Hullabaloo

Saturday, March 26, 2005

 
Cafeteria Moralists

Matt Yglesias writes:

I described the liberal as having a two-stage view about end of life issues. First, comes something like the "life as continuum" view Brooks attributes to us. Second, comes a principle of free choice -- I think that I should make my own decision on this, but that my view should not control others, though I may try to persuade others that my view is correct (non-relativism). The problem here is that I think a lot of liberals don't recognize that the second principle really does depend on something akin to the first. If you hold views about the sanctity of life and the doing/allowing distinction that lead you to the conclusion that failing to keep alive someone who could be kept alive is the equivalent to murder, then adopting a principle of free choise at the second level makes no sense. An absolutist view on the first question requires an absolutist view on the second question.

I agree that that the pro-life absolutist view on the first question requires an absolutist view on the second. The only problem is that in practice, the pro-life crowd doesn't take a pro-life absolutist view on either.

On abortion, which they call murder, they do not believe that the woman who has an abortion should be charged with a crime, which makes no sense. Many of them make an exception in the case of rape of incest, which also makes no sense if abortion is murder.

They do not believe that life support should be kept in place in all circumstances, just certain ones. If it is muder then there really cannot be any situation in which taking a person off life support or denying them a feeding tube ("a natural death") would be ok.

They believe that stem cell research should be banned because the embryo is a life, but they have nothing to say about the people who fertilize many eggs in the in vitro process which then are either frozen for no use or discarded.

When it comes to the death penalty, many of these same people are arguing for fewer legal rights for the accused, even in the case of evidence of actual innocence, so the idea of "innocent" life doesn't hold water either.

As Matt makes clear, the liberal position about freedom of choice is not moral relativism. But I would argue that a cafeteria moralism that uses the "life" issue as a cudgel in random situations in which one disagrees with individual decisions is.



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digby 3/26/2005 03:29:00 PM |

 
Accountability

Despite recommendations by Army investigators, commanders have decided not to prosecute 17 American soldiers implicated in the deaths of three prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, according to a new accounting released Friday by the Army.

Investigators had recommended that all 17 soldiers be charged in the cases, according to the accounting by the Army Criminal Investigation Command. The charges included murder, conspiracy and negligent homicide. While none of the 17 will face any prosecution, one received a letter of reprimand and another was discharged after the investigations.

To date, the military has taken steps toward prosecuting some three dozen soldiers in connection with a total of 28 confirmed or suspected homicides of detainees. The total number of such deaths is believed to be between 28 and 31.

In one of the three cases in which no charges are to be filed, the commanders determined the death to be "a result of a series of lawful applications of force." In the second, the commanders decided not to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. In the third, they determined the soldier involved had not been well informed of the rules of engagement.

A spokesman for the Army Criminal Investigation Command, Chris Grey, said in a statement: "We take each and every death very seriously and are committed and sworn to investigating each case with the utmost professionalism and thoroughness. We are equally determined to get to the truth wherever the evidence may lead us and regardless of how long it takes."

And if that doesn't work, we'll just go for the Schiavo Option. From Rox Populi:

Andy Warhol once mused that "in the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes." If he were alive today, he might say that everyone would get the U.S. Congress to intercede on their personal behalf. As it turns out, the Schavio case wasn't even the first one this month. Get this:

The North Carolina congressman who represents Camp Lejeune introduced legislation that would dismiss all charges against 2nd Lt. Ilario G. Pantano, the Marine who allegedly wrongfully shot two Iraqis while deployed to Iraq a year ago.

House Resolution 167, introduced by Rep. Walter B. Jones, R, states that Pantano, 33, was “defending the cause of freedom, democracy and liberty” in his actions on April 15 that resulted in the deaths of two Iraqis.

“The ongoing war in Iraq has taken a toll on this nation. Families have been torn apart by the loss of a loved one who has paid the ultimate price in service to our country,” Jones wrote in a Feb. 25 letter to President Bush.

“Charging Pantano with murder is not only wrong, but is also detrimental to morale in America. This sends a potentially flawed message to those considering enlisting in the military.”

The president has received the letter and the matter is under review, a spokesman for Jones’ office said on March 18.

Hey, what's the use of having control of all three branches of government if you can't do whatever you want to do? The rule of law is for losers.



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digby 3/26/2005 03:11:00 PM |

 
Here We Are

From Andrew Sullivan:

EMAIL OF THE DAY: "As I read through yesterday's emails, I am struck by the possible fruitfulness of moderate Republican conservatives joining forces with similar folks in the Democratic Party. Perhaps if we leave the extremists of both parties out on their respective limbs and offer a strong ideology of fiscal responsibility, "gentle" hawks only responding in war when clear need is identified, protecting our own public financially from being sold out abroad, protecting our borders (even at the expense of some very wealthy businesspeople) -- promising personal rights of privacy in the pew and the bedroom and on the deathbed -- I think a strong, pragmatic, sensible, workable "party" could emerge. We MUST ditch religious zealotry ASAP -- it is killing real moral values!!"

Can someone explain to me how this substantially differs from the vast mainstream of the Democratic party?

This illustrates how successful the Republicans have been in mischaracterizing themselves as reasonable and the Democrats as a bunch of flaky left wing weirdoes. The last Democratic president was so fiscally responsible he left office with a large surplus for the explicit purpose of funding the social security shortfall in 2040 or so. We all know what happened to that. It is the mainstream Democratic view that we should only use force when "clear need is identified." We are not pacifists and never have been. We are the party that protests outsourcing and off shore tax evasion and our "public being sold out abroad." We have never been for open borders, but we do think that if wealthy businessmen want to import cheap,illegal labor they ought to be required to pay a minimum wage and adhere to basic human rights. And clearly, the mainstream of the Democratic party have no interest in legislating what people do in their bedrooms, pews and deathbeds. None.

Your "strong, pragmatic, sensible, workable" party already exists, guys. If you like effective, fiscally responsible government that respects inbdividual rights, including a right to privacy, then come on over. We are not the party that impeaches presidents over private sexual matters. We may drink latte's and read the New York Times, but that doesn't actually make us communists. That's Rush talk. You know that. And while we have our share of crazies, they aren't running the party. In fact the more extreme on the left have their own Party and cost us the election in 2000. You know that too. And a sad day for this country it was.

All we needed was 60,000 votes in Ohio this time and we could have stopped these guys from doing their worst. Help us out next time. Your country needs you.



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digby 3/26/2005 12:38:00 PM |

 
“NBC was a much more effective tool for us.”

What a perfect choice of words.

“With the departure of Dan Rather, this is a good opportunity for CBS to reach out,” said Ari Fleischer, the former White House press spokesman. “This is almost a curtains-up for CBS to improve relationships.”

Mr. Fleischer—the former Presidential press secretary who has published his Bush explication memoir, Taking Heat: The President, the Press, and My Years in the White House—was considering CBS News now that Mr. Rather, the bête noir of the conservative class, has departed the CBS Evening News.

Mr. Rather’s early retirement was good, Mr. Fleischer said.

But it wasn’t quite enough.

“Dan Rather became a symbol,” said Mr. Fleischer, who remains close to President Bush. “That’s why this is a new opportunity for CBS. But there’s a lot more to it besides who was in the anchor chair. There’s CBS as a larger organization. There is still largely a Democratic tilt that goes in their journalism.”

Dan Rather was a good start. But the White House wanted more. “A new chapter has opened up at CBS,” Mr. Fleischer said on March 22, “but we don’t know what’s in it yet.”

[...]

“Relations were really, really horrible during that whole thing, and then the White House took a different view when Dan stepped down,” Mr. Roberts said. “Everything was affected by the tenure of the guy at the head of the Evening News. It’s really subsided.”

In contrast, Mr. Roberts said, he and Bob Schieffer, the 67-year-old Texan and Face the Nation host who is temporarily replacing Mr. Rather as evening anchor, are held in higher esteem by White House officials.

“Now, don’t get me wrong,” he added. The White House was “still good at controlling information. They’re never happy to see you, but they’re less not happy to see you.”

But at the White House, there was a different view of the CBS News–reborn theory.

Adam Levine, who was the assistant White House secretary in charge of television news until January 2004—and who, like Mr. Fleischer, remains close to the Bush administration press office—said CBS News still had “a lot of work to do.”

To measure the relative credibility of news networks with press officials at the White House, Mr. Levine suggested a scale of one to 100: he put Fox News at 90, NBC News at 80 and CBS News at “about 10.”

Asked about that assessment, a current White House official, who declined to be named, said that figure was “probably generous given what happened.”

“It depends on where they go from here,” said the official. “Contrition is always nice, but it all depends on what gets on the air. That’s the true test.”

“Bowing and scraping is not going to please this White House,” said Mr. Levine.

“Results are going to please the White House.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic,” he said, referring to Mr. Roberts’ comments, but “I don’t think removing Dan Rather from the equation—that doesn’t make CBS on par with Fox.”

[...]

The calculus for the White House in granting interviews, said Mr. Levine, was more than just the fairness and balance of the network—it was a combination of “reach, fairness and enjoyability.”

He described the latter as “the respect factor,” in which an interviewer showed due deference to the office of the Presidency, thereby making it a more appealing experience for Mr. Bush.

By this calculation, Mr. Schieffer, the CBS Evening News interim anchor, had “the respect factor” going for him, said Mr. Levine.

“I found him to be very gracious,” said Mr. Fleischer. “The only thing was he seems to really dislike Tom DeLay. I think a lot of reporters do. I always had good workings with Bob Schieffer. I thought he gave issues a fair ear.”

What Mr. Schieffer and Mr. Pelley lacked was “reach,” said Mr. Levine, which meant the network had much less to offer the White House in terms of audience—unlike, say, ABC News, which Mr. Levine assessed as having more on-air real estate for White House officials to send their messages than CBS News, not to mention an esteemed political web site, The Note.

He recalled that when Mr. Pelley interviewed the President for two hours shortly after Sept. 11, the resulting segment was only 13 minutes long. Mr. Levine had arranged that interview, he said, but he might advise the President against it now. “If I’m advising him,” he said, “I’m not sure that’s the best use of the President’s time.”

Mr. Levine said that during his tenure, “NBC was a much more effective tool for us.” He said press officials in the White House liked Meet the Press host Russert, but not because he tossed softball questions

“Nobody is going to tell you that Tim Russert is easiest,” said Mr. Levine. “He’s by far and away the toughest. But he’s fair.”

Oooh, baby. And he's got big biceps too.

Tim Russert is as fair as Fox news. Proud as a peacock he must be.

Why are they called mediawhores? Because the Republicans treat them like whores and they act like whores. It's not a nice name and I know that it hurts their feelings, but when you read things like this you ralize that it is the most accurate term you can find for these servile, supplicating chickenshits. Jayzuz.

Avedon Carol reminds us that when reporters become courtiers rather than journalists, bad things result. And when they don't, when they actually look for the story instead of simpering and posing for those in power, they can actually get the real story.

But, why would they care, really? John Roberts is getting his phone calls returned from the chief liar in the administration. He has rationalized that to mean that he is a fair journalist. "What Liberal Media?" indeed.



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digby 3/26/2005 09:45:00 AM |

Friday, March 25, 2005

 
What Will We Tell The Children?

I have been reading all this stuff about Wolfowitz's neocon World Bank girlfriend and her witchy influence over him, but I didn't know until today that Wolfie is married. To another woman.

The appointment of George Bush's leading hawk as head of the World Bank was heading for a crisis over his relationship with a senior British employee.

Influential members of staff at the international organisation have complained to its board that Paul Wolfowitz, a married father of three, is so besotted with Oxford-educated Shaha Riza he cannot be impartial.

Extraordinarily, they claim she played a key role in pushing the 61-year-old Pentagon official into the Iraq War. And the row comes amid claims that Wolfowitz's wife Clare once warned George Bush of the threat to national security any infidelity by her husband could cause.

A British citizen - at 51, eight years younger than Wolfowitz's wife - Ms Riza grew up in Saudi Arabia and was passionately committed to democratising the Middle East when she allegedly began to date Wolfowitz.
She studied at the London School of Economics in the Seventies before taking a master's degree at St Anthony's College, Oxford, where she met her future husband, Turkish Cypriot Bulent Ali Riza, from whom she is now divorced.

After they moved to America, Shaha worked for the Iraq Foundation, set up by expatriates to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War. She subsequently joined the National Endowment for Democracy, created by President Ronald Reagan to promote American ideals.

Bulent Riza said Shaha started to "talk to Paul" about reforming the Middle East. And New Yorker magazine's respected commentator Paul Boyer observed that a senior World Bank official "named Shaha Ali Riza" was an "influence".

I'm most anxious to hear Jerry Fallwell and James Dobson weigh in on this. Is it ethical for the evangelical president to nominate such immoral people to positions of high rank? Doesn't he care? Quick, check the poker room and see if William bennet can enlighten us about this.

And then there is the espionage. As the bride of Jesu said so long ago, in another time of the Florida passion:

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.

Even his wife thinks he might be a threat to national security. It would be very irresponsible not to speculate that Wolfowitz is being blackmailed by a beguiling, invasion-mad, Tunisian she-devil. It really would.


Good Friday Middle Aged Mistress Pop Quiz:

Do you know this woman?










answer: Poppi's little friend Jennifer Fitzgerald. What will we tell the great-great-grandchildren?


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digby 3/25/2005 03:23:00 PM |

Thursday, March 24, 2005

 
Too Far?

I think it's important to give John Cole credit here for recognizing what a threat to freedom these religious zealots are. It appears that more than a few Republicans are a little bit stunned by the hideous overreaching of the congress and the president in this case.

But I must also point out that this didn't happen in a vacuum. This started with the moralizing psuedo religious nonsense during the Clinton years when it was everybody's favorite sport to use the office of the "independent" counsel to rummage through Hillary Clinton's underwear drawer and clutch their lace hankies about a prosaic mid life crisis as if it were of the highest national importance. They impeached the president on the basis of a private sexual matter. Members of the house and senate stood on the floors of the congress and pontificated endlessly about sexual morality and trumped up a case for lying under oath that you could drive a truck through. And the only thing that stopped them from succeeding in making a federal case out of a blow-job was public opinion, which sharply turned against them as the silly spectacle lumbered on.

It was clear then that the modern GOP's small government and individual rights rhetoric was a crock. (I blame some Democrats for this too. A fair number of them fed the notion that this was worthy of official government disapprobation with their Liebermanesque preaching about how it was "deplorable" and "reprehensible.")

Cole notes that the NOW and NARAL slippery slope arguments don't seem so hysterical now. No they don't. Neither do those who have been a little bit kooky on the Patriot Act or the executive power grab that says the president can order torture because in wartime the president can do anything he wants. We are seeing this congressional majority and the president pretty much rip out any part of the constitution they don't care for.

I've been hoping that libertarians would realize that these guys not only have no intention of making government smaller but they have absolutely no respect for individual rights either. I realize that taxation is at the top of most libertarians' list of issues. But I think it's time for many of them to go back and re-read their John Stuart Mill "On Liberty" and expand their definition of freedom a little bit. Taxation can be onerous and tyrannous. But dear God, it's not the ONLY definition of tyranny nor are all levels of taxation onerous.

Maybe libertarians don't feel the yoke tightening around their neck from the corporate oligarchy and the religious right, but I sure as hell do. Maybe this circus is the last straw for some of them too.



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digby 3/24/2005 04:24:00 PM |

 
You Eat Spinach

Atrios links to another of TAPPED's great posts about the "pain caucus." Earlier this week Sam Rosenfeld wrote an interesting piece on the same subject regarding the punditocrisy's reflexive conventional wisdom that says "political courage" equals average people suffering. He brought up one of the most egregious examples I've ever had the misfortune to watch on last week's Capital Gang:

HUNT: Bob, for Bush to succeed in this or have something he calls success, does he have to get something on -- on personal accounts?

