Hullabaloo

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

 
Flame On High

I've been having some major Adelphia cable problems so posting is sporadic and I apologize. It's been a rough couple of days for me anyway. Seeing Ann Coulter feted on the cover of Time magazine as a mainstream political figure instead of the deranged, murderous extremist she actually is was quite a shock. And then a friend sent me the links to the Free Republic thread discussing the death of Marla Ruzicka, which made me so nauseous that I had to shut down for a while.

It has become clear to me that we are frogs being slowly boiled to death. And the media are enjoying the hot tub party so much that they are helping to turn up the heat.

Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn't. For instance, he doesn't say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn't say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn't say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn't put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn't, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it's a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

I have long felt that it was important not to minimize the impact of this sick shit. For years my friends and others in the online communities would say that it was a waste of time to worry about Rush because there are real issues to worry about. Likewise Coulter. Everytime I write something about her there is always someone chastizing me for wasting their time. Yet, here she is, being given the impramatur of a mainstream publication of record in a whitwash of epic proportions. Slowly, slowly the water is heating up.

It's kind of funny that I and others spent last week arguing whether Democrats ought to be encouraging Hollywood to stop selling sex, (which even David Brooks agrees doesn't seem to correlate to any real negative change in the way kids behave.) But, here we have a real problem, a real coarsening of the discourse which has resulted in our politics becoming so polarized and rhetorically violent that it's as if we live on two different planets.

While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a "preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy's labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That's what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

I'm not going to argue with my fellow Democrats any more about how Janet Jackson's nipple and Desperate Housewives' double ententres are coarsening American media culture. This is not because American media culture isn't being coarsened. But T&A is clearly not the problem. It's the sick, depraved fucks who are selling liberal death fantasies to the public and being aided by idiots in the mainstream press who are so in the (ever heating) tank that they have lost all sense of perspective.

The recently annointed GOP saint, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was the one who coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" and I think he's been validated. When a deranged, flamthrowing fascist like Ann Coulter is called "amusing" and "entertaining", deviancy has definitely been redefined.



.
digby 4/19/2005 11:52:00 AM |

Saturday, April 16, 2005

 
Swallowing Their Pride

Tom Delay's supporters are awfully upset about having things forced down their throats and would like Tom to ram something down the Democrats' throats instead:

Josh, You have to tell the whole story of anything or you are not credible. I never take anything democrats say because in the last 10 years the Minority is trying to force everything down our throats. You speak in such disrespect about Delay, the bug man, that I have suggested to many senators by email, that Delay should quit and start running or the presidency. He is just what we need. With his style we could ram down your throats.

Lotta forcing and ramming going on there. Of course,the big man himself likes to turn a colorful phrase in this regard only he prefers "stuffing" over "ramming." Here's a classic :

Americans "have been tolerant of homosexuality for years, but now it's being stuffed down their throats and they don't like it." DeLay said.

Tom DeLay's vivid rhetoric (like that of his biggest fan) apparently just burst out despite his best efforts to contain it. That'll happen.


.
digby 4/16/2005 09:06:00 PM |

Friday, April 15, 2005

 
Doing Our Part

I have written in the past that I would love to watch the Sunday gasbag shows with some of America's incisive social critics of the past. I can only imagine what Mark Twain or HL Mencken would say at the spectacle of Tim Russert and five pompadoured members of the clergy disgorging scripture with all the unctuous insincerity of a South Carolina push poller. You know it would be wicked.

This article by Richard Byrne in The American Prospect discusses Sinclair Lewis, one of the greats, and specifically notes just how relevant Elmer Gantry is today. (Considering the Big Tent Revival Senator Frist and the Dogbeater Dobson are putting on the Sunday, it's almost eerie.)

It has been almost 80 years since novelist Sinclair Lewis set his most iconic ?ctional creation, a hell-raiser turned hell?re preacher named Elmer Gantry, loose on an unsuspecting America. For a clergyman in his 70s, Gantry has proven to be remarkably hale and hearty. Op-ed writers and columnists lean continually on Lewis’ parson to represent a uniquely American type: the fundamentalist hypocrite serving up corn pone and brimstone to promulgate a strict public morality.

The type was on its way to the margins in Lewis’ day; the 1920s were when modernity won, if not in fact in the great heartland, at least in the larger self-image of a nation gorging itself on jazz, burlesque, motorcars, and bathtub gin. But the type -- the living, breathing Gantry, as it were -- is now back with a vengeance.

And social critics of our day must not be afraid to expose rank hypocrisy wherever we can. In our party's quest to clean up popular culture I've decided that my personal mission is to take on the country music business.

Country Music star Gretchen Wilson:

Well I'm an eight ball shooting double fisted drinking son of a gun
I wear My jeans a little tight
Just to watch the little boys come undone
Im here for the beer and the ball busting band
Gonna get a little crazy just because I can

You know im here for the party
And I aint leavin til they throw me out
Gonna have a little fun
gonna get me some

I may not be a ten but the boys say I clean up good
And if I gave em half a chance for some rowdy romance you know they would

I've been waiting all week just to have a good time
So bring on them cowboys and their pick up lines

Dont want no purple hooter shooter just some jack on the rocks
Dont mind me if i start that trashy talk

You know im here for the party
And I aint leavin til they throw me out
Gonna have a little fun
gonna get me some

Mothers all over the heartland must be beside themselves over this kind of cultural pollution. How can they explain it to their kids? (What does "get me some" mean, mommie?)


James Wolcott notices another shocking example of daytime radio sexual innuendo.

Where will it end?

.
digby 4/15/2005 11:52:00 PM |

 
Response

I wrote this short little piece for In These Times about the difference between the right and left blogosphere. It is a very superficial sketch of how the two spheres operate differently. It evoked the expected furious response from the usual suspects because I quoted from Garance Franke-Ruta's investigative piece on the right wing blogosphere.

The first thing that seems to bother people is my description of what I believe to be the main difference between the right and the left blogospheres --- which is that the right is a fully engaged part of the Republican party infrastructure while the left is a unique political constituency. But, except for the fact that Republicans are indulging in dirty tricks like the Thune bloggers (and it looks like others coming down the pike) I'm not really making a value judgment about those differences. Indeed, I have my doubts about both systems and wonder if the Democrats wouldn't benefit from a bit more message discipline.

Be that as it may, let me answer some of Mike Krempasky's specific criticisms. First he comments that I have the FEC controversy completely bass ackwards when I say this:

Because of these successes, some progressives believed that the recent efforts by Republican members of the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) to regulate blogs as paid political speech may have been motivated by partisanship. As it turns out, the new proposed FEC rule changes, still subject to public comment, continue to exempt blogs from regulation.

With all of the potential for fundraising, “guerilla activism” and massaging, perhaps neither party wants to unduly inhibit their sector of the blogosphere.

First of all, I was incorrect in my characterization that Republicans wanted to regulate blogs, (although not wrong in stating that liberal bloggers believed that.) What Republicans wanted to do was give the impression that they had to regulate blogs. It is a small but important distinction and I should have been more precise. However, I stand by my assertion that this entire controversy was perceived to have been a partisan move and indeed, I think it was. The Republican commissioners who were so verklempt about the Democrats' failure to appeal the decision are the same Republicans who want to take another bite out of McCain Feingold and this was an opportunity to do that.

The whole thing began with this interview with Republican commissioner Bradley Smith on C-Net called "The Coming Crackdown on Blogging". He claimed that because the Democrats on the panel refused to appeal a judicial ruling that said that the internet had to be addressed under McCain Feingold, the sky was falling. It was a hysterical and overblown interview coming from a guy who does not believe in the FEC to begin with. Via Waldo-Jacquith here's this about our intrepid blogging advocate, commissioner Bradley Smith:

Brad Smith, a law professor at Capital University Law School, has devoted his career to denouncing the FEC and the laws it is entrusted to enforce in precisely those strident terms. He believes that virtually the entire body of the nation's campaign finance law is fundamentally flawed and unworkable "indeed, unconstitutional." He has forcefully advocated deregulation of the system. And, if the James Watt of campaign finance had his way, the FEC, and its state counterparts, would do little more than serve as a file drawer for disclosure reports.

These are not stray and ill-considered comments. Rather, Brad Smith has become the single most aggressive advocate for deregulation of campaign finance in the academy today. Ask any scholar of campaign finance who has spilt the most ink denouncing our current campaign finance laws; the answer will be Brad Smith. Ask any enemy of campaign finance laws to identify the most sought-after witness to make the case to Congress; Brad Smith, will be the top answer.

Now, I have no idea if Bradley Smith truly believes that blogs have an absolute right to free speech. I give him the benefit of the doubt and say he probably does. However, it seems pretty clear to me that his zeal to appeal that lower court's ruling was primarily because he wants to whittle away at McCain-Feingold if he can. There was no reason to assume that you couldn't get where he wanted to go through new regulations or legislation that clarifies the issue.

As for whether the new proposed rules, which are still in the comment stage, specifically exempt blogs, well, I'll leave that to the lawyers. But at the time I wrote this article, the press certainly seemed to think that the proposed rules exempted bloggers. Certain well known right wing blogs also indicated that the situation was not dire.

The Democracy Project wrote this headline:

FEC Draft Rule Looks Good for [Non Corporate] Bloggers

Wizbang wrote:

Today the members of The Online Coalition received the FEC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [PDF - Word], which we're still looking through. The mood is cautiously optimistic.

Election law expert Richard Hazen said:

At first glance, the Federal Election Commission’s draft proposal for regulating Internet-based election activity is good news for the blogosphere.

Professor Bainbridge praised Hazen's analysis.

Eugene Volokh had said earlier:

It would be good to clarify FECA to make clear that Weblogs and online magazines are exempted. But I think that, properly -- even literally -- interpreted, "other periodical publication" already includes blogs (except perhaps ones that publish intermittently and very rarely).

Pardon me for concluding that the proposed rules were not, in fact, going to end blogging as we know it.

To Mike Krempansky, however, they apparently are. And he seems to be making progress in creating an ongoing furor, based partially on a leaked early draft (to him, conveniently)of the proposed rules which are supposed to show the draconian Democratic attempt to have government shut down free speech on the internet. Luckily, the blogging masses, with a heads up from Bradley Smith, came to the rescue of America once again and saved the day. God bless bloggers.

"We are not the speech police," said FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democrat. "The FEC does not tell private citizens what they can or can't say on the Internet or elsewhere." FEC Commissioner Danny McDonald, another Democrat, said: "I've never seen so much ado about nothing at this stage of the process."

Among bloggers and political commentators, the reaction to the FEC's proposed regulations ... was mixed. Mike Krempasky, a contributor to conservative Web site RedState.org who attended the meeting, said: "Don't believe Ellen Weintraub when she repeats her mantra of 'Bloggers, chill out!'" Krempasky said the draft rules, if finalized, would create a "regulatory minefield" because they give individuals greater leeway than corporations.

I do not quarrel with the fact that there exists a regulatory minefield --- a topic which could not possibly be dealt with in a short 700 word essay. But it is clear that the intent was that the average blogger be exempted from the proposed regulations.

For the record, I'm not in favor of regulating speech on the internet in any way. I'm a free speech absolutist. But I also see the brave new world of right wing "guerilla internet activism" as a very handy way to conduct their patented dirty tricks and funnel big corporate and individual money into campaigns, thus thwarting the McCain Feingold rules. But, it was ever thus. Money is like water in politics. It will always find a way in. The internet is too unknown and growing in too many different directions to know as yet whether it will corrupt the political system more than it enhances it. I say leave it alone and if that means that congress should write a law specifically exempting it, then I'm for it.

As for throwing my lot in with Mike Krempasky, however, I think not. I believe that he is sincere in his work on this issue, but he is a right wing political operative trained by slime-meister Morton Blackwell. He's not just another libertarian, open source internet kinda guy. Somehow, I don't think he has my best interest at heart. Caveat emptor, bloggers.

Oh, and as far as Krempasky's little fit of the giggles that I said Morton Blackwell is finding the blogosphere "useful" I can only link to this web page from Blackwell's "Leadership Institute" that advertises its "Internet Activist School."

Apparently, Krempasky teaches some of these classes:

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.

Call me crazy, but that seems like something that would be "useful" to the Republican Party, which Morton Blackwell has devoted his life and career to advancing. I never said he was a blogger. But he sure as hell is a legendary political operative and I have little doubt that his Leadership Institute is quite "useful" to the cause in many ways.

Again, I am not agitating against all this. But the thrust of my piece was simply that there is nothing like this on the left. There are no operatives running "blog schools" to teach people how to be activists. There is no rich partisan left wing media infrastructure that can pay for bloggers to write books and hit the lecture circuit and live off of nice sincures at think tanks.

Commenters at ITT claimed that Kos and Atrios fit that category, but that is patently not true. Their blog activism long preceded any involvement with the party and their clout today stems from their massive readership and ability to deliver money and votes to the party. They are the leaders of a constituency that operates as a pressure group and a grassroots organizing operation. None of them worked as political operatives before they became bloggers. The blogging came first.

There are some like Yglesias, Drum and others who also write for liberal magazines. But none of them can be guaranteed a book deal or a radio show or a fellowship to support them, because no network exists that trains and supports lefty writers, thinkers and public relations specialists in Democratic politics. It just isn't there.

But hey, I never said we shouldn't have such a thing or that it was wrong to do it. Indeed, I think we should. But that does not change the fact that we don't have it yet. (I do draw the line at dirty tricks schools, though. Not a good way to go.)

I hope, however, that the leftwing netroots maintain their activist independence to at least some extent. It's a valuable source of energy, new ideas and organization. As we are out of power and fighting for our political lives, keeping close contact with the people, even if the netroots are representative of only a small activist faction, is important.

I suspect the right would like to have some of that too which is why guys like Mike Krempasky are teaching conservatives how to be spontaneous grassroots activists. (Their people tend to respond best to direction from authority which is why the churches are so effective.) It's going to take a little bit more work for them to create a vital netroots. But they will probably do it. They take this stuff seriously. Luckily, we are beginning to do the same.



.
digby 4/15/2005 06:29:00 PM |

 
The Limits Of Politics

For your daily pop culture diatribe, I cannot recommend this post by Matt Yglesias highly enough.

Any worldview that can't stand up in the midst of a vibrant cultural ocean needs to rethink itself more than it needs to try and dragoon political forces into supporting it. I often feel that America's religious traditionalists ought to engage in more self-congratulation. Despite -- or, I would argue, because of -- its inability to entrench itself as a European-style official religion, certain strains of American Protestantism have established themselves as far and away the most robust and viable religious force in the developed world. Traditionalists are perfectly capable of doing as I suggest -- fighting the fight in the background society, contesting secular culture in the cultural domain. There's all this stuff out there. Let it fight, let's argue, write, sing, film, etc. But preserving that sort of vibrancy -- the integrity, one might say, of America's various communities -- requires us not to subordinate the value of everything to the values of politics, and not to try and turn everything into the subject of collective political decision-making.

That's it exactly. Politics can't do everything. And everything isn't politics. Democrats can offer real solutions to real people's problems, but not all of them. We can help mitigate the risk of the free market and provide some protection from the more predatory aspects of capitalism. We can guarantee that every person be treated equally under the law and we can ensure our civil liberties. But politics cannot dictate culture and everytime it tries it creates far more problems than it solves. In fact, the liberal should be in favor of an unfettered market in one thing --- ideas. It is only through that, that we can guarantee our freedom. Our Bill of Rights, properly protected, will do that. But, we have to protect it.

Bravo to Matt for finding the nub of this argument. Culture is a different sphere than politics and one that is just as essential, in its own right, to a free society as democracy is or freedom to practice religion. Politics is a very crude instrument to arbitrate something as delicate and ephemeral as ideas, art, love, personal meaning --- the whole sphere of life that culture encompasses.

And yet there is a political danger lurking of which we should be aware. One of my many brilliant commenters in that fine thread below points this out:

Today in the US, all the bases are belonging to the radical right, except a few.

They've got the think-tanks, but they haven't got academia.

They've got the executive and the legislative branches, but they haven't got the judiciary.

They've got the MSM stitched up along with the commentariat. They haven't got the entertainment industry quite where they'd like, though. Documentaries, in particular, can be a source of information and criticism that can cause a Rove or a Luntz to break a sweat.

Now look at all the "cultural" kerfuffles they've kicked up since the beginning of this year. American education is supposedly threatened by leftist professors, and conservatives are denied their rightful place on campus. New rules are needed to protect poor Young Republican students from their liberal professors, it seems. The Schiavo case shows that the judiciary needs kicking into shape (DeLay just said it again). The entertainment industry is putting out the Wrong Stuff, and what's needed is censorship. (Hey, blogs too.)

