award nomination speech. I've often wonder why in the hell they can't have somebody write them a decent acceptance speech and deliver it like an adult instead of a gushing 12 year old. I understand that it's an emotional moment, but these people are supposed to professional performers. And they are being rewarded for being the best professional performers of the year for crying out loud. Halle Berry had me blindly reaching for the Pepto.

As to why they don't seem to be able to play themselves as intelligent, thoughtful political pundits, that's simple. They need writers and directors. Democrats, are you listening?



.
digby 2/15/2005 02:17:00 PM |

 
Cagey

To all the wingnuts who've been bombarding me with puerile insults because I allegedly have my head up my keister for saying the JimJeff Gannon Guckert may have been a recipient of pillow talk on the Plame matter, here is why I said it:

GANNON: And the FBI did come to interview me. They were interested in where -- how I knew or received a copy of a confidential CIA memo that said that Valerie Plame suggested that Joe Wilson be sent on this mission, something that everybody -- they have all vigorously denied but is, in effect, true.

BLITZER: So they didn't make you go testify before the grand jury?

GANNON: No.

BLITZER: Do you have to reveal how you got that memo?

GANNON: No.

BLITZER: They didn't ask you?

GANNON: Well, the FBI kept asking. I said, well, look, I'm a journalist, I can't --

BLITZER: You didn't tell them?

GANNON: Yes. Can't divulge that. And they accepted that, and I've never been asked again.

He's acting mighty cagey for a guy who just reads the papers, don't you think? My thought was that his "source" might just be across the pillow. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The pillow part anyway.

Now, the blabbing of confidential CIA memos to destroy a political enemy is just sleazy.



.
digby 2/15/2005 12:53:00 AM |

Monday, February 14, 2005

 
Fine Whine

Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED makes a good argument that phony sanctimony is part of the modern political playbook and it's important that we play along or they'll get their destructive talking points out there unrebutted. I agree. It's distasteful but it must be done.

WHINING IS EVERYTHING. This is a minor point, but I take exception to one particular item in the two-party compare-and-contrast list compiled by The Note that Garance linked to on Friday:

One party never apologizes and never shows weakness; one party is on its fourth day of cry-babyish "defense" of its Senate Leader, after a run- of-the-mill GOP "attack."

...In the modern rules of partisan warfare -- which the Republicans largely wrote -- complaining incessently about the illegitimacy of the other side's attacks is as crucial a component as the actual attacks one's own side lobs. When the Democrats close ranks behind Reid and condemn Republican efforts to smear him, they don't really expect George W. Bush to heed their complaints and tell his party to call the dogs off. What they're doing, instead, is making sure that the Republicans' vilification campaign is recognized for what it is and discussed explicitly at the very outset. The mistake the party made with the Republicans' campaign against Tom Daschle -- which, let's recall, really began in earnest in the winter of 2001 -- was ignoring it for too long rather than making it an issue worthy of discussion (and press coverage) in and of itself. Thus the Republicans' attacks had a cumulative effect, over the course of three years, of transforming popular perceptions of the Democratic leader without there being any popular awareness that a concerted campaign even existed.

It becomes more and more obvious that the "analysts" in the press are just clueless about the game they analyze. The Republican weeping and whining about "political hate speech" alone is enough to cause informed people to stick ice picks in their ears just to shut out the pain. You don't have to be a highly paid insider to understand what game they are playing.

One of the main differences between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans simply don't pay any attention to what the press says about them. They don't care to be "understood" or "rational" by an institution that they consider tools. We are fools if we do not adopt that attitude. The media is not part of our coalition, it is not a bastion of rationality or objective truth. We have to tough out the kind of catty insults that The Note spits out as small arms fire in a much bigger battle. Caring whether the media respects us is part of why the other side is able to muster a majority in a country that doesn't want its policies. We have to play them not pander to them.



.
digby 2/14/2005 02:01:00 PM |

 
Oops

We're changing the culture of this country from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and, if you've got a problem, blame somebody else, to one in which each of us understands that we are responsible for the decisions we make. --- President George W. Bush October 15, 2003

Inspiring words.

I don't really know what to think about all this but I do have to marvel at, as Avorosis puts it:

"This is the same White House that ran for office on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. While they are surrounded by gay hookers?"