NOVAK: To have any success, of course, he does. If he just has a changing of the index, which is a reduction in benefits, that's not going to do it. And he's not going to go for a tax increase.

I agree with Mark, which I rarely do, that the Republicans look like chickens. They look like they're afraid of combat. But I think the Democrats really look bad because I -- I was talking to some very prominent ones, and I didn't realize that not only is personal accounts off the table, any indexing of -- of the -- of how many -- how the benefits will be is off the table. They are saying, We will not go along with any reduction in benefits to our constituents in the future! I mean, they're being very responsible, and -- and...

HUNT: You meant to say irresponsible, I think.

NOVAK: Irresponsible. And Nancy Pelosi...

(CROSSTALK)

NOVAK: Nancy Pelosi, I thought, just typifies exactly what's going on when she says, Stop him, stop him, stop him.

CARLSON: I agree with Bob, in that Democrats have to pivot now and acknowledge, yes, there's a problem, and put forward a proposal for fixing...

O'BEIRNE: And when that happens...

CARLSON: ... Social Security...

O'BEIRNE: ... the Republicans are confident that personal accounts, plus some other things which do affect solvency, will look a lot better than what liberal Democrats are likely to come up, which happens to be tax increases!

CARLSON: Kate, not only would personal...

HUNT: Mark -- Mark -- hurt Social Security, they're going to hurt the economy.

HUNT: Mark, the problem is that people say the concept of personal or private accounts is not such a bad concept, but the minute you say it has to be accompanied by benefit cuts, that's when...

SHIELDS: And tax increases.

HUNT: ... it plummets.

SHIELDS: No, that's absolutely...

CARLSON: And all that borrowing.

SHIELDS: That's absolutely right, Al. And the reality is that the president said there was a crisis. The president said, I have a plan. He said that in the 2000 campaign, said it in 2004 campaign. We just haven't seen the plan unveiled.

O'BEIRNE: Oh!

SHIELDS: And I would -- I would point out if the people in the White House feel so good about the polls, thank goodness they haven't seen the CNN/"USA Today" Gallup poll, which shows 35 percent approval for the president's handling of the Social Security issue.

O'BEIRNE: And it shows 76 percent of people under age 50 like the idea of the personal accounts, and people above that age won't be affected by them!

NOVAK: Let me just say that the idea that you have the benefit cuts, Mark, because you have personal accounts is ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. You're going to have to have benefit cuts. Pat Moynihan said you had to have benefit cuts. Everybody knows it, and the demagogueing that's going on -- I was -- I was talking with two members of the Social Security subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee. They say, We will not have any benefit cuts for our constituents. They're crazy! They're going to have to have them!

HUNT: You know, Bob, you're right on that. I think there are going to have to be benefit cuts, but I also think that if you move to some -- (UNINTELLIGIBLE) some kind of indexing, you can do it in a very progressive way.

NOVAK: I agree with that!

HUNT: And I think that's what...

NOVAK: But it's still -- they say they -- they want no benefit cuts!

CARLSON: Do you think borrowing a trillion dollars...

SHIELDS: Did the president...

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: ... personal accounts is a good idea? (CROSSTALK)

SHIELDS: ... any of his three dozen appearances when he mentioned it, ever mentioned benefit cuts? He never did.

NOVAK: But he told...

SHIELDS: He never did! No, Bob, but I mean, seriously, he never has.

HUNT: Kate, they at some point...

NOVAK: Do you think -- you think you can get by in this -- with this system without benefit cuts?

SHIELDS: I think -- I think you have to have benefit cuts. I'd like to see you struck from the Social Security rolls, and people of your ilk

The sheer inanity of that dialog is just so depressing. How much money do you suppose those guys all make a year? Do you think that any of them will actually be affected by "benefit cuts?"

We will have to have benefit cuts. Just because we will. There is no other option and the Democrats are just being obstinate in not accepting what we all know will have to happen which is benefit cuts. Pat Moynihan said so! You Americans who will depend on Social Security top keep the wolf from the door are just going to have to deal. That's the way it is.

Taxes? What are these taxes you speak of?

This relates to a Talking Points post from last week in which Johnathan Chait wrote:

Yesterday, Josh argued here that "One of the Democrats' greatest problems -- far more insidious than many realize -- is their desire to gain the approval and approbation of establishment Washington and its A-list pundits."

Interestingly, a reporter friend of mine came across some evidence of this proposition that very night. As he told me:

I was talking yesterday with a very influential Democratic congressman who firmly defended the current Democratic position of not having a specific Social Security 'plan' on the table. Yet at the same time he was a little defensive about it. Why? "Because I keep hearing from you guys" -- i.e., Washington reporters -- "that we're going to be in trouble for not having a plan," he said. "And it makes me nervous."

It occurs to me that liberals should spend more time writing reasoned e-mails to the punditocrisy than we do. It would be nice to break the lock that these gasbags have on the Democrats but we shouldn't just pin our hopes on that alone. We should be working these refs with wily cunning. They seem to be pretty vacuous. It can't be that hard.



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digby 3/24/2005 03:15:00 PM |

 
The New Front

Andrew Kohut wrote in yesterdays' New York Times:

While there were probably more votes of conscience in Congress on the bill than the public thinks, it is also pretty clear that the Christian conservative movement now has the clout on life-and-death issues to do what the National Rifle Association has done for years on gun control. Strengthened by the results of the November elections, the movement can convey to legislators that the intensity of their constituents' beliefs is more important than the balance of national public opinion. Swayed by this reasoning, more than a few Democrats may be more interested in moving to the right on moral values than in staking out the middle of the political landscape.

One of the first big skirmishes in the culture wars was gun control. It seemed for a long time that the forces of progress and enlightened self interest would dictate that we would enact reasonable restrictions on the ownership of guns. Even the police backed such measures as a matter of self defense. I took it for granted for many years that common sense would prevail. But in the end the right won that battle hands down. It's over. There isn't even a discussion about it when a kid gets his hands on a bunch of guns and mows down ten people. Nothing. Just collateral damage, folks. The price we pay for the right to bear arms.

Ron Brownstein wrote today:

Does the "culture of life" extend to the victims of gun violence?

That's the question critics are asking after President Bush's contrasting responses to the two events dominating national attention this week.

Although Bush made a special trip back to Washington from vacation to sign legislation offering a new federal right of appeal to Terri Schiavo's parents, the president and his aides have said almost nothing about the mass shooting in Red Lake, Minn. — the deadliest outbreak of school violence since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo.

The Minnesota tragedy has increased alarm among some school safety professionals about Bush's efforts to eliminate funding for two major programs meant to prevent classroom violence, including a Clinton administration initiative to help schools hire more police officers.

"It makes absolutely no sense that at a time when we are talking about better protecting bridges, monuments, dams and even the hallways of Congress, that we are going backward in protecting the hallways of our schools," said Kenneth S. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a consulting firm.

Bush's responses to the Schiavo case and the school shootings track with the preferences of two of his core constituencies.

Conservative Christians pressed Bush to intervene for Schiavo, while the National Rifle Assn. and other gun-owner groups generally look to minimize the relevance of political responses to mass shootings.

"It seems callous to talk about politics or to try to push a legislative agenda on the back of this heart-rending crime," the NRA's chief spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, said in response to the Minnesota shootings.

I wrote earlier that I had given up on that battle because of the bill of rights. While I think that most sentient beings would interpret the 2nd amendment to mean that members of the militia (a sort of national guard in today's parlance) should have access to weapons, I came to believe that any "interpretation" of the bill of rights was a mistake. In light of the zealots on the other side I decided that it was best to interpret the bill of rights as literally as possible or risk having these nutcases fool around with the fundamentals.

And they would. As Eugene Volokh said the other day, he doesn't see the BOR as sacred writ and it's pretty clear that these radical Republican Theocrats don't either. Normally, I would agree that enlightened people could look at the BOR and make changes to it as their culture evolved in different ways, so of course it isn't a sacred writ. But clearly we are not enlightened. I say now, don't touch it in any way.

The right had a very powerful weapon to gain the support of civil libertarians in the battle over gun rights but they don't have use of it in this next one. In fact, they are attacking the Bill of Rights and just as fundamentally, the independent judiciary that unholds them this time. And they are being quite open about it. Here's the smarmy Hugh Hewitt:

WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS, the latest in a string of judicial decrees that run contrary to the will of the representative branch? Here's one reaction that arrived in my email account an hour after the 11th Circuit chose to ignore Congress:

We are no longer a nation of laws. We are a nation of lawyers. It doesn't matter how carefully we frame a law. It doesn't matter what sort of initiative the voters pass. The elite judges do whatever they want. . . .

Lest you think I'm some sort of ignorant red-neck, I have a Ph.D. in History from the University of California. I am deeply troubled by the rise of the rogue courts. Unless
there is radical change--revolutionary change--we are doomed.

I don't share my correspondent's pessimism, but I think his anger is very widespread and fuels not only the strong support for Senator Frist's decision to break the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominees, but also a backlash against any Republican who sides with the Democrats on the coming rules change vote.

The polls don't support their position in the Schiavo case, but neither did they support the NRA. It's the zealousness of this constitutncy that will fuel their decision. Right now I am hearing that the zealots want to force Jeb Bush to send in troops to take custody of Schiavo and that he is thinking of doing it. (And BTW, any comparison between this and the Elian case is spurious. The Clinton administration was upholding the court's decision while Jebbie would be going expressly against it. That's something that normal people would call a constitutional crisis.)

If Democrats think that moving right on these alleged religious and "life" issues will help them, however, they are wrong. This is much bigger than the gun issue. If the GOP can destroy Americans' faith in the judiciary as being capable of making unbiased, apolitical decisions, and if they succeed in intimidating judges the way they have intimidated the media, we will see the Bill of Rights radically reinterpreted. (And the big money boys will slither along behind collecting all the money.)

Eric Alterman wrote yesterday:

This Terri Schiavo thing is a perfect paradigm for our politics. Republicans are fundamentally contravening their own alleged principles by trying to put the federal government in the face of an intimate family decision-making process—“In interviews, some conservatives either dismissed the argument that the vote was a federal intrusion on states' rights or argued that their opposition to euthanasia as part of their support of the right-to-life movement trumped any aversion they might have to a dominant federal government."-- and ignoring the structural problems (more here) they helped create vis-à-vis the nation’s health care coverage that are actually quite germane to the larger issues it raises. The Democrats, meanwhile, are taking a sensible position but are lack the confidence to defend it in public. And the media is covering the story as if it’s the Democrats who are risking the wrath of voters despite that fact that voters tell pollsters that 70 percent of the public supports their position.

The media, particularly the cable "news" networks, are what they are. Infotainment shows for news and tabloid junkies. (I just saw a story on CNN about a cat that was fitted with artificial limbs. I'm not kidding.) This is a problem.

But it is also a problem that Democrats can't seem to step forward and take the mantle of straight talking common sense on issues like these. We are intimidated on these social issues because we are buying into the frame the right wants us to use --- "the Bible" and "life." I think our frame for these social issues should be "the constitution" and "freedom." And from that we defend the judiciary on the basis of the separation of powers (checks and balances)and we defend people's right to live their lives freely on the basis of the Bill of Rights. Frank Luntz wants to use the symbolism of the constitution for his side and I think we are nuts to let him do it. They treat the constitution like toilet paper and plenty of people will see that if we just point it out to them, particularly if we repeatedly invoke the constitution as the means of protecting their right to live as they choose without interference from busy bodies.

While the Democrats may still be scarred by its alleged association with 60's libertinism, as Noam Scheiber writes here, the Republicans are revealing themselves to be contemporary radicals who are far more threatening. Scheiber uses the example of Bush flouting the UN as illustrative of how they win even when they are losing. But these issues that affect everyday lives are substantially different. People may be willing to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on national security, about which they acknowledge that the experts in the government know more than they do. But on issues like social security and medical care they are many degrees more confident in their own experience and many degrees more skeptical of the government's motives.

During the Clinton scandals, for instance, the Democrats came very close to taking back the congress in 1998 when the GOP went too far with their intrusion into his sex life. The public rejected the sanctimonious moralizing of the Republicans. Middle aged men having extra marital affairs is not shocking, nor is it something that most people believe is a public matter. Similarly, most people see this public spectacle of the Schiavo case for the political stunt that it is.

The problem is that Democrats failed last time to stake out for themselves the common sense argument with which people already agree and run on it. It's a terrible mistake because this is the very basis of the culture war.

These people want to dictate how you live your private life. They want to tell you who you can marry, how to raise your kids, what religion to practice (and you must practice it) and what "values" you must hold. And they want to use the strong arm of the government to do it. Sure, there are problems in our society. Yes we are living in a fast paced society in which it is difficult to raise children and the world is changing so quickly that it's hard to keep your balance sometimes. But most Americans don't wish for others to make decisions for them about how to live their day to day lives, regardless of the challenges. It's just not the American character.

That is not to say that we have no concept of the common good. Americans once came to a consensus that the government was the most democratic means of helping people to mitigate the pitfalls of capitalism and ensuring all of its citizens a fair shake. But we have never seen it as a means to legislate what people do behind closed doors or when making the most personal life decisions about their marriages, families or their own bodies. We believe that the government is far too clumsy a mechanism for such delicate matters. The individual reigns supreme over himself. All we ask is citizens pitch in for the national defense, the running of the government, social services to help the weakest among us and insure themselves against the risks they must take in a dynamic capitalistic system.

It's just this simple: The Republican party wants to tell you how to live your personal life while they systematically remove all government cooperation in ameliorating the risks this fast paced world creates. The Democrats want the government to leave you to make your own personal decisions while having it help you mitigate the social and economic risk our fast paced world creates. It is a stark choice. There is no reason we cannot begin to make the affirmative case for ourselves on this basis.

I don't know who it will be, but I think that the Democrats will win when they find a candidate who can speak in common sense terms to the American people about who we are and who they are. I think people are nervous about these guys but they don't know if we are any better. They are yearning for some clarity. If we provide it, they will come.



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digby 3/24/2005 09:29:00 AM |

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

 
Welcome To Gilead

Have you heard the scoop on "The Cause USA"? You know, the weirdos with the tape over their mouths that say "LIFE." Catch has the details.

The Cause USA is yet another organization churned out by the frothing evangelist Lou Engle, a man who has set up quite a cottage industry for himself by praying on teens (INTENTIONAL TYPO ALERT!) in the name of the you-know-who. I got dizzy googling all of the different organizations that have his name stamped on them, but he's behind The Call, Bound4LIFE and the Elijah Revolution (no, not that Elijah, silly bunny) for starters.

Go over there and read the whole thing. Unbelievable.

As James Wolcott points out, we aren't seeing any reporting being done on these fruitcakes because reporters believe that they have to be reverent toward all religious fanatics no matter what planet they are from.

Today I happened to hear Bob Franken "reporting" on the scene of the solemn procession in front of the hospice where demonstrators were attempting to bring Schiavo a cup of water, intending to be arrested. Franken, as hush-voiced as a golf commentator on the 18th hole awaiting a crucial putt, described one of the scenes of demonstrators stepping forward and being led away by sun-glassed police as "poignant."

The scene? A father being arrested with three of his children. Another child, age three, was spared, left to the custody of her mother. The father and three children--all three under the age of sixteen--were gently handcuffed and taken away in squad cars.

There was nothing "poignant" about this moment of togetherness. It was idiotic and irresponsible. If Dad wants to get arrested and spend the night behind bars with Otis the Town Drunk, fine, but don't drag the kids into it, particularly children that young. Let them stay home with gran'ma as Dad and Mom enjoy a second honeymoon in handcuffs. Franken's sentimentalizing of this pious photo-op is more proof that the so-called MSM is so cautious about being respectful of religion that it refuses to recognize the raw face of fanaticism even when it's filling the camera lens. Practically nothing is said about the backgrounds of the nutjob organizers of these sickly pseudo-events, leaving the impression that is simply People of Conscience converging on Florida to bear witness and catch some rays.