So let's go and pitch into the great "debate" about these subjects, and let's not see that, in each case, the radical right is proposing to legislate and even strangle essential constitutional precepts like freedom of speech and the separation of powers. Let's not notice that what they are trying to do is browbeat and bend to their will the last zones of influence in American life that are capable of being an obstacle in their path, and let's forget that their path is toward a new form of totalitarianism harnessing religion as the Nazis harnessed nationalism.

We are definitely seeing a frontal assault on the remaining spheres of social influence that are not organized around or willingly complicit with the Republican agenda. This is not an accident. They, of course, see all obstacles as "liberal" which in the classical sense, I suppose they are. But these social influences of the judiciary, academia and popular culture are not explicitly partisan. In fact, they are largely independent spheres that resist co-option by partisan politics.

So, it's not that liberals want to protect smut and Ward Churchill because we enjoy it or agree with it. And it's not solely because we don't trust that anybody could make decisions about such things that we could live with. It's because we are trying to preserve a society in which culture and intellectual freedom can even continue to exist.

The assaults on culture, academia and the judiciary are not criticisms or even strident disagreements with their products or outcomes. These assaults are legal, legislative and regulatory attempts to pull these independent spheres under governmental authority.

It's not our political agenda we're protecting. Not should we allow ourselves to be conned into thinking that we are helping the working mom so it is a good thing anyway. The stakes are much higher than that even if people don't choose to see it. We must ensure that our entire society, political, cultural and intellectual, isn't subsumed by the Republican agenda. There's a distinction there and a very important one. Without a vibrant culture, an independent judiciary and a free intellectial sphere that operates outside the political decision making process, we become, by default, totalitarian.




.
digby 4/15/2005 03:03:00 PM |

 
Suicide Pact

I am edified to learn that Dr Bill Frist, cat slayer, and Dr James Dobson, dauchshund beater, are joining hands to kill the independent judiciary. (As I have said before, while it's true that not all animal abusers become serial killers, it is true that the vast majority of serial killers were once animal abusers. Not that I'm saying that Frist and Dobson are serial killers ... let's just say that they are in some pretty disgusting company.)

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith."

The filibuster is being used against people of faith? Man, these wingnuts are feeling their oats.

Gawd I hope that the liberal media feel it is their duty to cover this telecast in great depth --- to show that they are not hostile to religion, of course. This would be a wonderful way for them to prove once and for all that they are fair and balanced and believe that these religious issues should be well covered in the press. I think we need to write to all the networks and demand that they cover this important story. We need to tell them that the people have a right to hear what their leaders are saying.

I cannot stress enough how important I think it is to draw the contrasts between the Democrats and Republicans right now. Their ducky president looks lamer and lamer by the day and both GOP leaders of the congress are overreaching badly with this public soul kissing of the extremist religious right. (Giving them any cover for this wacky morals crusade is just dumb. Don't go there, please.)

All we need to do is say we are defending the constitution. Most people may know nothing about civics in this country anymore, but they know damned well that disembowling one branch of government is not business as usual. This is a case where the Republicans have not done the spadework and spent years preparing the public with relentless soothing rhetoric meant to give the impression that this is a natural and inevitable political evolution that will disrupt nothing. Instead their rhetoric is uncharacteristically shrill and nervous. They are lurching around now, reacting to their riled up constituency and making mistakes.

They are leading the Senate to a big dramatic showdown and the stakes couldn't be higher. But we should not flinch. They are the ones in the spotlight, they are the ones who look hysterical, they are the ones who have the stink of desperation all over them, not us. Tone will be important, here. We should make sure that in the debate we are defending the constitution and tradition and we should do it in modest language with common sense rhetoric. The media will cover this and it will be a perfect chance for us to persuade the public through our temperate but unyielding approach that we are operating from principle and committment. The other side is going to work itself into a frenzy. We need to be calm and cool and united.

The media will trivialize the Democrats' position but we have to remember that this is also the kind of conflict they love so they'll cover it and give Democrats some time to make their case. We should be preparing right now for that opportunity with a set of strong and persuasive talking points that we stick with throughout the controversy. According to this widely reported recent WSJ poll, people are already nervous. They want the Democrats to act as a backstop for this wild nonsense. And that was before Schiavo. We should be prepared to say over and over again that we feel it is our duty to prevent the Republicans from radically altering our way of governance. Do you suppose that most people agree with this?:

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

That's the most powerful man in the US House of Representatives saying that, not some no-name preacher from Arkansas.

Luckily it seems the Harry Reid has the smarts and the cojones to realize that this is as much a defining issue for us as is social security and he's not going to flinch:

Alexander said Democrats "are badly misreading this politically" if they think the public would blame Republicans for a Senate breakdown orchestrated by Democrats. GOP aides say Frist has drawn the same conclusion. Nonetheless, Senate Democrats are vowing a scorched-earth response, noting that a single senator can dramatically slow down the chamber's work by insisting on time-consuming procedures that are normally bypassed by "unanimous consent."

They also are portraying Frist as a tool of GOP extremists. Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), asked this week if the radical right is driving Frist and his lieutenants, replied: "If they decide to do this, which it appears they are going to, the answer is unequivocally -- underlined, underscored -- yes."

Frist's political instincts are not very good as he has proven over and over again and it seems to have precipitated this showdown too:

"I think Senator Frist has backed himself into a corner where I don't see how he can avoid pulling the nuclear trigger," said Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. In terms of a presidential race, Cook said, "it hurts if he doesn't come up with the votes. But it also hurts him if the Senate comes to a grinding halt and can't get anything done. I think the guy's in a real jam."

I think Reid has the argument here and I think we will prevail. Just as newt failed to realize that it was his intemperate over-the-top rhetoric during the government shutdown that turned the people against him, these guys don't understand that allying themselves with the most extremist wing of the religious right is bound to do the same thing. Bubbles breed hubris and I think these people spend way too much time talking to each other.



Update: Does anyone out there know of any examples of moderate Republican religious types who have publicly come out against these recent extremist moves? I know that the polls indicate that a large number of them disagreed with the Schiavo matter, but I'm not aware of any of the people for whom morals are a voting issue moving away from the GOP because of it. Where I'm seeing the movement is in the libertarian, scientific and professional factions of the party.

For instance, I have not seen any full throated repudiations of the GOP by Republican religious moderates such as this from Bush voter, John Cole. My hunch is that people who vote on "morals" issues aren't actually moderates so they aren't disturbed in the least by what they are seeing. Therefore, posturing about the issue won't get us anywhere. But, who knows? It sure seems to me that the way to win is to go where the votes are up for grabs --- which seems to me to be among the people who really don't want James Dobson and Pat Robertson running the country.



.
digby 4/15/2005 12:30:00 PM |

 
Sissy Assassins

I'm awfully touched that so many Republicans have gone all Claud Raines over these mean Tom Delay and George Bush t-shirts. Indeed, they are so shocked and appalled that according to Crooks and Liars, they are even issuing death threats to Cafe Press, the outfit that distributes the offending items.

The liberal left is completely out of hand. (Michelle Malkin calls us the "pro-assassination" left which is something I'm hearing more of lately and wonder just when this latest delusion seized the wingnuts and what it means. Usually this sort of thing is projection which is a bit alarming.) In any case it appears that we liberals are now not only a bunch of sissies, we are also ruthless killers. Which is interesting, if incoherent.

For instance, it must be liberals who are selling the "Deep Six" campaign through cafe press, which consists of headstones with the names and pictures of Democratic Senators.



You can even get a tee shirt for your baby with that nice picture on it.

And this classic from the right wing shopmetrospy.com never gets old. The price has been discounted so stock up for gifts!:



It's interesting that when I first posted this back in November during the earlier "Che" t-shirt vapors, the caption said:

The Marine who killed the wounded insurgent in Fallujah deserves our praise and admiration. In a split second decision, he acted valiantly.

On the otherhand, Kevin Sites of NBC is a traitor. Beheading civilians, booby-trapped bodies, suicide bombers?? Sorry hippie, American lives come first. Terrorists don't deserve the benefit of the doubt. This Marine deserves a medal and Kevin Sites, you deserve a punch in the mouth.

Now it's toned down just a little bit.

But I think what really makes the point most clearly about the liberal penchant for violence, crudity and coarseness is this one, entitled "Irrigate Hillary" which shows a soldier urinating into Mrs. Clinton's mouth:



(Click on the link for the full panoply of just one guy's hate Hillary items available through cafe press. Sadly, the "Irrigate Hillary" campaign doesn't offer an apron or a baby shirt. Luckily, it does come on a coffee cup. Which is presumably empty.)

It's sad that we liberals, with our penchant for assasination and disgusting crudity, have lowered the discourse to such a degree that even Tom DeLay is being villified with mean t-shirts. But we may have gone too far this time. Republicans have stepped up and put liberals on notice that they will no longer tolerate our reprehensible rhetoric. Children are listening ... and wearing the t-shirts.



.
digby 4/15/2005 10:03:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

 
Believe It


This whole argument about pop culture reminds me of a conversation I had in 1977. I was sitting around with my friends and somebody put "God Save the Queen" by the Sex Pistols on the stereo. Afterwards, I said I thought it wasn't really music --- to which a friend of mine replied that I sounded just like his parents when he first played the Beatles. I was only 21 at the time, so this hit me pretty hard. I never forgot it.

This "kids today" stuff has been going on for a long, long time. Anybody who was a kid in the 60's like I was, remembers endless sermons and lectures and handwringing about how the world was coming to an end because the boys were growing their hair long and the girls weren't shaving their armpits and marijuana was going to fry your brain like an egg. Before that, in 1956, there was the fear of "juvenile delinquents":

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;
We never had the love that ev'ry child oughta get.
We ain't no delinquents,
We're misunderstood.
Deep down inside us there is good!

Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,
My parents treat me rough.
With all their marijuana,
They won't give me a puff.
They didn't wanna have me,
But somehow I was had.
Leapin' lizards! That's why I'm so bad!

Officer Krupke, you're really a square;
This boy don't need a judge, he needs an analyst's care!
It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.
He's psychologic'ly disturbed!

My father is a bastard,
My ma's an S.O.B.
My grandpa's always plastered,
My grandma pushes tea.
My sister wears a mustache,
My brother wears a dress.
Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!

Officer Krupke, you're really a slob.
This boy don't need a doctor, just a good honest job.
Society's played him a terrible trick,
And sociologic'ly he's sick!


Gee, Officer Krupke,
We're down on our knees,
'Cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease.
Gee, Officer Krupke,
What are we to do?
Gee, Officer Krupke,
Krup you!

And that was in the golden age of "Leave It To Beaver" and "I Love Lucy."

All these people who are so afraid of what their kids are doing and thinking are just like my parents were. Afraid of the new world they'd built and were leaving behind for their kids. And so it goes.

Ed Kilgore writes today on the subject:

If there's a problem, and at least some sorts of tangible public-policy solutions, then the argument that this is "all about politics" loses some of its sting. But of course, you "can't take the politics out of politics," so yeah, Democrats should look at this politically as well. And Amy is absolutely right that Democrats tend to view "cultural issues" as limited to abortion and gay marriage and other Republican-dictated agenda items, and Gerstein is absolutely right that such issues are often just the ways voters use to figure out whether politicians actually believe (a) there are principles more important than politics, and (b) there is such a thing as right and wrong.

The whole hep Democratic world right now, from Howard Dean to George Lackoff to Bill Bradley right over to the DLC, says it's important that Democrats clearly identify "what they believe" and "where they stand" and "what values they cherish." If all the evidence--some scientific, some anecdotal or intuitive--suggesting that parents believe they are fighting an unequal battle with powerful cultural forces over the upbringing of their children is at all correct, then we have to take a stand there, too. It may matter a whole lot, if you look at the Democratic vote among marrieds-with-children--steadily dropping from a Clinton win in 1996 to an eighteen-point loss in 2004, a disproportionately large swing

Yes, the public does wonder what we stand for. And in this debate it seems we can either stand for better V chips and Terri Schiavo's mother-in-law, or we can stand for this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

I don't know about you, but that sounds like it actually means something. Even has a bit of a ring to it.

Look, I don't care if we legislate for "better" V-chips. (From what I have read people aren't using the one we have available, not because it's too hard, but because they just don't want to be bothered. But whatever.) We can express our empathy for how difficult it is to parent in this environment. We can bemoan the coarsening of the culture and try shame people to stop selling useless consumer items to children. None of those things are particularly dangerous in themselves. But neither are they going to be politically advantageous.

Everytime we try to move in this "moderate" cultural direction that we think people will choose over the GOP vision, the more we appear to be a large puddle of lukewarm water. Because, let's face it. If you really think that the government should do something about popular culture because it's harmful then you really should step up to the plate and admit that you think censorship in some form or another would be a good thing. Because that's the only thing that government can really do to make a difference --- compel people to stop saying and selling and watching and buying.

And that's what the conservatives have to offer. Clear, simple, straightforward. They believe that this swill is harming society and they want it taken care of. They don't play around with studies and "oh I understand what you are going through." They offer a real solution. Censor the garbage. Impeach the judges. Fix the damn problem. The bully in their pulpit sounds a hell of a lot more competent than ours.

And, conversely, they have won the gun issue by being rigid absolutists about the second amendment and giving no quarter. In fact, I think that their rhetoric has been so widespread and so successful that we would benefit from making our argument explicitly about the first amendment in much the same way. Some people may just wonder why, if the second is sacred, the first shouldn't be also.

Now, I don't think that any Democrats really want censorship. They want magic. They want people to stop wanting what they want. And if that doesn't work, they want the manufacturers and producers to feel bad about what they are doing and stop providing what the people want. This is an unrealistic political goal. (It seems much more suited to religion than government and it makes me wonder, if religion is sweeping the nation in a new Great Awakening, why it is having so little effect?)

And there is the truly serious problem that these culture war issues are exploited by the right for the very reason that they are willing to offer these simple solutions to issues that we necessarily find complicated. They tie us in knots with this stuff. That's why we shouldn't walk into their trap time after time after time by trying to split the difference. It isn't working.

Kilgore says:

Gerstein is absolutely right that such issues are often just the ways voters use to figure out whether politicians actually believe (a) there are principles more important than politics, and (b) there is such a thing as right and wrong.

Why do we have to play the game on their "culture war" turf? Why can't we say that the principle of free speech is more important than politics (which I actually believe has the virtue of being true.) Why can't we say that it is wrong for people to impose their religious views on others? Are these not principles worth fighting for? Do they not have the ring of clear common sense? These seem like first principles to me.

Why people continue to believe that we can convince people that we "believe in something" by validating the GOP's calumnious rhetoric about deviant liberal culture I will never understand. I think we convince people that we believe in something by well ... believing in something. How about the constitution, for a starter?



Update: Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money makes a number of exceptional insights into this issue (read the whole post) but I think this one is particularly apt:

There's an additional problem evident in the way Sullivan frames the debate. One might ask why so many people are obsessed with culture, when the evidence for the influences attributed to it are so weak. Could it be that politicians and pundits like Sullivan continually tell parents that they should be obsessed with culture? This isn't just harmless misdirection, either. The national political agenda can only be focused on a fraction of the policy solutions being advocated. The more people are convinced that TV is causing certain social pathologies, the less likely they are to agitate for solutions that might actually be relevant to the problem (which, of course, is why the cultural conservative agenda is so effective for Republicans.) I would like liberals to point out that other liberal democracies have lower rates of violence and teen pregnancy despite their children being exposed to similar cultural influences, which suggests that other factors may be more relevant that pop culture. But according to Sullivan, you're not even allowed to point this out, because if parents believe what politicians tell them you're not allowed to say anything different.

It's the old Cokie Roberts line "It doesn't matter if it's true. It's out there."

And frankly, I'm not ever sure it is. Is there any hard data, other than the fact that married women are voting more Republican, that this culture clash is a voting issue? And even if it is, I think Lemiuex's observation is likely correct. Republicans are laughing themselves silly everytime we validate their winning misdirection strategy.



.
digby 4/13/2005 01:21:00 PM |

 
Comment of the week

On the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy:

An open Letter to David Horowitz:

April 13, 2005
Dear Mr. Horowitz:

I see that your list is a tad short of 1000 so I would like to nominate myself for inclusion. You probably have never heard of me (unless you followed the Boston Symphony where I played for 27 years). I feel my political mojo has faded with my aging and I fear encroaching irrelevance (remember the good old days!) so I’m hoping you will help me out, since I can claim many points of contact, some of them admittedly rather casual, with people on your list, to wit:

I went to a summer music camp with Carol Gilligan (she was Carol Friedman then) and have remained in contact with her ever since. Another fairly regular presence at this camp was Pete Seeger, which should tell you all you need to know. Some years later, I taught at the place and in varying years had in my choruses both Arlo Guthrie (who really belongs in your list) and Frank Rich, although he was only thirteen at the time.