I personally have no problems with the Bush White House needing to blow off some consensual adult steam. It's a stressful job. If gay hookers are going to help them relax then who am I to argue? I'm a liberal. I have nothing against gays or hookers.

But for a moment let me think as a Republican would, if the shoe were on the other foot:

So many questions so few answers. Just why did JimJeff get such special treatment? It's not like they didn't already have a bunch of ready made shills to ask softball questions. Les Kinsolving's been throwing partisan bombs for years. They certainly didn't need JimJeff to transcribe RNC talking points when they have the Beltway Boys to do it on national television.

Scotty said that the president called on JimJeff of his own volition. A coincidence? Or did someone request that JimJeff get a special treat that day?

And has it ever been logical that this nobody from a vanity web site would get access to the Plame story? Why him? JimJeff claims that he never actually saw the Plame memo, yet he clearly knew of it. Could it have been pillow talk?

I don't have a clue. But, I do know that if this were 1998, we'd be knee deep in congressional investigations into the gay hooker ring in the White House. Every news crew in the DC area would be camped out on JimJeff's front lawn. A wild-eyed Victoria Toensing and panting Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick would be crawling up on the Hardball desk rending their silk teddies and speaking in tongues while Matthews'exploding head spun around on his shoulders.

But, it isn't 1998 and it will probably not even be mentioned. And I'm not a Republican so I don't think, as they would, that it's necessary to dig into every single White House staffer's sex life to find out who leaked a confidential memo to a gay hooker.

As a Democrat, however, if gay hookers are running around the White House I do find it somewhat frustrating that we have to put up with this shock and horror bullshit from the right wing about average Joe and Jane gay person wanting to get married and have a family. Please.

And yes, I do think that Patrick Fitzgerald's boys will probably be paying JimJeff another visit. Sadly, I think it's entirely likely that they didn't know about this until today. It is impossible to believe that the secret service and the FBI would allow a known prostitute to have access to the White House after 9/11. If they did, then our national security is in very deep shit. Come to think of it, it's also pretty scary that they didn't know. What's up with that?



.
digby 2/14/2005 11:30:00 AM |

Sunday, February 13, 2005

 
Subversive Heroes of The Left

And the Grammy stiffs don't have any idea...

Don't wanna be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new media.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mindfuck America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
Well that's enough to argue.

Well maybe I'm the faggot America.
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along in the age of paranoia.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
Well that's enough to argue.

Don't wanna be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information nation of hysteria.
It's going out to idiot America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow

Green Day rules.



.
digby 2/13/2005 08:56:00 PM |

 
Off Limits

I see via TalkLeft that Instapundit believes that left wing bloggers have gone too far with this delving into the personal life of JD Guckert:

...it was the stuff about Gannon's personal life that led to his resignation, and that there's something rather sleazy about that. Backstage or not, targeting parts of people's lives that don't have to do with the story -- like, say, Eason Jordan's love life -- seems inappropriate to me, and likely to lend support to the bloggers-as-lynch-mob caricature.

We don't know that the reason Guckert "resigned" was because of the personal stuff. It's just as likely he was asked to leave because he had brought attention to himself and embarrassed the White House. Who knows?

But I think we all can agree that publicly discussing people's sex lives, really should be out of bounds. Sexual witch hunts are wrong. I just don't know what's come over people.

Of course it's possible that some people came across this and just got inspired:

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had ten sexual encounters, eight while she worked at the White House and two thereafter.(35) The sexual encounters generally occurred in or near the private study off the Oval Office -- most often in the windowless hallway outside the study.(36) During many of their sexual encounters, the President stood leaning against the doorway of the bathroom across from the study, which, he told Ms. Lewinsky, eased his sore back.(37)

Ms. Lewinsky testified that her physical relationship with the President included oral sex but not sexual intercourse.(38) According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President; he never performed oral sex on her.(39) Initially, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President would not let her perform oral sex to completion. In Ms. Lewinsky's understanding, his refusal was related to "trust and not knowing me well enough."(40) During their last two sexual encounters, both in 1997, he did ejaculate.(41)

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President on nine occasions. On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts. He touched her genitals, both through her underwear and directly, bringing her to orgasm on two occasions. On one occasion, the President inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and the President had brief genital-to-genital contact.(42)

Of course, that was an official government document so it was ok to disseminate those details to the entire world. And, remember it wasn't about the sex, it was about the lying. Not like an evil liberal blogger lynch mob linking to underwear pics that someone who was writing under an alias for unknown reasons had plastered all over the internet. You simply can't compare the two. Not at all. I don't know what I was thinking.