Working those refs really gets the job done. If they can put enough heat on the judiciary they'll own this country.



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digby 3/23/2005 08:51:00 PM |

 
Urban Legends

Reggie Graves, a student at Red Lake High School, said he was watching a movie about Shakespeare in class Monday when he heard the gunman blast his way past the metal detector at the school's entrance, killing a guard.

Then, in a nearby classroom, he heard the gunman say something to his friend Ryan: "He asked Ryan if he believed in God," Graves said. "And then he shot him."

*sigh*

Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains:

Thing is, Jeff Weise wasn’t imitating the actual Columbine shooters. He was imitating a pious urban legend (what back home we used to call a faith-promoting rumor) that sprang up in the wake of the Columbine shootings: that shooter Dylan Klebold asked Cassie Bernall whether she believed in God, and shot her when she said she did.

This story, in many variant versions, spread as fast as the internet would carry it. Cassie Bernall—a cute blonde who had a classic conversion-narrative history of turning to religion after dabbling in bush-league wickedness—was hailed as a martyr, and her story has since been repeatedly invoked to push the usual religious agendas. It’s been especially useful for WASP Chinos who want to think of themselves as being cruelly persecuted for their faith, but who are inconveniently short on evidence that this has ever happened.

Trouble is, the Cassie Bernall incident didn’t happen anything like the stories describe it, and the shooters weren’t targeting Christians. As has gradually become clear, the media coverage of Columbine was notably bad, and the Cassie Bernall story was the single most egregious example of slovenly journalism in the whole mess.

[...]

I’m sure Jeff Weise’s behavior will be trotted out as further proof that Christians are coming in for persecution. If I’m right, that claim will be purest codswallop. What this tragic incident really teaches us is that kids who are exposed to non-reality-based right-wing Christian propaganda may subsequently commit horrid acts of violence.

Yes. Despite the fact that Weise was evidently imitating an urban legend, I doubt very seriously that the press will report it that way or that the religious zealots will take the proper lesson from it. They are too busy trying to keep a dead woman's body alive right now to notice this latest example of their horrible persecution at the hands of liberals, but they will eventually. They must continually gather evidence that liberals are satanically omnipotent or they lose their raison d'etre.

This reminds me of an e-mail I got from one of my trolls:

Michael Jackson is a special case to be sure, but so are the 90 million in Africa who are expected to get AIDS. What is special is that both are, in large part, victims of liberal Democrats. It seems that neither was taught Republican family values and so both embarked into the brave new sexual world that conservatives had long warned against.

Yes, Jackson was born into a very odd and abusive family, and with incredible talent. He was given neither education, love, nor sensible religious values. And, lastly, he apparently was also born with a tendency to be an effeminate, homosexual, pedophile. But perhaps most importantly, he was born into a feminist, homosexual, liberal, tolerant culture which wanted to make room for the entire rich and sophisticated panoply of diverse lifestyles that the liberal mind could cook up. Johnny had two dads, Suzy had two Moms, Michael was boldly liberal androgynous, and it was ok that 10,000 years of human history had been instantly reversed, or so it seemed.

In fact, Mr. Jackson at one point was on the cover of Time Magazine where he was hailed as the liberal symbol of the "New Androgyny". None other than Elizabeth Taylor testified to his glorious combination of male and female qualities. A raft of feminists chimed in that he represented the death of traditional macho men and the dawn of a glorious, liberated new sexual future. Some men did seem to cringe, but mostly in intimidated silence, at the thought of lipstick and makeup. Ok, so the liberal attempt to rewrite human cultural history in an instant didn't quite work out as expected, and even liberals seem to have drawn the line at pedophilia, but other aspects of the attack on the traditional Republican family continued unabated. The American divorce rate is 50%, nearly 50% of all American children grow up in broken homes, and we are paralyzed on the world stage about seeming intolerant toward even Africa's genocidal sexual culture.

But now it may be time for liberals to punish Mr. Jackson for his excessive liberalism. It is hard though. When a priest in Boston (Father John Geoghan) was send to prison for pedophilia, guards noticed that other inmates developed a predilection for urinating on his bed. In time he was then transferred to another prison, for his own safety, whereupon he was promptly stomped to death by another group of very intolerant fellow inmates. Very sadly, there was almost no reaction anywhere to our inability to make the proscribed punishment fit the crime. If Mr. Jackson does go to jail we can only hope the state's proscribed punishment will be administered, and not usurped by an insane, blood thirsty, liberal mob.

A liberal mob? Yes, a liberal mob indeed, and Hillary Clinton knows this grotesque truth all to well and seems quite happy to exploit it. Convicts are liberal Democrats as certainly as soldiers are Republicans. Her very recent "make every vote count" legislation seeks to enfranchise ex-cons because she knows the concentration of liberalism among ex-cons is as great as it is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It seems liberalism is everywhere: in Michael Jackson, Africa, Hillary Clinton, and in prison. And everywhere it is a horror.

I don't have the energy to deconstruct this incomprehensible mish mash. (I'm intrigued by the fact that liberals are responsible for the fact that Africans are not taught Republican family values, but whatever.) I think this is a pretty good representation of the cognitive ability of many of the right wing, so it's pretty clear that we are up against something that appeals to reason are not going to affect. It would be really nice, however, if the media could refrain from enabling their persecution fantasies as they did with the Cassie Bernal story and this Terry Schiavo circus. I'm not holding my breath.



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digby 3/23/2005 06:37:00 PM |

 
Whose Family Is It Anyway?

One of my favorite readers (you know who you are) posited an interesting supposition in an e-mail last night that has been obliquely addressed today by Charles Krauthamer. My friend wondered if some of the lizard brain activity on the right surrounding this Schiavo issue might be wingnut parental reaction to seeing their children reject their conservative views. I know that it has been a bone of contention in my family for decades.

Krauthamer says this:

In this case, the loved ones disagree. The husband wants Terri to die; the parents do not. The Florida court gave the surrogacy to her husband, under the generally useful rule that your spouse is the most reliable diviner of your wishes: You pick your spouse and not your parents, and you have spent most of your recent years with your spouse and not your parents.

The problem is that although your spouse probably knows you best, there is no guarantee that he will not confuse his wishes with yours. Terri's spouse presents complications. He has a girlfriend, and has two kids with her. He clearly wants to marry again. And a living Terri stands in the way.

Now, all of this may be irrelevant in his mind. He may actually be acting entirely based on his understanding of his wife's wishes. And as she left nothing behind, the courts have been forced to conclude, on the basis of his testimony, that she would prefer to be dead.

That is why this is a terrible case. The general rule of spousal supremacy leads you here to a thoroughly repulsive conclusion. Repulsive because in a case where there is no consensus among the loved ones, one's natural human sympathies suggest giving custody to the party committed to her staying alive and pledging to carry the burden themselves.

First of all, a living Terri doesn't stand in the way. Michael Schiavo could have divorced her years ago if he just wanted to move on. He says that he believes he is carrying out his wife's wishes and will not abandon her to live as she said she would never have wanted to live. The rule of spousal "supremacy" does not lead to a repulsive conclusion at all, even to Krauthamer, who like 87% of the country says he would want his feeding tube removed if he were in Schiavo's position. In many people's minds the repulsive outcome is this ghoulish need to force this poor woman's body to carry on when it is clear that it is nothing more than an emotional crutch for her parents.

More importantly, I think that Krauthamer may be expressing the views of plenty of "conservative" people who want to control their children's lives long past the time they are legally and morally allowed to do so. That particular kind of control is often the default temperamental style of right wingers. They wish to control everything, particularly the people around them.

Krauthamer goes on to conclude that we have no way of knowing if Schiavo is really braindead (which puts him the same camp as the other Republican doctors who have discarded their fealty to reason for political reasons) but he also rightly says that the Florida courts upheld the law as we know it. His solution is to change the law:

There is no good outcome to this case. Except perhaps if Florida and the other states were to amend their laws and resolve conflicts among loved ones differently -- by granting authority not necessarily to the spouse but to whatever first-degree relative (even if in the minority) chooses life and is committed to support it. Call it Terri's law. It would help prevent our having to choose in the future between travesty and tragedy.

Essentially, he's saying that parents should have a veto over the spouse in these issues. (If it were the spouse who wanted to use extraordinary measure to keep the patient alive, current law would already suffice.) Therefore, he's promoting the idea that there are cases in which your "first degree relatives" have the power of life and death over you in circumstances where your spouse disagrees. What a concept.

I had a colleague years ago who was in a terrible car accident and severely brain damaged at the age of 33. He had been estranged for years from his abusive family and had been more or less raised by others to whom he was very close. He was quite wealthy and had left his surrogate family all of his money in his will. He was also unmarried and did not have a living will, although those who knew him said that he had expressed many times that he would not want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures. His estranged family were extremely religious and insisted that he be kept alive at all costs. Being "first degree" relatives they had the right to make that decision. I lost track of the situation after five years or so, but at that time he was still living in a persistent vegetative state. The money ran out and he was put on medicaid. I heard that his family rarely visited.

I know that this doesn't track exactly with the Schiavo case and that there could have been no legal rights conferred on the adopted family short of a durable power of attorney. It does, however, illustrate why it is important that adults be allowed to create their own families through marriage. For some people their experience with their parents is a joyful, lifelong relationship. But for others, adulthood marks the beginning of their freedom and separation from people who do not share their values. When they marry, their choice of spouse is often in conflict with their parent's wishes. If people truly value marriage they must also honor the fact that the people involved made a decision to create a new family when they did it. That new family is the one that must take precedence in situations like this.

My right wing dad doesn't come from the religious end of the spectrum; he's more of the old fashioned John Birch and racist variety. He doesn't go along with this Schiavo thing largely because he's had to face these decisions with my mother (who died of cancer) and now himself. Like many Republicans, he's remarkably pragmatic about these things. However, if I had married someone of another race or were gay, I think it is entirely possible that he would have easily stepped into a situation like this and demanded that he be allowed to make the decision. He would never have acknowledged that a person of whom he disapproved had the right to make decisions on his child's behalf. He's just that kind of man.

I would hate to think that my Dad (who, while he is a political abomination it should also be said has his good points) would have been given any legal standing to interfere in my family for any reason. That would go against my family values in the most important ways I can imagine.


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digby 3/23/2005 04:05:00 PM |

 
Just A Bunch Of Numbers

"Just last week, DeLay marshaled a budget resolution through the House of Representatives that would cut funding for Medicaid by at least $15 billion, threatening the quality of care for people like Terri Schiavo."

DeLay spokesman Dan Allen fired back: "The fact that they're tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality."

Yes, the medicaid budget has nothing at all to do with reality. It's not a "life issue" It's a process. Sorry. Carry on.



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digby 3/23/2005 03:51:00 PM |

 
Vomito

Via TBOGG

I've been waiting for this:

THE AGONY OF HOLY WEEK [Peter Robinson]
As Terri Schiavo is being starved to death, reports indicate, the successor of St. Peter is finding it impossible to hold down his food. A young woman, martyred by the culture of death. An old man who has poured out his life combatting it.

Sitio. I thirst.

Posted at 10:24 AM

TBOGG notes

Meanwhile, the Brides of Jesus ponder whether the the Little Black Cocktail Dress will be appropriate for both mourning and wake binge drinking.

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digby 3/23/2005 03:21:00 PM |

 
Living Forever


There are many fine articles all over the left blosphere about the social security trustee report written by people far more conversant with the details than I. So I'm not going to weigh in on the particulars except to note that I think I understand why the projected death rates have inexplicably gone down precipitously from last year to this.

Now that we are learning to respect the culture 'o life (as Dear Leader so endearingly puts it) we can expect that in the future no one will be allowed to have life support removed. The actuaries are simply factoring in the probability that many of the people who could be expected to shuffle off their mortal coil when their brains have liquified will be kept alive by artificial means for decades longer than expected just last year.

Let's just keep our fingers crossed that their private accounts do well in the market ...


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digby 3/23/2005 03:10:00 PM |

 
The Poor Dears

Atrios has already issued the call to action on the sensitive, delicate Democrats of the NDN who were swooning over the coarse, indecorous criticism they received for voting for the Bankruptcy bill, so I'll just send you there for the information.

However, I'd like to make one little suggestion. When you obstreperous partisans write your e-mails you might want to ask them what exactly they mean by this:

“The center [CAP] could have made the argument on the merits, but it chose to do so in a personal way,” said Schiff, one of roughly a dozen lawmakers who attended the meeting.

“The [NDC] wanted to say, ‘We’re all under the same flag here, and let’s not forget that,’” he said

[...]


“The unfortunate thing about the e-mail is that it questioned the good faith of the Democrats who support the bankruptcy bill. Whenever you question the good faith, that’s problematic,” he [Artur Davis(D-Ala)] said. “But I certainly don’t blame John for that e-mail. I don’t think it was authorized.”

“Certainly there is a disagreement over the bankruptcy bill,” he said.

(Oh my stars, it was rude to get so personal and all, wasn't it? How ill-bred.)

Without upsetting their fragile nerves, when you send your e-mails you might want to ask politely why any Democrat would think that the bankruptcy bill would be good for their constituents who are, after all, who they actually represent. Are they creating jobs by doing this? Are they creating a more dynamic economy? Why would it be "pro-business", as Democrats define that term, to enable just one business --- the credit card companies --- to reap ever higher profits while they charge usurious interest rates to average Americans?

If it isn't that they've whored themselves out to such an extent that they are now the credit card companies' bitches, (pardon my french!) what exactly is the reason they support it?



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digby 3/23/2005 09:40:00 AM |

 
Idle Hands

The Poorman has a copy of the House agenda for Wednesday. Our representatives are very busy these days.



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digby 3/23/2005 08:46:00 AM |

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

 
Visual Aids

Via Media Matters, here is a CNN chart showing the partisan differences in the Schiavo case.




WTF? Did Daryn Kagan have her boyfriend design that for her last night while she was changing into something more comfortable?


This isn't really surprising. Here is one issue about which the media seem to have absolutely no interest in what the public thinks. Usually, they'd be pulling polls out of every orifice to try to explain things. Not this time. Eric Boehlert discusses this in Salon:

Imagine how differently the televised debate would have unfolded over the past few days if journalists had simply done their job and asked Terri Schiavo's pro-life proponents why an overwhelming percentage of Americans disagree with them about this case. Indeed, polls taken over the past two years show that Americans are adamant that the spouse, and not the parents, should decide on a loved one's right to die. And in the past week, an overwhelming majority -- 87 percent -- of Americans polled by ABC News and the Washington Post said that if they were in the same state as Terri Schiavo, they too would want their feeding tube removed.

Just as every judge who has heard the Schiavo case so far has ruled in Michael's favor, so has every poll taken shown that the majority of the public supports the husband's position. In survey after survey dating from 2003 to the present, asked who should have the final right-to-die decision, the majority of Americans have answered: the spouse. From national polls (e.g., ABC News/Washington Post, 65-25; and Fox News, 50-31) to statewide polls (e.g., KING-TV in Washington, 67-19; and St. Petersburg Times in Florida, 75-13) to unscientific, interactive polls (e.g., CNN, 65-26; and MSNBC, 63-37), the response has always been the same. A 2003 poll by CNN/USA Today had a similar result: Eighty percent agreed that a spouse should be allowed to decide whether to end the life of a person in a persistent vegetative state.

Which is why it has been so startling to find so few mentions by major news outlets of the recent polls regarding the Schiavo controversy. For instance, last Friday at 11 a.m., a Fox News reporter referenced a poll from earlier this month conducted by Fox that found that a strong majority -- 59 to 24 percent -- would remove Terri Schiavo's feeding tube if they were her guardian. According to TVeyes, a digital, around-the-clock television monitoring service, that was the last time a Fox News reporter mentioned Fox's own poll. Then again, that's typical of Fox, which on Friday night's "Hannity and Colmes" invited six strident pro-life advocates to argue why Congress should intervene on Schiavo's behalf. No guests were booked to appear on the show and argue Michael Schiavo's side.