I lived in New York City in 1968 and became acquainted with Harold Ickes Jr. when he was a boy genius and I was a foot-soldier in the Eugene McCarthy campaign. Dennis Kucunich is my mother’s Congressman, and my brother who lives in Seattle is a supporter of Patty Murray. I even had an uncle named Joe Miller, although he is not the same as your guy. Still….

I once hoisted beers with Norman Mailer, although I’m sure he doesn’t remember me (or anything else from that evening in the Lion’s Head Tavern). I met Abbie Hoffman (also not on your list, strangely…he is as dead as Paul Robeson and a lot hipper) at a party while he was under indictment and encountered Alexander Cockburn ---also in the Lion’s Head –but I must admit that I didn’t like him very much. I shook hands with Muhammed Ali and was really excited. For a year in Cambridge I lived down the street from Bonny Raitt, and even performed on the same stage with her when she was a guest with the Boston Pops.

Although I agree with very little of what I says, I did teach for a while at Boston University at the same time that Howard Zinn was there. My son was once an intern in John Kerry’s Washington office and went to George Soros’ Central European University in Budapest for two years (although since he is now a corporate lawyer maybe this doesn’t count) and his wonderful wife worked for the Ford Foundation.

Lest you think I have slacked off, presently Michael Capuano is my Congressman and I actually live in Somerville, his birthplace. I admit it’s a bit of a stretch but it should count for something, and my poetry professor of last year married her same-sex partner. I’d guess that she would be thrilled to be included too.

Now since I don’t have a blog or an op-ed column, you may me dismiss me as a wannabe. But I hope you’ll consider that carefully, since I’m capable of the following sort of thing (and I’m really proud of it…four technically sound limericks on the same subject --- you --- is not at all easy to bring off)

David Horowitz

This Horowitz is a phenom
Who once railed against Vietnam
He fought his good fight
On the left not the right
O’er the Ramparts red glare with aplomb.

But things on the left were not jake
He skedaddled, a Long March did make
As Far Left as he’d been
He repented his sin
Went Far Right, made the same old mistake.


Though he moved to the opposite wing
And neocon hymns he may sing,
As he once lauded Mao
He’s right radical now
Not position, but style is the thing.

For the style of his dogmatic way
(I don’t doubt that it really does pay)
Is with passion extreme
To declaim, rant and scream
His great Absolute Truth (of today).


I would be happy to supply you with a bio if you would honor me with inclusion in your little list. I am yours truly

Jerome P. Rosen

PS I think John Bolton is an asshole, that Cheney and Richard Perle are evil, and that you are a nut-job. Does this help?

digby 4/13/2005 09:13:00 AM |

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

 
Smear Boats Are A Comin'

If anyone is wondering about this Hillary swift boat style smear book that Drudge is flacking on his site, be advised that the alleged liberal who wrote it is actually the right wing fuck who writes Walter Scott's Personality Parade -- a piece of Sunday morning trash I stopped reading when he wrote that Chelsea Clinton was an "apple that doesn't fall far from the tree" drunken party girl.

Apparently, Pengiun has joined the Regnery ranks. Nice.



.
digby 4/12/2005 11:21:00 PM |

 
Light Of Reason

Arthur Silber wades into the now legendary Horowitz Bérubé smackdown (which if you haven't read it is one of the most satisfying series of blog posts in blogdom) with characteristically interesting insights:

Given the statement in his own “Academic Bill of Rights,” on what grounds can Horowitz possibly maintain these blatantly irreconcilable positions? Whenever he accuses anyone of “shar[ing] negative views of the Bush Administration” with known terrorists (or more briefly, of “hating America”), one can simply reply: “But, Mr. Horowitz, you yourself believe that ‘there is no humanly accessible truth that is not in principle open to challenge.’ So how do you know that anyone hates America, or that the invasion of Iraq was legitimate, or that occupying Iraq was a wise move in the war against terrorism? In fact, given your own statements, how do you know anything at all?”

Given Horowitz’s approach (which inevitably and necessarily combines relativism, skepticism and subjectivism in one particularly nasty mix), he would have no answer—and in fact, he doesn’t know anything, not with certainty, by his own admission.

I've been meaning to write a little post directing my lovely readers to Arthur Silber's Light of Reason. His site is consistently interesting, well written and original. He's a libertarian, but not one of those annoying fake libertarians who pretend that they are libertarians because they are too embarrassed to be called Republicans (which I understand, but disdain.)

Anyway, Arthur's blog is one of the ways that we can keep some intellectual integrity in this fight with the crazed right wing. He makes arguments, he doesn't hurl epithets. You might learn something even when you disagree with him, which you will, if your politics are like mine.

He's a real humanoid who incidentally could use some financial help due to ill health. If you have it to spare, it would be a good place to do your good deed for the day.



.
digby 4/12/2005 05:38:00 PM |

 
Exploding Bandwagon

Noam Scheiber, who I often endorse wholeheartedly on other issues, explicitly lays out the divide in the Democratic party as I did, as being between "social libertarians" and "communitarians" which is, in my opinion, a weasel word for "kinda socially conservative" in this context.

He says that Democrats began losing because they were perceived as being immoral and licentious, going all the way back to 1972's "abortion, amnesty and acid." It was, in his opinion, only when Bill Clinton said that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare" that we began to lose that perception. But we've been backsliding ever since. Indeed, according to him, every election we have lost or won in the last 30 years has been because we are either perceived as moral or immoral to the moderates who swing elections.

I'll leave it to others to analyze the election statistics to prove whether or not that last is true, but I will say that while we are concerning ourselves with how we are perceived, let us not forget that we have also been perceived as weak on defense. Also the party of racial and gender preferences. And perhaps most importantly, we have been portrayed for decades as the party of big government, the "nanny state" who want to regulate and tax everyone out of existence and force you to hang around with people you hate, eat foods you don't like and quit smoking and drinking even though you hurt nobody but yourself. That's as much of a critique of "do-gooder" Democrats as it ever has been of "law and order" Republicans, who traditionally made their argument on the basis of rampant crime, not telling people what they should do for themselves.

It's always something, isn't it? Those republican scamps have a handy critique for everything we believe. So, I would imagine just as we become the "communitarian" party of love for the weak and defenseless, you'll be seeing a spirited defense of individual liberty coming from the other side. It's kind of the way these things work. Karl knows this.

The thing is that rarely have I seen in my lifetime a situation in which the Republicans have been so soundly criticized by even their own constituency for being too intrusive and imposing their own values on others as we saw in the Schiavo case. It would seem a natural that Democrats would, out of pragmatism if not principle, see this as a way to drive a wedge into the Republican coalition by capitalizing on public opinion and characterizing the Republicans as being in the grip of a mad faction that wants to impose its religious values on everyone.

Apparently not. Instead we are going to drive a wedge into our own, against the will of the majority of both Democrats and Republicans. It's an unusual strategy to say the least. Now is our chance to expose their extremism and it looks like we may just punt. How depressing:

When the Schiavo case began garnering national attention, Democrats' first reaction was to press their social libertarian line. "Congressional leaders have no business substituting their judgment for that of multiple state courts that have extensively considered the issues in this intensely personal family matter," House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi complained. Liberals became increasingly confident as polls showed the public overwhelmingly concerned about federal intrusion into a private family matter. Once again, Democrats risked reinforcing the perception they lacked core values.

Something interesting, however, was beginning to happen: Voices within the Democratic Party were genuinely agonizing over whether congressional intervention in the Schiavo case was truly so egregious. Almost 50 House Democrats voted in favor of the legislation authorizing the additional judicial review--many of them Southern moderates, but several of them liberal members of the Congressional Black Caucus. It was dawning on the party that there was an affirmative statement of values to be made, not simply a libertarian attack on government intervention.

The case of Terri Schiavo is incredibly complex. But the question of a government obligation to the weak, the sick, and the disabled is not--at least for Democrats. So it was reassuring to learn this week that congressional Democrats like Tom Harkin and Barney Frank are closing ranks behind legislation that would allow federal courts to review cases in which end-of-life choices are murky and the family is divided. Considered alongside Hillary Clinton's efforts to reframe the pro-choice position as a communitarian belief that every child should be born into a loving, caring family, it looks as though we're seeing the beginning of a new Democratic Party. It's a party that appeals to core values, not one that allows itself to be caricatured by their absence. Let's hope that party is here to stay.

Yes, by all means, let's adopt the biggest political cock-up the Republicans have made in the last twenty years as our own. (And anybody who thinks that we can stop the Republicans from caricaturing us is fooling themselves. The key is for us to caricature them --- and they are making it easy for us to do it if we have the guts.)

I sincerely hope that we are not dumb enough to portray ourselves as the party of the do-gooder church lady just when they are in the process of proving to the entire country that they are the party of nosy mother-in-law. I do not believe that we will get one more vote for it in the south, and we will lose any hope of gaining back some of the western red states that might be persuaded that all this holy roller nonsense has gone too far.

This is terrible, terrible politics. I don't mind Hillary emphasizing birth control and sex education as a way to expose the religious right's real agenda. I think that makes sense. But that is far different than joining the most far right of the far right in allowing the federal courts to dabble in individual end of life issues. If we do this I hope we are also prepared to give the right its cover as they continue their assult on the allegedly runaway "activist" judiciary --- because that's the basis for this ridiculous federal power grab. There was no reason for the federal courts to get involved with Sciavo because the state courts did NOTHING wrong. My God. Are we really willing to go down this road?

I sincerely hope Scheiber is wrong on this because if he isn't it means that we are thinking of jumping on the right's exploding bandwagon just as it's careening off the edge of a cliff. I can't think of a more self-destructive act.



.
digby 4/12/2005 03:59:00 PM |

 
Heartsease

Go read this beautiful meditation and eulogy from the fine writer Meteor Blades at The Next Hurrah.




And by the way, Hugh Hewitt can once again kiss my ass.


.
digby 4/12/2005 02:41:00 PM |

 
This, I'm Worried About



Honestly, people are killing their children with diets of disguting food. I recognize their freedom to do this if they want to, but it is a real problem nonetheless. I'd be a lot more sympathetic to their complaints about how difficult it is to raise kids in popular culture if they cared as much about this very serious physical health issue. I'm not a purist in this way. I like a Big Mac and fries now and again myself. And I'm not suggesting that everyone serve tofu and green tea to their toddlers. But from what I see at the grocery store --- and the statistics on childhood obestity and diabetes bear this out -- childrens' health is becoming demonstrably compromised by the way they are eating and the sedentary lifestyle they are leading.

And the government could certainly help with this by forcing schools to limit the crap they serve kids at school, requiring physical exercize in the curriculum and instituting a major education initiative to get parents to feed their children correctly. This is a scientifically proveable problem, not some sort of vague unease about teen age sexuality (which, by the way, has had the older generation freaking out for my entire lifetime --- it's just that we are now the older generation.) The costs to society and to individuals of this health crisis, on the other hand, are going to be huge if something isn't done to reverse this trend.

So, here we a have real, tangible problem for parents and children in desperate need of a solution. But neither party can even go near it because it will be greeted with fury by corporate America and will be perceived my most Americans as an elitist attack on their lifestyle. Instead we're going to regulate cable TV shows because parents can't be bothered to figure out how to program their V Chip. How fucked up is that?


Picture Via Tom Moody



.
digby 4/12/2005 02:00:00 PM |

 
She Can Boast (lyingly)

Via DC Media Girl, I see that Ann Coulter has been named as one of TIME magazine's 100 most influential people:

In her books, Coulter can be erudite and persuasive, as when she exposes the left’s chronic softness on communism. But her signature is her gleeful willingness to taunt liberals and Democrats, to say out loud what some other conservatives dare only think--that Bill Clinton is a "horny hick," for example, and his wife "pond scum." It’s what makes Coulter irresistible and influential, whether you like it or not.

Here's the opening passage of Coulter's "erudite and persuasive" exposure of the left's chronic softness on communism in her influential book "Treason":

Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love American, too. No they don't. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence. The Left’s obsession with the crimes of the West and their Rousseauian respect for Third World savages all flow from this subversive goal. If anyone has the gaucherie to point out the left's nearly unblemished record of rooting against American, liberals turn around and scream "McCarthyism!"

Liberals invented the myth of McCarthyism to delegitimize impertinent questions about their own patriotism. They boast (lyingly) about their superior stance on civil rights. But somehow their loyalty to the United States is off-limits as a subject of political debate. Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for discussion? Why can't we ask: Who is more patriotic --- Democrats or Republicans? You could win that case in court.

Fifty years ago, Senator Joe McCarthy said, "The loyal Democrats of this nation no longer have a Party." Since then the evidence had continued to pour in. Liberals mock Americans who love their country, calling them cowboys, warmongers, religious zealots and jingoists. By contrast, America's enemies are called "Uncle Joe," "Fidel," "agrarian reformers," and practitioners of a "religion of peace." Indeed, Communists and terrorists alike are said to be advocates of "peace."

That first sentence isn't a typo although when I first read it I thought for sure it was. It would make so much more sense if it said "Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of reason." But, no. She means it.

I suppose one could agree that it is erudite (and unbelievably awkward) to use the word "lyingly" the way she used it, along with the word "gaucherie."
But that's nit picking. Her erudition on the subject of McCarthy is well -- non-existent. She basically just made shit up. But, nonetheless it was apparently "irrestistable" to the great historical minds at Time magazine. They are evidently wingnut crackwhores over there.

Aside from her astonishing lack of historical knowledge, however, is it even remotely possible that anyone who isn't already a true believer can make any sense of that mess? For instance, what could possibly be persuasive in this paragraph?:

Liberals invented the myth of McCarthyism to delegitimize impertinent questions about their own patriotism. They boast (lyingly) about their superior stance on civil rights. But somehow their loyalty to the United States is off-limits as a subject of political debate. Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for discussion? Why can't we ask: Who is more patriotic --- Democrats or Republicans? You could win that case in court.

Liberals invented the myth of McCarthyism to keep the other side from questioning their patriotism. Which is, of course, what McCarthy actually did and was eventually disgraced for doing. But whatever. Liberals also boast about their superior stance on civil rights --- lyingly. How this related to the fact that we invented McCarthyism, I don't know. And yet we "somehow" (by boasting "lyingly" about civil rights?) have made made it impossible to question our loyalty to the United States.

But lest we forget, Coulter isn't actually talking about patriotism. She says that Democrats have a "preturnatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason," which is actually many degrees worse than calling somebody a "cowboy" or referring to castro as "Fidel." Indeed, it is a capital offense.

I guess this kind of intellectual incoherence is what makes Coulter so "irresistible" to TIME magazine which has decided to go back to its old 60's ways when it was widely known to be a tool for the political establishment. Between naming Powerline blog of the year, Joe Klein calling the Democrats "undemocratic" and this, I think it's fair to say that the Noise Machine has a proud new member --- or maybe it's actually a founding member that's just recently decided to wear its stripes more proudly. Good to know.

I'm reminded of this passage from Allen Ginsberg's great poem "America"

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

.
digby 4/12/2005 10:31:00 AM |

 
Prove It

Matt Yglesias and Atrios both got to this post by Amy Sullivan before I could, but since it's one of my hobby horses, I can't help but weigh in. Sullivan makes the case again that the Democrats could gain from bashing Hollywood because a lot of parents are uncomfortable with the sexual innuendo on "Friends". Or something like that.

After the election we all argued quite a bit about this sort of thing because the religious right jumped on an initial bit of analysis that said that "moral values" were the primary reason people voted for Republicans. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, but it set off a division in the party, I think, between those who believe that we can achieve a majority by competing for social conservative type votes through religious rhetoric, those who believe that we will win a majority by competing for libertarian type votes through appeals to individual liberty, and those who believe we will win through a muscular foreign policy message.

In order to gain a political majority in this country we need 51%. We have 49%. This question of where we are going to get that majority could be answered in any number of ways or any combination of ways. But, you have to settle on some sort of strategy and mine comes down on the second option. It reflects my personal values and I think it presents a stark, clear choice between the two parties now that the Republicans are being shackled by their image as the party of the religious right extremists. I think it's good policy and good politics both to embrace a "mind your own business" message in light of how far out the Republicans have become. Now is not the time, in my opinion, to blur the lines. It's time to draw them clearly. All those people who watched FOXnews in disgust during the Schiavo matter are open to the argument that the Republicans are trying to impose radical religious values on the country.

But, others disagree and think that social conservatism is where the votes are and that's where we should concentrate our efforts. I have serious doubts that attacking popular culture will be seen as anything more than pandering but there are ways to test this issue.