.
digby 2/13/2005 01:24:00 PM |

 
Dissent Is Good For You

Orcinus points to a lengthy list of rightwing academics who would be ripe for a Churchilling if there existed a left wing machine capable of doing it.

But even if we could, it would be self defeating to demand that they lose their jobs. Academic freedom demands that scholars with repugnant views be allowed to make their arguments so that an intellectual debate can take place. I think that the Right is making a mistake if they think that they'll be able to hang on to power if they shut people up. One of the reasons they've been successful in selling their ideas is that they spent years honing their arguments. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and all that.



.
digby 2/13/2005 01:04:00 PM |

 
What's The Problem?

I'm fascinated by the fact that Eason Jordan was driven from his job for making a remark about the US targeting journalists when it seems clear that many on the right think that targeting journalists is actually a good idea. Why all the self-righteous Claude Rainsing about this? If you write or say publicly that it's a good idea to kill journalists and someone else says we ARE killing journalists I don't see why that person is considered a traitor.

The Pink Flamingo Bar Grill thinks the US Military should at least be able to target "enemy" journalists when we invade a foreign country. They aren't really free anyway; unlike our journalists they are part of their government's propaganda efforts and can, therefore, be considered part of the enemy force. Can we win this war (that "we are further away from winning than we are losing") with our hands tied behind our backs? We are, after all, "at war with possibly the worst enemy we have ever faced." We have to ask ourselves if we are prepared to do whatever it takes.

Apparently a BBC journalist by the name of Nik Gowing contributed a chapter to a book called Dying To Tell The Story in which he says that our military has already made that decision:(pdf)

There is evidence that media activity in the midst of real-time war fighting is now regarded by commanders as having ‘military significance’ which justifies a firm military response to remove or at least neutralise it. From the media’s perspective, the core guiding principles of reporting must remain accuracy, impartiality, objectivity and balance in a time of armed conflict.Yet if some worst case fears are shown to be justified, then on the political and military side some senior officials seem to view our 24 hour/7 day-a-week presence as a real-time military threat that on some occasions justifies our removal by the application of deadly force. Despite expressions of sympathy, the fact that journalists and technicians are killed or injured appears to be of barely marginal concern.

Captain's Quarters goes to great lengths to debunk various charges in this book. But it gets a bit thick when they charge Gowing with using intemperate rhetoric (like that above) and say that CNN is now a "faith-based organization instead of a fact-finding media outlet" because its executives are under the sway of a writer whose work doesn't stand up under scrutiny.

I just hate when that happens, don't you?






Thanks RP. You can have all the profits.



.
digby 2/13/2005 11:37:00 AM |

 
Hounds of Hell

Kevin is right that scalp collecting benefits the right, but it has nothing to do with bloggers or liberals' willingness to engage in the game. It has to do with the fact that character assasination has been the political combat weapon of choice on the right for a long, long time. Hounding people from their jobs is one of their favorite tools of intimidation.

Remember Webb Hubbel, Bernie Nussbaum, Mike Espy, Henry Cisneros, Roger Altman blah, blah, blah? And let's not forget that they spent 70 million taxpayer dollars trying to hound Clinton out of office. He just refused to go. The only difference now is that the target is the long-hated liberal media and bloggers have joined the assassination squad.

If liberal bloggers' record of scalps is Trent Lott losing the leadership post that Bush wanted him out of anyway then we aren't even in the same league. The Right Wing Noise machine is a group seasoned professionals made up of bloggers, newspapers, FOX, talk radio, and a direct pipeline to powerful Republicans in the government. We are Kos and Atrios et al. We are not equivalent.



Update: Kevin expands on his earlier post here and I think he makes some good points.
Frankly, I think the left blogosphere probably isn't going to prosper through right wing style character assassination because we don't have the megaphone to really make it work or a compliant media or the legislative clout to create psuedo scandals and investigations.

The left blogosphere, on the other hand, has already shown that it can effect change by bringing to bear the financial clout of the consumer. Sinclair. That's the paradigm of lefty new media clout. It's all we've got folks, but it's a lot.



.
digby 2/13/2005 08:33:00 AM |