But perhaps even more peculiar are ABC News and the Washington Post, which, like Fox News, commissioned their own poll regarding the matter, and yet, again like Fox, seemed to downplay the findings once the story became a political one. On March 15, when ABC devoted its "Nightline" program to the Schiavo story, host Chris Bury informed the audience, "A new ABC News poll suggests that a clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, believe that husbands and wives should have the final say in family disputes over life support. Only 25 percent say parents should make that decision. And when asked, 'Would you want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo's condition?' an overwhelming number, 87 percent, said no."

The article goes on to show how the papers have ignored this finding as well. It might have been helpful, however, if certain pundits had their assistants and interns google the question because they might not sound so dumb. Here's what passes for insight on this issue from the media sages, Chris Matthews and Tim Russert last night:

RUSSERT: It becomes this symbol that becomes irresistible to the politicians and then irresistible to the media. And I‘m quite interested to see how this plays out with the voters, with the public. What are they thinking?

And, again, I go back to the point of, I‘m so intrigued as to why a Democratic senator wouldn‘t stand up and say, I don‘t know the specific details of Terri Schiavo. I do know it was heard in court after court, judge after judge in the state of Florida. But I also know that these kinds of issues and these kinds of decisions are being made every day in practically every hospital in every state in the union.

And all of us in our own families have probably been affected by this in one way, shape or form.

MATTHEWS: I can tell you, when you have an Alzheimer‘s victim in your family, like my mom, you know all about this territory. It‘s terrible territory. It‘s murky, morally murky in terms of medical science, and yet, in the end, in many of these cases, where there is a supreme almost diminution of human life, that eventually, you stop feeding, you stop hydrating. These cases happen all the time, as you said.

Let me ask you a question. This is a tough one. Are we living in an era where there is no middle ground?

RUSSERT: That is a great question, because life is filled with complexity and contradiction. We live in middle ground.

MATTHEWS: But these parties don‘t seem to operate in middle ground.

I was thinking, if somebody came on the floor last night and said, let‘s use some common sense here. If this woman is a vegetable, let‘s leave it up to her husband. If she is not, if she has emotional life, let‘s hold back and restrict it. But nobody seemed to be talking about the clinical questions.

RUSSERT: Yes. The phrase we all grew up with, middle America.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

RUSSERT: That represents to me where most Americans really are. They live in the middle. And, on some issues, they‘re conservative, right of center, some left of center. They‘re not rabid ideologues.

Russert wonders what people are thinking even though there have been numerous polls taken in just the last few days telling him that a vast majority oppose the Republican right wing on this issue. There's no splitting the difference. It's clear. Even a majority of Republicans oppose it, for gawds sake.

Matthews wonders why nobody makes the common sense argument in this case. But the majority of the AMERICAN PEOPLE already hold the common sense position that Tim and Chris are advocating and the Democrats clearly are on the side of that common sense position. And who is backing this macabre sideshow? The Religious Right and the craven Republican leadership.

Don't expect these bozos to know that, however. Or care. They are too busy toasting each other's pumpkinheaded faux-populism to even look into it. Convinced of their intimate connection with the common man, these millionaire pundits proclaim from on high that this is a fiery partisan issue and then bemoan the loss of comaraderie in the senate cloakroom. Apparently, they just don't realize that the common men and women on both sides of the political aisle hold them both in utter contempt. You want common ground? I think I've found one issue even Hinderocket and I can agree upon. Kumbaya.





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digby 3/22/2005 02:01:00 PM |

 
Competing Realities

Responding to Kevin Drum's post of the other night and mine which followed, Michael over at Reading A1 has posted an interesting piece extolling the virtues of partisan media and reminding us that this idea of a "objective media" is fairly new:

... to Kevin and Digby I say, stop worrying. A little historical perspective works wonders here. The simple truth is that, for most of its proper existence—from the beginnings of mass-distribution journalism in the mid-nineteenth century to roughly the start of World War II—the American press has been explicitly partisan. Newspapers were often the overt organs of political machines; when they weren't, they differentiated themselves for their audiences based on ideology and partisan identification. Competition was fierce, and was very often a competition over what facts were actually facts, and over what sorts of things ought to be reported. (Strangely enough, this situation was understood by no one during the period as some sort of "postmodern" hell. Nor was it considered a challenge to the very possibility of democratic self-government.) The neutral, "objective" press that we now think of as a natural property of democratic civil society is, broadly speaking, an invention of the corporate, managerial capitalism of the twentieth century, and tracks its growth.

As I've written previously, the elevation of the "objective" press to almost an institution of state, a semi-official fourth branch in the American constitutional system, is a phenomenon of the post-World War II period. Like so much of what we regard now as the natural order of political things, in other words, the constitutional place of our so-called mainstream press is an artifact of the Cold War. In its pose of objectivity, the corporate press had a central role to play during that struggle: both in the maintenance of the internal consensus necessary to confront the Soviet Union over a long period, and as a support for, and embodiment of, the claim of Western liberal democracy (over against Communism) to represent a universal, historically unconditioned solution to the question of political and social freedom.

I think this is largely true but I would take issue with a couple of things. I'm no expert, but my understanding is that the partisan press began to die out around the turn of the last century with the commercialization of the press and the big media barons (along with the general revulsion amongst the population at the corruption of the parties.) And I think that journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20's and 30's by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war. However, there is no doubt that there was a general disgust at the propaganda of both the fascist movement in Europe and the Soviet regime that propelled this new fetish for objectivity in the American press into the cold war consensus. And certainly our current lame definition of objectivity as "he said/she said" is thoroughly modern.

It appears to me that some of the conditions that created the concept of "Objective Journalism" in the first place have strongly re-emerged. The right is not running a partisan press. It is running a corrupt partisan propaganda machine based on the techniques of public relations and paid for by big money interests. That's why I was a bit rueful in my piece the other day. I don't particularly want to be part of a propaganda machine. I have no problem being a fiery partisan and working hard to persuade people to my side. But outright lying for the cause turns my stomach. And that's what the other side does.

But at this point I am resigned to the idea that we are going to have a partisan media battle for the forseeeable future so I'm not fighting it. It may, as Michael suggests, turn out to be a good thing in the long run, revitalizing our political system and getting people engaged. In the meantime, however, I would very much like the allegedly non-aligned media to come out from behind their absurd notion that they are objective because "both sides complain so they must be doing something right" and simply report when people are not presenting the facts accurately. That's all I want. When you have the government, business and the radical right consistently cooking the truth you really need somebody, somewhere who can be an honest broker of the facts. The mainstream press is the logical institution to do that, but they seem to have lost their ability to sort through the right's sophisticated propaganda.

Perhaps if they just concentrated on the simple reporting of the who, what, when where and get that right, we partisans could fill in the "why." Without that, I doubt very seriously that our modern society can rationally cope with what is shaping up not as competing political visions but competing realities. If that continues I think we are paving the way for demagoguery to become the default mode of political persuasion.



Update: Booyah. Read this superb post by Avedon Carol on this subject. I think she needs to be put on the rolodex for one of these media panels, stat.



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digby 3/22/2005 09:36:00 AM |

 
The Big Baby

Tom Delay breaks down and has a good old fashioned cry:

One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

"This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," Mr. DeLay said.

Mr. DeLay complained that "the other side" had figured out how "to defeat the conservative movement," by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that "the whole syndicate" was "a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in."

Oh, boo fucking hoo. He's crawled into bed with a severely disabled woman for the sole purpose of soaking up some of the sympathy people naturally feel toward her. In fact, her whole purpose in this is to show how the liberals are trying to destroy Tom Delay.

These radical Republicans are the tough guys who are the only ones with the guts to protect our country from the bad guys? People like this whining little baby of a man who is openly using a braindead woman as cover for his massive corruption and misdeeds? Gawd help us.



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digby 3/22/2005 08:49:00 AM |

Monday, March 21, 2005

 
Judgment Day

What must underlie petitioners’ entire federal assault on the Florida election procedures is an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed. Otherwise, their position is wholly without merit. The endorsement of that position by the majority of this Court can only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land. It is confidence in the men and women who administer the judicial system that is the true backbone of the rule of law. Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision. One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.

From Justice John Paul Stevens' dissent in Bush v Gore

That paragraph was often cited in the wake of Bush v Gore as criticism of the Supreme Court for ruling as it did. It was, but if you read it carefully you see that he was also saying that the petitioners were perpetuating the belief that the Florida state judges could not be impartial. (This despite the fact that the Florida courts had ruled in favor of Bush in the procedings a number of times.) This bothered Stevens because it undermined the nation's faith in the justice system everywhere, particularly the belief that judges would uphold the rule of law as impartially as possible.

Here's William Schneider on CNN:

PHILLIPS: All right. Bill, you've come out, you've told me, look, this is all political. Everything that we're observing here is political. You brought up a very interesting point, and that is the continuation of these grievances against judges. How does that play into this?

SCHNEIDER: Well, we saw signs last night in Florida among the people who were supporting the congressional action. They said stop renegade judges. They said starve the judicial system. This case, which was a case of a state court ordering that the federal -- the feeding tube be removed, this is the latest in a long series of grievances that go back more than 30 years, to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 allowing abortion rights, giving them constitutional protection.

Religious conservatives and other conservatives have protested judicial activism for all these decades on what issues? Abortion, school prayer, sex education, pornography, same-sex marriage, the mandated teaching of evolution, and now, of course, the issue of end of life decisions and assisted suicide. Again and again and again, they see the judiciary as power-grabbing activists, and most importantly, violating their own personal religious liberties. And this is the latest in that -- in those grievances that have been brewing for decades.

Nice frame old Bill gives the Republicans there.

Clearly, this entire line of argument is just trash. There could have been no more of an "activist" judicial act than the Supreme Court intervening in a presidential election. There can be nothing more activist than members of congress violating the separation of powers as they did this past week-end. Courts are called activist when they hand down decisions that the wingnuts don't like. States rights are a principle that the wingnuts hold dear when they don't hold federal power. Now they are holding midnight sessions of congress to overturn 19 state judges and interfere in people's most personal decisions. Please.

Sam Rosenfeld explains:

...the liberal critique of how Republicans have handled this issue has less to do with “federalism” than it does with the separation of powers and the rule of law. The sustained ideological assault against an independent judiciary -- components of which include this weekend’s shenanigans and the current congressional majority’s zealous efforts to strip the courts of jurisdiction over any number of partisan agenda items -- is itself only one facet of a pervasive tendency of modern Republicans to disregard wholesale the integrity of codified processes and the autonomy of institutions, to change the rules and to politicize all conflict in the service of totally unprincipled and narrow political objectives.

[...]

As far as I can tell, conservative advocates in this fight haven’t even bothered to engage these kinds of questions -- they just don’t care. An individual woman in Florida must be “saved” by any means necessary and that’s all there is to say about the matter. Thus legislation is passed that doesn’t even bother to offer a forward-looking rule change in the process by which these kinds of decisions can be adjudicated in the future. (Instead, the action should be considered non-binding and narrowly targeted at the specific case in question -- sound familiar?)

We’re a law-based society. Rules matter. Precedents matter. Separation of powers and institutional autonomy matter. To the Republicans in power and the conservative intelligentsia lending legitimacy to their governance, apparently, such things don’t matter at all. Congressional Republicans capped a week during which they definitively demonstrated that small-government fiscal conservatism as a guiding legislative principle is completely dead by whipping up this grotesque circus of ill-informed hysteria and rampant trampling of rules and procedural limits. There’s nothing “hypocritical” in pointing out the apparently direct relationship between the ideological bankruptcy of Republican governance and their inability to recognize any limits on their actions.

I wonder if judges throughout the country realize that they must now be whores for the right wing or they will be slandered for being unpardonably biased any time they rule against the interests of radical Republicans? Do they know that any judgment that differs from Randall Terry's or Tom DeLay's is no longer attributable to a difference in legal opinion but is instead considered a reflection of their dishonesty and corruption? Perhaps many of them don't mind being a rubber stamp for Grover Norquist and Jerry Falwell. It certainly makes the job easier.

I would imagine that some judges, however, might just think that they represent one of the branches of government and have a duty to uphold the rule of law even when Steve Forbes doesn't like the result. (It isn't just the religious freaks who want their way with this.) You would certainly think that conservatives would think it's a good idea for the nation to have some faith in the judicial system and not assume that every judge who rules in ways that certain people don't agree with is a hack for a political agenda. Sometime soon Republican legal scholors and judges may come to rue the day they let a radical vocal minority have this kind of power over their party. They gave away their own in the process.



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digby 3/21/2005 03:12:00 PM |

 
Check Their Affiliations

I've been thinking that I'm going to have to ask whether a doctor is a Republican or a Democrat before I trust my health to him or her from now on. Doctors who vote for Republicans obviously have no fealty to science or reason or they wouldn't vote for them. Some, like Bill Frist blatantly violate medical ethics for political reasons:

Congressional intervention in Michael and Terri Schiavo's personal medical tragedy is unprecedented and dangerous. But Frist's comments are especially shocking. As a surprised and concerned Laurie Zoloth, director of bioethics for the Center for Genetic Medicine at Northwestern University, noted of Doctor Frist's statements, "It is extremely unusual -- and by a non-neurologist, I might add. There should be no confusion about the medical data, and that's what was so surprising to me about Dr. Frist disagreeing about her medical status."

This is not Frist's first abuse of his medical background for partisan political leverage. In December, the Senator tried to defend a federally-funded abstinence program which claimed that HIV/AIDS could be contracted through tears and sweat. Pressed by ABC News host George Stephanopoulos, Frist was forced to recant. “It would be very hard,” he said.

Dr Dave Weldon (R-Florida) said last night (video from Crooks and Liars):

"By my medical definition, she was not in a persistenct vegitative state based on my review of the videos, my tlaking to the family and my discussing the case with one of the neurologists who examined her."

This may explain why the Republican party is so anxious to eliminate medical malpractice laws. Republican doctors seem to flout science and medical ethics quite regularly. Caveat Emptor.

This is where we are today. Republican doctors are willing to say and do anything to protect their political power, including enabling pre-modern, unscientific superstition in medical matters. Tomorrow, we will see this:

washingtonpost.com
Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens

Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution.

The proposals typically stop short of overturning evolution or introducing biblical accounts. Instead, they are calculated pleas to teach what advocates consider gaps in long-accepted Darwinian theory, with many relying on the idea of intelligent design, which posits the central role of a creator.

The growing trend has alarmed scientists and educators who consider it a masked effort to replace science with theology. But 80 years after the Scopes "monkey" trial -- in which a Tennessee man was prosecuted for violating state law by teaching evolution -- it is the anti-evolutionary scientists and Christian activists who say they are the ones being persecuted, by a liberal establishment.

[...]

Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush's No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to "the full range of scientific views that exist."

"Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy," Santorum said in an interview. "My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had."

Although the new strategy speaks of "teaching the controversy" over evolution, opponents insist the controversy is not scientific, but political. They paint the approach as a disarming subterfuge designed to undermine solid evidence that all living things share a common ancestry.

[...]

The efforts are not limited to schools. From offices overlooking Puget Sound, Meyer is waging a careful campaign to change the way Americans think about the natural world. The Discovery Institute devotes about 85 percent of its budget to funding scientists, with other money going to public action campaigns.

Discovery Institute raised money for "Unlocking the Mystery of Life," a DVD produced by Illustra Media and shown on PBS stations in major markets. The institute has sponsored opinion polls and underwrites research for books sold in secular and Christian bookstores. Its newest project is to establish a science laboratory.