The fact is that if all these religious people stop watching these television shows they will be cancelled. The entertainment business is the most sensitive market in the world. They measure their product sales every single day and they will stop producing it if it isn't selling. If you don't like it, don't watch it, and if there are as many religious people in this country as we are told, Hollywood will respond. Immediately.

A bunch of pulpits and righteous religious people, who are said to be legion in this country, can get something like this done without doing anything more than just saying no. Because right now a lot of these religious people do watch all this crap. The numbers do not lie. They are buying Britney CD's and Grand Theft Auto for their kids. What they seem to want is for somebody else to make it easier for them to say no to their kids. I suggest that they say no first and popular culture will follow. If religion is as politically and culturally powerful as people keep saying it is, it should be able to persuade people to do this one simple thing.

Of course, there is the little problem that people lie about this stuff. They lie about going to church, and they tell pollsters they are unhappy with things on television --- the very things they continue to watch. I imagine that many people think they need to say these things even as they spend Sunday watching the football game and Sunday night glued to "Desperate Housewives". They refuse to use the V-chip that could keep their little kids from watching any channel they choose and they give their kids money to buy the junk that that they profess not to like. But I can't say as I blame them. Hypocrisy is a requirement of American citizenship these days. Pity the person who admits out loud to being secular or unconcerned with current sexual morality. Better to pay lip service to the morals police than bring down their provincial ire on your head.

And it should be remembered that even if Democratic politicans could benefit from bashing Susan Sarandon and Janeane Garofolo, all of this pressure would likely go awry and we'd be seeing halter tops on the Venus de Milo. Neither politicans nor bureaucrats are capable of telling the difference between art and pornography and they will always err on the side of tight assed stupidity. Like this. And voluntary censorship is worse than government censorship. At least you can vote the censors out of office. If you leave it up to the corporations somebody's mentally challenged nephew will be deciding that the word "but" is dirty.

And as Yglesias points out in his piece, this is all being done in an environment in which pregnancy rates are going down, youth violence is going down and a whole host of other youth pathologies are showing every sign of dissipating. Yet, the one thing that parents could really do to help their children --- get them off the fucking couch in the first place and feed them some real, nutritious food --- they evidently aren't eager to do. Instead, I suspect that many of those who aren't just saying what they think people expect, simply want politicians to make them feel that they are good parents by expressing their faux outrage for them --- while they munch on their super-sized big macs and eagerly watch women metaphorically scratch each others eyes out competing for some zero in a hot tub on "The Bachelor."

But like I said, all that needs to change things here is that these vast numbers of priests, pastors and preachers tell their tens of millions of obedient flocks to stop watching the bad stuff. The bad stuff will disappear if they do it, guaranteed. Take this message to the churches, not the politicians. If we are to believe that this country is awash in religiosity and that religious people make up the constituency that can make or break any political party, then I say prove it. Here's your issue. Get your followers to stop watching all the shows on television that are allegedly polluting our culture and you will have shown once and for all that social conservatism is a majority position in America.



Update: For the record, I do not disagree that we should be addressing the needs of parents. The government can do many things to help people with this, from providing good schools to subsidising decent health care to dealing with as Yglesias calls it "the interesection of feminism and capitalism." As a liberal I think the government has a vital role to play in economic issues, particularly those that help the middle class. That's what we do.

But, by feeding into the myth that the biggest problem facing America is a decline in "values" --- a decline which is promulgated by liberal elites (who, yes work for corporate masters) --- we play into the the right wing's game plan. They have created a myth that liberal values are the prime cause of people's discontent instead of the very real pressures that people feel in the squeeze between work, family, consumerism, freedom and responsibility. Some of these things the government can help with, some of them they can't. But the problem with the current formulation is that the Right has convinced everyone that the government should interfere in the ways in which it is most clumsy and ill equipped and abdicate it's responsibility to do the things it can actually do pretty well.

Here's the thing. Everytime we expolicitly play into this "oh the country's values are going to hell in a handbasket" game, we are playing on GOP turf. I think Amy Sullivan is correct to say that we can use this issue as a way into the hearts and minds of overworked and worried parents. But not by joining with Joementum and condemning Hollywood or, as Amy Sullivan said, pulling a Sistah Soljah on Susan Sarandon. (And, why her? She won the Oscar playing a nun who fights against the death penalty. See what happens when you meddle in art and culture? The good gets all mixed in with the bad.)

The way you worm your way into this topic is by responding to people's concerns about popular culture with an empathetic, "well we live in a free country and apparently a lot of people like that stuff or it wouldn't be on. However, I think we should definitely try to find some ways for you to be able to spend more time with your kids so you can have at least as much influence as the television does."

What you don't do is allow their framing of the argument to stick. It only reinforces their message that liberalism is the cause of all evil. We just have to stop doing that. Whenever we find ourselves speaking in terms that could come out of a Republican's mouth we should ask ourselves if it's really common ground or just internalizing their criticisms of us. 90% of the time it's the latter.


Update II: Julia discusses the strange hippie, liberal phenomenon called ... parental responsibility.



.
digby 4/12/2005 09:14:00 AM |

Monday, April 11, 2005

 
Now It's A Democracy Not A Republic?

From Joe Klein to Ed Koch to every wingnut in the land, the meme of the week is that Democrats are undemocratic because we believe in an independent judiciary and will use the illegitimate minority cudgel of the filibuster to thwart the will of the people. Shame, shame on us.

Yes, we do desire that judicial nominees not be ideologically so removed from our way of thinking as to turn the country in a completely different direction --- like proclaim for the first time, for instance, that the government derives its authority from God rather than the governed. And yes, since the Republicans repealed all the tools they used to accomplished the same tempering of ideology when a Democrat was president, we have threatened to use the only tool at our disposal, the filibuster. This means we have no respect for the majority and are attempting to thwart the will of the electorate, who evidently voted en masse for a radical reform of the judiciary in the last election. Who knew?

Undemocratic. I wonder what one would call impeaching a twice elected president for a personal indiscretion would be? How about redrawing the electoral maps whenever it suits in order to establish a larger majority? Or how about staging a recall less than two years after a scheduled election just because the governor had hit a rough spot in public opinion? (The way Bush is going right now, I wish we had such a thing at the federal level. We could kick his unpopular ass out. But, surely that would be considered "undemocratic" wouldn't it --- if Democrats did it?)

The word "democracy" is sadly being bastardized to such a degree that it's losing its meaning. It's become like Jesus --- a code word for Republicans to bash Democrats. But with all this talk of the filibuster being undemocratic, and it is, it certainly is no more undemocratic than the Senate itself. The Republican party currently represents a majority of states in the Sernate, but the Democrats represent a majority of people. What's democratic about that?

Or how about that relic called the electoral college --- you know the little anachronism that got Junior his first term? Talk about undemocratic. If we are going to start going down the road to a pure democracy then I would suggest that we should probably eliminate both of those institutions.

But it's a funny thing. Whenever I've had conversations bemoaning the undemocratic streak in the GOP these last few years, what with its unprecedented blow job impeachments and recalls and district redrawings and the like, I'm always met with the standard wingnut line "the United States is a republic, not a democracy." Suddenly, we're hearing all this stuff about thwarting the majority. How convenient.

I get tired of pointing out the intellectual inconsistencies on the right. But it is so vast and fertile a subject that I come up against it again and again and again. This is way beyond something as prosaic as hypocrisy. They feel no shame in completely doing an intellectual 180 overnight when circumstances require it. They don't even betray a rueful shrug of the shoulders with a "well you know, it's politics." They argue with the same supercilious, ferocious rudeness on whatever side of the argument serves them at any moment, without ever acknowledging (even, I suspect, to themselves) that just yesterday they were on the other side. Very, very weird.



.
digby 4/11/2005 08:06:00 PM |

 
Poison Embrace

Busy, Busy, Busy has this great screenshot of an ad by the wingnut "Moving America Forward" featuring those great conservatives Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, John Bolton and ... Joe Lieberman.

It occurs to me that the Democrats should start doing the same thing to John McCain. If McCain runs in '08, it would be nice to have him saddled with being the Democrats favorite conservative. Why take the chance that he could get the nomination? Let's taint him.

Here's a good quote we can use:

"The politics of division and slander are not our values," McCain said in Virginia. "They are corrupting influences on religion and politics and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country."

That's a message that could play well in the general election, where independents could go for him. Best make sure he doesn't get the nomination. Let's run some ads with McCain alongside Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton. That ought to finish him off.


As an aside, I don't know if the Republican establishment is as convinced of this as Republicans of my acquaintance, but the ones I know really think that Lieberman could win. Really. They think he's the only guy in the party who could get Republican votes. I think they are delusional. What Lieberman lacks in charisma he more than makes up for in lack of appeal. But these people really believe that Joementum is a threat.

Of course, he will never get the nomination, as we know. But we should ensure that McCain doesn't get it either. Democrats have to win.



.
digby 4/11/2005 07:18:00 PM |

 
Location Location Location


Kevin says something today that I think is odd:

It's one thing to stretch logic enough to conclude that a fertilized piece of DNA in the womb is a human life that deserves the full protection of the law, but it's quite another to conclude that a fertilized piece of DNA in a petri dish is a human life that deserves the full protection of the law. Especially when the petri dish version might hold the key to curing grandpa's Parkinson's.

I actually think the opposite is true. If one concludes that these scraps of DNA have the rights of personhood depending on where they are located, I would think that logic would force you to choose the one that doesn't conflict directly with the fully formed human being it's living within --- the woman. The controversy about abortion can be distilled to a conflict between what is, at the DNA scrap stage anyway, a "life" that is quite literally attached to and part of another life. If people want to decide that DNA scraps in petri dishes are full citizens with the right to vote and own condos in Miami, it's stupid, but far more logical than it is when you tell a woman that the scrap of DNA inside of her body has the same equal rights under the law as she does.

Personally, I see scraps of DNA in petri dishes and wombs simply as scraps of DNA which do not hold human rights at all. I'm all for curing grandpa's Parkinsons with the hundreds of thousands of discarded embryos from in vitro fertilization. That seems like common sense to me --- maybe even God's plan. But if we are going to go around bestowing human rights on DNA I think fully formed human beings should have at least a slightly superior claim to those rights than the microscopic scrap of DNA inside her body.



.
digby 4/11/2005 10:49:00 AM |

Friday, April 08, 2005

 
Eine Kleine Mock Music

Would it be terribly politically incorrect of me to wish that Joe Klein would just succumb to his impending persistent vegetative state? I promise to let the Schindlers adopt him and they can pump his feeding tube full of homemade butterscotch puddin' 24/7 if he will just shut his burbling piehole.

In spite of the fact that three quarters of the country were repelled by the Republican grandstanding in the Schiavo circus, Klein insists, as always, that it is the Democrats who have it wrong. We need to give "careful consideration to what thoughtful conservatives are saying about the role of the judiciary in our public life."

Which thoughtful conservatives should we be listening to Joe? The ones who are directly threatening conservative and liberal judges who believe their job is to interpret the laws or the ones who merely understand why someone would be moved to threaten conservative and liberal judges who believe their job is to interpret the laws? Or maybe it's this thoughtful conservative who heads the Coalition For A Fair Judiciary. Here's what she thoughtfully had to say today, (via Sam Rosenfeld on TAPPED):

My job is stand in the breach between the left and the president’s judicial nominations . . . You know who they are. You’ve seen them. The pro-abortion fanatics and the radical feminists, the atheists who file lawsuits attacking the pledge of allegiance and the ten commandments, the environmentalist tree-hugging animal-rights extremists, the one-world globalists who worship at the altar of the United Nations and international law, the militant homosexuals and the anti-military hippie pieceniks, the racial agitators who believe we are all created equal but some are a little more equal than others, the union bosses and the socialists posing as journalists and college professors, the government bureaucrats and the tax-and-spend junkies, the Hollywood elitists, the air-headed actors and singers who think that we actually care what they think, the pornographers who fund the leftists and who won’t be happy until every Bible in every child’s hands is replaced with the latest copy of Hustler magazine, and of course the gun-grabbing trial lawyers and their willing accomplices in the United States Senate who won’t be happy until they disarm every last citizen down to the last bee bee and paintball gun.

Yes, I agree that I need to listen more to flaming fuckwads like that. Right after I pull the hot needles from my eyeballs.

Joe says:

The Schiavo case has provoked a passionate American conversation, which is taking place on a more profound level than the simple yes and no answers of the polls. Yes, the vast majority disdain the politicians who chose to exploit the case. And yes, a solid majority would not want their own lives prolonged in a similar situation. But the questions that cut closest to home are the family issues. What would you do if Terri Schiavo were your daughter? Why couldn't Michael Schiavo just give custody over to the parents? What do we do about custody in a society where the parent-child bond is more durable than many marriages? The President's solution, to "err on the side of life," seems the only humane answer—if there is a dispute between parents and spouse, and the disabled person has left no clear instruction.

"The parent-child bond is more durable that many marriages?" And here I thought it was supposed to be the Democrats who infantilized adults. Or maybe it's really just the infantilization of men. The old rhyme used to say that a "son is a son 'til he takes a wife, a daughter's a daughter all of her life." Now a son is a daughter all of his life too. I guess that's a weird form of progress.

Klein's insistence that the polls don't acurately reflect the nation's feelings on the matter is reminiscent of official Washington's gobsmacked reaction to the public's take on the Lewinsky scandal. Here's how Klein himself explained it in "The Natural."

When it has all been digested, public opinion has shifted not a whit. The President's job approval ratings remained very high, in the 60 percent range --- he would leave office with the highest sustained job approval ratings of any President since John F. Kennedy. His personal approval ratings were lower, of course. It was difficult to imagine any civilian answering in the affirmative if asked, "Do you approve of the President's personal behavior?" Of course many secret sympathies were undoubtedly harbored, especially among those Clinton's age, who had navigated themselves --- shakily --- through the uncertain moral shoals of the late twentieth century.

[...]

The Republicans suffered grievously. They lost five seats in the congressional elections that fall, which was very rare for a midterm election during a President's sixth year in office. Newt Gingrich suffered and appropriately Jacobin fate, becoming as target of his own hotheads...His reign had lasted exactly four --- entirely disasterous --- years...A Harris poll showed that journalists were now held in the lowest public esteem of any professional group, lower even than lawyers.

This mystified Washington. William Bennett, the former Reagan education Secretary who had built a cottage industry out of books that compiles stories about "virtues" now hustled forth with a new book called "The Death of Outrage, and made a national tour lamenting the moral insensitivity of the American people. The editorial pages of both the New York Times and Washington Post had sounded, in the midst of the scandal every bit as intemperate as the editorial page of the Wall Street journal.

[...]

How then to explain the contrast between the intensity of outrage in Washington and the laissez-faire attitude toward the President's immorality among the citizens of the most religious of Western democracies? It seemed an inprecedented disparity, and quite fascinating. It was especially entertaining to watch the commentariat --- which had been predicting for months yhat the public would soon share its anti-Clinton obsession --- try to explain why that hadn't happened. Americans had judged the Lewinsky affair a delicious, disgraceful, exploitive and ultimately private act of consensual sex.

However you choose to characterize people's reactions, the only one that matters politically is that they believed it was a private act and that the government had overstepped its bounds. But "the uncertain moral shoals of the late twentieth century" (and early 21st century) aren't confined to whether middle aged men can keep it in their pants at the office. Lot's of uncertainty these days Joe, except for one thing --- nobody wants that moron George W. Bush defining what constitutes "erring on the side of life" any more than they wanted Ken Starr rifling through their panty drawers.

Speaking of the Democratic response he says:

...it was a curiously sterile pronouncement, bereft of the Congressman's usual raucous humanity. It exemplified the Democratic Party's recent overdependence on legal process, a culture of law that has supplanted legislative consideration of vexing social issues. This is democracy once removed.

Huh? The libertine left is now overly dependent on the rule of law? WTF? And who says that liberals are supplanting legislative consideration of vexing social issues? We are happy to pass laws on all these things. But, we just have a little expectation that these laws should be constitutional that's all. We're not in favor of inflicting particular religious doctine on those who don't believe and we don't think that the government should intrude on purely private matters. If that's a "culture of law" count me in.

There must be some kind of computer program you can buy in DC that scolds Democrats like a drunk and bitter stepmother no matter what the circumstances. If there isn't, I'm going to invent one so that Joe Klein can spend even more time kissing the flatulent asses of sanctimonious Republican gasbags who insist that James Dobson and his zombie nation represent "real" America

This month, Democrats may use procedural tricks to stop all Senate business and block a Republican effort to eliminate minority filibuster rights and jam through seven federal judges proposed by the President. The fight may be winnable, but it is a culture of law cul-de-sac. The Democrats will be shutting down the Senate over a matter of process rather than substance, a pinhead of principle most civilians will find difficult to understand. The Armageddon of confirmation battles—over the next Supreme Court Justice—will probably follow soon after, and it may cement a public impression of the Democrats as a party obsessed with the legal processes that preserve the status quo on issues such as abortion, gay rights and extreme secularism—and little else. The political damage may be considerable.