Meyer said the institute accepts money from such wealthy conservatives as Howard Ahmanson Jr., who once said his goal is "the total integration of biblical law into our lives," and the Maclellan Foundation, which commits itself to "the infallibility of the Scripture."

"We'll take money from anyone who wants to give it to us," Meyer said. "Everyone has motives. Let's acknowledge that and get on with the interesting part."

Meyer said he and Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman devised the compromise strategy in March 2002 when they realized a dispute over intelligent design was complicating efforts to challenge evolution in the classroom. They settled on the current approach that stresses open debate and evolution's ostensible weakness, but does not require students to study design.

The idea was to sow doubt about Darwin and buy time for the 40-plus scientists affiliated with the institute to perfect the theory, Meyer said. Also, by deferring a debate about whether God was the intelligent designer, the strategy avoids the defeats suffered by creationists who tried to oust evolution from the classroom and ran afoul of the Constitution.

"Our goal is to not remove evolution. Good lord, it's incredible how much this is misunderstood," said William Harris, a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City medical school. "Kids need to understand it, but they need to know the strengths and weaknesses of the data, how much of it is a guess, how much of it is extrapolation."

Schiavo, abortion, "the culture of life" and this teaching of creationism is all of a piece. And Republican scientists, doctors and intellectuals are enabling this for reasons that are very difficult to understand in any way but a lust for personal gain.

I will not be patronizing any Republicans who need to rely on science to do their job. Clearly, they are aligning themselves with the forces of superstition over reason and can no longer be trusted. Why would you ever put your life into the hands of someone who would sell out their professional ethics and their intellectual integrity for the sole purpose of appeasing a bunch of religious zealots?

Update: Sam Rosenfeld on TAPPED links to Amy Sullivan's terrific piece on this subject. Read both links. Republican doctors are dangerous to your health.


Dr Weldon's name corrected.
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digby 3/21/2005 10:41:00 AM |

 
Bold Leadership

Unconfirmed Sources reports that The President will name convicted murder Charles Manson to head the government's Office for Victims of Crime. The appointment, yet another in a string of bold personal choices by the President, should have Manson installed in his new office in time for National Crime Victims' Rights Week, April 10-16, 2005.

Party_like_its_2004 on bartcop forum got the response from the Democrats:

Joe Biden: I was overjoyed when I heard the news. Chuck is a solid choice for the position. I've known Chas for years and I don't know anyone who has a longer or more distinguished career in the criminal area. And talk about management skills - WOW! The terrorist have got to know that we've got some terrifying people working for us too and Charles Manson is the man for the job.

Joe Lieberman: Bottom line, I like it when the President kisses me. It makes me all tingly inside.

Hillary Clinton: Crime is certainly an area where we need to roll up our sleeves and do what the American people want us to do. I stand by the President and share his concern about crime in America. I don't always agree with his choices, but I also don't always say WHAT I disagree with when I disagree with the choices that I am disagreeing with. At the same time, I STRONGLY stand with the President in his RIGHT to make the choices that he makes. Even so, I would like to inject a note of criticism in this particular choice which I am not going to explain further at this time.

John Kerry: President Bush has made an excellent choice for this position which I strongly disagree with. Its wrong for America.

Harry Reid: Look, I've got work to do, so please, just shut up.

Howard Dean: Shut your damn pie-holes. None of you is going to be President - got it? AEEEHAAAAAA!!

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digby 3/21/2005 09:43:00 AM |

 
War Porn

Following up the dog story below, here's another one about our new cineaste army in Iraq:

When Pfc. Chase McCollough went home on leave in November, he brought a movie made by fellow soldiers in Iraq. On his first night back at his parents' house in Texas, he showed the video to his fiancee, family and friends.

This is what they saw: a handful of American soldiers filmed through the green haze of night-vision goggles. Radio communication between two soldiers crackles in the background before it's drowned out by a heavy-metal soundtrack.

"Don't need your forgiveness," the song by the band Dope begins as images unfurl: armed soldiers posing in front of Bradley fighting vehicles, two women covered in black abayas walking along a dusty road, a blue-domed mosque, a poster of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. Then, to the fast, hard beat of the music — "Die, don't need your resistance. Die, don't need your prayers" — charred, decapitated and bloody corpses fill the screen.

"It's like a trophy, something to keep," McCullough, 20, said back at his cramped living quarters at Camp Warhorse near Baqubah. "I was there. I did this."

I don't blame these dumb kids. They are taught to have these attitudes. Maybe it's a natural consequence of being in a war zone. But war supporters really need to stop pretending that it isn't the usual exercise in cruelty and brutality because it is. You can dress up this "liberation" to make Americans feel good about their goodness all you want, but it's just another violent, dehumanizing war of domination. Certainly, that soldier thinks it is. And he's proud of it.

Via Gonzography.



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digby 3/21/2005 08:45:00 AM |

Sunday, March 20, 2005

 
There Is Opposition

Majikthise calls for a Schiavo blogswarm. Click over there for the info.

I'm inclined to agree. Peggy Noonan and her macabre cronies are saying that there is no opposition to this travesty. We should probably cure the media of that notion.

I'm sure they'll be surprised that Peggy doesn't speak for the whole country. They always are.



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digby 3/20/2005 08:05:00 PM |

 
Taming The Beast Within


The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
- Thomas Babington Macaulay, History of England

Hi my name is M. D. formaly of A TRP 1-10 CAV 4ID and while in Iraq we had a sport of killing dogs whenever the Iraqis werent shooting us. So when I shot this one at about 50 yards with my M4 and it ran yelping to lower ground, we had to finish it so my friends and I went to it and started shooting it. I ve never seen a dog take as many shots to the head at least 4 as this one did and then after we thought it was dead we dug a hole and when I picked it up with the shovel it came back to life, so we shot it a couple more times....its pretty funny."

Click here to see the sickening footage.

But why shouldn't a simple soldier like this do such things? Our government is, after all, officially condoning torture for humans. Law professors are arguing for cruel and unusual punishment because of the emotional satisfaction it will give family members of the victims. Surely our society cannot then say that torturing a stray dog is wrong. How could it be?



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digby 3/20/2005 03:03:00 PM |

 
Here's Your Baseball Scandal

WTF?:

Last June, the Boston Red Sox chartered an executive jet to help their manager make a quick visit home in the midst of the team's championship season.

But what was the very same Gulfstream--owned by one of the Red Sox's partners, but presumably without the team's logo on its fuselage--doing in Cairo on Feb. 18, 2003?

Perhaps by coincidence, Feb. 18, 2003, was the day an Islamic preacher known as Abu Omar, who had been abducted in Italy the previous day and forced aboard a small plane, also arrived at the Cairo airport.

Omar, whose given name is Osama Nasr Mostafa Hassan, was imprisoned by the Egyptians and, he claims, brutally tortured. The public prosecutor in Milan, Armando Spataro, who is investigating Omar's apparent kidnapping, expects to file charges within a few days, according to an Italian official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Spataro made headlines last month when, attempting to identify the plane that transported Omar from Italy to Egypt, he served a warrant on the Italian commander of the air base at Aviano, Italy, which is home to the U.S. Air Force's 31st Fighter Wing.

Spataro declines to say whether the Gulfstream that landed in Cairo, which bore the tail number N85VM, departed from Aviano around the time of Omar's disappearance.

But Federal Aviation Administration records obtained by the Tribune show that Gulfstream N85VM has been many places around the world that the Red Sox have almost certainly never gone.

Between June 2002 and January of this year, the Gulfstream made 51 visits to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, site of the U.S. naval base where more than 500 terrorism suspects are behind bars.

During the same period, the plane recorded 82 visits to Washington's Dulles International Airport as well as landings at Andrews Air Force Base, Md., outside the capital and the U.S. air bases at Ramstein and Rhein-Main in Germany.

The plane's flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.

In case you are wondering, this isn't the same plane that was offered to John Kerry's legal team on election night. This plane is owned by another Red Sox partner named Philip H. Morse. Morse, the wealthy former owner of a catheter company, is listed as the sole officer and director of a company called Assembly Point which Dun and Bradstreet describes as a "religious organization" that is somehow involved with "churches, temples and shrines."

Now this seems like it would be a good topic on which the congress could hold fruitful "baseball" hearings. They could call Curt "Bush shill" Schilling in just for fun and harrass him about whether he knows anything about his pals in the Bush administration using one of the Red Sox owners' private planes to transport suspects to countries where they can be tortured with impunity. And if he refuses to appear maybe the committee could charter the plane to take him to one of those countries that have been so helpful to us to see if he changes his mind.

This is another of those juicy stories that just eludes the mainstream media. I know they write a story or two here and there. But, it never gets the kind of attention that these right wing soap operas get.

Let's look at the nut here. The US government appears to be using one of the world series winning Boston Red Sox's jet to kidnap and transport suspected terrorists all over the world to be tortured.

This isn't a big story. Scott Peterson, however, is. Problem #7,556 with the corporate media.




Hat tip to samela

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digby 3/20/2005 01:30:00 PM |

 
The Days Of Our Lives

Tom DeLay of Texas says:

"Mrs. Schiavo's life is not slipping away - it is being violently wrenched from her body in an act of medical terrorism," DeLay said. "Mr. Schiavo's attorney's characterization of the premeditated starvation and dehydration of a helpless woman as 'her dying process' is as disturbing as it is unacceptable. What is happening to her is not compassion - it is homicide. She doesn't need to die, and as long as Terri Schiavo can breathe and her supporters can pray, we will not rest."

By now most people who read liberal blogs are aware that George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are also aware that Republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug (no pun intended) on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country.

Those of us who read liberal blogs also understand that that the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far.

Those of us who read liberal blogs are aware that the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming.

And those of us who read liberal blogs also know that this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative.

Those who don't read liberal blogs, on the other hand, are seeing a spectacle on television in which the news anchors repeatedly say that the congress is "stepping in to save Terry Schiavo" mimicking the unctuous words of Tom Delay as they grovel and leer at the family and nod sympathetically at the sanctimonious phonies who are using this issue for their political gain.

This is why we cannot trust the mainstream media. Most people get their news from television. And television is presenting this issue as a round the clock one dimensional soap opera pitting the "family", the congress and the church against this woman's husband and the judicial system that upheld Terry Schiavo's right and explicit request that she be allowed to die if extraordinary means were required to keep her alive. The ghoulish infotainment industry is making a killing by acceding once again to trumped up right wing sensationalism.

This issue gets to the essence of the culture war. Shall the state be allowed to interfere in the most delicate, complicated personal matters of life, death and health because a particular religious constituency holds that their belief system should override each individual's right to make these personal decisions for him or herself. And it isn't the allegedly statist/communist/socialist left that is agitating for the government to tell Americans how they must live and how they must die.

One of the things that we need to help America understand is that there is a big difference between the way the two parties perceive the role of government in its citizens personal lives. Democrats want the government to collect money from all its citizens in order to deliver services to the people. The Republicans want the government to collect money from working people in order to dictate individual citizen's personal decisions. You tell me which is the bigger intrusion into the average American's liberty?


Via Julia we find real life:

The Friday lunch crowd at Jimmy's Eastside Diner was starting to dwindle. Jerita Collins, a waitress everyone calls Shorty, was carrying several plates when she noticed the television behind the counter airing a Washington, D.C., news conference featuring House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

''It is now 1 o'clock on the East Coast, the time preordained by a Florida state judge to allow for denial of food and water to Terri Schiavo,'' the Texas Republican declared. ``That act of barbarism can be and must be prevented.''

Across the bottom of the screen CNN noted a judge temporarily stopped Terri Schiavo's feeding tube from being removed because Congress had issued subpoenas for the brain-damaged woman to appear in Washington.

As DeLay spoke, Shorty stared at the TV and shook her head. ''This is wrong,'' she said. ``This is incredibly wrong. How can they interfere like this?''

Shorty, 57, a waitress at the Biscayne Boulevard diner for 35 years, should know.

''Two years ago,'' she said, ``I had to make the same decision for my son. It was the hardest thing I ever did. You don't plan on your children dying before you do. You don't even want to think about it.

''But if you love your child,'' she continued, tears welling up in her eyes, ``sometimes you have to let them go.''

Shorty's son, Jerry, was 36 when he died in 2003 from pancreatic cancer. He wasn't married. He had one child who was a minor, so the decisions fell to her.

''Toward the end, he didn't want to be kept alive,'' she said. ``But I wanted him to live. I didn't want him to go. The hospital, they had to tie his hands down so that he couldn't pull his own tubes out.

'After a while, I realized he was ready. I told him how much I loved him and I didn't want him to continue to suffer because of me. He couldn't talk anymore, so he wrote me a note. It said, `Forgive me.' And I looked at it and I said, 'For what? For dying?' And he shook his head yes.''

He died a few days later, on Dec. 29, from a heart attack. By then, Shorty had signed directives for her son's care, including instructions not to resuscitate him if his heart stopped.

On the TV, another politician talked about saving Schiavo.

''These politicians,'' Shorty hissed, her hands trembling with emotion. ``They're just playing a game. It's not about her anymore, it's about them getting what they want. It's about them wanting to look good in front of the people who are pro-life. I'm against abortion, too, but I believe each person has their own right to decide. You know in your heart what is right for you and you have to live with any decision you make.''

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digby 3/20/2005 10:45:00 AM |

Saturday, March 19, 2005

 
Self Defense

Kevin Drum has an interesting post up regarding this article by Dana Milbank in which Milbank decries a "postmodern morass where there are no such things as facts, only competing perceptions of reality." It's nice that Milbank's finally noticed, but really, this has been in the works for a long time.

Kevin agrees that this is unhealthy and sees signs that the left is beginning to follow the right's example and only tune in to its chosen media. I agree with him, but I really think it's unavoidable. For the left it's largely a matter of self-defense. And it's because of what Milbank says here:

Would liberals really favor the absence of a press that calls into questions the Bush administration's claims about Iraq's weapons and ties to al Qaeda? Would conservatives really favor the absence of a press that brought the Clinton scandals to light?

That Milbank continues to see these things as being equivalent is the problem.

The Clinton scandals were contrived political character assassination that were investigated to the tune of 70 million dollars by numerous Republican congressional committees and Republican special prosecutors and WERE PROVED TO BE WITHOUT MERIT!!! The mainstream press were not muckrakers, they were willing whores and shills for a partisan agenda. They obsessed over a decades old land deal, the firing of some employees in the travel office, some bozo in the basement reading FBI files and Clinton's sex life among many other trivial charges. None of them came to anything. These facts are clear. If there is any doubt in anyone's mind that the right wing was willing to do anything to cripple Clinton's presidency one need only remember that they IMPEACHED him over a consensual extra-marital affair that he lied about in a trumped up sexual harrassment case that was thrown out of court.

Now, I know that official Washington remains upset that the Clintons allegedly came in and "trashed" the place, but I really think it's a bit much to compare that pathetic tabloid witchhunt with the uninvestigated, officially sanctioned lies that got us into a WAR.

I can't speak for everyone on the left, but this is why I cannot trust the mainstream media. It's not because they are biased. I don't know what the individual reporters' politics are and I don't care. I mistrust the media because they get played over and over and over again by the right wing and keep coming back for more. I don't know if they are stupid or weak, but it's clear to me that they are addicted to spoonfed puerile right wing generated gossip and completely unwilling to pursue serious Republican scandals beyond a perfunctory story or two before they move on to the next atrocity. (And I mean right wing generated gossip because it's clear that they will not breathlessly pursue a Republican sex scandal with equal fervor even when it features a gay prostitute in the conservative White House press room who plastered pictures of his erections all over the internet.)

I recognize that a lot of this is because there is no partisan left wing media that can pound away at the stories that are damaging to Republicans thereby keeping the mainstream media focused and aware of the drumbeat. Indeed that is why many of us are advocating that we create such a thing. It's been clear for more than a decade that the mainstream media responds almost unthinkingly to the deafening sounds of the right wing noise machine and now seems paralyzed by the power the Republican establishment exerts over it. They simply are incapable of speaking truth to power and employing the kind of skepticism that is required if this body politic is to be healthy.

I struggle with this issue as Kevin does because I really don't want to have two competing discourses out there. It's a risky and frightening thing to do and I honestly don't know where it will lead. But I think we have no choice but to enter this fray and just hope that we can keep things straight in our own minds. I know that I am not crazy. I know what I am seeing with my own eyes. This bullshit by Frank Luntz is not something out of my fevered imagination. Neither was the stage managed tabloid circus that I watched with stunned disbelief in the 90's. Or the jingoistic spectacle that led up to this misbegotten war in Iraq or the continuing glassy-eyed servility that they show toward this administration every single day. This stuff is really happening.

As it stands, we have a Republican alternate version of reality and a mainstream press that is apparently impotent to take it on with any real zeal. I don't know what else to do but create our own discourse that hopefully provides the flaccid media with another point of view that they can then flog with equal fervor. I hope that our discourse is more honest and more true, but I cannot guarantee it. All I know is that we have to pull on the other end of the ideological rope or we are all going to be dragged off the cliff together.



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digby 3/19/2005 07:58:00 PM |

 
Blogcontroversy

I was busy yesterday and didn't weigh in on Matt Stoller and Sean Paul Kelley's open letter to bloggers regarding the Brookings panel. Since the letter was inspired by a post of mine and furthered by an e-mail from a reader of mine, I feel that I should weigh in.

On a personal note, I must make it clear that I wasn't agitating for a spot on the panel. Believe me, I have a voice made for writing. My original comments were more of an amused observation of the thickheadedness of the DC establishment about blogging rather than pique.

After reading Kelley and Stoller's letter, along with comments to my post and those by Gilliard and Armstrong, I realize that I should probably address this issue a bit more seriously. There seems to be a controversy developing about whether bloggers should even appear in the MSM at all. My feeling is that if they are good at it, of course they should. Any chance we have to force new liberal voices out into the ether is a good thing.

Since blogging seems to be the pet rock of 2005, we should take advantage of that opportunity to get some new, articulate people out there. Who knows when we will get the chance to breathe some new life into the punditocrisy again. If you appear in public and do well, there is a good chance you will be asked to speak again. If you can bring some bloggy stimulation in the form of edgy, fearless informed commentary, you could become a valued television speaker. Gawd knows we need some. I'm awfully tired of being represented by colorless, frightened journalists who are presumed to be liberal because the wingnuts say they are.

I was extremely impressed with John Aravosis of Americablog, for instance, in his television appearances. He took his blog personality right on TV with him, showing no sense of the cliquish, beltway insiderism you see so often. Instead, he challenged the conventional wisdom and took the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go. I don't know if others would have the same presence, but I sense something refreshing in his approach that I think may stem from his immersion in the combative world of blogging.

In a different way, I thought that Peter Daou's appearance on the Crowley/Reagan show yesterday was effective. He was called upon to do a round-up style spot and took the opportunity to mention the Volokh brouhaha (and, yes, gave me a plug --- thank you Peter.) This is important because Volokh is often mentioned for a federal judgeship, so its nice to have this statement (since retracted) disseminated. Moreover, a segment like Daou's is a way for the liberal blog arguments to seep into the MSM. Daou was attractive and articulate and if someone like him were to have a regular segment it could offset the Jeff Jarvis monopoly which slants the coverage to topics of interest and advantage to the right thus reinforcing the Republican CW tilt of the media in general.

The establishment is pretending to be bimbos about blogging as a way of covering for their ignorance. We have seen a pattern emerge in which they excuse the rightward bias of their blogger choices by saying that their spot/panel/conference isn't really about politics, it's about "new media" so balance isn't required. The logical conclusion I draw from that is that the only new media these people read is gossip and rightwing blogs. We should not let them get away with this argument. When you choose political bloggers you are making a political statement in itself. When only rightwing blogs are representing new media then new media is perceived as right wing. These bloggers are unabashed partisans and to ignore that fact is to ignore their purpose.

Furthermore, liberal and rightwing bloggers see the blogosphere differently, interact differently and deal with their parties differently. If you think that "new media" can be explained without looking into how the two political spheres approach politics in entirely different ways then you are missing the story. The right blogosphere is an extension of the right wing message machine and the Republican party. The left is a grassroots political constituency of its own. Exclude the liberal bloggers from this discussion and you are missing the most important new development in the new media.

I am glad to see that the action taken yesterday resulted in the inclusion of two excellent bloggers in the Brookings discussion, Laura Rozen and Ruy Teixeira. I'm of the same mind as Atrios that "live blogging" is a little bit dumb --- there's really no good reason to have people writing down their comments at a live event. Blogging isn't a "live" medium. But whatever. It's good news that smart liberals get their names into rolodexes so that when somebody wants a "blogger" the only name that comes to mind isn't Andrew Sullivan, Wonkette or Hinderocket.

The most important thing about this brouhaha isn't really defending the honor of the blogosphere or explaining why it is innovative and different. This matters because liberals need to take every opportunity to get the word out any way we possibly can --- not for the sake of blogging but for the sake of the country. If articulate bloggers can worm their way onto panels or TV shows or radio shows because blogging is the flavor of the week then they should do it. Whatever it takes to get our views heard, we should do it. Always.



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digby 3/19/2005 01:10:00 PM |

 
Family Schamily

Ok, everybody. It's time to flood the news outlets with the talking points that Linda Douglas reported last night. The senate is holding a prime time Saturday sideshow to vote on this Schiavo issue and the networks should be FORCED to report that the Republicans are pulling this garbage for political reasons. Via Oliver Willis and NoMoreMisterNiceBlog here is the report:

ABC News has obtained talking points circulated among Republican senators explaining why they should vote to intervene in the Schiavo case. Among them: "This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited..." and "This is a great political issue... this is a tough issue for Democrats."

This circus is being produced purely for the benefit of the right to life zealot base of the Party for political reasons. They admit it. Here's Peggy Nooner:

Here's both a political and a public-relations reality: The Republican Party controls the Senate, the House and the White House. The Republicans are in charge. They have the power. If they can't save this woman's life, they will face a reckoning from a sizable portion of their own base. And they will of course deserve it.There is a passionate, highly motivated and sincere group of voters and activists who care deeply about whether Terri Schiavo is allowed to live.

This should concentrate their minds.

So should this: America is watching. As the deadline for removal of Mrs. Schiavo's feeding tube approaches, the story has broken through as never before in the media.

[...

The supporters of Terri Schiavo's right to continue living have fought for her heroically, through the courts and through the legislatures. They're still fighting. They really mean it. And they have memories.

Nice little party you have here boys. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.

Gosh it seems like only yesterday that Peggy was complaining about anti-smoking laws because of their pernicious intrusion into people's liberty. I sure can't wait to hear another lecture on how Republicans just want the government out of our lives. I need for Peggy to tell me again how government can't solve the problem, it is the problem. I keep forgetting how that's supposed to work. Is it that the government is only interfering if it charges Republicans for the services that Republicans so willingly use? Is that the problem? Because it sure looks as if the only thing people like Peggy don't want the government to do is send them a bill. Other than that it's just fine if the Republicans use the strong arm of the law to step right into the living rooms, bedrooms and hospital rooms of American citizens because a "sizable portion of their ... base" doesn't approve of the difficult moral decisions that they make. What a very interesting view of limited government these people have. What a twisted, greed-soaked view of freedom.

On the other side of this debate, one would assume there is an equally well organized and passionate group of organizations deeply committed to removing Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. But that's not true. There's just about no one on the other side. Or rather there is one person, a disaffected husband who insists Terri once told him she didn't want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures.

I don't know why she thinks this, but it clearly isn't true. It may be that there isn't a group of blindered fetishists who have devoted their pathetic lives to interfering in the intimate personal lives of their fellow humans as the pro-life people have, but there are millions of people who have had to face these situations and who have strong opinions about it. Many, many of them have decided to let their loved one die a natural death rather than live as they would never have wanted to live --- with no mind. These decisions are faced every day all over the country and it is not, as Nooner suggests, that nobody cares. People care deeply and she may just be surprised how much people despise the sick openness with which Republicans are using this issue for political purposes.

This reminds me of another issue in which the Republicans were willing to flout all the known laws that really protect families in their zeal to pander to the radicals in their base. Little Elian. In that case they were more than willing to keep a little boy from his own father because they didn't approve of the father's politics. In this case they are flouting the very essence of what constitutes a family by insisting that they have the right to veto the wishes of both the patient and the patient's spouse.

The Schiavo case also shows that their braying about the sanctity of marriage is a load of rubbish. One of the things that gays want from the marriage contract is the right to make decisions for their spouse in case like this one. Clearly, those rights are only applicable even to straight people if Bill Frist and Randall Terry approve. Otherwise, they may actually enact an act of Congress to stop you --- especially if it's "a great political issue" that "excites their base." I guess the traditional view of marriage isn't so sacred after all, is it? And here I thought this stuff was handed down from God. Go figure.


Update: For those who would like a clear rundown of the medical aspects of this case Respectful of Otters has a full compendium of links and analysis.




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digby 3/19/2005 11:26:00 AM |

Thursday, March 17, 2005

 
The Greatest Show On Earth

What do you suppose would happen if the congress and the media spent as much time on say, torture, as they are on this absurd inquisition on steroids in baseball?

If Democrats think that this is good theatre for them they are nuts. The "optics" on this are not good judging from the off hand comments I've heard from varous people today. This is America's pastime, not the tobacco industry. It is highly unpleasant to watch a bunch of politicians browbeat famous players and then grill baseball owners as if they are a mafia family --- while we are at war, the treasury is being bankrupted and unprecedented government corruption is happening right before their eyes. Listening to them sanctimoniously lecture baseball about its ethics and practices is just mind boggling.

If they really want to tackle the issue of steroid use they should call one person --- Arnold Schwarzenneger. He knows everything there is to know about the product and he would be an exceptionally good witness who would provide them all with the limelight they apparently need so badly. Publicly humiliating Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa et al, just looks gratuitous. This faux outrage wouldn't get first place in an 8th grade talent show.

Dennis Kucinich is the only one who made any sense all day when he pointed out that this is rally about America's "win at all cost" ethos in athletics, business and politics. But he's the only one. Everybody else is publicly accusing people willy nilly of taking steroids without any proof and then riffing on and on about the shocking, shocking nature of this most important public health matter.

This country is in big trouble.



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digby 3/17/2005 04:37:00 PM |

 
Intuitive Barbarity

The blogosphere is gobsmacked by Eugene Volokh’s startling admission that he approves of this Iranian style justice:

Mohammad Bijeh, 24, dubbed "the Tehran desert vampire" by Iran's press, was flogged 100 times before being hanged.

A brother of one of his young victims stabbed him as he was being punished. The mother of another victim was asked to put the noose around his neck.

The execution took place in Pakdasht south of Tehran, near where Bijeh's year-long killing spree took place.

The killer was hoisted about 10 metres into the air by a crane and slowly throttled to death in front of the baying crowd.

Hanging by a crane - a common form of execution in Iran - does not involve a swift death as the condemned prisoner's neck is not broken.

The killer collapsed twice during the punishment, although he remained calm and silent throughout.

Spectators, held back by barbed wire and about 100 police officers, chanted "harder, harder" as judicial officials took turns to flog Bijeh's bare back before his hanging.

The condemned collapsed twice during the pre-execution flogging
Bijeh was stabbed by the 17-year-old brother of victim Rahim Younessi, AFP reported, as he was being readied to be hanged.

Officials then invited the mother Milad Kahani to put the blue nylon rope around his neck.

The crimes of Mohammed Bijeh and his accomplice Ali Baghi had drawn massive attention in the Iranian media.



The condemned collapsed twice during the pre-execution flogging

Volokh, a professor of constitutional law, writes:

I particularly like the involvement of the victims' relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he'd killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there's a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.

This is awfully interesting, don’t you think? How long has it been since we were talking about torture for the alleged higher purpose of obtaining information a suspect may or may not have? A couple of months? Yesterday? And now the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment has entered the dialog as well.

I have to agree with Roy Edroso on this one:

When critics say that radical professors have "a unique hostility toward Western traditional and commonsense attitudes," and that their "true raison d'etre is in practice nothing other than to destroy utterly whatever allegiance a young person might have to traditional conceptions in morality, religion, politics and culture," are they talking about this guy [Volokh]?

They should be. This kind of “moral intuition” coming from a law professor is a rejection of just about everything the West and particularly the enlightenment has been progressing toward for hundreds of years. He rejects empiricism, reason and logic for a primitive bloodlust that can only be described as barbaric.

(I can hardly wait to hear the PoMo spin on this in which it will be argued that flogging, choking and stabbing are long standing Christian traditions and cannot be construed as torture or cruel and unusual punishment when the person actually dies from the activity.)

It’s not really all that surprising. We have been leaning this way for a while with our move away from the idea of dispassionate justice to revenge. Listening to the inescapable rundowns of the Peterson verdict yesterday, I was struck as I often am by the sarcastic angry tone of the victim’s family in front of the cameras just as I’ve often been struck by the spectacle of the families inside the courtroom when they get their chance to confront the perpetrator in the penalty phase. It’s not that I blame them for feeling such rage. But I find it very disconcerting that our justice system believes that this revenge and catharsis should be part of the judicial process itself. Justice is supposed to be blind. Or so I thought.

I don’t believe in the death penalty because I think that the only justification for killing is self defense and when someone is locked up forever that is protection enough from their depredations. But I’m beginning to wonder if accepting the death penalty as we have presents another problem. So much focus is placed on the feelings of the victim’s families these days that I think we may have lost sight of the fact that there can be no recompense for the loss of a loved one. Therefore, the death penalty can never really be enough to satisfy the need that we are trying to make it satisfy.

As Volokh suggests, people will want to inflict pain to try to ease their own but that will not be sufficient either, will it? If one were to ask those relatives who helped in the torture and execution of that criminal if they felt satisfied, I would bet you that they don’t believe that real justice was served. Perhaps they think they should have been allowed to inflict the exact kind of pain that was inflicted on their kids, forced sodomy. Maybe they think that they should have been allowed to relive the murders with him as the victim. But would even that be enough? Could he suffer exactly the same way a child would have suffered in similar circumstances? It’s never going to be enough. And once you go down this road the line between those who kill because of mental defect, disease and evil and those who do it for revenge becomes very hard to see.

Volokh goes on to say that he thinks the constitution should be amended to allow cruel and unusual punishment in certain cases:

Naturally, I don't expect this to happen any time soon; my point is about what should be the rule, not about what is the rule, or even what is the constitutionally permissible rule. I think the Bill of Rights is generally a great idea, but I don't think it's holy writ handed down from on high. Certain amendments to it may well be proper, though again I freely acknowledge that they'd be highly unlikely.

That is exactly why I gave up on arguing for gun control. You cannot even go near the Bill of Rights until Americans have evolved much, much further than we already have. When influential conservative constitutional law professors start giving the Bill of Rights only tepid support then we have to just say no. The Bill of Rights may not be a sacred writ, but it’s the best thing this misbegotten country ever did and it’s the single thing that makes the American system worth a damn.

Of course we have a brand new democracy of our very own creation taking shape before our eyes. Perhaps this will be legally institutionalized in a way that Volokh could heartily endorse: (Via Spencer Ackerman)

When Iraqi and American soldiers detained a suspected Sunni insurgent in Haifa this week, a group of the Shiite troops crowded around him. A sergeant kicked him in the face. Another soldier grabbed him by the neck and slammed his head into a wall. A third slapped him hard in the face.

Ali Abdul Mohsen, a 22-year-old Shiite, pointed his AK-47 at the man and screamed, his eyes bulging, "You will confess or I swear to God I will shoot you here." Most of the Iraqi soldiers nearby smiled in approval. "This is revenge for everyone who has been killed," Mohsen said.