I'll take my chances. Klein was among those he now mocks for assuming for months that Clinton would be forced from office. He has the political instincts of a dead cat. This judicial fight could have turned out the way Klein presents it. But Schiavo changed all that. Klein's got it exactly backwards. The GOP let loose the hounds of hell and now they can't get them back under control. We are better positioned than we have been since 9/11 to win one.

It's not about Democrats being "obsessed with legal processes and little else." It's about a bunch of extremists pushing their agenda far beyond what the public is ready to accept. Nobody gives a shit what Barney Frank said about this matter. They haven't even heard it. It's what Bill Frist and Tom DeLay said that freaked them out.

Josh Marshall brought up an interesting point about this that hadn't occurred to me before:

Was there any clear point in the legal history of this case at which, purely on legal intepretation grounds, any significant question should have been judged in a different manner?

I raise this because one of this site's regular readers and correspondents just dropped me a note about some program he was watching on C-Span in which some staffer from the Hill was about to blow a fuse over unaccountable activist judges and how they all need to be impeached.

But if the answer to the question above is 'no', then isn't the real beef of all these Schiavo-hounds that these judges aren't activist enough in departing from the law to get results the hounds want?

Well that gets to Klein's newfound embrace of the democratic process for resolving all these pesky social issues instead of relying on that musty old "culture of law" (aka the constitution of the United States.) Yes, it's very easy for these "culture of life" zealots to complain, but it's a little bit more difficult for them to actually step up to the plate and pass these laws in the way that Klein believes we all should. That's because these ideas are unpopular, unconsitutional and completely out of the mainstream. (Here's an interesting article in the St Petersberg Times that shows the great democratic and deliberative process that brought about "Terri's law" --- which was rightly declared unconstitutional by 7-0 margin in the Florida Supreme court and rejected for review by the US Supreme Court. Maybe if these people wrote literate legislation they'd pass muster. But then, perhaps they really don't want to...)

It's not that these judges are "liberal activists" --- the main players in the Schiavo matter were conservative republicans, for God's sake. It's that the Republican legislatures both state and federal want to blame the judiciary for the fact that they cannot deliver on these repugnant, unamerican, demands from their extremist religious right constituency. They want something that both real "thoughtful" Republican judges and Democrats all agree is unconstitutional. They want to destroy an independent judiciary so they can pass unconstituional laws on a purely partisan basis with no review. Sorry, I just don't see what's so "thoughtful" about that.

Armando has a full detailed Klein take down in this post over on Kos. Check it out.



.


.
digby 4/08/2005 08:17:00 PM |

 
Was Ken Mehlman The Maid Of Honor?

Atrios has posted a Drudge story about Arthur Finkelstein allegedly getting married in Massachusetts to his lover of forty years. The couple have two adopted children.

For those of you who don't know the full extent of Arthur Finkelstein's heroic self-loathing, read this article:

Finkelstein's signature style emerges through the ads he creates. Two recent adds brand Democrats as liberals: "Call liberal Paul Wellstone. Tell him it's wrong to spend billions more on welfare," one ad states.

"That's liberal," says another. "That's Jack Reed. That's wrong. Call liberal Jack Reed and tell him his record on welfare is just too liberal for you."

"That's the Finkelstein formula: just brand somebody a liberal, use the word over and over again, engage in that kind of name-calling," said Democratic consultant Mark Mellman.

Arthur Finkelstein, more than any other person in this country, is the one who made the word "liberal" into a dirty word.

In the end, I suppose it's quite sweet, actually, that the rabid gay baiter Jesse Helms depended on the openly gay Finkelstein to consult on his racist and homophobic campaigns. What a big tent these mean and macho Republicans pitch when they let their hair down.

It would seem that they have no problem with gays marrying each other as long as they are willing to bash other gays who want to marry each other. Arthur's still very much in the game. Here's his latest little project:

Stop Her Now,” is the name of the new Web site soon to be launched by Arthur Finkelstein, the chief political guru of New York Governor George Pataki, and one of the country's most successful yet least known political consultants/spin doctors. The “Her” at StopHerNow.com is New York Senator Hillary Clinton. According to the New York Post, Finkelstein, the longtime master of the political attack ad, hopes the site will raise as much as $10 million from Hillary-haters across the nation and provide a gathering point for conservative activists working to defeat her in next year's Senatorial election. Hillary's defeat would likely derail any presidential aspirations she might have.

It's a mistake to think that Karl Rove is the evil puppetmaster of the GOP. It's just that Rove had so little to work with that he's considered something of a genius. There are a whole bunch of evil puppetmasters and they've been around for a long time. This modern GOP is Nixon's party. They like to think they are Reagan's party, but they are Nixon's party. Dirty politics is their specialty. And Arthur Finkelstein is one of the Grand Vizier's of the game.



.
digby 4/08/2005 07:13:00 PM |

 
Pillow Talking Points

According to TBOGG, Rush said this yesterday about the Darling Martinez memo:

What was wrong with this? What's wrong with the Republicans having political strategy sessions? They didn't in this case, but even if they had, so what?

Here's what the future ex-Mrs Limbaugh (thanks GL) said:

Basically a political memo that said the fight over the removing Schiavo's feeding tube is a great political issue, and a tough issue for Democrats. News of the day, comes out of Mel Martinez' office. He's fired an aide who allegedly wrote this. Ed Henry question -- what's the big deal?

.
digby 4/08/2005 04:23:00 PM |

 
New Star

For those who didn't see the NPC blogging, ass-fucking and journalism panel this morning, the great Crooks and Liars has the highlights for you right here.

Gannon has quite the schtick going for him. I don't know if it's a natural gift or if he has had help, but he handled it all quite deftly, I thought. He makes absolutely no sense, wanders off into unrelated subjects, claims victimhood at every turn, avoids questions like a pro and appears to me to be incredibly stupid, arrogant and deluded all at the same time. A clown that nobody in their right mind could take seriously. In others words, meet the next GOP nominee for President of the United States.

I spent years right on this old blog screeching about George W. Bush being just as I described, assuming that any sentient person could see that he makes no sense, that he speaks in riddles that he is coached (badly) and that he has absolutely no idea that he is an idiot. It took me a long time realize that that is exactly what a lot of people like about him. He doesn't need to make sense as long as he claims to represent the "real" people who are predisposed to support him against the pointy headed know-it-alls who lord over them. I have little doubt that they think Gannon really kicked ass.

"And why shouldn't the president have one person who will tell his side of the story? Fox is fair and balanced, they have to tell all sides. It's not right that president Bush has to spend tax payer money just to get his story told. I'm so sick of this liberal media."

"You know he was a marine don't you, Ethel?" "I heard that. He looks like one too."

I think Gannon's assertion that FOXNews is not conservative was his "Christ, he changed mah heart moment." I expect that he's on his way to a comeback. The right takes care of its own, even if they sell out the country to the Russian mob or advertise their prositution services with pictures of themselves pissing on the internet. It's all good.

Matt Yglesias was just great and I especially enjoyed his incredulous amusement at Gannon's nonsense. It is always difficult to argue with aliens from other planets, but I thought that Matt did it very well. It remains important that as we go into this bizarre new era of elastic truth and contrived alternate storylines that normal, intelligent people continue to operate within the bounds of verifiable reality. Somebody's got to keep score.

And Wonkette was a big surprise. She was unrelenting with old JG and she came the closest to rattling his bizarre robotic composure. Maybe it takes an aggressive, unflappable female with a sense of humor to get to wierd gay Republicans like Guckert. I saw a little bitchy sneer on his face come forth as she was questioning him and it would have been interesting if she'd been allowed to continue. Unfortunately, all the timorous and delicate old ladies of the DC press club were willing to host a panel featuring a real mediawhore, but they weren't willing to let the discussion go where it would naturally lead.

I'm not saying that they needed to spend the hour addressing the fact that Guckert has his pictures plastered all over the internet illegally selling his body for money, but it is such an amazing turn around from just a few years ago when the DC press corp had no compunctions whatsoever about spending month after month speculating about the sex lives of the president, first lady and Monica Lewisnky (plus all of her former lovers) without a minute spared as to whether the details were relevant to any particular public discussion. And to the best of my knowledge, there weren't even any naked pictures.

It's very nice that they have now decided that these private matters are off limits when it comes to male prostitutes in the white house press corps with connections to Republican operatives and born again Christians who believe that sexual morals should be policed by the federal government. It will be interesting to see if they hold to this new regard for personal privacy when the next GOP pimped sex scandal pops up.

In the end, these panels about "what constitutes journalism" will probably become perennial just as the "why can't we stop ourselves from only covering the horserace" panels that crop up after every election. The internet is changing all of it and nobody knows where it's going. All the talking in the world isn't going to make a lick of difference. Everybody's just along for the ride --- bloggers, journalists and Republican male hookers alike.



.
digby 4/08/2005 01:41:00 PM |

Thursday, April 07, 2005

 
Spine Tingling

Many of you have already read this amazing essay called "Life and Death" by a very interesting fellow named Chris Clarke. If you haven't, you should. And then read his bio. Some people's lives are a work of art.



.
digby 4/07/2005 05:12:00 PM |

 
Book Meme Redux

So Lindsay has passed me the baton in the Book Meme Game. Here goes:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be [saved]?

The Complete Works of Shakespeare


Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yes, I have. Indeed, so many that it is a miracle that I was able to find a real live human to marry who could live up to the competition.

The last book you bought is?

"The Master" by Colm Toibin (Major Henry James fan here)

What are you currently reading?

"Happy Days Are Here Again: The 1932 Democratic convention, The Emergence of FDR and how America Was Changed Forever" by Steven Neal

Michel Foucault's "the Archeology of Knowledge"

"Any Human Heart" by William Boyd

"The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth

(I always read more than one book at a time. Don't know why.)


Five books you would take to a deserted island?

1. Ulysses
2. Brothers K
3. Wilderness Living and Survival Skills
4. Remembrances of Things Past
5. Atlas Shrugged (I'll need toilet paper)

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged because she's obviously very well read

Avedon Carol because she's got a very lively and eclectic mind

Ezra Klein because he's in college so he's probably reading some really good stuff for the first time.



.
digby 4/07/2005 03:54:00 PM |

 
Cry Wolf Much?

After yesterday's post on Powerline's lack of even rudimentary knowledge of photography, I couldn't believe it when I read all this over at Atrios's place this morning. And apparently Highpockets still can't admit that every document that sheds a bad light on Republicans isn't a Democratic party forgery.

Someday someone is going to have to go back and examine again how they and the other wingnut bloggers also got every detail wrong on the Rathergate memos and still came to be lauded for their "investigation." Why nobody has found the irony of that worth exploring I'll never know.

Of course these "investigative bloggers" are full of shit. They are part of the right wing media and they are just doing what they all do. They have no credibility as "investigators" or analysts because they have no personal integrity. This is clear because they never, ever admit that they make a mistake. Sadly, because the mainstream media are so clueless about what "blogging" is, we all get tarred by the same brush as these GOP tools.

I don't mind being called partisan because I am. I really makes me angry, however, to be called dishonest because these rightwing scumbags lie constantly and the media can't be bothered to see what is right in front of their faces --- that just like Rush and FoxNews and all the dirty tricksters and Regnery whores, the right wing blogosphere is full of people who just make shit up. It's one of the things that distinguishes the right from the left generally --- the blatent, in your face, "you can believe me or you can believe your eyes" dishonesty. There is nothing new about this but the fact that so many in the press still eat those lies with a spoon and never get tired of being played is just stunning.

Earlier today, Rush's little galpal Daryn Kagan was questioning the CNN congressional correspondent about the Martinez memo. She said something to the effect of "aren't people in this town a little too sensitive? What's wrong with this memo, anyway?" The guy was a little taken aback (probably because he didn't realize he now works for FOXNews) and patiently explained that it was a big deal because the Republicans had denied writing or seeing the memo and that they had insisted that the Schiavo case was a matter of conscience not politics.

This is what we are dealing with. And the fact that Hindquarter got it wrong again won't matter at all. He's in the club and he'll be back with more ridiculous flights of logic and Howie Kurtz will kiss his ass because Time magazine named him and his partners in bullshit bloggers of the year. And the lines between the mainstream media and the right wing noise machine get blurrier and blurrier by the day.

Update: Here's the Kagan exchange:

KAGAN: The first one deals with this memo that we now know comes out of Senator Mel Martinez' office. It goes back to the Terri Schiavo story, which you're very familiar with, because you were in the state capital. Basically a political memo that said the fight over the removing Schiavo's feeding tube is a great political issue, and a tough issue for Democrats. News of the day, comes out of Mel Martinez' office. He's fired an aide who allegedly wrote this.

Ed Henry question -- what's the big deal?

HENRY: The big deal here is that Republicans were really under fire when they were handling that emergency legislation, because this memo suggested that they were doing the Schiavo legislation for political purposes. As you mentioned, they kept insisting no, and they also suggested this have been a hoax, that maybe the democrats had a little political dirty trick here, and we've seen a lot of blogs out there saying that basically this was a fake memo, maybe it was like CBS documents on the National Guard story, and everyone was running around to figured it all out.

I think it's a footnote to the entire Schiavo story. But it was a big political battle, and now we learned it, in fact, was a Republican talking points memo. It was drafted by an aide to Senator Mel Martinez, the former cabinet secretary. As you mentioned, that staffer has now resigned his job, and it's a pretty big political black eye for the Republicans, and I think, again, it's just going to be a footnote in the long run. But it's not a good day for the Republicans on that.

KAGAN: But here's what I don't get it, when I look at it, it just seems -- is this town just too sensitive. It just seems the fight over removing Schiavo's tube, it was a political issue, it did come up, and the Democrats did have a tough time with it. I think a lot of people felt they didn't speak up like they should have.

HENRY: The bottom line is that Tom Delay and other top Republicans who were pushing this legislation insisted that politics played no role in the debate. They were just trying to save Terri Schiavo's life. This memo said Republicans felt, in fact, it was going to rally their political base. This was going to be a big issue for them in the 2006 election. The other flip side of this that's kind of interesting, is that whether or not the Republicans intended it to be a political benefit, the polls now show that overwhelmingly across the country, the American people feel it was a big political loser for the Republicans; they should have stayed out of it. So sometimes the best-laid plans don't exactly work out.

It sounds to me like the future Mrs Limbaugh's been getting some very special talking points of her own.


.
digby 4/07/2005 09:34:00 AM |

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

 
Powerbozos


You know, I'm a big fan of blogging. I dabble in it myself. But, this absurd notion on the part of some bloggers that they are taking down the big time media brick by brick is just absurd. And by "some bloggers" I'm referring to those schmucks over at Powerline. Jesus, has there ever been a bigger bunch of vainglorious nobodies in the history of the world?

From Clark Stooksbury:

Being a blogger means never having to hold your self to the standards you demand of the big media, or so it seems for some. I noted last year how several bloggers were boasting about their various takedowns of the dreaded MSM, especially over this photo from the Associated Press which "proved" that that organiziation was guilty of working with terrorists because, I think it was Hindpocket at Power Line who said, "the photographer was obviously within a few yards of the scene of the murder, which raises obvious questions, such as 1) what was the photographer doing there; did he have advance knowledge of the crime, or was he even accompanying the terrorists? and 2) why did the photographer apparently have no fear of the terrorists, or conversely, why were the terrorists evidently unconcerned about being photographed in the commission of a murder?" Also, an anonymous source told Salon that the photographer might have been tipped that something was going to happen on that street. High Pockets treats that as an admission of guilt by the Associated Press

[...]

Now Hindpocket's partner, Elephant Guy has his snout in a snit because the picture won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. He calls it a pulitzer for "felony murder."

Apparently they have never heard of a telephoto lens. For all the technical reason why these guys are morons, click here to Dead Parrot's Society's embarrassing debunking.

The thing to remember about the Powerline boyz is that they aren't just some louts who started a blog and say a bunch of dumb stuff. These guys are Claremont Fellows who have been writing for National Review and Weakly Standard for years. They are among those guys who David Brooks was patting on the back yesterday for their deep philosophical understanding of the underpinnings of our democracy.

Gosh, was it Hobbes or Locke who said no free man shall ever admit to error? I can't remember.


Via Avedon Carol


.
digby 4/06/2005 02:14:00 PM |

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

 
Crazed Nurses And Firefighters

Wow. Arnold's in trouble.