Check out the posts commenting on this subject for a real eye opener.

Update: Matt Yglesias makes the erudite philosophical argument.


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digby 3/17/2005 12:18:00 PM |

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

 
Training the Messengers

Parker Blackman of Fenton Communications has an interesting piece on TomPaine.com regarding every liberal’s favorite topic framing. First he suggests that we stop using the terms conservative and neoconservative and simply use "radical." I, of course, agree since I've been doing it since I started this blog. (And in fairness to Carville and Begala, they wrote an op-ed back in '01 that said the same thing.)

Still, it's past time that every Democrat committed to doing this. The fact that Tom Delay and Rush Limbaugh are considered mainstream is partially the fault of those who failed to decouple them from the word conservative, which people today believe to be a positive, virtuous word. We need to be disciplined about this kind of thing the way the Republicans are. They are careful and conscious of the words they use and it is very effective.

In that regard, I would highly recommend that everyone read Chris Hayes' fascinating article about a budding young conservative talking head called "The Message Machine." It's creepy and fascinating. This guy's no Ben Shapiro:

We’d just returned from the first College Republicans meeting of the semester. The Northwestern group is a branch of the College Republican National Committee, whose membership has more than tripled in the past six years. On the surface, it had looked like any other gathering of college kids: about a dozen students sitting around a classroom, sipping Diet Coke and munching on Papa John’s pizza. But as the group started discussing its agenda, I realized I was witnessing something extraordinary. If you’ve ever wondered where the legions of conservative pundits are trained and schooled, where the talk-radio hosts and cable news guests and best-selling authors of jeremiads with inflammatory titles come from, it all starts here, in little classrooms like this one. These humble gatherings, full of kids in Greek-lettered T-shirts and sweats, are the incubator for the future of the right wing.

What the entire meeting would boil down to was message discipline. College Republican President Henry Bowles III, a junior whose vintage T-shirt and carefully tousled hair made him look like the lead singer of an indie-rock band, got things started. He told the group that for the duration of the semester, each session would start with a presentation on some important issue. This week Ben Snyder, a member of Students for Life, would give a PowerPoint presentation about the upcoming Supreme Court battles titled “Us vs. Them.” And next week, said Henry, someone would be talking about the flat tax.

“Fair tax. It’s fair tax now,” said a guy in the front row wearing a Zeppelin T-shirt.

“Right,” said Henry. “Fair tax. That’s the euphemism.”

A little later, as Ben discussed the impending battle over Supreme Court nominees, he mentioned the possibility that Senate Republicans would rewrite filibuster rules so Democrats couldn’t filibuster judicial nominees. This strategy is often called the “nuclear option” because it could provoke a war between the two parties, but has, Ben told the group, “now been renamed the constitutional option.”

Guy was the most vocal person in the room, gently correcting his comrades’ facts and terminology, offering up tidbits and arguments that others might want to employ when arguing with liberals. It was clear that he’d done his homework. When Ben talked about renaming the nuclear/constitutional option, Guy raised his hand and provided some background. While liberals express outrage at the thought of amending Senate rules, he said, the practice of filibustering nominees “is at the very least extraconstitutional, perhaps unconstitutional.” Everyone in the room listened intently. In fact, he went on, during the Constitutional Convention no less a figure than James Madison had taken the president’s power to appoint his cabinet to be so strong he proposed that a two-thirds majority be required to vote down a nominee. “So,” he concluded, “I think that’s an interesting tool to use when you’re debating this issue with people.” The other kids nodded, looking serious.

I graduated from college four years ago, and I happen to have spent a good percentage of my time as an undergraduate talking about politics – in my case, sweatshop labor and other lefty causes – with my activist friends. With the possible exception of a few mild admonitions for language that wasn’t sufficiently PC, I never saw anyone interrupt anyone for slipping off message. I was also surprised to see the Republican kids collectively generating arguments to use when fighting with liberals, sharpening their talking points, and preparing for battle. My fellow liberals and I didn’t see ourselves as engaged in a war of ideas. We probably didn’t even realize there were any conservatives around to fight with.

The meeting ended with an announcement that the club would soon be conducting elections for officers. Someone asked Guy if he was going to run for president, since he seemed the obvious successor to Henry. Guy demurred, though, saying he thought an official position with the College Republicans might limit his future journalistic career.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm unaware of anything like the Republican clubs on and off campus where liberals talk politics on this tactical and strategic level. Do we do this at all?

We also don't believe in saying that someone is "off message" and it's hurting us. One of the only ways you can break through the white noise of the infotainment cacophony is through endless repetition of certain words and phrases used in particular ways that become so familiar that people believe it even if they don't know why. If serious little Republican college kids are on to this in campus bull sessions it would be nice if our leadership and punditocrisy could get with the program.

If you are interested in framing and message, both of these articles are extremely informative on the topic.



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digby 3/16/2005 07:01:00 PM |

 
Power To The Owners


Kevin discusses the new CAP tax proposal as a way of putting a wedge between shareholders and rich CEO's which I think is a great idea. It also raises the question about shareholder clout in general and big pension funds in particular.

We should, as a matter of course, be looking for ways to leverage shareholder power for our causes. A fair number of Democrats are invested in the market through their 401k's and the big public pension funds, the latter of which are the 800 pound gorillas of Wall Street. We have been remiss in not using that clout to put countervailing pressure on business when it acts against its shareholders' interests, otherwise known as “the people.” If you combine the organizing power of consumer protests we could, through some savvy collective action, make business wonder if it's such a good idea to let the hoi polloi join their so-called ownership society after all.

For instance, check out what this guy says:

When Marshall Field's employed a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs theme for its 2004 holiday festivities, the Chicago-born retailer received some complaints that it was promoting the homosexual lifestyle, an executive said recently.

The concerned citizens divined that there was a "hidden gay agenda" in Field's theme "because seven men were living together," Gregory Clark, vice president of creative services for Field's in Minneapolis, recounted last month at a Retail Advertising & Marketing Association conference in Chicago.

A few years back, Rev. Jerry Falwell went after purse-toting Teletubby Tinky Winky. More recently, conservatives accused cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants of promoting a homosexual agenda.

When Field's receives such complaints, the department store chain listens to them, Clark said. But unless it receives, say, 10,000 letters and phone calls, it doesn't change its strategy, he said.

Setting aside the sheer freakishness of people who are so twisted that they think of sex when they see seven little men together, this guy says that he would change his strategy if he got 10,000 letters and phone calls. That’s not all that many. And look how little it takes to get the FCC to act.

This is one area where the organizing types in the left blogosphere could exploit our natural inclination and belief in collective action. Remember Sinclair.

I’d volunteer, but I’m terrible at organizing. You should see my desk. But there are others out there who are very good at this sort of thing and I think it would be worth a try. Business is very sensitive to its image and reputation. We should be pressuring them the same way we pressure politicians. After all, they are the ones who own the politicians.



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digby 3/16/2005 04:59:00 PM |

 
Neocon Hitmen

Via ThinkProgress:

“If we want stability on our planet, we must fight to end poverty. Since the time of the Bretton Woods Conference, through the Pearson Commission, the Brandt Commission, and the Brundtland Commission, through to statements of our leaders at the 2000 Millennium Assembly - and today - all confirm that the eradication of poverty is central to stability and peace.” – Outgoing World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, 10/3/04

“These people are not fighting because they’re poor. They’re poor because they fight all the time. ” – President Bush’s nominee for World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, Congressional Testimony, 6/6/96

“We hear a lot of talk about the root causes of terrorism. Some people seem to suggest that poverty is the root cause of terrorism. It’s a little hard to look at a billionaire named Osama bin Laden and think that poverty drove him to it.” – Wolfowitz, 11/15/2002

I have little doubt that Wolfowitz feels that way. As a card carrying neocon of the PNAC persuasion, he thinks that all this namby-pamby handwringing about poverty is rubbish. He believes in Empire, specifically the American Empire, as the answer to the world's problems. And his new job is to carry out yet another aspect of that assignnent:

Under Wolfowitz, the Bush administration may now try to narrow the focus of the World Bank, returning the international lending institution to its roots of primarily financing large infrastructure projects and limiting the practice of handing out zero-interest loans, analysts such as Alan Meltzer, who led a 2000 congressional inquiry into the World Bank, said.

How does that translate to Empire, you ask?

BRANCACCIO:

For much of his career, as a consultant in international development, John Perkins says he was an empire builder… though maybe not in ways you'd think.

Perkins calls himself an "economic hit man" — a kind of secret agent of U.S. power, armed not with a Walther PPK pistol but a set of corrupt economic spreadsheets. His job, he says, was to convince developing countries to borrow money to build expensive projects. Projects like roads, dams and power grids that would ostensibly improve the quality of life.

But there was a catch: These projects would also leave these countries with more debt than they could ever hope to repay. This crushing debt, Perkins says, left those countries with little choice but to follow America's lead on foreign and economic policies. His controversial book, CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN has been on THE NEW YORK TIMES best seller list for 11 weeks.

[...]


DAVID BRANCACCIO: But just for the sake of living with yourself when you're a younger man, I mean you must have said to yourself, "I am helping the population of this developing country, be it Indonesia, be it someplace else, by bringing, for instance, a hydroelectric project to them." Yes, it'll cost them a lot, yes, they'll have to borrow a lot. But ultimately you must have been guided by the sense that you're trying to help out poor folks.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, that's what I'd learned in business school and that's the model that the World Bank presents. But if you really get to know these countries, and I did, I spent a lot of time in them, what I saw was that the money that was going to build these projects like the hydroelectric projects or the highways or the ports, hardly ever actually made its way to the country.

The money was transferred from banks in Washington, DC to banks in Houston or San Francisco or New York where most of it went to big US corporations. The ones we heard a lot about these days like Halliburton and Bechtel. And these corporations then built these projects and the projects primarily served the very rich in those countries.

The electricity, the highways, the ports were seldom even used by the people who needed them the most. But the country would be left holding a huge debt and it would be such a large debt that they couldn't possibly repay it. And so at some point in time, we economic hit men, we go back into the country and say, "Look, you owe us a lot of money, you can't pay your debts. Therefore sell us your oil at a real cheap price or vote with us at a UN vote or give us land for a military base or send some of your troops to some country where we want you to support us."

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You think that from the word go that this kind of lending was meant to essentially put these countries into hock?

JOHN PERKINS: There's no question in my mind that this was what I was intended to do was to go out and create these projects that would bring billions of dollars back to US corporations and create projects that would put these countries into such deep debt, that in essence, they became part of our empire. They became our slaves in a way.

[...]


The reason I wrote the book, David, is because finally after 9/11 I realized that the American people must know what's going on. Because most Americans don't know. And the that 9/11 was just symbolic of a tremendous amount of anger around the world. And we in the United States don't are not aware of that. September 11th made us somewhat aware of it although I think we've really covered that aspect of it over. We say this is a rogue terrorist.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Or that it's based in sort of religious passion. Or that it's something about Saudi Arabia in particular. This isn't really about the United States and its international relations. That's the argument.

JOHN PERKINS: That's the argument. But in fact, if you go to Catholic countries in South America, you'll see that Osama bin Laden is a is a hero amongst a lot of people. He's on billboards. He's on T-shirts. It's very unfortunate that this mass murderer has become the symbol of a David who is standing up to a Goliath. The way they see it. He's like a Robin Hood to many people.

[...]

DAVID BRANCACCIO: You know, I saw a World Bank official quoted in regard to your book, hadn't read the book. Saw some account. But thought that your view of all this was really out of date. And regardless of whether or not your vision of this is really what happened, World Bank has moved on.

Even now they've shifted. I saw a statistic in 1980 something like three or five percent of their lending went into things like health and pensions and education. Now it's up to 22 percent. They're not giving so much money to big dam projects that runs up the debt.

JOHN PERKINS: If you really look behind those numbers of schools and hospitals and those kinds of things, you'll see that yes, we've spent more money on constructing those types of facilities — building the schools and the hospitals. The big construction companies have gotten rich building them.

But look behind the numbers and see how much money we've put into training health specialists. Doctors and nurses and technicians or how much money we've put into teaching into training teachers. To fill the schools. It's not enough to build schools and hospitals. You've also got to create the whole system that allows for better education and better health care. It's- I'm very sad to say it's a system that has really pulled the wool over people's eyes. We paint a very good picture, but when you go deep in, you find a very different story.

Clearly, even that 22% is too much for the Empire builders. We must get them heavily in our debt so that we can own them.

Wolfowitz is a true believer that the way conditions in the world will improve is through American power. Others are simply greedy. But it doesn't matter. The result is the same.

Whatever small amount of progress has occurred since Perkins was working in the field is now going to be turned back in order that American has the strength to strong arm countries into giving us their oil and allowing military bases and any number of other things we wish to take. (And, of course, we need the money for Halliburton and Bechtel and the others.)

I read somewhere recently, maybe even in my comment section, that the neocons are achieving their goals one by one while our howls of protest just fly out into the void. I once compared them to sharks, lethal predators who never stop swimming --- they just circle menacingly and systematically bite off one item of their agenda after the other.

Wolfowitz in charge of the World Bank is simply another phase of the plan. Their project is going swimmingly. As they were convinced that Iraq would be a cakewalk, they are convinced that all this hatred we are creating is irrelevant, that our awesome power can overcome anything.

Meanwhile:

Hitler Finds An Audience In Turkey

Why this nation — which welcomed millions of Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and was the first Muslim country to recognize the state of Israel — now appears so fascinated with Hitler is a question that sparks heated debate. Booksellers said buyers tended to be men between the ages of 18 and 30.

Like several other vendors here, Oznur insisted that the newfound popularity of "Mein Kampf" was a factor mostly of price. Sales soared after several new translations were published at the beginning of the year and priced at about $3.50 a copy. Most books of a similar length cost nearly double that.

Some analysts say the appeal of "Mein Kampf" probably has to do with the rising anti-Americanism here, a result of the U.S.-led invasion of neighboring Iraq. Among the work's chief rivals on the bestseller lists is "Metal Storm," a gory thriller that depicts a U.S. invasion of Turkey. The hero, a Turkish spy whose training includes shooting his puppy, avenges his homeland by leveling Washington with a nuclear device.

In a country where conspiracy theories are commonly used to explain international politics, "it is accepted wisdom in some circles that Israel dictates U.S. policy," said Dogu Ergil, a Middle East expert at Ankara University. Thus, his theory goes, anti-Americanism morphs into a hybrid strain of anti-Semitism that in turn arouses curiosity about Hitler.

Nothing to see here folks. Proceed with the empire building.



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digby 3/16/2005 11:18:00 AM |

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

 
The Big Time

Another exciting panel discussion on blogging and the new media! It's going to be thrilling.

Here's the roster:

Moderator:
E.J. Dionne, Jr.
Senior Fellow, Brookings; Columnist, Washington Post Writers Group

Panelists:
Jodie T. Allen
Senior Editor, Pew Research Center

Ana Marie Cox
Wonkette.com

Ellen Ratner
White House Correspondent, Talk Radio News Service

Jack Shafer
Editor-at-Large, Slate

Andrew Sullivan
AndrewSullivan.com; Senior Editor The New Republic, Columnist, Time Magazine Live Bloggers

The following individuals will be watching the event, either in person or via the webcast, and providing online commentary in real-time on their respective blogs. Their commentary will also be shown on a projector screen at the event and on the webcast.

Daniel Drezner
www.danieldrezner.com

Ed Morrissey
www.captainsquartersblog.com

Josh Trevino
www.redstate.org

I'm awfully glad that Wonkette will be there to represent the liberal blogosphere by saying fuck a lot. It is, after all, the very essence of what we all do.



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digby 3/15/2005 06:47:00 PM |

 
Spanking Uncle Alan

In 1983, Greenspan, a Republican, chaired a bipartisan commission that recommended a package of tax increases and benefit reductions to shore up Social Security's finances. Congress followed the panel's recommendations.

Today, he said, the debate is far more partisan. Earlier this month Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called Greenspan a "political hack." Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., pounced on him harshly as well. She said his support of tax cuts in 2001 "helped blow the lid off" a government budget surplus and led to last year's record $412 billion deficit.

Greenspan countered that he warned in 2001 that tax reductions could lead to deficits and that a trigger was needed to force automatic spending cuts if deficits appeared. Congress didn't do that.

"It turns out we were all wrong," Greenspan said.

Clinton interrupted him.

"Just for the record," she said, "we were not all wrong, but many people were wrong."

Damned straight. Greenspan got up before the country and said that it was dangerous to run a surplus and we simply had to cut taxes. Now he is feverish on the subject of getting the savings rate up. Perhaps I'm wrong here, but from an economic standpoint I thought it didn't matter a whole lot if the government saves the money or the private sector saves the money, the economy benefits more or less the same.

Randians like Uncle Alan, however, don't really see these things in terms of the health of the overall economy so much as the imperatives of a moral system that must be followed regardless of the consequences. They believe capitalism is a religion in which it is always wrong for the government to tax the heroic John Galts of the world, as a matter of virtue, not economics. Therefore, their dogma requires that the idea of surplus is positively wicked if the Galt strata are being taxed even a penny.

This strange erratic behavior we see in Uncle Alan these days is to be expected of people who follow the teachings of speedy, chainsmoking Russian romance novelists. They tend to serve their goddess as needs be. One could call them hacks. I prefer cultist.



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digby 3/15/2005 03:33:00 PM |

 
Kumbaya

Over at The Poor Man, The Editors take issue with Max Boot's triumphalism while recognizing that history is usually written by the wankers.

Boot says:

Well, who’s the simpleton now? Those who dreamed of spreading democracy to the Arabs or those who denied that it could ever happen?

In an attempt to get another view into the record before we all break into "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke" the Editors point this out:

Fifteen hundred Americans, who volunteered to defend their country, are dead in Iraq. This is in addition to however many American and other coalition civilians, and coalition troops, have also been killed - a thousand more, perhaps. Now add in the Iraqi civilians killed - estimated, with almost complete uncertainty, to be in the range of 100,000. And now consider the maimed. And the cost of this is in the range of $200 billion. All these numbers are increasing daily.

Terrorism in the region has unquestionably increased. This doesn’t require defining anyone attacking our troops or civilians or Iraqi allies as a “terrorist” - if killing 125+ people at prayer is not terrorism, then the word has no meaning. Iraq isn’t a democracy, nor is Iraqi democracy inevitable - it is unstable, violent, with sharp ethnic/religious divisions. Some parts are better than other parts, some parts are much, much worse. And some parts are rubble.

Saddam had no WMD, nor any WMD programs, nor any connection to international terrorism, over perhaps the last decade. On this score, as a result of the “framing of a guilty man” that our government engaged in, our credibility around the world has been devastated. In Abu Ghraib, our reputation for respecting human rights has been devastated. By virtue of the bloodshed we have unleashed in Iraq (and by virtue of the tall tales which grow up around it), our reputation for peace and forbearance has been demolished. And by virtue of the fact that we have not honestly come to grips with any of this, have taken no action to correct our mistakes, our devastated credibility has been devastated some more.

And Saddam is gone. And Hosni said there’d be elections, some day. Sweet.

But other than that, remember folks, it's been a huge success and anybody who doesn't see it that way is a nattaring nabob of negativism. It's long past time to break out the Budweiser and move on to destroying social security and shutting down the bong industry.

Do read the whole post if only for the description of the annual Indy 500 kegger at Tim Russert's place in Martha's Vinyard. Talk about sweet.


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digby 3/15/2005 02:28:00 PM |

 
Rogue Element

Brad Plumer, subbing for Kevin over on Political Animal, links to a wikipedia definition of "rogue state" in order to clarify an earlier discussion in which commenters took exception to his use of the phrase:

Wikipedia has a good discussion: "rogue state" is used almost exclusively by the United States, and has been used to refer to other states that: don't follow international law, don't follow standards of proper governance, try to acquire weapons of mass destruction, sponsor terrorism, reject human rights, squander natural resources, or just plain don't engage in "good" diplomacy. Of course, that could refer to a very wide range of states; in practice, it mostly just refers these days to Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, and maybe Libya—states the U.S. government doesn't particularly like and doesn't mind antagonizing. (No official calls China a rogue state, for instance.) Venezuela might find itself on the list soon, but right now it's only a measly "rogue element."

I can think of another country that is acting decidely roguish these days what with it's abrogation of international treaties, it's spokesmen being on the record saying that international law doesn't apply to it, that supplies money to terrorist regimes like Uzbekistan, believes in indefinate detention and torture, squanders its natural resources and talks trash to its allies and enemies alike. And it's crowing about spreading its system of government all over the world as fast as it can. One wonders how long it's going to take for other countries to have a little meeting and decide that they need to protect themselves from this powerful rogue nation?



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digby 3/15/2005 02:01:00 PM |

 
Party Orthodoxy

Jeffrey Goldberg writes on the Democratic "toughness" problem in this week's The New Yorker, mostly by focusing on Joe Biden:

He has come to realize, he said, that many Democrats still haven’t grasped the political importance of September 11th, and again he recalled how he had urged Kerry to keep his campaign message focussed on terrorism. Kerry, Biden said, would tell voters that he would “fight terror as hard as Bush,” but then he would add, “and I’ll help you economically.” “What is Bush saying?” Biden said. “Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. I would say to John, ‘Let me put it to you this way. The Lord Almighty, or Allah, whoever, if he came to every kitchen table in America and said, “Look, I have a Faustian bargain for you, you choose. I will guarantee to you that I will end all terror threats against the United States within the year, but in return for that there will be no help for education, no help for Social Security, no help for health care.” What do you do?’

“My answer,” Biden said, “is that seventy-five per cent of the American people would buy that bargain.”

Have you ever read anything more stupid than this? Does he really believe that seventy-five percent of the country is so afraid of terrorism that they would make that bargain? Absolute rubbish.

It's not fear of terrorism, Joe. I'm sure New Yorkers and Washington DC'ers are truly afraid of terrorism for very good reason and THEY DIDN'T VOTE FOR BUSH! If Bush won because of the terrorism issue it was patriotism, not fear, that got him over the line. People responded to his simple Hollywood tough guy image because it looks heroic. Even "Ashley's Story" was a made for Oprah moment, not a call to Bush's great fatherly ability to keep us safe. He ran as Top Gun, not George Washington. There's a big difference.

For most people in this country "terrorism" is an abstract thing, not a source of everyday fear. Biden is wrong that Americans would trade education, health care or social security for an end to terror threats. They don't even feel the terror threats. What they cared about in this last election was patriotism and national pride (with a touch of old fashioned bloodlust and revenge) and that is something, particularly in this age of the televised campaign and pop politics, that can move people. But never think that people will trade their own immediate, personal well being for what up to now has been for most people a reality television show. They want it all. Bush's war has not called for sacrifice for a reason.

This article is an interesting insight into this argument within the party about both the foreign policy differences and the fiercely partisan nature of our politics today. In my mind, they may be intertwined in certain ways, but it's a mistake to think that we can solve the problem simply by speaking more hawkishly and voting with Republicans on military matters.

The fundamental misunderstanding is that we will be seen as "tough" if we just back a tough foreign policy. I don't think that our alleged lack of toughness is the result of soft policy but rather a carefully designed negative image forged from years of Republican marketing. Most importantly, it once again completely misses the most important fact about our current state of politics. Bill Richardson doesn't get it:

The Democrats need to stand with the President when he’s right,” Bill Richardson told me. “His emphasis on being more pro-democracy in the Middle East seems to have galvanized some movement. The Democrats need to establish their credentials on national security, and we get hurt by reflexive negativism.

Interestingly (and when you think about it, naturally) here's someone who does:

Hillary Clinton says that she has been “forthright in agreeing with the Administration where I thought we could agree,” but she believes that the Administration has taken advantage of Democratic support—particularly in the days after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. “Joe and I and others offered our support to the President and stood unified with him in response to these attacks,” Clinton said last week, referring to Biden. “The Administration saw our actions as a sign of weakness,” she said, adding that it “had a campaign strategy to exploit the legitimate fears of the American people.” Clinton also said that the Democrats must criticize the Bush Administration for its foreign-policy failings—of which, she said, there are many—but that they are hindered by their role as the opposition party. “It’s hard to describe a Democratic Party foreign-policy position, because we’re not in charge of making policy,” Clinton said. “We are, by the nature of the system, forced to critique and analyze and offer suggestions.”

It will not matter if we are agreeing with Bush and Cheney that we should immediately launch nuclear missiles and kill every arab in the middle east, by our very agreement the Republicans will deride us as weak. Politics are playing out on both a real and a kabuki level in which the theatre of the issue is actually more important than the reality in political terms. It's not a matter of being right or wrong on an issue, as sad as that may be. It's a matter of being willing to be aggressive against people who quite publicly hold you in contempt whether you agree with them or not.

Sam Rosenfeld on TAPPED, referring to what Josh Marshall calls the "convulsively neoliberal" pundit establishment points out:

The DC chatterers rank no value higher than “political courage,” and their special brand of policy dramaturgy demands that ennobled lawmakers demonstrate said courage by screwing over some constituency or another. Somebody has to pay. Someone must be sacrificed. Hence, when discussing Social Security reform, it is sacrosanct that benefit cuts will happen, one way or another, and that the only honorable lawmakers are those who assess the situation with cold-eyed realism and exact the necessary sacrifices in the name of reform.

This is where I think the real disconnect exists between the punditocrisy/party elites and the grassroots. The argument isn't really about policy although their are some differences. It's about what we define as political courage. Insiders still believe that the key is to distance itself from the base of the party as it did in the 90's, as Rosenfeld outlines above. Out here in the hinterlands we think that political conditions obviously require us to unify behind what feels to us like an existential battle with the Republicans.

Here's an example of the kind of beltway discussion that seems to me to entirely miss the point:

CROWLEY: With me now to talk more about the Democrats, including their new party chairman, is Bruce Reed. He is president of the Democratic Leadership Council.

We were interested in an article that you and your fellow chairman wrote in blueprint, which said in part about Democrats, "Voters don't know what we stand for and have grave doubts about what they think we stand for." You went on to say that changing this is going to require challenging party orthodoxy.

What part of party orthodoxy has to be challenged?

BRUCE REED, PRESIDENT, DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP COUNCIL: Well, Candy, politics is like anything else in life. The most important thing is what you stand for. And Democrats' biggest problem is Americans don't have a clue, most Americans don't have a clue. And some Democrats don't seem to either.

So the voters have given us some extra time. We think the best use of that time is to have a good, healthy debate within the party about what our values are, what our principles are, and what big ideas we have to back them up.

CROWLEY: So what is it in the party orthodoxy that you think has to be challenged from the DLC point of view.

REED: Well, the central issue in the last election, and a big issue going forward is, what are we going to do to keep the country safe? And, you know, it's all well and good to criticize the administration's many mistakes on this issue, but going forward, we need to come up with our own plan to promote democracy around the world, and come to terms with where we will be willing to use military force if necessary.

That seems pretty benign. But, in fact, when I heard this interview on in the backround I was fuming at the tone and the substance of those comments, but even more at what he wasn't saying. "Party orthodoxy" is a code word --- and I hate using code words against our own party --- for the liberal wing. I've been hearing this trope about party orthodoxy for almost twenty years and it's as stale as "tax and spend" and "hell no, we won't go." The only people who are still listening to this shit are the "convulsively neoliberal" DC establishment.

I was once an adherent of the view that moving to be middle was the smart move. But I finally hit a wall, a wall that apparently has knocked the Democratic establishment unconscious or stupid instead of awake. The other side now holds all institutional power in Washington and its power is strengthened by what the DLC is doing, namely promoting the position that the base of the Democratic party is outside the mainstream of the country. You never hear Republicans doing that.

Mostly, I am infuriated when Democrats do not properly defend our party against the Republicans and call the republicans out whenever they get the microphone. Reed could have made his points and still taken the opportunity to take the fight to the Republicans. Here's what he did instead:

CROWLEY: You also talked about it's not enough to say what we're against, we have to say what we're for. Looking at Congress right now, one of the criticisms coming from Republicans, but coming apparently through the poll, is that, look, what do the Democrats stand for when it comes to Social Security? Are they handling the Social Security issue well at this point, the Democrats?

REED: Well, I think they're doing a very good job of pointing out the flaws in Bush's plan, and they need to do that because it is a bad plan. President Bush seems to have finally found common ground in Washington, and most Republicans are scared of what he's doing on Social Security as Democrats.

CROWLEY: But is it enough for the Democrats to say no?

REED: Once that plan crashes and burns, Democrats are going to need to step up with our own ideas. Because it's an important issue for the country over the long haul, and we're going to have to address it.

CROWLEY: One of the things that you also talked about in your article is, look, this is a false choice between sort of the DLC more moderate and the base. But I want to read you something from "The Nation," which said this about the DLC: "After dominating the party in the 1990s, the DLC is struggling to maintain its identity and influence in a party beset by losses and determined to oppose George W. Bush."

When you look at it, moderation and compromise is not what the Democrats have said from the grassroots that they're about right now. They're about confrontation. There's no way you can square that, is that, with the DLC position?

REED: Oh, I think this is a false choice. We're not about compromise. We're about putting forward good, new ideas that bring together a majority of the American people.

Look, there are some -- Bill Clinton is the only president to get re-elected. We've lost five of the last seven elections. There are some Democrats who would like to leave behind the one guy who broke that curse. We think there's an important lesson from the Clinton years, which is that if you put forward a compelling agenda, you can excite your base and you can persuade new voters to come join your cause.

Well yes, it is about compromise. If Democrats put forward good, new ideas that bring together a majority of the American people, we'd like to think that the fifty fucking percent of us out here who don't vote Republican are considered a part of that majority. When the moderates fail to get the support of Democrats either in the country or the congress, then they are not doing what they say they are doing, they are enabling the Republicans. Even worse, they are helping to promote the erroneous idea that Republicans are mainstream and we are not. Could we all agree that if a bill cannot garner the support of a majority of Democrats in the Senate and House --- it isn't a Democratic bill. Is that too much to ask?

I'm sure there are some Democrats who hate Clinton. There always were. Most Democrats, however, see Clinton as a man of his time. And if the DLC guys don't recognize that TIMES HAVE CHANGED then there is no reason to listen to them anymore. The Republicans that were the minority leaders in the house and senate when Bill Clinton got elected were Bob Michel and Bob Dole. Those guys have been turned out to pasture. The Republicans today are systematically starting wars, bankrupting the country and repealing the bill of rights. Excuse me while I get a little more alarmed about that kind of thing than whether Michael Moore and Move-on are a little but unruly. I don't think it's too much to ask that centrist and moderate Democrats look at the Republican orthodoxy at least as often as they complain in the direction of the base of the Democratic party. I certainly think that they should take their ample opportunities in the media to make that point as long as they are distancing themselves from the "party orthodoxy." Indeed, if I were asked to define what party orthodoxy is these days, I would have to say that it is the reflexive recoil against the unwashed masses out here in the grassroots who are tearing our hair out and screaming for the establishment to look at the rogue elephant that is trampling on everything we believe in.


Update: It's good to see the Senate hanging tough with Reid on the nuclear option. more of this please.

UpdateII: James Walcott: Read Now



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digby 3/15/2005 12:14:00 PM |

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.


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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.




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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.



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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?



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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?


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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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

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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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? :)



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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.





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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.



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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?



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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.



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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.



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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?



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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.



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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?




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