.
digby 4/05/2005 11:00:00 PM |

 
He's No Criminal

The left has come up with a target, and his name is Tom DeLay. He isn’t their first and won’t be their last, but for now he’s the Republican they hope to take down.

They’ve tried in the past to do the same thing to others. Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and White House adviser Karl Rove have all been portrayed as ethically challenged and sleazy by the same folks who are now going after the House Republican leader from Texas. Trumped-up charges of illegality, paid ads and reports from ethics groups that are little more than fronts for partisan and ideological assaults on their opponents are all part of the now familiar pattern.

If the attacks on those who have come before are any guide, this will go on for some time and then subside as they find new targets on whom to vent their bile.

DeLay is far from perfect, but he’s no criminal and one doubts if any of his colleagues really believes he’s motivated by anything other than his strongly held principles and a desire to win. In fact, the argument that he’s essentially a venal inside-the-Beltway operator is probably the weakest part of the left wing’s case against him because, while one can picture him crossing the line to achieve his ideological objectives, it is impossible to visualize him doing so to make a buck.

uhm...

A six-day trip to Moscow in 1997 by then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was underwritten by business interests lobbying in support of the Russian government, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the trip arrangements.

DeLay reported that the trip was sponsored by a Washington-based nonprofit organization. But interviews with those involved in planning DeLay's trip say the expenses were covered by a mysterious company registered in the Bahamas that also paid for an intensive $440,000 lobbying campaign.

[...]

The 1997 Moscow trip is the third foreign trip by DeLay to be scrutinized in recent weeks because of new statements by those involved that his travel was directly or indirectly financed by registered lobbyists or a foreign agent.

Media attention focused on DeLay's travel last month after The Washington Post reported on DeLay's participation in a $70,000 expense-paid trip to London and Scotland in 2000 that sources said was indirectly financed in part by an Indian tribe and a gambling services company. A few days earlier, media attention had focused on a $106,921 trip DeLay took to South Korea in 2001 that was financed by a tax-exempt group created by a lobbyist on behalf of a Korean businessman.

[...]

Untangling the origin of the Moscow trip's financing is complicated by questions about the ownership and origins of Chelsea, the obscure Bahamian-registered company that financed the lobbying effort in favor of the Russian government that targeted Republicans in Washington in 1997 and 1998. Those involved in this effort also prepared and coordinated the DeLay visit, individuals with direct knowledge about it said.

In that period, prominent Russian businessmen, as well as the Russian government, depended heavily on a flow of billions of dollars in annual Western aid and so had good reason to build bridges to Congress. House Republicans were becoming increasingly critical of U.S. and international lending institutions, such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the International Monetary Fund, which were then investing heavily in Russia's fragile economy.

Unlike some House conservatives who scorn such support as "corporate welfare," DeLay proved to be a "yes" vote for institutions bolstering Russia in this period. For example, DeLay voted for a bill that included the replenishment of billions of dollars in IMF funds used to bail out the Russian economy in 1998.

well...

The wife and daughter of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have been paid more than $500,000 since 2001 by Mr. DeLay's political action and campaign committees, according to a detailed review of disclosure statements filed with the Federal Election Commission and separate fund-raising records in Mr. DeLay's home state, Texas.

Most of the payments to his wife, Christine A. DeLay, and his only child, Dani DeLay Ferro, were described in the disclosure forms as "fund-raising fees," "campaign management" or "payroll," with no additional details about how they earned the money. The payments appear to reflect what Mr. DeLay's aides say is the central role played by the majority leader's wife and daughter in his political career.

Mr. DeLay's national political action committee, Americans for a Republican Majority, or Armpac, said in a statement on Tuesday that the two women had provided valuable services to the committee in exchange for the payments: "Mrs. DeLay provides big picture, long-term strategic guidance and helps with personnel decisions. Ms. Ferro is a skilled and experienced professional event planner who assists Armpac in arranging and organizing individual events."

As with Terry Schiavo, it seems the ruthless liberals are determined to deny Monsieur Tom DeLay the nourishment he needs to survive --- the mother's milk of politics. And all because he loves Jesus.

Why next thing you know they'll be clamoring for an investigation or a special prosecutor or something. That's how low they are willing to sink. Is there no end to this religious persecution?



Update: Just as a point of contrast, read this story about the Mike Espy case in which Special Prosecutor Donald Smaltz spent over 17 million dollars to nail Espy for accepting some tickets to a football game and failed to get a conviction when it was shown that not only was there no quid pro quo, but Espy actually tightened the regulations on the people who gave him the tickets and assorted trinkets. Back in those days there was a lot of hugh minded Republican talk about the rule of law and the appearance of impropriety. We don't hear much about that anymore.



..
digby 4/05/2005 10:22:00 PM |

 
Mentor, Mentee

So, one of John Cornyn's schoolmates had wondered if his old acquaintance might have a little problem with the race issue when he ran for Senator against Ron Kirk. Unbenownst to most people, Cornyn had been an avid supporter of George Wallace:

I read a couple of weeks ago that John Cornyn had pledged to keep the issue of race out of his upcoming U.S. Senate campaign against African-American Democratic nominee Ron Kirk. That was a relief, because the John Cornyn I knew in high school was a big supporter of George Wallace and seemed oblivious to the dangers of Wallace’s racial demagoguery.

Cornyn a Wallace supporter? Why hasn’t Texas heard about that before? Cornyn and I graduated in 1969 from the American School in Japan, and I guess word of his early dabbling in right-wing politics never reached these shores. Besides, statements like this are not something I’d want to broadcast if I was trying to step into Phil Gramm’s shoes and join George Bush’s team in Washington.

"With the continuing concentration of power in the hands of the inept Democratic and Republican parties, it is time for a change," Cornyn wrote in our student newspaper just before the 1968 presidential election. "Cast your vote for a strong America. Vote for George C. Wallace on November 5."

Well, old George wasn't just a one note samba. According to Rick Perlstein he had a lot of interesting things to add to the political discourse. Like this:

9/27/63 George Wallace apears on Today for twenty minute interview with
Martin Agronsky and adresses 16th street Church bombing in Birmingham.
Shows him surveillance photos of "known subversives.... The supreme
Court, the Kennedy adminsitraiton and the civil rights agitators are
more to blame for this dastardly crime than anyone else."

Seems Cornyn was much, much more influenced by Wallace than he ever let on. As are a good many of the southern Republicans (or should we call them Dixiecans?) I'm afraid.

I'm telling you, there is nothing that the mainstream of the modern Republican party is doing today that their most virulent racist, extremist fringe wasn't advocating forty years ago. I haven't heard anything about flouridation in the water lately, but it's only a matter of time.



.
digby 4/05/2005 01:26:00 PM |

 
I'm Not Like Them. Really.

Perhaps I'm unduly cynical, but I simply cannot take this David Brooks column seriously. Brad Plumer and Mark Schmittt seem to think that he's really on to something, while Matt Yglesias takes issue with it. I think it's just the usual GOP projection bullshit combined with a little CYA sleight of hand.

I don't think it's wrong to say that Democrats should embrace the big ideas. I think we've all agreed that our approach has been a bit too long on programmatic details and a bit too short on the vision thing. But the mere idea that the Republicans derive their strength from diversity just cracks me up. Yeah. And FoxNews is fair and balanced. Tipsy disagreements at cocktail parties don't count as diversity.

Brooks says that Republicans are strong because they argue all the time amongst themselves in a congenial way and everybody is open minded and understanding that they can't have everything they want. It's one big philosphy seminar over there in GOPland. Liberals, on the other hand, are so obsessed with our ever expanding list of big complicated government programs that we haven't given a moment's thought to the kind of big thinking that evidently goes on among cosmopolitan Republican intellectuals who represent all those heartland values we are supposed to revere.

Why, he asked the unnamed head of a big liberal think tank who his favorite philospher was and he never called him back with the answer. Imagine that. (And here I thought we all knew that the only appropriate response to that question was "Christ --- he changed mah heart.")

Brooks says that we should emulate the right's unruly but friendly fractiousness and spend more time arguing philosophy. He says that's what they did when they were completely out of power and it's shown to be very healthy for their big happy tentful of civilized individualists. This entire discussion about media infrastructure and message discipline is wrong because that is not where the real strength of the right's political dominance lies.

The rule of thumb for all Republicans giving advice to Democrats on op-ed pages is to assume the opposite. This means that message discipline and the right's media infrastructure is exactly where the strength of the right's political dominance lies. And I would argue that regardless of the friendly philosophy seminars in the break room at NR or The Weakly Standard, their governing philosophy can quite easily be summed up as a strong belief in no taxes on wealth, laissez faire capitalism, coercive Christianity and a huge police/military infrastructure. There are only a couple of philosophers who lead you in that direction, and it's a place that I don't think America knows it's going.

He further says that we have a hard time understanding the big philosophical ideas because liberal theorists are so "influenced by post-modernism, multiculturalism, relativism, value pluralism and all the other influences that dissuade one from relying heavily on dead white guys."

This means that we are on the right track because understanding post-modernism, relativism and the rest is the single most important key to understanding how the right is operating right now. Any party that can win the presidency by saying that hand counting uncounted votes is inherently unreliable compared to the machines that failed to count the votes in the first place cannot be said to be a party that doesn't understand relativism. Michel Fouccault is a much better guide to modern politics in the radical Republican era than John Dewey could ever be. We should be dragging all those ivory tower Derrida-ites out of the classrooms and hiring them at think tanks to deconstruct Republican rhetoric. (In fact, the most valuable person in the Democratic party may be Michael Berube.)

It's funny, the last I heard liberals were elitists for being a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals who spent too much time watching PBS and not enough time burning rubber and eating at Red Lobster. There was no end to the lectures telling us that we libs were out of touch with everyday real Americans and we should take our heads out of our nancy-boy literchur and open up the Bible for some real inspiration. And now Brooks says we should be holding a non-stop series of undergrad rap sessions. Man, it's so hard to know what we should do to be more like Republicans. My head is spinning.

Brooks says that we should embrace disunity. Like the Republicans have. He must be talking about stuff like this:

Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay," he said."

I think that is what's at work here. Brooks has been recently embarrassed by his GOP cronies in a number of ways and now he is trying to excuse his affiliation with them by saying that the Republican party is one big bunch of iconclastic thinkers so don't even try to say that he's like them. But hey, you hang around with mangy dogs you get it too. He's one of them whether he likes it or not.


Update: Jonathan Chait says:

If you look at the major organs of conservative opinion, you'd start with the Standard and National Review, add in The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and probably include columnists like Brooks, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Novak. You could toss in The Washington Times editorial page and, arguably, talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Depending on your definition, you could add or subtract from this group and have a good sense of all the opinion outlets that wield any significant influence over the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

So, what major issues do these conservative intellectuals disagree on? They all supported the Iraq war, with the exception of Novak, who has tellingly muted his criticism. They all supported every one of Bush's tax cuts and Social Security privatization. They all clucked their tongues at Bush's Medicare drug benefit but, like the White House, have refused to recognize any connection between the deficit and Bush's tax cuts. They all passionately supported Bush's judicial nominees. They all basically endorse Karl Rove's political strategy. They all see Bush as a towering Churchillian figure of compassion, wisdom, vision, homespun virtue, and basic decency.

Basically, these organs agree on everything--certainly every major political issue of the last five years. Even if you follow Brooks's bizarre definition and include Reason and The American Conservative, you'll get some dissent on judicial nominations and the war and a less worshipful view of Bush as a man. But you'll still have basic agreement on all the major domestic policy questions.

[...]

Brooks insists, "Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly." In fact, on every important debate of his presidency, Bush has enjoyed a solid phalanx of conservative pundits all repeating the same talking points on his behalf. It's a successful arrangement. It also worked for the Comintern, for a while. I'm sure the communist intellectuals who relentlessly backed Moscow's every move liked to flatter themselves by insisting they were a bunch of squabbling freethinkers, too.

And Ezra adds:

...where's the refusal to face up to big disagreements and ideas? For that matter, what serious factions are missing and therefore leaving converts no place to join up? Is there no DLC, no MoveOn, no place for liberals and greens and law-and-order types and moderates? Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Marc Cooper and Al From pledge allegiance to the same ticket every four years, but spend the intervening periods screaming at each other?

[...]

In recent months, various folks -- notably Mike Tomasky -- have called for liberals to learn or relearn their history, to understand their evolution. They're right to do so. But they've been joined and, in some cases, mixed up with the David Brooks and Jonah Goldbergs of the world, conserva-scolds who wear their semi-functional knowledge of Hayek and Hobbes on their sleeves, all the better to allude to the moral and intellectual grounding they've got that progressives don't. It's ridiculous, and we shouldn't buy into it. Knowing our history is critical to understanding the genesis and thus root causes of contemporary problems, but that imperative shouldn't be expanded to transform politics into a game of trivial pursuit. If philosophers aid your understanding of your values, fine, great, I suggest you read them. But no Republican needs to know Burke's views on the French Revolution in order to comprehend his movement and no liberal needs to rattle off philosophers to conservative columnists in order to have her beliefs judged legitimate.

Read thewhole thing. It sizzles.

.
digby 4/05/2005 09:39:00 AM |

Monday, April 04, 2005

 
"You had to have a sit down, you had to have an OK, or....you'd be the one who got whacked."

I think Yglesias exactly nails the brutish logic of Cornyn's "warning" earlier today. These guys are selling protection, saying that they would hate to see something happen to these judges who won't cooperate but sadly, unless they do there's not much they can do about it.

His hope -- along, it seems, though less clearly -- with Tom DeLay's is that judges will begin to operate under a cloud of intimidation. They may not like the idea of buckling under to whatever it is Cornyn wants them to do, but Cornyn is making it clear that he's the judges' friends. He doesn't want to see them killed, or maimed, or assaulted. He's trying to save them. Trying to warn them. Warning them that unless they change their ways someone -- someone who has nothing to do with John Cornyn or the Texas cabal running the country, mind you -- just might decide to do something crazy. But here's Cornyn offering a safe harbor. Confirm all of Bush's nominees, no matter how incompetent, corrupt, or inept they are, no matter how unsound their view of the constitution. And for the others, try to conform your views to those of Bush's new appointees. Do it and you'll be safe. If you don't do it, well, then, certainly John Cornyn wouldn't advocate killing you, he's just pointing out that it will happen.

The term "Texas mafia" is no longer metaphorical.

I was particularly intrigued to see that Cornyn's statement very specifically mentions the Supreme Court but makes no distinction amongst the Justices. He might want to start being a little bit more specific lest some anti-judicial activism nut fails to distinguish between the good guys and the bad and blows away the wrong judge. This is just sloppy, very sloppy.



.
digby 4/04/2005 09:20:00 PM |

 
Back To The Future

I don't know who this group of hippie protester strawmen are in Kevin Mattson's cautionary tale in this months Prospect, but I've not had the pleasure. I don't think there exists a vast number of nostalgic baby boomers and utopian youngsters out there who are planning to launch another Summer of Love, unless he's specifically talking about the anti-Iraq war protests, which of course, he is, but won't admit it. That's because those war protesters weren't trying to hop on a nostalgic magic carpet ride back to the days of Hanoi Jane, they were participating in a worldwide protest about a very specific unjust war being launched by an illegitimate president --- a war which the "fighting liberals" like he and Peter Beinert foolishly endorsed. I suppose the fact that millions of people all over the globe also marched merely means that they too were recreating the alleged glory days of People's Park.

People will always take protests to the streets from time to time. The 60's liberals certainly didn't invent the tactic and the fact that liberals are associated with protesting has a lot more to do with an image propagated by the right than any real danger of a resurgent Yippie movement.

My instinctive reaction to this entire line of paranoid ramblings about the wild and crazy lefites making a big scene and ruining everything is that if this guy thinks that a bloodless, wonkish liberalism is ever going to compete with the right wing true believers he's got another thing coming. American liberalism grew out of a passionate progressivism and a worldwide union movement, both of which featured plenty of "protest politics" in their day. And if he thinks that the modern GOP's political might hasn't drawn much of its power from pulpits and talk radio demagoguery, then he hasn't been paying attention. Nobody does political theatre better than the right wing.

He very generously offers that he doesn't agree that Move-On should be purged from the coalition because they are, after all, learning that street protests are bad form. As long as they "behave" they can stay. (And all that money they raise can stay too, presumably.) The author fails to realize, however, that just as the rabble on the right took to the airwaves, the rabble on the left is taking to cyberspace. This ain't no hippie protest movement, dude. It's as modern as modern can get.

People need to feel things about politics, not just think. It's a grave mistake for political types to insult and marginalize those who have passion and wish to express that publicly. These jittery fellows who are so afraid of "the left's" overheated energy need to remember that their golden post war age was populated by a people who had just been through a crushing economic upheavel and a cataclysmic war. They were willingly docile and conformist for good reason. Don't expect that to be present in other circumstances in a thriving democracy. It isn't natural nor should it be desired. It only lasted a very brief time even then.

And remember, the favorite candidate of the wonkish cold war liberals was Adlai Stephenson who warmed the blood of at least 43 upper west side society matrons and a couple of college kids in Cambridge. Other than that, even in Stepford America of the 1950's they picked the man who looked good in a uniform. All the wonky goodness in the world doesn't necessarily translate into votes. You've got to resonate on a deeper level with people and while I appreciate the need for an elegant foreign policy argument, I frankly wonder if this public wonkfest isn't just going to reinforce the Republican image of us as a bunch of weenies. In today's political climate nothing spells defeat for Democrats more than the image of a bunch of fey, ivory tower eggheads running the military.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that until JFK's assassination, there was plenty of theatrical and violent public rhetoric coming from the right. It may be that that violent impulse found its catharsis in the assassination, and massive social opprobrium required a severe ratcheting down of anti-communist demagoguery. Could it be that the benign institution building for which the Republicans are now being canonized as visionaries was actually a pragmatic reaction to the country's disgust with their vocal extremism? Regardless, it's ridiculous to completely place the Republicans as some sort of calm, reasonable suburbanites in contrast to us crazed extremists on the left then or now.

Please:


(link here for larger version)






Yes, the New Left was a bunch of wankers, but you know, that wasn't news even at the time. And it's true that much of the peace protesting of the 60's were pretty much a reflection of a large youth demographic and an unpopular military draft. There was a lot of babble but in the end the radical political movement of Tom Hayden et al mostly collapsed because its raison d'etre, Vietnam, collapsed as an issue. But, underneath that Chicago convention circus a bunch of really important other things were happening that are glossed over by these newly minted men in the grey flannel suits with patronizing lip service to "idealism". He acknowledges that the world before the 60's was unequal and starkly illiberal for many people and says that nobody wants to go back to those days. But he then scribbles a long essay about how the protest movement was terrible for liberalism.

These critics of the unwashed rabble just can't seem to recognize that with great prosperity and political power the time had come for liberalism to act on its long overdue responsibility to fully extend the rights and responsibilities of the American experiment to women and racial minorities --- to use, as Dear Leader would say, its political capital. The social changes that were ratified in the 60's and 70's were arguably more important to the lives of more than 50% of Americans than anything that had happened in the previous century. That's not hyperbole. The women's rights movement alone is one of the greatest progressive leaps forward in human history.

My 36 year old mother couldn't get a mortgage in her own name in 1955. She had to have her father sign the papers. Birth control was illegal in many parts of the country until 1965. Women were routinely denied slots in education and were openly and without shame discriminated against in employment. African Americans, we all know, could be denied the right to enter even public buildings in many areas of the country until 1964. Their "right" to vote was a joke. I needn't even mention the fact that they were dismissed socially as second class citizens without a moment's thought by very large numbers of Americans until quite recently.

That is the world that the "fighting liberals" were protecting. And that is the world that was changed irrevocably during this allegedly frivolous time of liberal protest politics in 1960's. And it was done though the means that this writer seems to find so distasteful --- while he perfunctorily agrees that the ends were all in all a good thing. I'm sorry if all those changes subsequently made it difficult for policy wonks to make a good national security argument, but you know, tough shit. Sometimes you have to do hard things and there is often a price to pay for it.

You don't make radical quantum leaps in social equality without there being a reaction. The reverberations of all of that are still being felt in the culture wars of today and it has made things difficult for Democratic party politics. However, the energetic political activism of the 60's resulted in tangible, everyday improvement in the lives of vast numbers of Americans who fought for and won the right to be equal under the law in this country. That betterment of real people's lives is what liberalism is supposed to be about.

The lauded "fighting foreign policy liberals" of the 50's were the dying dinosaurs of an establishment that was rapidly losing its energy in a stable, wealthy, globally dominant America. As the writer acknowledges, it was quite easy for them to ride the back of the liberal consensus because they were the inheritors of it --- a condition that does not exist today. It's harder now. That's the reality that we are facing.

I don't know where this vast horde of reborn hippies worshipping at the feet of Jerry Rubin are but I do not see them. What I do see is modern political activism that is demanding change in modern ways. It seems to me that it isn't "the left" that is nostalgic for the past, it's these centrists who for reasons I cannot fathom have decided that their grandfather's political methods are the ticket to political dominance in the 21st century.

Sure, policy wonks should be developing a cohesive and persuasive voice on foreign policy. Have at it. But to try to create some quasi "movement" from a very brief and quite uninspired --- even at the time --- political era strikes me as strangely reactionary. As the author writes in his first paragraph, "examining ... history can mean recycling good ideas and tactics. But what if it means recycling bad ones?" Excellent question and one that I would suggest he ask his colleagues in the "let's take a trip back to 1948" club.

We're progressives. We're supposed to progress. We don't do nostaligia. Let's leave that to Pat Buchanan.


correction: hoard,horde,whored
.
digby 4/04/2005 04:25:00 PM |

Sunday, April 03, 2005

 
Teachable Moment

Via Kevin, I see that Andrew Sullivan's question has been answered as to what the Republican party has in mind when it comes to personal freedom. He quotes Eric Cohen's piece in the Weekly Standard in which he claims that "people cannot be allowed to revoke life simply because it is theirs' to revoke."

We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are ... [T]he autonomy regime, even at its best, is deeply inadequate. It is based on a failure to recognize that the human condition involves both giving and needing care, and not always being morally free to decide our own fate.

Sullivan adds:

So let us be plain: the theoconservative vision would remove the right of individuals to decide their own fate in such cases, and would exclude the family from such a decision as well. Indeed, the law might even compel the family to provide care as long as they were capable of doing so. My "what if?" is a real one. And the theocon right has answered it. They want an end to the "autonomy regime." They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom - autonomy over one's own physical body - is now under attack. And if a theocon government won't allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?

I would imagine that there are more than a few women who are slapping their foreheads at that and saying ..."duh!" And there are probably some distressed "pregnant mothers" who would argue that it is quite strange to suggest their six week old fetus has more autonomy over the body it lives in than she does. Certainly the principle has never stuck me as particularly compelling.

The "autonomy regime" is not absolute, but it's pretty damned clear that the government, with its grandstanding morons running for the microphones, is hardly equipped to make the delicate decisions at the margins. It's been very convenient for politicians and self-righteous moralists to take pot shots at those who found themselves in the unenviable position of having to make such decisions as abortion. Perhaps now that the Schiavo case has filled in some of the blanks about what the "culture of life" really means, maybe a few people will understand why it is such a tremendous insult to women to tell them that Trent Lott and Pat Robertson are the ones who will decide what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.



.
digby 4/03/2005 10:42:00 PM |

 
Helloooo DC!!!!

So I hear from Weldon Berger that the National Press club has had a change of heart:

John is welcome to attend, as are any bloggers, as long as they’re not going to disrupt the proceedings.

Well, yes, we simply can't have anyone disrupt the gripping ass-fucking discussion.

Apparently bloggers really are considered the barbarians at the gates --- unrefined, undisciplined and uncivilized. We can't even be expected to behave like adults in public.

Isn't that great? I always wanted to be a rock star.

BOO!


.
digby 4/03/2005 03:02:00 PM |

 
Not Exactly "Swing Low Sweet Chariot"

The indispensible Crooks and Liars made me watch this thing and I'm pretty sure that that I'm now in a persistent vegetative state.
Randall Terry singing a soulful ballad at Terry Schiavo's memorial service. It is so strange and creepy that I just feel dirty. I think FCC complaints should follow.

Here are the lyrics to what seems to me to be an incestuous love song. I don't remember any hymns I sang talking about God caressing me and running his hands through my hair, but maybe I'm just out of date:

When I feel the waves crash over me
Father
And my heart is overwhelmed with pain
Help me, find me, seek me, hide me
In the scars you bear
Caress me in your embrace
Run your fingers through my hair
I believe in you

digby 4/03/2005 02:44:00 PM |

 
Thank You Jesus

Ok, I believe. I finally got that post posted, which I wrote yesterday afternoon and have been trying to post pretty much ever since then. Jayzuz. Blogger really wants us gone, don't they? Too much traffic? Legal liability? Dearth of cute cat pictures?

I dunno, but they clearly are not interested in offering this free service anymore. Too bad.



.
digby 4/03/2005 02:27:00 PM |

Saturday, April 02, 2005

 
"It's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes."

Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia and a member of ACU's board, said Republicans are being told support for Mr. DeLay is mandatory if they want future support from conservatives.

"Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay," he said."

This Tom DeLay mess is really getting interesting, isn't it? While I appreciate the "don't fire 'til you see the whites of their eyes" strategy, after some thought I've decided that it's probably a good idea for the Democrats to put pressure on Delay right now. As a matter of fact, I think it will ensure that the wingnuts continue to support him and that he stays in the news and in his post well into the 2006 election cycle. Nothing will make the radicals more vociferously defend their wounded leader than a bunch of Democrats attacking him. And I think that we want the extreme rightwing to be defending Tom DeLay, especially the Randall Terrys and the James Dobsons, as often as possible.

We especially want to see those guys on Fox News. A lot. And here's why. Something happened during the Schiavo circus, I think, and it was something significant. But it wasn't that the nation saw that politicians were all a bunch of craven opportunists. They already knew that. It was that the Republican professional class, the libertarians and some common sense types saw FOX News and talk radio as being full of shit for the first time. I have nothing but a handful of anecdotes to back that up, but I think Schiavo may turn out to be the first big tear in the right wing matrix.

For instance, a conservative doctor of my acquaintance was stunned by the Schiavo matter. This man watches nothing but Fox news and could not believe the anti-intellectual religiosity of their coverage. This is a matter that he knows intimately and he could see clearly that the coverage wasn't "fair and balanced." Indeed, it wasn't true. It's as if a veil fell from his eyes.

My conservative Rush loving neighbor was heard complaining the his hero didn't know what he was talking about on the Schiavo case. That is a first. This guy is a true believer --- who also has a very sick wife.

My nurse sister-in-law (also a born again Christian and avid FOX watcher) insisted that all the news be turned off in the house because she couldn't stand the exploitation of the patient or the sideshow outside that hospice. She's very depressed about all this.

See, the right isn't like us. They think that the so called liberal media is irretrievably biased but believe what they see, read and hear on their own media. We on the left, on the other hand, have no faith in any mainstream media, really, or any alternative media either for that matter. We have developed the habit of culling from various sources and analyzing the information ourselves as best we can. Even then we are very skeptical. Nothing that the media could do would particularly shock or disappoint us. No so with the other side. A fair number of them are actually hurt and bewildered by what they saw in the Schiavo matter.

I suppose it's possible that this will fade and that nobody will remember the bizarre spectacle of these urbane, cosmopolitan news celebrities on television spouting lines from Elmer Gantry or Rush clumsily sputtering about the culture of life, but once people have been shocked like this they don't fully trust again. I think there may be quite a few Republicans who were surprised by the complete abdication of responsible coverage by their own trusted Wurlitzer.

It's one thing to get behind jingoistic nationalism and shut your eyes and ears to anything that disturbs that vision of your government. Most wingnuts have a bizarre belief that the government must know best when it comes to national security, despite all evidence to the contrary. But, to see your trusted media blow it so hugely on a personal issue about which most of us have very definite opinions and are pretty well informed, must be quite jarring.

Liberals have been hung for decades with the alleged radicalism and extremism of the new left of 35 years ago. But it's not as if we ever made Abbie Hoffman the majority leader of the House. Tom Hayden never ran for president. Today we have a corrupt GOP congressional leader who is now actively embracing a shift in the separation of powers and he's being supported by an active extremist constituency inside the Republican party. The fringe appears to be wielding a tremendous amount of power.

Via Sandrover over at Kos I read that four senators have sponsored an act that "makes it possible for the Congress to charge any judge with a crime who disagrees with the concept that all law, liberty, and government comes only from God."

"The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 - Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

Prohibits a court of the United States from relying upon any law, policy, or other action of a foreign state or international organization in interpreting and applying the Constitution, other than English constitutional and common law up to the time of adoption of the U.S. Constitution.Provides that any Federal court decision relating to an issue removed from Federal jurisdiction by this Act is not binding precedent on State courts.

Provides that any Supreme Court justice or Federal court judge who exceeds the jurisdictional limitations of this Act shall be deemed to have committed an offense for which the justice or judge may be removed, and to have violated the standard of good behavior required of Article III judges by the Constitution.

Co-sponsors:
Sen Brownback, Sam - 3/3/2005
Sen Burr, Richard - 3/3/2005
Sen Craig, Larry E. - 3/8/2005
Sen Lott, Trent - 3/8/2005

The House has 18 co-sponsors for their versions of the same bill.

As much as the Republicans may hate judges these days, this guy surely warms the cockles of their lil' hearts:

"When someone walks by the commandments, they are not studying the text. They are acknowledging that the government derives its authority from God."

Now if they can just pass that law that forces all judges to march to Uncle Nino's tune then everything will just be hunky dory. Funny, I thought "we the people" were the sovereign source of law, liberty and government. Silly me.

Apparently, we are entering a new phase in the culture war that should be startling to even those who didn't see that partisan witch hunts, bogus impeachments and stolen elections indicated a certain, shall we say, imaginative interpretation of our constitution and a willingness to radically exceed any previous limits on partisan power. As the brilliant Dahlia Lithwick puts it in her review of the latest bestselling Regnery toilet paper Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America (aka Thanks For Bush vs Gore But What Have You Done For Me
Lately?):

...Levin pays some lip service to the idea that the federal bench needs to be stacked with right-wing ideologues in his penultimate chapter. But he betrays early on his fear that even the staunchest conservative jurist is all-too-often "seduced by the liberal establishment once they move inside the Beltway." Thus, his real fixes for the problem of judicial overreaching go further than manipulating the appointments process. He wants to cut all judges off at the knees: He'd like to give force to the impeachment rules, put legislative limits on the kinds of constitutional questions courts may review, and institute judicial term limits. He'd also amend the Constitution to give congress a veto over the court's decisions. Each of which imperils the notion of an independent judiciary and of three separate, co-equal branches of government. But the Levins of the world are not interested in a co-equal judiciary. They seem to want to see it burn.

Now that these nutcases have political power it becomes clear that their beef with the judiciary has actually always been that it operates more or less independently of the political process and that means they cannot completely control it, which is the real problem. When you are running a strongarm operation, ("the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior") partisanship or ideology really doesn't matter anymore. It's a pure power game and it clearly applies to conservative Republicans as much as it applies to liberal Democrats.

From a political perspective, this is very interesting. I don't think that the Federalist Society Borg have quite come to terms yet with the monster they've unleashed. Neither has big business. These people may have a different vision of how the government ought to run than I have, but they must maintain a reasonable belief in a judicial system in which the various parties involved can have faith in the outcome. They are, after all, lawyers, judges and scholors. And business, particularly, simply has to have a system of arbitration that is considered fair and impartial or they are going to have a tremendous problem on their hands. It isn't just a bunch of hippies filing bogus lawsuits in the courts. The vast majority of cases are businesses suing each other.

So, we are dealing with a very powerful constituency of religious nuts now doing the muscle work for a criminal political gang. And it would appear that nobody is safe, not even those who sign the blood oath to the Republican Party. The slimy criminals and the self-righteous religious zealots have formed their own power center right smack dab in the middle of the Republican Party.

I say let the games begin. This has been brewing for quite some time. This undemocratic streak in the GOP waxes and wanes but it has been dramatically on the upswing for the last decade or so. But this time the radical Republicans are piping their revolution straight into homes and cars and offices all over this country and it's starting to freak out the normal people.

I've been shouting myself hoarse about this for more than ten years. These self-proclaimed revolutionaries are exactly what they say they are and they do not respect the spirit of democracy, the rule of law or our constitution. That they are supported by so-called conservatives just makes the irony that much richer.



Update: I think Jesse Lee's analysis of the Delay political situation is probably quite right. But I think that if Rove is going to work any magic and dump Delay he'd better work quickly. It sure looks to me as if Delay has jumped directly into the arms of the religious right and they are more than happy to receive him. He's always been a good extremist for their cause. Junior, on the other hand, is wobbly on gay marriage, as is Cheney. The zealots may very well feel they have a better chance with Delay.


Correction: Contrary to the quote above, the proposed law doesn't give congress the right to charge judges with a crime. It provides for the removal of judges if they "exercise jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity's, officer's, or agent's acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government."

So, People for the American Way or the ACLU would no longer be able to get a hearing in court on the constitutionality of Judge Roy Moore proclaiming from the bench --- or a Mayor Osama bin laden, perhaps --- that the law derives directly from God. This is spite of the fact that our constitution explicitly states that the government should establish no religion and that the law is derived from "we the people."


We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Why do you suppose they didn't mention God in all that?


.
digby 4/02/2005 03:29:00 PM |

 
This Week

This has been the worst week of blogging since I started. Blogger has been constantly bloggered and when it wasn't, my cable has been offline. Since last Tuesday, I've barely been able to read Atrios, for gawds sake, much less post one of my own brilliant observances. I hate blogging in coffee shops, I just hate it. But I'm here and if I don't keel over from caffeine poisoning before blogger eats my post, I'll hopefully have something brilliant up soon. Or not.

The good news is that there has never been more riveting news coverage on television than these last few days, has there? I mean, who can take their eyes off of that spine tingling long shot of The Apostolic Palace with the three lit windows. I could stare at it for hours and hours and hours. And hours. Talk about a story made for TV.

And I don't know about you, but after listening to the last three days of non-stop pre-eulogizing by such brilliant minds as Daryn Kagan and Miles O'Brien, the latter of whom seemed simply bowled over yesterday when informed that the Pope talked to Jews just like they were normal, I'm truly on pins and needles wondering what they will all say for the next week of ritual and observance. It's been so spritually uplifting to listen to Kelly Wallace's remembrances of things people passing on the street said about Pope John Paul. (They mostly liked him. Plenty.) And who can forget Lester Holt's moving daily tribute to the Holy Father's popemobile?

What can they possibly do to top themselves? I'm thinking Judy Woodruff and Aaron Brown could get into some serious self-flagellation. And I think Paula Zahn would look smashing in a hair shirt. (She looks good in anything.) And clearly, the only appropriately reverent response from Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity would be taking vows of silence. Since everyone on television agrees that the pope was the most awesomely terrific pope ever, I'm pretty sure that's what he would have wanted. I know I'm praying for it.



.
digby 4/02/2005 02:20:00 PM |

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

 
Expert Witnesses

I've been busy and bloggered for the last day or so and missed the latest blogging panel and GG kerfluffle. My goodness, the mainstream media certainly is having a difficult time understanding what both blogging and prostitution are. And you'd think they could figure it out since they practice certain elements of both pursuits on a daily basis. No wonder they don't question the Bush administration's lies. They just aren't very bright, apparently.

Others have more than adequately discussed the usual frustrating lack of informed liberal bloggers on the panel and the absurdity of inviting GG to represent "blogging." Clearly the press is having a little bit of difficulty understanding these internets and it's going to take some time to educate the poor dears.

But this is not just another blogging confab, is it? Jimmy Jeff on the panel represents a unique opportunity to discuss some of this "new journalism" stuff if they really want to do it. It's a blog that broke the Gannon story and it's a blogger who knows all the details. John Aravosis owns this story and if GG is given a forum to tell his side of the story, Aravosis should be invited also to ensure that he isn't allowed to continue to deny that he was a hooker who sold himself on the internet as a "military" man while he was "reporting" from the white house press room.

See, this is a real goddamned story that, for reasons that elude me, has become lost in some sort of Victorian delicacy that certainly wasn't evident during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when reporters and pundits regularly speculated about whether the she and the president had both experienced orgasms during their trysts. I recall a panel on one of the shoutfests drawing pictures of penises to illustrate whether the president of the Unites States might suffer from Peyronie's disease as Paula Jones alleged (wrongly it turned out) in her bogus lawsuit.

This is not a matter of intruding into someone's private life. Guckert was selling himself on line for profit. Perhaps I missed it, but I am unaware of any interviewer who has pinned him down on that fact. Now, because they haven't done their job, this guy is actually rehabilitating himself as a representative of "new media" and is called to discuss the role of the internet in modern journalism. It's ludicrous. I'm beginning to think that the whole Jeff Gannon story is really a reality show cooked up by Hollywood to snooker the entire country. He's really Jamie Kennedy.

Here's the deal. Jim Guckert, male prostitute, operated as a reporter who got very unusual privileges in a Republican White House that is so enamored of the Christian Right that the GOP is now writing one time only laws on their behalf against the will of 80% of the American people. That's what we are dealing with. And it is clear that the extremist minority that is basically running the country has not heard about this male hooker in the White House because Fox (purveyor of pornography) and Rush and Pat Robertson have not told them. Someone should. For the good of the country.

I'm glad to see that they've included Matt Yglesias who will likely make a persuasive case that blogging is merely a new technological tool for specialists and professionals to communicate, much as academics and journalists do now in their respective fields on paper. I don't agree with that view, but I do think that it could provoke an interesting discussion at the blogging panels that we haven't already heard a thousand times before from the usual suspects. And he is a real blogger who's been writing serious political posts for years now. He might be able to at least school some of these bimbos in the press about what constitutes a real blog. Good luck to him.

However, by virtue of Guckert's presence this blogging panel is probably not the place to discuss such dry academic subjects. While it is required by law evidently, that all blogging discussions include at least two panelists who write frequently about anal sex, this one actually features a guy who made a profit at it. Matt may not be able to add much to that discussion because I don't think he's been following that story very closely. Maybe Wonkette could be persuaded to pin old Jeff down on his professional activities, but she might be a bit too focused on the what, not the who. Or they could just invite Aravosis who might actually be able to get to the truth. If, of course, that's what they're interested in --- a big if.



.
digby 3/29/2005 04:42:00 PM |

Monday, March 28, 2005

 
Strange Bedfellows

Commenter Ken Cope catches the fact that the Nader press release, featured in the post below, and the fellow he has partnered with in condemning the Schiavo decisions, both emanate from The Discovery institute, home of crackpot, creationist drivel.

Wesley J. Smith wrote a couple of consumer books with Ralph back in the early 90's but has since made quite a career fopr himself as a self-anointed bioethicist and expert in "life" issues. (He also has a sub-specialty in knocking the "dangerous" animal rights movement.)

So the chief anti-stem cell, cloning hysteric on the right, it turns out, is involved with the Discovery institute which has a broad agenda to discredit science:

On March 3, 1999, an anonymous person obtained an internal white paper from the CRSC entitled "The Wedge Project," which detailed the Center's ambitious long-term strategy to replace "materialistic science" with intelligent design. The paper describes the CRSC's mission with a sense of urgency:

"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a "wedge" that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the "thin edge of the wedge," was Phillip Johnson's critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

[...]

Phase I, "Scientific Research, Writing, and Publicity" involves the Paleontology Research Program (led by Dr. Paul Chien), the Molecular Biology Research Program (led by Dr. Douglas Axe), and any individual researcher who is given a fellowship by the Institute. Phase I has already begun, the paper argues, with the watershed work of Phillip Johnson, whose Darwinism on Trial sparked the intelligent design movement. The Center hopes that more Christian scientists will step forward and engage in research that would support the intelligent design theory.

Phase II, "Publicity and Opinion-Making" involves communicating the research of Phase I. The Center plans to do this through book tours, opinion-making conferences, apologetics seminars, a teacher training program, use of opinion-editorials in newspapers, television program productions (either with Public Broadcasting or another broadcaster), and the printing of publications to distribute. Phases I and II are to be implemented over the next five years (1999-2003). Phase II is

"to prepare the popular reception of our ideas. The best and truest research can languish unread and unused unless it is properly publicized. For this reason we seek to cultivate and convince influential individuals in print and broadcast media, as well as think tank leaders, scientists and academics, congressional staff, talk show hosts, college and seminary presidents and faculty, future talent and potential academic allies. Because of his long tenure in politics, journalism and public policy, Discovery President Bruce Chapman brings to the project rare knowledge and acquaintance of key op-ed writers, journalists, and political leaders. This combination of scientific and scholarly expertise and media and political connections makes the Wedge unique, and also prevents it from being 'merely academic.' Other activities include production of a PBS documentary on intelligent design and its implications, and popular op-ed publishing. Alongside a focus on influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's that support the faith, as well as to "popularize" our ideas in the broader culture."

Phase III, "Cultural Confrontation and Renewal" begins sometime in 2003 and may take as long as twenty years to complete. It involves three things: (1) "Academic and Scientific Challenge Conferences"; (2) "Potential Legal Action for Teacher Training"; and (3) "Research Fellowship Program: shift to social sciences and humanities". The white paper describes Phase III as the renewal phase because it seeks to fill the void left behind by materialistic evolution (attacked in Phase II) with its own intelligent design model:

"Once our research and writing have had time to mature, and the public prepared for the reception of design theory, we will move toward direct confrontation with the advocates of materialist science through challenge conferences in significant academic settings. We will also pursue possible legal assistance in response to resistance to the integration of design theory into public school science curricula. The attention, publicity, and influence of design theory should draw scientific materialists into open debate with design theorists, and we will be ready. With an added emphasis to the social sciences and humanities, we will begin to address the specific social consequences of materialism and the Darwinist theory that supports it in the sciences."

The plan is working.

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.

[...]

"It's an academic freedom proposal. What we would like to foment is a civil discussion about science. That falls right down the middle of the fairway of American pluralism," said the Discovery Institute's Stephen C. Meyer, who believes evolution alone cannot explain life's unfurling. "We are interested in seeing that spread state by state across the country."

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."

[...]

Despite some disagreement, Calvert, Harris and the Discovery Institute collectively favor efforts to change state teaching standards. Bypassing the work of a 26-member science standards committee that rejected revisions, the Kansas board's conservative majority recently announced a series of "scientific hearings" to discuss evolution and its critics.

The board's chairman, Steve Abrams, said he is seeking space for students to "critically analyze" the evidence.

That approach appeals to Cindy Duckett, a Wichita mother who believes public school leaves many religious children feeling shut out. Teaching doubts about evolution, she said, is "more inclusive. I think the more options, the better."

"If students only have one thing to consider, one option, that's really more brainwashing," said Duckett, who sent her children to Christian schools because of her frustration. Students should be exposed to the Big Bang, evolution, intelligent design "and, beyond that, any other belief that a kid in class has. It should all be okay."

Fox -- pastor of the largest Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, drawing 6,000 worshipers a week to his Wichita church -- said the compromise is an important tactic. "The strategy this time is not to go for the whole enchilada. We're trying to be a little more subtle," he said.

To fundamentalist Christians, Fox said, the fight to teach God's role in creation is becoming the essential front in America's culture war. The issue is on the agenda at every meeting of pastors he attends. If evolution's boosters can be forced to back down, he said, the Christian right's agenda will advance.

"If you believe God created that baby, it makes it a whole lot harder to get rid of that baby," Fox said. "If you can cause enough doubt on evolution, liberalism will die."

This is a wonderful group for a left wing icon to be involved with, don't you think?

Hopefully, this Schiavo mess will begin to open people's eyes a bit about what the religious right is really after or it won't be liberalism that will die, it will be reason.

Oh and please, please somebody ask Lynn Cheney to explain how that conservative mother's comment "I think the more options, the better" squares with her book Telling The Truth in which she concludes "In rejecting an independent reality, an externally verifiable truth, and even reason itself, he [Foucault] was rejecting the foundational principles of the West."

The right wing relativists at "The Wedge Project" are applying Foucault's theory in real time, right before our eyes and I haven't heard any outcry from Lynn at all. How odd.



.
digby 3/28/2005 07:13:00 AM |

Sunday, March 27, 2005

 
Surprise, surprise

I missed this one. Another medical expert weighs in:

Consumer Advocate Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith, author of the award winning book "Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America" call upon the Florida Courts, Governor Jeb Bush and concerned citizens to take any legal action available to let Terri Schiavo live.

"A profound injustice is being inflicted on Terri Schiavo," Nader and Smith asserted today. "Worse, this slow death by dehydration is being imposed upon her under the color of law, in proceedings in which every benefit of the doubt-and there are many doubts in this case-has been given to her death, rather than her continued life."

Among the many injustices in this case, Nader and Smith point to the following:

The courts not only are refusing her tube feeding, but have ordered that no attempts be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical treatment. "This outrageous order proves that the courts are not merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld, it has ordered her to be made dead," Nader and Smith assert.

Has it just become reflex with him?



.
digby 3/27/2005 10:25:00 AM |

 
Journalist, Heal Thyself


LA Times Media critic David Shaw claims in today's paper that bloggers don't deserve the reporter's privilege because they are lazy, careless and inaccurate. In the process of explaining why, he makes a couple of whopping mistakes that one can only assume he makes because he is lazy and careless. (subscription only, sorry):

It isn't easy to define what a journalist is --- or isn't. Forty or 50 years ago, some might have dismissed IF Stone as the print equivalent of a blogger, writing and puhlishing his muckraking 'I.F. Stone Weekly." But Stone was an experienced journalist, and his Weekly did not traffic in gossip or rumor. He was so highly regarded by his peers that he was widely known as "the conscience of investigative journalism."

Bloggers require no journalistic experience. All they need is computer access and the desire to blog. There are other, even important diofferences between bloggers and journalists, perhaps the most significant being that bloggers pride themselves on being part on an unmediated medium, giving their readers unfiltered information. And therein lies the problem.

When I or virtually any other journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column for example.

[...]

If I'm careless --- if I am guilty of what the courts call a "reckless disregard for the truth" --- The Times could be sued for libel ... and could lose a lot of money. With that thought --- as well as out own personal and progessional copmmittments to accuracy and fairness --- very much much in mind, I and my editors all try hard to be sure that what appears in ther paper is just that, accurate and fair.

[...]

Many bloggers --- not all, perhaps or even most --- don't seem to worry much about being accurate. or fair. They just want to get their opinions --- and their scoops --- our there as fast as they pop into their brains.

[...]

But the knowledge that you can correct errors quickly,combined with the absence of editors or filters, encourages laziness, carelessness and inaccuracy, and I don't think the reporter's privilege to maintain confidential sources should be granted to such practitioners of what is at best psuedo-journalism.

[...]

Certainly, some bloggers practice what anyone would consider "journalism" in its roughest form -- they provide news. And just as surely, bloggers deserve credit for, among other things, being the first to discredit Dan Rather's use of documents of dubious origin and legitimacy to accuse President Bush of having received special treatment in the National Guard.

But bloggers alos took the lead in circulating speculation that what appeared to be a bulge beneath Bush's jacket during his first debate with Sen John Kerry might have been some kind of transmission device to enable advisors to feed him answers.

No credible evidence has emerged to support such a charge.

In the first case, the Columbia Journalism Review did a thorough debunking of the blogging "journalism" in the Dan Rather case.

And there is ample evidence from real gen-u-wine accurate 'n fair jernlists that the NY Times pursued the Bush bulge story, was ready to run with it and killed it as it drew too close to the election. A NASA scientist came forward with sophisticated imaging to prove it (as Salon magazine reported at the time.) The Times' science editor Andrew Rivkin, who contributed the bulk of the reporting, had told [ombudsman]Okrent that the scientist’s assertions “did rise above the level of garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. ... He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line." Certainly, the bizarre denials by the white house --- that it was "bad tailoring" should have made any legitimate journalist question what was going on. This was not just idle blogging gossip.

So, in his scathing article about blogging malfeasance and inaccuracy, David Shaw missed the mark in both of his examples.

I'm only sorry that you can't link to the whole story. If there has ever been a better example of self-righteous elitism from a total fuck-up, I've never seen it. Mr Shaw makes quite the fool of himself.


Update: Here's a link to the entire article.
.
digby 3/27/2005 09:19:00 AM |

 
Wish I'd Seen That

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus' resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

If anyone hasn't had the opportunity to read the Newsweak story from which that quote is lifted, do yourself a favor and read it. It is onstensibly about the fascinating story of the historical Jesus and Christian history. But, in the media's new committment to religious sensitivity it is filled with strange intellectual gyrations like that above.

As far as I'm concerned, the metaphorical beauty of the resurrection ought to be enough for anyone. But that's just me. It's an incredible spring day here in southern California, the flowers are bursting into bloom, everything is green and new and lovely. Whether you are a literalist Christian or a non-believer like me, anyone can appreciate the glory of rebirth.

But turning yourself into a pretzel in an alleged work of journalism to say that because a story is unbelievable it is more believable, well, that's just silly. Faith is faith and reason is reason. You can't just split the difference.

Happy Easter everyone. Whether religious or secular, spring has sprung and that's something we can all celebrate.


For the secular humanists among us, check out this post by James Wolcott.



.
digby 3/27/2005 08:23:00 AM |

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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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?


.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.


.
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.



.
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.

.
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 ...


.
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?



.
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.



.
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.





.
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.



.
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.



.
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.



.
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.
.
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!!

.
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.



.
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.



.
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?



.
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

.
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.''

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